The Imperfectionists

"Bush Slumps to New Low in Polls"

Paris Correspondent-Lloyd Burko

Lloyd shoves off the bedcovers and hurries to the front door in white underwear and black socks. He steadies himself on the knob and shuts his eyes. Chill air rushes under the door; he curls his toes. But the hallway is silent. Only high-heeled clicks from the floor above. A shutter squeaking on the other side of the courtyard. His own breath, whistling in his nostrils, whistling out.

Faintly, a woman's voice drifts in. He clenches his eyelids tighter, as if to drive up the volume, but makes out only murmurs, a breakfast exchange between the woman and the man in the apartment across the hall. Until, abruptly, their door opens: her voice grows louder, the hallway floorboards creak-she is approaching. Lloyd hustles back, unlatches the window above the courtyard, and takes up a position there, gazing out over his corner of Paris. She taps on his front door.

"Come in," he says. "No need to knock." And his wife enters their apartment for the first time since the night before. He does not turn from the window to face Eileen, only presses his bald knees harder into the iron guardrail. She smoothes down the back of his gray hair. He flinches, surprised to be touched.

"Only me," she says.

He smiles, eyes crinkling, lips parting, inhaling as if to speak. But he has no reply. She lets go.

He turns finally to find her seated before the drawer where they keep old photographs. A kitchen towel hangs from her shoulder and she wipes off her fingers, damp from peeled potatoes,dishwashing liquid, diced onions, scented from mothballed blankets, soil from the window boxes-Eileen is a woman who touches everything, tastes all, digs in. She slips on her reading glasses.

"What are you hunting for in there?" he asks.

"Just a picture of me in Vermont when I was little. To show Didier." She rises, taking a photo album with her, and stands by the front door. "You have plans for dinner, right?"

"Mm." He nods at the album. "Bit by bit," he says.

"What's that mean?"

"You're shifting across the hall."

"No."

"You're allowed to."

He hasn't resisted her friendship with Didier, the man across the hall. She is not finished with that part of her life, with sex, as Lloyd is. She is eighteen years younger, a gap that incited him once but that, now he is seventy, separates them like a lake. He blows her a kiss and returns to the window.

The floorboards in the hallway creak. Didier's front door opens and shuts-Eileen doesn't knock over there, just goes in. Lloyd glances at the phone. It has been weeks since he sold an article and he needs money. He dials the paper in Rome.

An intern transfers him to the news editor, Craig Menzies, a balding worrier who decides much of what appears in each edition. No matter the time of day, Menzies is at his desk. The man has nothing in his life but news.

"Good time for a pitch?" Lloyd asks.

"I'm a tad busy, actually. Could you zing me an e-mail?"

"Can't. Problem with my computer." The problem is that he doesn't own one; Lloyd still uses a word processor, vintage 1993. "I can print something and fax it over."

"Tell me by phone. But please, if possible, could you get your computer working?"

"Yes: get computer fixed. Duly noted." He scratches his finger across the notepad, as if to tease out a better idea than the one scrawled there. "You folks interested in a feature on the ortolan? It's this French delicacy, a bird-a sort of finch, I think-that's illegal to sell here. They stick it in a cage, poke out its eyes so it can't tell day from night, then feed it round the clock. When it's full up, they drown it in Cognac and cook it. Mitterrand ate one for his last meal." "Uh-huh," Menzies responds circumspectly. "But sorry, where's the news?"

"No news. Just a feature."

"You have anything else?"

Lloyd scratches at his pad again. "How about a business piece on wine: sales of rosé outstripping white for the first time in France."

"Is that true?"

"I think so. I still have to double-check."

"Do you have anything more timely?"

"You don't want the ortolan?"

"I don't think we have space for it. It's a tight day-four pages in news."

All the other publications Lloyd freelanced for have dumped him. Now he suspects that the paper-his final string, his last employer-is looking to send him away, too.

"You know our money problems, Lloyd. We're only buying freelance stuff that's jaw-dropping these days. Which isn't saying yours isn't good. I just mean Kathleen only wants enterprise now. Terrorism, nuclear Iran, resurgent Russia-that kind of thing. Anything else we basically take from the wires. It's a money thing, not about you."

Lloyd hangs up and returns to the window, gazing out at Sixth Arrondissement apartment buildings, white walls dirtied where rain drizzled and drainpipes leaked, the paint peeling, shutters closed tight, courtyards below where residents' bicycles huddle, handlebars and pedals and spokes jammed into each other, zinc roofs overhead, capped chimney pipes streaking white smoke across white sky.

He walks over to the closed front door and stands still, listening. She might come back from Didier's unbidden. This is their home, for Christ's sake.

When the dinner hour arrives, he bangs about as clamorously as possible, crashing the door into the coatrack, simulating a coughing fit on his way out, all to ensure that Eileen across the hall hears him leaving for his supposed dinner plans, although no such plans exist. He simply will not sit down for another charity meal with her and Didier. He wanders down Boulevard du Montparnasse to kill time, buys a box of calissons to give to his daughter Charlotte, and returns home, as stealthy now as he was noisy before. When he enters the apartment, he raises the front door on its hinges to dull the squeak, clicks it gently shut. He doesn't turn on the main light-Eileen might see it under the door-and fumbles in the kitchen, leaving the fridge ajar for illumination. He opens a can of chickpeas and digs straight in with a fork, catching sight of his right hand, which is mottled with age spots. He switches the fork to his left hand, the decrepit right thrust deep in his trouser pocket, hugging a thin leather wallet.

Been broke plenty of times. Always spent better than he saved. On tailored shirts from Jermyn Street. Cases of Château Gloria 1971. Shares in a racehorse that almost landed in the money. Impromptu vacations to Brazil with impromptu women. Taxis everywhere. He takes another fork of chickpeas. Salt. Needs salt. He drops a pinch into the can.

At dawn, he lies under layers of blankets and bedcovers-he doesn't use the heating anymore unless Eileen is here. He'll visit Charlotte today, but doesn't relish it. He turns on his other side, as if to flip from her to his son, Jérôme. Sweet kid. Lloyd flips again. So awake, so weary. Lazy-he's become lazy. How did that happen?

He forces off the covers and, shivering in his underwear and socks, makes for his desk. He pores over old phone numbers-hundreds of scraps of paper, stapled, taped, glued in place. Too early to call anyone. He grins at names of former colleagues: the editor who cursed him out for missing the first Paris riots in '68 because he had been drunk in the bathtub with a lady friend. Or the bureau chief who flew him to Lisbon to cover the coup in '74, even though he couldn't speak a word of Portuguese. Or the reporter who got the giggles with Lloyd at a Giscard d'Estaing presser until they were flung out and upbraided by the press secretary. How many of these ancient numbers still work?

The living-room curtains brighten gradually from behind. He parts them. The sun is not visible, nor clouds-only buildings. At least Eileen doesn't realize his money situation. If she found out, she'd try to help. And then what would he have left? He opens the window, breathes in, presses his knees into the guardrail. The grandeur of Paris-its tallness and broadness and hardness and softness, its perfect symmetry, human will imposed on stone, on razored lawns, on the disobedient rosebushes-that Paris resides elsewhere. His own is smaller, containing himself, this window, the floorboards that creak across the hall.

By 9 a.m., he is trooping north through the Luxembourg Gardens. By the Palais de Justice, he rests. Flagging already? Lazy bastard. He forces himself onward, over the Seine, up Rue Montorgueil, past the Grands Boulevards.

Charlotte's shop is on Rue Rochechouart-not too high up the hill, thankfully. The store isn't open yet, so he wanders toward a café, then changes his mind at the door-no money to waste on luxuries. He gazes in the window of his daughter's shop, which is full of handmade hats, designed by Charlotte and produced by a team of young women in high-waisted linen aprons and mobcaps, like eighteenth-century maids. She arrives later than the posted opening time. "Oui?" she says upon seeing her father-she only talks to him in French.

"I was admiring your window," he says. "It's beautifully arranged."

She unlocks the shop and enters. "Why are you wearing a tie? Do you have somewhere to go?"

"Here-I was coming here to see you." He hands her the box of candies. "Some calissons."

"I don't eat those."

"I thought you loved them."

"Not me. Brigitte does." This is her mother, the second of Lloyd's ex-wives.

"Could you give them to her?"

"She won't want anything from you."

"You're so angry with me, Charlie."

She marches to the other side of the shop, tidying as if it were combat. A customer enters and Charlotte puts on a smile. Lloyd removes himself to a corner. The customer leaves and Charlotte resumes her pugilistic dusting. "Did I do something wrong?" he asks.

"My God-you are so egocentric."

He peers into the back of the shop.

"They're not here yet," she snaps.

"Who aren't?"

"The girls."

"Your workers? Why are you telling me that?"

"You got here too early. Bad timing." Charlotte claims that Lloyd has pursued every woman she ever introduced him to, starting with her best friend at lycée, Nathalie, who came along for a vacation to Antibes once and lost her bikini top in the waves. Charlotte caught Lloyd watching. Thankfully, she never learned that matters eventually went much further between her father and Nathalie.

But all that is over. Finished, finally. So senseless in retrospect-such effort wasted. Libido: it has been the tyrant of his times, hurling him from comfortable America all those years ago to sinful Europe for adventure and conquest, marrying him four times, tripping him up a hundred more, distracting and degrading and nearly ruining him. Yet now it is mercifully done with, desire having dwindled these past years, as mysterious in departure as it was on arrival. For the first time since age twelve, Lloyd witnesses the world without motive. And he is quite lost.

"You really don't like the candies?" he says.

"I didn't ask for them."

"No, you didn't." He smiles sadly. "Is there something I could do for you, though?"

"What for?"

"To help."

"I don't want your help."

"All right," he says. "All right, then." He nods, sighs, and turns for the door.

She comes out after him. He reaches to touch her arm, but she pulls away. She hands back the box of calissons. "I'm not going to use these."

Back home, he runs through his contact numbers and ends up calling an old reporter buddy, Ken Lazzarino, now working at a magazine in Manhattan. They exchange news and get nostalgic for a few minutes, but an undercurrent runs through the conversation: both men know that Lloyd needs a favor, but he can't bring himself to ask. Finally, he forces it out. "What if I wanted to pitch something?"

"You never wrote for us, Lloyd."

"I know, I'm just wondering if."

"I do online strategy now-I don't have a say in content anymore."

"Is there someone you could get me in touch with?"

After listening to several variations of no, Lloyd puts down the phone.

He eats another can of chickpeas and tries Menzies again at the paper. "What about me doing the European business roundup today?"

"Hardy Benjamin handles that now."

"I know it's a pain for you guys that I don't have this email stuff working. I can fax it, though. It won't make a difference."

"It does, actually. But look, I'll call if we need something out of Paris. Or give me a ring if you have something newsy."

Lloyd opens a French current-affairs magazine in hopes of stealing a story idea. He flips the pages impatiently-he doesn't recognize half the names. Who the hell is that guy in the photo? He used to know everything going on in this country. At press conferences, he was front-row, arm raised, rushing up afterward to pitch questions from the sidelines. At embassy cocktail parties, he sidled up to the ambassadors with a grin, notebook emerging from his hip pocket. Nowadays, if he attends press conferences at all, he's back-row, doodling, dozing. Embossed invitations pile up on his coffee table. Scoops, big and little, pass him by. He still has smarts enough to produce the obvious pieces-those he can do drunk, eyelids closed, in his underwear at the word processor.

He tosses the current-affairs magazine onto a chair. What's the point in trying? He calls his son's mobile. "Am I waking you?" he asks in French, the language they use together.

Jérôme covers the phone and coughs.

"I was hoping to buy you lunch later," Lloyd says. "Shouldn't you be down at the ministry at this hour?"

But Jérôme has the day off, so they agree to meet at a bistro around Place de Clichy, which is near where the young man lives, though the precise location of Jérôme's home is as much a mystery to Lloyd as are the details of the young man's job at the French foreign ministry. The boy is secretive.

Lloyd arrives at the bistro early to check the prices on the menu. He opens his wallet to count the cash, then takes a table.

When Jérôme walks in, Lloyd stands and smiles. "I'd almost forgotten how fond I am of you."

Jérôme sits quickly, as if caught out in musical chairs. "You're strange."

"Yes. It's true."

Jérôme flaps out the napkin and runs a hand through his floppy locks, leaving tangled tents of hair. His mother, Françoise, a tobacco-fingered stage actress, had the same hair-mussing habit and it made her even more attractive until years later, when she had no work, and it made her disheveled. Jérôme, at twenty-eight, is tattered already, dressed as if by a vintage shop, in a velvet blazer whose sleeves stop halfway up his forearms and an over-tight pin-striped shirt, cigarette rolling papers visible through a rip in the breast pocket.

"Let me buy you a shirt," Lloyd says impulsively. "You need a proper shirt. We'll go down to Hilditch & Key, down on Rivoli. We'll take a taxi. Come on." He speaks rashly-he couldn't afford a new shirt. But Jérôme declines.

Q&A with Tom

What is The Imperfectionists about?
Set in Rome, The Imperfectionists is a novel told in linked stories about the private lives of the reporters, editors and executives at an international English-language newspaper as they struggle to keep their publication—and themselves—afloat. Kathleen, the tough editor-in-chief, experiments with betrayal in her open marriage. Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a tragedy at home. And Abbey, the besieged financial officer, finds that that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in unexpected ways. Out in the field, the veteran Paris reporter goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while an inexperienced new Mideast stringer is seeking terrorists to interview. In the shadows is the isolated young publisher whose actions may determine the future of every employee at the paper. The Imperfectionists touches on the decline of newspapers and the rise of technology, but above all it is about these characters and their peculiar stories.

How did you come up with the idea for this novel?
The Imperfectionists came to me in stages, starting with the characters, who wandered into my imagination surprisingly well-formed, even down to their eyeglasses and the stains on their shirts. I organized them, placed them in a setting I knew, a news organization, and watched what happened, sometimes nudging them, sometimes nudged by them. The stories took life as I wrote them, the outcomes almost as unexpected to me at times as to any future reader.

You have lived in several different countries. Where is home for you?
That's tricky. I was born in London in 1974, moved to Vancouver at age 7, attended university in Toronto and New York, wrote news stories from India, Sri Lanka, Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Egypt, composed this book in Paris, and now live in Rome. Yet no place feels exactly like a home. My family, of Eastern European Jewish and British-Welsh descent, has been a mobile, rootless bunch, sometimes out of choice, sometimes out of necessity. These days, I have relations in South Africa, China, France, Israel, the United States, England and Canada. Moving can be liberating: you may adopt what you admire from each culture yet are restricted by none. On the other hand, there is something primal about wanting to possess a piece of land and to feel possessed by it. I sometimes envy those who enjoy easy belonging, but it can't be faked.

How much is the book based on your own experiences?
I worked for most of my professional life in journalism, starting at the foreign desk of the Associated Press in New York and more recently as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. The depiction of journalism in The Imperfectionists is accurate and offers an inside view of how the news is produced. But the characters and stories are all fictional.

What made you want to write a novel, to switch from non-fiction to fiction?
Actually, I set out wanting to write fiction and that led me to journalism, not the other way around. When growing up, I had dreamed of making movies, but in university my enthusiasm for literature moved me to write instead. I believed myself too inexperienced to write a novel right away. Journalism seemed a good way to travel, write and read, while paying my way. So I took that path, with every intention to return to fiction, which I now do full-time.

Your book touches on the problems faced by today's newspapers. Do you think they have a future?
Unfortunately, print publications are in an increasingly dire situation. Their problems are numerous, not least that the Internet has habituated readers to information at no cost. Daily papers, to hold onto their readership, offer most of their work online for free. Yet they must still pay the vast costs of gathering news. This obvious gulf, plus a raft of other problems, is decimating the industry. Nonetheless, readers are more numerous than ever, more educated, more cosmopolitan, and they hunger for trustworthy reports. So the decline of papers cannot kill the news business. We're just not sure how it will look in the future.

Who are some of your favorite writers?
I tend to love particular works rather than a writer's entire output. But those I most admire include Tolstoy (War and Peace and The Death of Ivan Illyich), Chekhov (many stories), Dickens (Great Expectations), plus 20th century masters like Graham Greene (The Comedians, The Quiet American and others), Bruce Chatwin (On the Black Hill and Utz), George Orwell (essays), Katherine Mansfield (stories), Isaac Bashevis Singer (Enemies, a Love Story plus short stories), Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse and essays), and Raymond Carver (many stories). Outstanding contemporary writers include William Boyd (Any Human Heart and A Good Man in Africa), V.S. Naipaul (A House for Mr. Biswas), Zoë Heller (Notes on a Scandal), Russell Banks (Affliction), and J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace). I know I'm forgetting dozens of other brilliant writers. I expect they'll come to me five minutes too late!