The Imperfectionists

"76 DIE IN BAGHDAD BOMBINGS"
NEWS EDITOR-CRAIG MENZIES

ANNIKA CROUCHES BEFORE THE WASHING MACHINE IN THEIR apartment, unloading damp clothes. "I'm beginning to suspect that my purpose in life is laundry," she says. "All the rest is just fleeting glory."

Menzies stands behind her and touches his forefinger to the crown of her head, following the swirl of her dyed-black hair. He opens his palm across the top of her skull as if to measure it, then hooks his thumbs under the straps of her dungarees and tugs. She leans against his palm and kisses his fingers, looking up. "Seven hundred and twenty-eight socks last year," she tells him. "That's how many I washed."

"You counted?"

"Of course." She reaches into the washing machine and draws out a bedsheet that seems never to end.

He kneels beside her, hugs her around the middle. "I have the day off," he says. "Let me do something."

He gets few days off from the paper. Normally, he starts his labors at 6 A.M., logging on from home to see what has happened overnight in the United States and what is happening at that moment in Asia. He scans the websites of competing news organizations and responds to emails, typing softly so as not to wake her in the other room. By seven, he is at the bus stop on Via Marmorata, urging the No. 30 to hurry up. He's first in the office and turns on the lights: throughout the newsroom, fluorescent beams flicker on like reluctant morning eyes. He places a thermos of American coffee on his desk, turns on the TV, checks CNN and the BBC, consults the news wires, compiles a list of stories to assign. Other employees arrive: secretaries, technicians, editors, reporters. By nine, he is consulting with staff correspondents and the few stringers they have left overseas. Then Kathleen shows up, demanding a rundown of the world at that moment. She never appears to pay attention, yet absorbs it all. "Quiet day," she says. "Let's hope something happens." He shepherds the main stories through their various stages: writing, backfielding, copy-editing. He consults with layout, sizes up ad space, requests photos and orders graphics-all through a blizzard of phone calls. Colleagues pester him to take a break, not because they care but to underscore that he's a sucker to toil like this. When the late edition closes, everyone else goes home and he puts the newsroom to bed: the fluorescent beams flicker back to sleep. On the bus ride home to Testaccio, he is assaulted by headlines that stream across his mind like a news ticker: " Iran test-fires 3 new missiles… 90% of maritime life forms extinct by 2048… Evangelical leader resigns over gay hooker scandal." He takes the elevator upstairs. The news ticker continues: "Keys in right pocket, officials say… Unlock deadbolt, sources suggest… Call Annika's name, report recommends." He does so, and she arrives to kiss him on the lips. She shuttles him into the kitchen, has him tasting bubbling sauces, hearing about her day. All that mattered a minute before no longer does. The news stops.

Annika's day runs to a different schedule. She rises at ten, drains a glass of grapefruit juice over the sink, eats jam toast on the terrace, crumbs floating down to the sidewalk as she watches the neighborhood below: the bank security guard who is always on his cellphone, schoolboys kicking soccer balls, little old ladies tromping to and from the covered market. She stretches her arms above her head, emits a little squeak, licks her jam-sticky fingers. She showers with the bathroom door open, lets her hair dry while reading emails, browses the Internet, sends messages to Menzies. By 1 P.M., she emerges into the sun for a stroll up Lungotevere, along the sidewalk that overlooks the Tiber. She follows the river's snaking path from Testaccio toward the Centro Storico. The bottle-green water eddies in parts, is still in others. As with much in Rome, the river has been left to its own devices, a strip of jungle winding through the caterwauling city. Weeds clamber down the riverbanks, clasping at bogwater, snagging what litter washes downstream: plastic bottles, furniture flyers, shoeboxes, a thousand bobbing cigarette filters. The sidewalk has been abandoned, too, left to the tree roots, which seam the pavement, cracking it upward into concrete lips. Back home, she deposits her groceries on the kitchen table and flings open the shutters. Light slices across the parquet, up the white walls. She stuffs in another load of laundry, sets the dial, sits down with a book. She is trying to improve her Italian by reading short stories-Natalia Ginzburg and Alberto Moravia of late. She lunches late-3 P.M., typically-in order to contain her appetite till his nighttime return. She watches a little idiotic Italian TV, irons, washes dishes, hangs laundry, preps dinner. By the time he arrives, she is famished and she bundles him into the kitchen. She never inquires about the day's news-news is only disappointing, and there is nothing she can do about it. After dinner, Menzies falls into bed while she watches old movies with headphones, eating homemade yogurt sweetened with rhubarb compote. When friends ask her about life in Rome, she says, "It's fine, it's good," then is out of words. She does not admit that the apartment is magnificent, the neighborhood ideal, and Menzies an endearing mess. She does not speak of the pleasure she takes in tidying him, nor that she hasn't snapped a single photo in earnest since coming to Rome, that she has no desire to, that she doesn't care about grants or galleries anymore, if indeed she ever did. Above all, she will not admit that she is happy.

"I just don't want you to get bored," he says.

"I'm not." She puts on music: Dinah Washington singing "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes." Menzies was clueless about jazz before meeting her, but she has been educating him, introducing him to Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra.

"You're amazingly self-sustained," he says. "I'm just afraid you'll get sick of me. Of my socks in particular."

"There is that possibility. As long as nobody sees me cooking you dinner every night, I'm fine."

At least this life takes place overseas. She can point out that she's learning another language and that Rome is such an artistic city and that living here is itself an aesthetic education. When she does return to photography, this experience will have had a salutary effect. If she were tending house like this back in D.C.-well, she simply wouldn't. But living overseas changes the rules. As long as no one sees her. She discourages visits from friends and family, and flies home twice a year to avert them. If her mother saw this! After all those efforts to instill the importance of financial independence and a career. Or if Annika's art-school friends saw her Nikon sitting there, its case gray with dust, as her cookbook collection mounts-the domesticated horror of it! He gets the career, he gets the prestige. She? She gets to clean socks. And if anything goes wrong he has a bank account. And she? How will she explain this gap on her resume? How will she explain her contentment at living like a housewife?

Menzies' colleagues know little about his life with Annika. For a time, she was friendly with Hardy Benjamin and the two met for coffee most afternoons at the espresso bar downstairs from the office. But Hardy got a boyfriend, and her friendship with Annika faded. As for the others at the paper, they tend to forget that Menzies lives with someone-if they were to imagine him outside office hours, they would picture him alone, eating thin sandwiches, reading the ingredients off the bread package. For them, he exists less as a man than as a wrinkle-headed prig in a desk chair.

An office party approaches, and he considers not telling Annika. If she sees him among his colleagues, she'll gather what they think of him. "It'll just be dull news people, I warn you."

"Do you want me there?"

"I don't want me there."

"Maybe you need backup. Unless you don't want me to come."

"You're welcome anywhere I go."

"What should I tell them that I do out here?"

"No one'll ask that sort of thing."

"But if they do?"

As they enter the newsroom, he releases her hand, then wishes he still held it. He sees in the glances of his colleagues a thirst to know what connection he could possibly have with this much younger woman: she, in a purple frock and green-and-black striped tights, a smile so spontaneous it seems almost to surprise her; and he, in a blue oxford shirt and brown corduroys, pudgy despite the weekend sit-ups, a horseshoe of chestnut hair around a bald dome that glistens when he is agitated, and glistens often.

Hardy catches sight of them, waves a little too exuberantly, and comes over. She and Annika chat for a few minutes and agree to sign up for yoga classes together, though both know the pledge is hollow. "Well," Hardy says, "I should probably go save my man." Her boyfriend, Rory, was last spotted with a bottle of wine in hand, trying to engage a frowning Herman in a debate on the factual accuracy of the James Bond series. Hardy trots off to the rescue.

Other staffers approach Menzies, their gazes shifting between their dreary news editor and this curvaceous young woman. "So, Menzies my man, you going to introduce us?"

Once home, he tells her, "You were very"-he pauses-"very popular with everyone."

She smiles. "Popular? What is this, ninth grade?"

"I know, it sounds ridiculous. I'm saying it in a good way, though-I'm impressed."

She kisses his eyelids and gooses his behind.

He wakes early the next morning and lies a few extra minutes in bed, alive to the softness of her back, the scent of her hair. She feels unreal: the tide of her breathing against him in the dark.

He walks to work and hesitates at a boutique window. That turquoise bracelet? What about those earrings? Are they part of a set? He can't assess jewelry, can't tell if it's pretty, if she'd like it. He needs her opinion, but that defeats the purpose. He checks the opening hours. Perhaps he can sneak back between editions. Does she need earrings? Is "need" the point? What is the point? To make a point. Which is? He doesn't know, only that there is one. He's always catching her hand, then letting it go. His every effort to make his point flops. He'll buy those earrings. But the shop is closed.

At dinner, she chats about the office party, comments on his colleagues. "Herman's adorable," she says.

"That is not the word I would have chosen."

"He's sweet," she insists. "And so insecure."

"Herman is? Herman Cohen?"

"And it was interesting talking to Kathleen. She loves you."

"Kathleen loves that I do all her work."

"She clearly has a lot of respect for you."

"Really?"

"All those interns are so young. Made me feel ancient. Actually, I already feel ancient."

"If you're ancient, you must think I'm prehistoric."

"Not at all-it's only age in myself that seems old."

"Twenty-seven is not old."

"Depends what you've done. My sister says everyone who's gonna make it is already on their way by thirty."

"That's not true; it's just the sort of thing your sister says. Anyway, you've still got three years-then we'll talk about what a failure you are. Okay? And, for the record, I hadn't achieved anything by age thirty."

"What were you doing then?"

"I was in Washington, I think. Working on the copydesk there."

"So you had made it."

"I'd hardly call that making it."

"But you had a career, a professional skill. Not something pointless like taking artsy pictures, which any loser with a digital camera and Photoshop can do nowadays," she says. "All the hours I spent in darkrooms, inhaling fixer fumes, fiddling with stop baths and plastic trays and tongs! What a waste."

"Nothing's a waste."

"Some things are. Like, let's face it, I'm not exactly taking advantage of my time here. I'm still not even fluent in Italian. And even though I live with a hard-core newshound, I don't know the first thing about what's going on in the world."

"Yes, you do."

"Maybe I should start reading the paper. Everybody at the party was so authoritative about stuff."

"About what stuff?"

"I don't know-parliamentary voting procedures and arms races in South Asia and U.N. tribunals in Cambodia. Then they turned to me and I'm, like, 'Hi, I used to work as a photographer's assistant, but now I hang out at Craig's place.'"

"Our place," he corrects her. "If anything, your place. And my colleagues are forced to know that stuff-it's their job."

"Well, exactly. I don't have to know anything."

"You want to restart the job hunt? I can put out feelers again."

"Do you think I should?"

"Well, you don't need to." This seems not to be the correct response. "But there's no harm in looking. Again, I'm happy to help. Just tell me what you'd like. Or did you want to get back into photography?"

"I don't know."

"What were you talking to Hardy about at the party-yoga classes, right? Would that be fun? I'm not saying it's the answer. I just don't want you to get sick of me, stuck in the apartment, washing socks."

Her birthday arrives and he gives her the turquoise bracelet and earrings, along with a subscription to an Italian photography magazine and a set of yoga classes.

She immediately makes friends in the class. They are all locals, artistic types who smoke too much, paint their bedrooms orange, and smell of damp wool. She is particularly sympathetic to a clumsy kid called Paolo. "I've never seen anyone more uncoordinated than this guy," she says. "Poor Paolo-can't even touch his toes. Totally incapable."

"Can I touch my toes?" Menzies attempts it. He groans, straining for his shoe tips.

Annika leaps up and hugs him.

"Thank you," he says, laughing. "What's that for?"

Her yoga friends urge her to bring in her portfolio to show around. But when she considers her old photos she is ashamed; they'll think she's an amateur. So she embarks on a new series. Her subject is the graffiti blighting historical buildings around Rome. They love the pictures and urge her to exhibit them.

With Annika out shooting or with her yoga friends, Menzies often returns to an empty apartment. Oddly, the place seems louder without her: motor scooters buzzing outside, footfalls pounding across the apartment overhead, the wall clock ticking. He prepares a sandwich for dinner and descends to his basement workshop, a room he rents to conduct science projects, his hobby since boyhood. He fiddles with balsa-wood models, browses back issues of science-and-technology magazines, and he daydreams. It is always the same daydream: about earning a patent.

If only he'd studied sciences at college! Then again, he'd not have ended up in D.C. and not have met her. He could still invent something, of course. A creation so remarkable it would force MIT to admit him. He'd earn his doctorate in record time. And he'd have Annika with him. If she wanted to come. But would she? Here in Rome, he has something to offer her: a desirable place to live, the romance of Europe. If all he had was student housing in Boston and debts…? But these are absurd thoughts. He's not an inventor, he doesn't have the qualifications, and he's far too old to obtain them now. He has a different life, a newsman's life, like it or not.

She's knocking at the door that leads down to his basement workshop. "I'm coming up now," he calls out. He finds her on the landing, leaning against the wall, wincing. She has done something to her back and must skip yoga for a while.

Over the next few weeks, she hangs around the apartment, drinking herbal tea, watching Italian variety shows. She is crotchety with him, then apologizes. Once healed, she resumes her photography project on graffiti but does not return to yoga.

One afternoon at the office, Menzies is reworking an awkward headline. He tries a few different versions, settling finally on the plainest, which is always his preference. "76 Die in Baghdad Bombings," he writes.

Arthur Gopal appears. He is Menzies' only friend in the newsroom. Occasionally, they take lunch together at Corsi, a bustling trattoria on Via del Gesu. At these meals, Menzies always wants to ask how Arthur is faring without Visantha and Pickle; and Arthur wants to ask about Annika, of whom he knows little. But neither poses personal questions. Instead, the subject is work, with Arthur doing much of the talking. Between mouthfuls of bean soup, he slanders colleagues ("Kathleen misses the point," "Clint Oakley can't even do a basic obit," "Herman is living in another era") and elaborates ambitions ("This old editor friend of my father's says I should work for him in New York "). Once he has finished speaking, Arthur adopts a dissatisfied air and spoons at his soup as if hunting for a lost cuff link.

On this afternoon, however, Arthur approaches Menzies' desk with an uncommon manner. "Have you checked your email?" he asks.

"Not lately. Why? Should I?"

"You got one from someone called jojo98. I strongly advise you to read it."

Menzies prints off a copy. But the email is in Italian, which he understands poorly. The message refers to Annika, and it includes an attachment. He clicks on this and a photo fills his screen. The quality is poor, as if taken with a cellphone camera. It shows Annika-evidently unaware that she is being photographed-on their bed, undressed, looking away. In the foreground is a man's hairy thigh, presumably that of the photographer. Hurriedly, Menzies turns off his monitor. "What the hell is this?"

"I have no idea. But it went to the whole staff."

Menzies stares at his blackened screen. "Jesus."

"I'm sorry to be the one to point it out," Arthur says.

"What do I do? Call her?"

"You should probably go talk in person."

"I can't just leave work."

"You can."

Menzies takes the stairs down, hurries across Campo de' Fiori, through the Ghetto, and crosses to the narrow sidewalk that follows the Tiber. He half walks, half jogs home, gazing down at the uneven path, then up at the traffic lights on Via Marmorata, then ahead at the tall metal gate of their apartment block.

He is here and wishes he were not.

He cannot go up. Their bedroom could be occupied. He goes down to his basement workshop and takes out the printed email. With an Italian-English dictionary, he pieces together the sentences. It claims that Annika has been having sex with another man while Menzies is at work. It says she plans to leave him, and that she and her lover are buying an apartment together. "When you sleep at night, your sheets are stained with his sperm," the letter says.

Everyone in the office (he closes his eyes at the thought-they all got this email) would expect him to barge into the apartment, waving the letter, swearing his throat raw, demanding, "Who is the asshole that sent this, and what the hell is going on?"

But he can't. He stands before his workbench, hands on hips.

When it is late, he goes up. His mobile phone, which gets no signal in the basement, returns to life. Kathleen has phoned numerous times and Annika left three messages, asking when he'll be home, that she's getting hungry, is everything okay?

"Hey," she says, opening the front door. "What happened?"

"Hi, yeah. No, nothing-just some confusion. Sorry," he says. "You have an okay day?"

"Fine. But hang on-don't disappear. I'm still"-she pulls at her T-shirt-"still confused a bit. You got, like, a million calls from the office."

"It's no big deal." Normally, when he walks in he kisses her. He hasn't tonight, and they both notice. "They're too dependent on me." He goes into the bathroom, watches himself blandly in the mirror, returns to the arena.

She can't look at him. "He sent you that letter, right?" she says. "I can't believe that-" She says a man's name.

"Wait, wait," Menzies interrupts. "Please don't say his name. I don't want to know it. If possible."

"Okay, but I have to say some things." She is pale. "Then, after, we don't have to talk about it again. I feel like-" She shakes her head. "I feel ill. I'm really, really so sorry. I am. I have to say this, though. Paolo only sent that-I apologize, I'm not supposed to say his name." She hesitates to find the right description. "That sickening, evil, fucking letter because I wouldn't get involved in some huge thing with him. Do you mind if I get a cigarette?" She rummages through the kitchen drawer for her Camels, which she normally smokes only when she's out with her yoga friends. She has never lit one in the apartment. She does now and exhales, shaking her head. "He's trying to force me into something. That's the point of this."

"You're upset."

"Well, yeah." She pinches her arm. "More than. More than upset. It's, like, the only time in my life I wanted to physically harm someone. I'd like to see him hurt. Physically. Hit by a truck. You know?" Her features strain toward Menzies, as if to grasp him. "You know?"

He looks at his hands. "Okay."

"Do you see, though?"

"I think I do."

"The reason he sent that thing was to break you and me up," she says.

"So you would have a relationship with him."

She takes another drag. "Basically." She exhales. "Yeah." She stubs out the cigarette.

"Let's not talk about it. I find that-" He doesn't finish the sentence. He picks up the TV remote. "Do you know if anything happened?" He turns on CNN to learn the answer.

Arriving at work the next day, he sits at his desk staring at his thermos for a minute. "Anything happened?" he asks his computer as it loads up.

The workday passes like any other-no one even mentions his disappearance of the day before, and Kathleen doesn't seem to remember that he never returned her calls. At newspapers, what was of the utmost importance yesterday is immaterial today.

That night, their phone rings at home and Menzies answers. It is an Italian man. He asks for Annika. Menzies hands it over. She hears the voice and immediately puts down the receiver. "Hang up next time," she tells Menzies. "Don't give it to me if it's him. Just hang up."

Paolo keeps calling. He rings late and wakes them. They change the phone number. All goes quiet for a few weeks. Then legal papers arrive-astonishingly, he's suing Annika for breach of promise, claiming that she broke a verbal contract to leave her partner and buy an apartment with him. The suit says that he carried out his part and even took on a mortgage. Now he wants compensation.

No one at work asks Menzies about the humiliating email, but they haven't forgotten it. Reporters challenge him more often. Senior editors undermine him in news meetings. Only Kathleen is unchanged: she bosses him around and takes out her moods on him, same as ever.

As for Menzies and Annika themselves, they behave almost the same as before. But the scale is off. His praise of her photo project is too intent; her queries about his inventions are too assiduous. Previously, they used to try different dishes each night at dinner. Now they repeat the same few. "It's one of your favorites, I thought."

"Yes. Great. Thanks."

When they meet with the lawyer, he advises Menzies to settle, otherwise the case will drag on. Annika almost intervenes, but she shuts up. Menzies knows that she wants to fight Paolo's case-she is raging.

"I'd prefer to be done with this," Menzies tells the lawyer. "I'll happily pay for that. Well, not happily, but…"

They return to their apartment in silence. Later, they have a ridiculous spat: she criticizes the way he grates Parmesan. The apartment is suddenly too small for two people.

"I'm going downstairs for a bit of tinkering," he says.

And she is left alone.

She flips through their music and puts on Chet Baker's soundtrack for Let's Get Lost, a documentary by one of her favorite photographers, Bruce Weber. The tune is "You're My Thrill." She frowns with concentration to make out the lyrics, then loses interest. She opens her cellphone-no messages. What if she messaged him? Saying? She types into the phone keypad, erasing each snippet in turn: "this song" (delete) "idiot" (delete) "i wish" (delete) "why is it always dumb stuff?" (delete) "so stupid." She erases this, too, and writes "i miss u, can i come for visit?" She sends it. From the stereo, Chet Baker sings, "Nothing seems to matter… Here's my heart on a silver platter… Where's my will?"

Down in the workshop, Menzies flicks a rubber band, trying to hit a mark on the wall. He achieves it once, then tries for three consecutive hits. He tires of the game and turns to sketching unrealistic inventions that he will never build.

She knocks at the door. "Hi," she says uneasily. "Am I disturbing?"

"No, no. What's up?"

She takes a hop closer. "What can you show me? Some new invention that's gonna make us millions and revolutionize life as we know it?"

"I wish."

"You're not working on some evil plot against me, are you?"

"Yes, I'm going to drive you slowly mad with my diabolical cheese-grating."

She sticks out her tongue.

"We should work on a revenge invention," she says.

"For him, you mean?"

"Yeah."

"I must admit I've thought about that."

"You have to tell me."

"No, it's stupid."

"Come on."

He half smiles. "It's this: a little audio player that we'd stick in his bedroom and that would play an endless loop of a mosquito whining. But it would only activate in darkness, so every time he turned off the lights the whining would start. Then he'd turn on the lights to hunt for it and the mosquito wouldn't be there. And so on and so on, until straitjackets were required."

"That's genius! We have to do it!"

"No, no."

"Why not?"

"Well, many reasons."

"Like?"

"First of all, I'm not even sure how. Also, we'd definitely get caught. And I don't want to spend my time building a gadget for the purpose of tormenting someone. What would be the point? Making this guy's life a bit annoying? So we'd sit around at night feeling happy that someone else was irritated?"

"Okay, not your mosquito thing necessarily. But something-a bit of revenge. No?"

"I suspect revenge is one of those things that's better in principle than in practice. I mean, there's no real satisfaction in making someone else suffer because you have."

"You are so wrong there."

"And does revenge even work? I mean, is the point to get justice-to balance out something unfair? Nothing does that. Is it to make you feel better? It wouldn't make me feel better."

"So if someone does something shitty to you, there's no way to fix it?" She looks away, as if casually.

"I don't think there is, no," he answers. "The way to get over stuff, I think, is by forgetting. But there's no way to 'fix' in the way you mean. Not in my opinion."

She shakes her head. "I hate this."

"What?"

"I feel-I don't know-out of balance. You're not a vengeful person like me. You should get pissed off."

"At him?"

"At me. You know?"

"That doesn't appeal in the least, making you suffer."

"Then I end up suffering more."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Why are you getting mad? We're just talking."

"I'm not mad. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do." He clears his throat. "What you don't realize is that I'd be in real trouble without you. That sounded melodramatic-sorry. I just meant that, to be honest, even if you did something worse, I'm not about to reject you. I can't. Getting hurt by you only makes me need comfort more. Comfort from you. Not something I should admit. But…"

"It's okay."

It isn't okay. He ought to shut up. She's drifting away, more with each word of pardon he thrusts upon her. "I'm forty-one now," he says, "I live in a country whose language I don't speak, where, without you, I don't remotely fit it, where my colleagues consider me some kind of weasel."

"No, they don't."

"They do. Look, I'm Kathleen's henchman. She gives orders and I hop to it. And I don't have another option. That one day I'll come up with some great invention and get out of journalism? It's not going to happen."

"It might."

"It won't. I have no alternative to this life. Without you, I'm-you've seen me, Annika. I told you what I was before you. So I'm slightly worried. I mean, I'm terrified essentially."

"Of what?"

"I spent almost a decade alone before you."

"I know. I know that. But-" She pauses. "You can't be with someone just because you can't face being alone."

"No? Isn't that the best reason to be with someone? I'd put up with anything for that reason. I mean, look, I've never been so humiliated as I have over this situation with you. Did you know he sent that letter to everyone in my office?"

She freezes. "What?"

"I'm serious."

She covers her mouth. "You never told me that."

"And there was a photo with it. Of you. On our bed."

She goes pale.

"I'm not joking," he says. "It went to everyone."

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. "I want to die."

"It's okay," he says. "It's okay. Look, my point is that all of this, from start to finish, makes me want to, makes me want to be sick or-or, because, I don't know. Sorry, I'm sort of overwhelmed. Feel free to laugh at me. But that is how I feel about it. It doesn't matter. It's all right." He touches her cheek. "Thank you," he says, "for traveling out here to Italy with me." He kisses her. "Did you come downstairs to leave me?"

She is quiet.

"You can leave me," he says.

"I," she says, "I can't bear that I humiliated you." She can scarcely get the words out, but repeats them. "I can't bear that. I wish you would do something. I wish you were evil like me."

"What are you talking about?"

"I could do anything to you, then? You'd put up with anything?"

"I don't have a choice."

"Do I make any difference here?" Her voice wavers; she is losing control. "I mean, please-get angry with me. Give me the impression I'm involved here, that I'm not just some random girl whose job it is to make sure you don't get lonely at your new life overseas." She struggles out the words. "I don't want you to-if it's possible-to think of what I did as a humiliation to you. It was my selfishness. My acting dumb, like an idiot, for my own selfish, I don't know what, boredom. It wasn't important. I wish I could, you know, make you know that."

She calms somewhat. But there is a distance in her.

"Why did you come down here?" he asks. "You never come down here."

"I had something for you." She holds out an envelope.

He removes the letter and reads the opening lines. "Oh," he says with surprise. "You applied for a patent. In my name." He looks up. "And they rejected it." He laughs.

"It says why, though. You could make some changes maybe."

He reads the letter in full. She must not have realized that his infantile science projects are not nearly sophisticated enough to obtain a patent. He won't look up from the letter. If he does and she is gone, he will not make it out of this room. Of course, that is untrue-he will make it out, climb upstairs, return to work tomorrow, and the following day's paper will come out. That feels even worse.

He must keep her here. He must make his point. But what is his point? What is the point he's been trying to make all along? His impulse is to apologize, but that's wrong, too. Another apology would surely spell the end. She wants him to do something.

"Okay," he says.

"Okay what?"

"Thanks, but who said I wanted a patent?"

"Didn't you? I thought you did."

"And how did you get this stuff, anyway? I mean, did you go through my material down here? That project wasn't even finished."

"What's the problem?"

"Well, it's an intrusion is the problem. I mean, this is none of your business."

"Oh, come on. You're overreacting."

"I don't interfere with your shit."

She goes silent-he never swears. "Personally," she says, "I'd be happy if you entered my stuff in some competition."

"Oh, yeah? Really? You'd like it if I came waving a rejection letter in your face and said, 'Here, I thought I'd do you a favor'? Spare me your next favor."

"Why are you so angry about this?"

"I'm not. I just don't know what else to do," he says. "My stuff down here is mine alone. For no other reason than this dumb workshop is a pleasure for me. I spend my life at a job I hate, in a career I can't stand. I'm forty-one and my girlfriend gets screwed by some guy in her yoga class, by some little Italian kid, and has me pay the legal bills. So-" He waves the rejection letter at her.

She wipes her eyes, but her face is hard.

"So," he goes on, "you can keep your fingers out of my private business. Out of the only stuff I do that isn't a fucking disgrace."

"I'm going upstairs."

"Good." He's losing his nerve. "Good," he repeats louder. "Not upstairs, though. You can fuck off back to the States. I'll pay your ticket."

He joins her in the apartment. She's at the kitchen table, shell-shocked. He takes her suitcase from the cupboard.

"Are you kidding me?" she says.

"You need to pack."

She opens a drawer full of underwear and socks, stares at them, doing nothing for a minute.

As she fills the suitcase, he goes online and buys a ticket for her flight back to Washington, leaving the next day.

"That's three thousand bucks," she exclaims, looking at the computer screen. "Are you insane?"

"Too late. I just paid for it." He phones a hotel and books her a room for that night.

"What about my things?"

"Get them shipped. Look, don't take the flight if you don't want. But then you're paying your own way home."

He calls a taxi and carries her bags outside. He drops them beside her at the curb and goes back in, without a word. His legs tremble on the stairs up. In the apartment, he stands over the toilet, spitting bitter saliva into the bowl until his mouth is dry.

How long before she arrives at the hotel?

If he calls too soon, he'll seem insane. He must appear to have cooled down.

He sits on the cold tiles of the bathroom, his shoulder against the toilet bowl. He rereads the letter from the patent office. It was kind of her. Nothing she has done has touched him like this. And the rejection is useful: it puts an end to all these years of ridiculous daydreams. No inventor, he. That's done with, then. Good.

He waits two nauseating hours.

Has he made his point? The point he's been trying to make? But no, this isn't the point he wanted to make at all.

He picks up his cellphone and finds that she has sent him a text message: "i miss u, can i come for visit?" It was sent hours before, when he was still in the basement and she was still here. He calls her mobile, but there is no answer.

He phones the hotel. The reception desk transfers him to her room. His mouth is parched. He keeps swallowing.

"It's me," he says as the phone is answered. "My point is this. I think we both want." He hesitates. "Don't we? Or am I-"

But he is interrupted. It is a man's voice. It is Paolo.

1977. CORSO VITTORIO, ROME

The paper improved under Milton Berber. It developed pluck and humor, pulled off the occasional scoop, even won a couple of awards-nothing stunning, but still unprecedented in its history.

The newsroom changed, too. In the old days, journalists were referred to as "the boys." Now many of the boys were women. Crude jokes earned fewer snorts of approval, and ethnic slurs did not fly. Milton demanded that ashtrays (and the floor is not an ashtray) be used. The filthy carpeting was changed, made pristine white again. And the cocktail bar in the east wall was replaced with a watercooler; the consequent decline in typos was extraordinary.

Typewriters disappeared next, replaced by video display terminals. Overnight, the newsroom's distinctive clack-clack-bing went silent. The rumbling basement presses hushed, too, with the work outsourced to modernized printing sites around the globe. No longer did vast rolls of newsprint slam into the backside of the building in the late afternoon, jolting any dozing reporter awake. No longer did delivery trucks clog Corso Vittorio at dawn as workmen loaded the papers, copies still warm.

News got cooler, quieter, cleaner.

However, the biggest change was money: the paper started making it. Not a heap, and not every month. But after decades it was profitable.

While other publications snubbed far-flung outposts, the paper targeted them, finding its niche at the fringes of the world, copies turning up on armchairs in the Diamond Dealers Club of Freetown, or at a village newsagent on the island of Gozo, or on a bar stool in Arrowtown, New Zealand. A passerby picked it up, perused a few pages and, as often as not, the paper gained a new devotee. By the early 1980s, daily circulation had neared twenty-five thousand, climbing annually.

With readers around the globe, it was impossible to produce a normal daily-yesterday in Melbourne wasn't yesterday in Guadalajara. So the paper took its own route, trusting reporters and editors to veer from the media pack, with varying success. The trick was to hire well: hungry reporters like Lloyd Burko in Paris; nitpicky wordsmiths like Herman Cohen.

The paper also gained a reputation in journalistic circles as a feeder to prestigious U.S. publications, which attracted young hotshots to Rome. Milton trained them, wrung copy from them for a few years, then hoisted them to high-profile positions elsewhere. Those who moved away recalled him with affection and always dropped by the office when transiting through Italy, showing off their expensive jobs, boasting of bylines and babies.

Milton's reputation was enhanced by all this, and various midsize U.S. newspapers tried to lure him away. But he had no intention of leaving-this was the best job of his life.

Elsewhere in the Ott Group, matters were more bleak. The problems began when Boyd was peripherally implicated in the fraudulent bankruptcy of a Midwestern bank. He and eight others avoided criminal charges but were fined $120 million. His reputation was further sullied over a stock-fixing scandal involving several Ott Group employees. Boyd himself had no role in it, but a spate of articles conflated his bank scandal with the stock-fixing case. The ugliest blow came in the mid-1980s, when an Ott Group copper subsidiary was found to have dumped toxins into a rural water source in Zambia, causing scores of birth defects. A South African newspaper printed a ghoulish price list that Ott Group reps had used to compensate villagers: $165 for missing limbs, $40 for missing hands, and a diminishing scale from there, concluding with the curiously exact sum of $3.85 per lost toe. Ott Group headquarters claimed ignorance of this but built the villagers new houses nevertheless.