Tom Rachman was born in London and raised in Vancouver. He has been a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, stationed in Rome, and worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. This is an edited extract from his debut novel, The Imperfectionists, which is set at an English-language newspaper in Rome.
“Working in an office, you may spend hours a day beside the same colleague,” he told Prospect. “I wanted to follow my characters out of the office, away from the striving and disappointment of the workplace. I wanted to sneak into their homes, to watch as they became truer versions of themselves.” The Imperfectionists is out now (Quercus, £16.99).
Hardy spends her morning on the phone to London, Paris, and Frankfurt, wheedling quotes from grumpy financial analysts. “Is an interest-rate hike imminent?” she asks. “Is Brussels extending the shoe tariffs? What about the trade imbalance?”
By midafternoon she has written 1,000 words, which is greater than the number of calories she has consumed since yesterday. Hardy is on a diet that started, roughly, at age 12. She’s 36 now and still dreaming of butter cookies.
She takes a break at the espresso bar downstairs, where she meets up with her friend Annika, who is unemployed and therefore usually free for coffee. Hardy empties a packet of artificial sweetener over her cappuccino. “Nothing epitomises the futility of human striving quite like aspartame,” she says and sips. “Ah, but this is good.”
Meanwhile, Annika floods her caffè macchiato with an endless stream of brown sugar.
They are an unusual duo at the bar: one is pinkish, geeky, short (Hardy); the other is bosomy, stylish, tall (Annika). The pinkish one waves for the barman, but he doesn’t notice; the bosomy one nods and he bolts forward.
“You’re annoyingly good at hailing boys,” Hardy says. “Though it’s demeaning how they slobber over you.”
“It doesn’t demean me.”
“It demeans me. I want counter staff to treat me like an object,” she says. “Did I tell you, by the way, that I had another nightmare about my hair?”
Annika smiles. “You’re sick, Hardy.”
“In my dream, I was looking in the mirror and I saw this apparition blinking back at me, surrounded by orange frizz. Horrifying.” She glimpses herself in the mirror behind the bar and turns from the sight. “Grotesque.”
“For the record,” Annika says, “I adore your hair.” She pulls one of Hardy’s curls. “Look how it boings back. And I love auburn.”
“Auburn?” she says, eyebrows raised. “My hair is auburn like carrot soup is auburn.” Her cellphone rings, and she drains the last sip of cappuccino. “It’s gonna be Kathleen with questions on my story.” Hardy assumes her professional voice and answers. But after listening a moment her tone changes to alarm. She responds in Italian, copies down an address, and hangs up. “It was the police,” she tells Annika. “My apartment was burglarised. Apparently, they caught a couple of punkabbestia druggies coming out with all my stuff.”
Back home, she finds the drawers flung open and food dumped on the floor. In place of her mini-stereo and tiny flat- screen television are wires. Thankfully, her laptop was at the office. Her apartment is on the ground floor and the kitchen window, which gives onto an alley, has been smashed. Apparently, the two suspects stuffed all they could into plastic bags, then fled. But the bags—already jammed with stolen goods from another apartment in Trastevere—tore under the weight and disgorged loot all over the roadway outside.
On a long table at the police station are her possessions mixed with those of the other, absent victim: a nylon necktie circa 1961, a handful of spy thrillers in English, a Catholic catechism, and, strangely, a pile of ratty boxer shorts.
She states for the record that her belongings are among those recovered, but is not allowed to retrieve anything—the other victim must be present to avoid disputes over ownership, and the police cannot find him.
That night, Hardy phones Annika to coax her over. “It’s creepy with the window smashed,” Hardy says. “You don’t want to come and protect me? I’ll cook.”
“I wish I could, but I’m still waiting for my fella to get home,” Annika says, meaning Craig Menzies, the paper’s news editor. “You could always come hang out with us.”
“I don’t want to go overboard. It’s fine.”
Hardy checks the deadbolt and settles on the couch, blanket laid over her legs, feet snuggled beneath, a carving knife within reach. She gets up and checks the lock again. As she passes the mirror, she raises a hand to block the sight of herself.
She inspects the window in the kitchen—air rushes under the cardboard that patches over the shattered pane. She prods the card. It holds, but is hardly safe. She nestles under the blanket and opens her book. After 80 pages—she’s a fast reader—she gets up to investigate what’s available in the kitchen for dinner. She settles on rice crackers and a can of chicken broth on the top shelf, which she is too short to reach. Using a ladle, she taps the can to the edge. It wobbles, falls, and she catches it with her free hand. “I’m a genius,” she says.
Days pass and the police cannot find the other victim, which means that Hardy is still forbidden to reclaim her possessions.
“At the start,” she complains to Annika, “I imagined this guy as some kind of sweet, innocent English monk, with the spy thrillers and the catechism and all that. But I’m starting to hate him. I have this image now of some pervert priest, you know, with the cilice and the drooling problem, hiding out at some ponti?cal institute to avoid criminal charges in the States. Regrettably, I’ve seen the man’s boxers.”
Almost two weeks later, the police locate him. By the time she arrives at the station, he’s already sorting through their stuff. She turns angrily to a policeman. “I can’t believe you didn’t wait for me,” she says in Italian. “The whole point was for me and him to divide up the stuff together.”
The officer melts away and the other victim turns cheerfully toward her. He’s not a priest, after all, but a scruffy twenty-something with blond dreadlocks. “Buongiorno!” he says, conveying in one word his utter inability with the language.
“Weren’t you supposed to wait?” she replies in English.
“Ah, you’re American!” he says, speaking with an Irish accent. “I love America!”
“Well, thank you, but I’m not actually the ambassador. Look, how do we want to do this? Shall we start going through the CDs?”
“You go ahead. A person needs lots of patience for that kind of thing. And Rory is alien to lots of patience.”
“You’re Rory?”
“Yes.”
“You refer to yourself in the third person?”
“The what person?”
“Forget it. OK, I’ll get my stuff.” She loads up her duffel bag, then scans the remaining items. “Wait—something of mine isn’t here.” All that’s left on the table are his tie, books, CDs, and boxer shorts.
“What are you missing?”
“Just something private. Damn it,” she says. “It’s not worth anything—just sentimental value. A Rubik’s Cube, if you must know. It was a present. Anyway…” She sighs. “Are you making a report for the insurance?”
“I hadn’t planned to, to be honest.” He leans his head out the door and glances down the hall. He returns and, in a whisper, tells her, “I’m not exactly living in my flat legally. It’s a commercial space, in the strictest-speaking sense. I can work there, but I’m not supposed to be living there.”
“And what’s your work?”
“Teaching work.”
“What sort?”
“Bit of a nightmare with these coppers, what with me not living there officially in the formal sense. I thought about not picking up my things at all. But I needed these.” He touches the pile of boxers, grinning.
“OK, but my insurance has nothing to do with you living in a commercial space.”
“They might start sniffing around, don’t you think?”
“Sorry—what did you say you teach, Rory?”
“Improv,” he says. “And juggling.”
“Not at the same time, I hope.”
“Sorry?”
“Doesn’t matter. Where are you from in Ireland? County Cork, by any chance? Everyone I meet from Ireland seems to be from County Cork. I think it must be empty by now.”
“No, no—lots of people there,” he responds guilelessly. “Is that what you’re hearing? That it’s emptied out?”
“I’m joking. Anyway, back to business. My insurance company isn’t going to be interested in you, so I will have to file a report. The burglars smashed my window, and in Rome that’s going to cost me a fortune.”
“A window? Is that all? Jesus, I can sort that out.”
“You’re going to replace my window?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
“Put in some glass.”
“You yourself will?”
“Absolutely.”
“OK, but when?”
“Right now, if you like.”
“I can’t—I have to get back to work. Plus, don’t you need materials?”
“Like what?”
“Glass, for example.”
“Ah,” he says, nodding. “You have a point.”
“I don’t want to be difficult here, but it took the police practically two weeks to track you down. I can’t spend my life corralling you into fixing my window.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“It’s not that I distrust you. I just don’t know you.”
“Here, take my business card.” He hands her one, then removes his watch. “You can keep this, too, as a deposit till I fix your window.”
“Your digital watch?”
“If you don’t want that, take your pick—anything you like from the table.” His junk is laid out there: CDs, dog-eared spy thrillers, the Catholic catechism, the boxer shorts.
A smile crosses her face. She glances at him. She sweeps the boxers into her duffel bag. “Now that’s a deposit.”
“You can’t take those!” he exclaims. “What am I gonna wear?”
“What have you been wearing this past week?”
At the espresso bar, she tells Annika about the Irishman. “And I stole his boxers.”
“Why would you take some old guy’s underwear?”
“He’s a kid, actually. From Ireland. Has blond dreadlocks.”
“Dreadlocks on a white guy? That is sad.”
“I know, but he’s tall, which makes it slightly less horrific. Doesn’t it? I’m a total idiot, though—I ran out without leaving him my contact details.”
“Look, you’ve got the guy’s underwear—he’ll turn up.”
But he doesn’t. She phones the number on his business card and leaves a message. He doesn’t call back. She leaves another. Again, no response. Finally, she visits his address, which looks like a boarded-up garage. He answers the door, blinking at the daylight. “Well, hello there!” He stoops to her low altitude and kisses her cheek. She pulls away in surprise. He says, “I clean forgot. You know that—I clean bloody forgot about your window. Aren’t I terrible! I am sorry. I’ll sort that out for you right now.”
“Actually, I’m going to have to file that insurance claim.”
He toys with a dreadlock. “I should get rid of these stupid things. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bit of a tradition about them. One of my odysseys.”
“Odysseys?”
“Like, trademarks.”
“You mean ‘oddities’?”
“Daft, though, aren’t they. Come on—you chop them for me. All right?” He beckons her in.
“What are you talking about?”
“I give you scissors. You cut them off.”
His place was clearly not intended as a living space. It is windowless and illuminated solely by a halogen lamp. A yellowing mattress is pushed against the wall, with a battered backpack beside it, a heap of clothing, juggling balls and clubs, a toolbox, and his spy thrillers and catechism. It smells of old pizza. He rummages in the toolbox and emerges with a pair of industrial scissors.
He sits on the closed toilet seat. He’s now almost the same height as she is standing. She rises on the balls of her feet and snips, handing him the ?rst amputated strand. “This is actually kind of fun,” she says, and cuts another. The discarded locks pile up like kindling. His ears, bared now, are bent slightly, like a rabbit’s. He raises a mirror. Both are reflected: Rory studying his shorn head; she studying him. He grins at her and she laughs, then catches sight of her own face and recoils, shaking hair from her shoes. “That look okay to you?”
“Looks brilliant. Thanks very much. My head feels so light.” He shakes it, like a wet dog. “You know, I’m starting to think getting robbed wasn’t so bad after all. I got my stuff back and I got a free haircut out of it.”
“Fine for you, maybe. I didn’t get all my things back.”
The next morning, Hardy awakens thinking of Rory. At noon, she sends him a text message. Thereafter, whenever a mobile beeps she checks hers. But it’s never him. She rues having sent that pathetic message (“I still have your underwear!”) and hopes that somehow he never received it. After a few hours, she can’t bear waiting any longer, so she phones him. He picks up and promises to “pop by” later.
It’s almost 1am when he appears, grinning, on her doorstep. She makes a point of looking at her watch. “It’s kind of freezing if you leave the door open like that.”
“Should I come in, then?”
“I guess.” She fetches the plastic bag containing his underwear. “I hope those weren’t your only pairs.”
“Course not.” He takes them. “I wondered before why a thief would want my underpants. But now I see they’re a pretty popular item.”
“So, okay, I guess that’s all. Or, uhm, did you want a drink or something?”
“Yeah, nice one, yeah. Lovely.”
“I have stuff to eat. If you want.”
“Super, super.” He follows her into the kitchen.
She opens a bottle of Valpolicella and heats up a lasagna that she had planned to bring to the office. She cooks expertly but eats none of it; she has seen the bricks of butter that disappeared into the mix, ready to reappear on her hips. So her gourmet creations end up at the paper, spread out for the staff, nibbled by distracted editors, as she observes from her desk, feeding only on their praise.
Rory devours the lasagne, downs most of the wine, and chatters, all at once. “Lovely. Super.” He tells her about his father, who owns a plumbing company outside Dublin, and his mother, a secretary at a medical-supplies company. He attended university in Ireland but quit short of a degree and travelled to Australia, Thailand, Nepal. Next, he was in New York, working at pubs and taking classes in improv comedy. After that, he trekked through Europe ending up in Rome.
She fills his glass. “I’d never have the courage to teach a class in anything. Not that I’m qualified to. Let alone in a foreign city. It’s pretty brave.”
“Or plain stupid.”
“Brave,” she insists.
He asks about her work. “Hate to admit it,” he says, “but I’ve hardly read a newspaper in my life. So bloody small.”
“Small?”
“The writing. You need to make the writing bigger.”
“Mm,” she says. “Maybe.”
“What do you write about then, Hardy?”
“Business.” She sips her wine. “Sorry, I’m not keeping up with you here.”
“You won’t keep up with me,” he replies good-naturedly.
“Can I pour you some more?” She does so. “Well, I was hired to write about luxury goods. But lately, I seem to be a one-woman business section.”
“Nice one, Hardy.” He notices something in her expression. “What’s funny?”
“Nothing—I just like how you call me Hardy.”
“That’s your name, is it not?”
“Yes. But I mean how you say it.”
“How’s that?”
“Say it again.”
“Hardy.”
She smiles, then resumes: “Basically, financial reporting is this sinkhole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until, finally, you can’t fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.”
“That bad, is it?”
“Not really. I tend to dramatise. The sad truth is that I’m secretly into this stuff—I’m the kind of person who reads Morningstar stock reports on vacation. My feeling is that, at heart, every story is a business story.”
“Ah, right,” he says.
“But I’m weird that way.”
He carries his dirty plate to the sink. She jumps to her feet. “No, no—you don’t need to do that.” She stumbles. “Oh—I think I’m a bit drunk.”
In the restricted space of her kitchen, they are close. She looks up.
“You’re irritatingly tall. It’s like an indictment of everything I stand for.”
“You’re not so short.”
“Who said I was short? I’m a minimalist.”
He leans down and kisses her. “Your nose is freezing, Hardy.”
She touches it. She’s no longer trying to sound clever. “Can you do that again?”
“What?”
“That thing you did before.”
“Calling you Hardy?”
“No, the thing you did after that. The thing you just did.”
“What thing?”
She kisses him. “That thing. Keep doing it, please.”
Activities shift into the bedroom.
Afterward, they lie in the dark, side by side on her bed. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, no, Hardy. I’m lovely.”
“I quite agree. A last bit of wine, maybe?”
“A wee dram wouldn’t hurt.”
She pours him a glassful and speeds back to the bedroom. Before entering, she says, “I wasn’t cold before, I was just nervous.” She hands him the glass. “My nose, I mean.”
The next day at the espresso bar, Annika asks for details. “Did your Irishman fix the window?”
“We got slightly drunk, actually.”
“Oh really? Continue.”
“No, nothing.”
“No, something.”
“OK, something.”
“And the window?”
Hardy hires a glazier—she doesn’t want Rory to feel pressured about it each time he drops by. But a week later he hasn’t dropped by again, hasn’t called, hasn’t answered her messages. She visits his place, ready for a sad scene. But when he opens the door he kisses her on the mouth and asks where on earth she’s been. She ends up taking him home, feeding him, watering him, giving him lodgings, as before.
“I like coming here,” he says, propped up in her bed as she dresses for work next morning. “You have a proper bathtub.”
“Is that the extent of my appeal? You’re overlooking my shower.”
“I prefer baths myself.”
“You’re not going to vanish again, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Vanish. As in absence of Rory. Deficit of Rory. Apartment devoid of Rory.”
“Don’t be batty. I’ll give you a ring.”
“When?”
“How’s about tomorrow?”
“When you say tomorrow, do you mean two weeks from tomorrow?”
“I mean tomorrow. Actual tomorrow.”
He doesn’t call. She wants to scream. But this is how he is: easygoing, which means tough-going for everyone else. His time without her, as far as she can tell, is occupied by reading books on the CIA and drinking plonk with his Italian hippie friends. His improv classes turn out to be more hypothetical than real. But everyone needs something they do, she decides, especially if they’re not doing it.
His dream is to make it as a comedian and he’s convinced that fame is around the corner, though how he might achieve this in Italy is beyond her. What’s more, while he is a cheery fellow, he’s not a markedly funny one. Hardy refuses to hear his stand-up routine. She’s polite about this but firm.
One afternoon, Annika asks her, “What if I found Rory a one-off gig?”
“How would you do that?”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”
“No, I am. Tell me.”
Annika saw a flyer advertising a fundraiser at a local pub for the Vatican Radio soccer team. The organisers already have a band arranged but are looking for other acts. “It wouldn’t pay, but it’d be practice,” Annika says.
Hardy and Rory meet up with Annika and Menzies at the pub. The crowd is large and boisterous, and a drum kit is set up on the stage at the back, with a microphone stand before it. They find a free table.
“This is marvellous, this is,” Rory says.
Hardy grips Annika’s leg under the table. “I’m so nervous.”
“You’re nervous?” Annika says. “You’re not the one doing it.”
The emcee—an Englishman who normally delivers sombre bulletins on Vatican Radio but is this evening dressed as a Harlequin—jogs across the stage. “Ready, everybody?”
The crowd murmurs as Rory climbs onto the stage. He tugs the microphone baf?e down tight, shades his eyes from the spotlight. “All right,” he says.
“Who is this guy?” a drunk bellows.
Rory identifies himself.
Derisory hellos spray back at him.
Hardy squeezes Annika’s leg again. “I can’t bear this.”
“What are you worried about?”
Rory begins his routine. “The internet is amazing, isn’t it.” He clears his throat. “Did you realise the US military invented it? It’s true. I read that. They wanted to be sure that if there was a nuclear war everyone would still be able to get pornography.” He pauses.
No one laughs.
“And,” he persists, “come to think of it, if the world was at the brink of destruction, with Armageddon and all that, perhaps a bit of a wank would be in order.”
A few dubious snorts.
Hardy closes her eyes and lets go of Annika’s leg.
“Since this is a Vatican crowd,” he continues gamely, “I thought I’d talk about religion. I’m a Catholic myself. In the Bible there’s that section on God killing everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. But I don’t get it. I mean, we know why everyone in Sodom got punished. But what did the Gomorrans ever do to anybody?”
Once more, the room is silent.
“I feel like I’m going to be sick,” Hardy says. “I have to get out. Is it going to be obvious? I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“Maybe it’ll get better.”
Rory changes topics. “Let me tell you about my girlfriend. Have you heard of the biological clock? Hers is at about half-past midnight. She is so desperate, you have no idea.”
“Maybe,” Annika suggests hurriedly, “you should take this opportunity to go to the toilets.”
Hardy hustles away.
As she passes the bathroom mirror, she raises her hand to block the reflection and enters a stall, sits, her chin on her hands. The echo of Rory’s voice drifts in. She plugs her ears. After ten minutes, Annika taps on her stall. “It’s safe to come back now.”
“I drank too much—that’s the story if he noticed.”
“Gotcha.”
“You seem kind of weird,” Hardy says.
“Did you not hear his act?”
“No. Why?”
“It was totally inappropriate. All sorts of private stuff about you. I’m extremely pissed off right now.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“I’m tempted to punch him.”
“What should I do?” Hardy asks.
“I can’t tell you.” Her expression, however, does.
Rory is at the bar, seeking the bartender.
“So?” Hardy says, trying to sound enthused. “How’d you think it went? Did you enjoy it?”
“Brilliant.” He clearly didn’t notice her absence.
“Let’s snag that table in the corner,” she says.
“We’re not going back with the others?”
“They’re in the middle of a talk.”
A U2 cover band plays its first set. During the intermission, Annika and Menzies, their coats on, stop at Hardy and Rory’s table. “We’re off now, I’m afraid.”
Hardy stands and gives Annika a hug.
“You all right?” Annika asks.
Hardy doesn’t respond.
For the rest of the week, she finds ways out of their afternoon coffee break.
“Kathleen has me slaving away on a massive takeout,” she tells Annika by phone.
“What’s the subject?”
“It’s supposed to be called ‘Europeans are lazy.’ ”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m serious. What kind of deranged person lies about differential rates of labour productivity?”
“You, probably. I want coffee. You must come. I command you.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.” Hardy adds, “I know you don’t like him, by the way.”
“What does that have to do with anything? And I don’t dislike him. I just… He’s sucking all the funny out of you.”
“I’m still funny. I’m just not funny ha-ha. More funny weird.”
“Nothing new there.”
“I don’t want to get into my situation with Rory. It’s fine. I’m happy about it.”
“You don’t seem any more happy than you were before.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
“I just think you have to have standards.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t mean it like that.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Hardy says. “Be furious? Outrage hasn’t gotten me anywhere, ever.”
“Are you in love with this guy?”
“Look, I stopped waiting for that particular sentiment sometime around 1998. At this stage, I’m satisfied if he can reach the top shelf without using my ladle.”
“But this guy?”
“You have to understand, Annika, that I have pretty much resigned myself to spinsterhood since, I don’t know, since approximately my entire life. But just because I act chirpy about it doesn’t mean that I’m chirpy about it. You have Menzies. Me? I dread weekends. How depressing is that? I wish I didn’t have vacation time—I have no idea what to do with it. It’s like a four-week reminder of what a loser I am. I don’t have anyone to go anywhere with. Look at me—I’m practically 40 and I still resemble Pippi Longstocking.”
“Quit it.”
“Are you saying I should dump him? Wait for true love? And if that doesn’t happen? I can’t count on my friends. You guys all have other things to do—husbands, families. Anyway, it’s not as if your man is about to set the world ablaze.”
“Menzies is Menzies. At least he’s smart.”
“Brains don’t keep me warm at night.”
“This guy is taking advantage of you.”
“No one takes advantage of me. Not without my say-so.”
After this, their tradition of afternoon coffee breaks ends.
But Hardy barely notices. Rory is set to move in.
When the day arrives, his Italian hippie friends turn up to help. She has promised to cook a hearty meal in exchange, and the loading and unloading is a jolly affair, sploshed with cheap red wine. Fortunately, Rory owns nothing of value and his few possessions survive the increasingly inebriated moving team.
“Is that it?” she asks.
“I think so.” He pats her on the top of her head.
She pulls him down by the shoulders to her height and kisses him, pressing as hard as she can, then draws back. “I’m going over to your place to give it a final clean. You stay here with your friends”
His old apartment is a terrible mess. She wipes down the stubble-clogged sink, gathers a discarded razor and a strand of dental floss. Old pizza boxes are everywhere. She sweeps and airs out the walk-in closet, which tinkles with metal hangers.
She notices something: dumped in the corner is her old Rubik’s Cube, the one that the burglars stole.
She is still for nearly a minute.
Beneath the toy are a few of her CDs that were never recovered, and rings that went missing, too; Rory must have helped himself before she arrived at the police station. On the panels of the Rubik’s Cube are letters in her father’s handwriting. It was a present on her 14th birthday and he wrote a wish in marker on the squares, then scrambled the puzzle so that she had to solve it in order to read the message. But the cube is scrambled again now, spelling nonsense. Mechanically, she twists it back into its correct position, reviving the message, written in three-letter segments around the cube: AVE RYH APP Y14 FOR DEA RHA RDY ALL MYL OVE DAD.
To this day, her father in Boston is the only person who Hardy knows esteems her. With the rest, she must be clever, must cook sublimely. Her father’s affection alone is unconditional. Yet it has been years since she has returned home. Each time they meet, his expression states so fixedly: how is it possible that you are still alone?
When she goes back to her apartment, Rory and his friends are debating which spy agency is the best—MI6, the CIA, or the Mossad. She proceeds past them, her overcoat pocket heavy with the stolen toy. She lays the coat across a kitchen chair and finishes preparing the meal.
The men drink heartily and gorge themselves on her food. She herself doesn’t eat, instead clattering about the kitchen with dirty pots, opening cupboard doors just for somewhere to stare. Must she mention what she found?
“Rory,” she calls out, “I’m so dumb—I left something over at your place.”
In the dark of his apartment, she digs her nails under the stickers on the Rubik’s Cube. She peels off the squares one by one. The Rubik’s Cube is smooth now, plain black. She reaches for the farthest point in his closet and drops the toy. It lands with a clatter on the CDs and the rings that he stole.
Back home, she finds the men boozily debating Guantánamo Bay. She asks if they have everything they need, then excuses herself to the kitchen. She washes her hands, dries herself. She ought to go in there and confront him.
“Hardy!” he calls merrily. “Hardy, where are you?”
“Coming.”
She catches sight of herself in the silver kettle and studies the reflection, not recoiling this time. She tucks her carrot hair behind her ear and grabs a fresh bottle of Valpolicella.
On the arm of his chair she sits, watching him struggle with the cork.
“Pop,” he says finally, pouring the first dash into his glass.
“Pop,” she says and presses a kiss into his shoulder. No reason to mention anything at all.
“Working in an office, you may spend hours a day beside the same colleague,” he told Prospect. “I wanted to follow my characters out of the office, away from the striving and disappointment of the workplace. I wanted to sneak into their homes, to watch as they became truer versions of themselves.” The Imperfectionists is out now (Quercus, £16.99).
Hardy spends her morning on the phone to London, Paris, and Frankfurt, wheedling quotes from grumpy financial analysts. “Is an interest-rate hike imminent?” she asks. “Is Brussels extending the shoe tariffs? What about the trade imbalance?”
By midafternoon she has written 1,000 words, which is greater than the number of calories she has consumed since yesterday. Hardy is on a diet that started, roughly, at age 12. She’s 36 now and still dreaming of butter cookies.
She takes a break at the espresso bar downstairs, where she meets up with her friend Annika, who is unemployed and therefore usually free for coffee. Hardy empties a packet of artificial sweetener over her cappuccino. “Nothing epitomises the futility of human striving quite like aspartame,” she says and sips. “Ah, but this is good.”
Meanwhile, Annika floods her caffè macchiato with an endless stream of brown sugar.
They are an unusual duo at the bar: one is pinkish, geeky, short (Hardy); the other is bosomy, stylish, tall (Annika). The pinkish one waves for the barman, but he doesn’t notice; the bosomy one nods and he bolts forward.
“You’re annoyingly good at hailing boys,” Hardy says. “Though it’s demeaning how they slobber over you.”
“It doesn’t demean me.”
“It demeans me. I want counter staff to treat me like an object,” she says. “Did I tell you, by the way, that I had another nightmare about my hair?”
Annika smiles. “You’re sick, Hardy.”
“In my dream, I was looking in the mirror and I saw this apparition blinking back at me, surrounded by orange frizz. Horrifying.” She glimpses herself in the mirror behind the bar and turns from the sight. “Grotesque.”
“For the record,” Annika says, “I adore your hair.” She pulls one of Hardy’s curls. “Look how it boings back. And I love auburn.”
“Auburn?” she says, eyebrows raised. “My hair is auburn like carrot soup is auburn.” Her cellphone rings, and she drains the last sip of cappuccino. “It’s gonna be Kathleen with questions on my story.” Hardy assumes her professional voice and answers. But after listening a moment her tone changes to alarm. She responds in Italian, copies down an address, and hangs up. “It was the police,” she tells Annika. “My apartment was burglarised. Apparently, they caught a couple of punkabbestia druggies coming out with all my stuff.”
Back home, she finds the drawers flung open and food dumped on the floor. In place of her mini-stereo and tiny flat- screen television are wires. Thankfully, her laptop was at the office. Her apartment is on the ground floor and the kitchen window, which gives onto an alley, has been smashed. Apparently, the two suspects stuffed all they could into plastic bags, then fled. But the bags—already jammed with stolen goods from another apartment in Trastevere—tore under the weight and disgorged loot all over the roadway outside.
On a long table at the police station are her possessions mixed with those of the other, absent victim: a nylon necktie circa 1961, a handful of spy thrillers in English, a Catholic catechism, and, strangely, a pile of ratty boxer shorts.
She states for the record that her belongings are among those recovered, but is not allowed to retrieve anything—the other victim must be present to avoid disputes over ownership, and the police cannot find him.
That night, Hardy phones Annika to coax her over. “It’s creepy with the window smashed,” Hardy says. “You don’t want to come and protect me? I’ll cook.”
“I wish I could, but I’m still waiting for my fella to get home,” Annika says, meaning Craig Menzies, the paper’s news editor. “You could always come hang out with us.”
“I don’t want to go overboard. It’s fine.”
Hardy checks the deadbolt and settles on the couch, blanket laid over her legs, feet snuggled beneath, a carving knife within reach. She gets up and checks the lock again. As she passes the mirror, she raises a hand to block the sight of herself.
She inspects the window in the kitchen—air rushes under the cardboard that patches over the shattered pane. She prods the card. It holds, but is hardly safe. She nestles under the blanket and opens her book. After 80 pages—she’s a fast reader—she gets up to investigate what’s available in the kitchen for dinner. She settles on rice crackers and a can of chicken broth on the top shelf, which she is too short to reach. Using a ladle, she taps the can to the edge. It wobbles, falls, and she catches it with her free hand. “I’m a genius,” she says.
Days pass and the police cannot find the other victim, which means that Hardy is still forbidden to reclaim her possessions.
“At the start,” she complains to Annika, “I imagined this guy as some kind of sweet, innocent English monk, with the spy thrillers and the catechism and all that. But I’m starting to hate him. I have this image now of some pervert priest, you know, with the cilice and the drooling problem, hiding out at some ponti?cal institute to avoid criminal charges in the States. Regrettably, I’ve seen the man’s boxers.”
Almost two weeks later, the police locate him. By the time she arrives at the station, he’s already sorting through their stuff. She turns angrily to a policeman. “I can’t believe you didn’t wait for me,” she says in Italian. “The whole point was for me and him to divide up the stuff together.”
The officer melts away and the other victim turns cheerfully toward her. He’s not a priest, after all, but a scruffy twenty-something with blond dreadlocks. “Buongiorno!” he says, conveying in one word his utter inability with the language.
“Weren’t you supposed to wait?” she replies in English.
“Ah, you’re American!” he says, speaking with an Irish accent. “I love America!”
“Well, thank you, but I’m not actually the ambassador. Look, how do we want to do this? Shall we start going through the CDs?”
“You go ahead. A person needs lots of patience for that kind of thing. And Rory is alien to lots of patience.”
“You’re Rory?”
“Yes.”
“You refer to yourself in the third person?”
“The what person?”
“Forget it. OK, I’ll get my stuff.” She loads up her duffel bag, then scans the remaining items. “Wait—something of mine isn’t here.” All that’s left on the table are his tie, books, CDs, and boxer shorts.
“What are you missing?”
“Just something private. Damn it,” she says. “It’s not worth anything—just sentimental value. A Rubik’s Cube, if you must know. It was a present. Anyway…” She sighs. “Are you making a report for the insurance?”
“I hadn’t planned to, to be honest.” He leans his head out the door and glances down the hall. He returns and, in a whisper, tells her, “I’m not exactly living in my flat legally. It’s a commercial space, in the strictest-speaking sense. I can work there, but I’m not supposed to be living there.”
“And what’s your work?”
“Teaching work.”
“What sort?”
“Bit of a nightmare with these coppers, what with me not living there officially in the formal sense. I thought about not picking up my things at all. But I needed these.” He touches the pile of boxers, grinning.
“OK, but my insurance has nothing to do with you living in a commercial space.”
“They might start sniffing around, don’t you think?”
“Sorry—what did you say you teach, Rory?”
“Improv,” he says. “And juggling.”
“Not at the same time, I hope.”
“Sorry?”
“Doesn’t matter. Where are you from in Ireland? County Cork, by any chance? Everyone I meet from Ireland seems to be from County Cork. I think it must be empty by now.”
“No, no—lots of people there,” he responds guilelessly. “Is that what you’re hearing? That it’s emptied out?”
“I’m joking. Anyway, back to business. My insurance company isn’t going to be interested in you, so I will have to file a report. The burglars smashed my window, and in Rome that’s going to cost me a fortune.”
“A window? Is that all? Jesus, I can sort that out.”
“You’re going to replace my window?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
“Put in some glass.”
“You yourself will?”
“Absolutely.”
“OK, but when?”
“Right now, if you like.”
“I can’t—I have to get back to work. Plus, don’t you need materials?”
“Like what?”
“Glass, for example.”
“Ah,” he says, nodding. “You have a point.”
“I don’t want to be difficult here, but it took the police practically two weeks to track you down. I can’t spend my life corralling you into fixing my window.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“It’s not that I distrust you. I just don’t know you.”
“Here, take my business card.” He hands her one, then removes his watch. “You can keep this, too, as a deposit till I fix your window.”
“Your digital watch?”
“If you don’t want that, take your pick—anything you like from the table.” His junk is laid out there: CDs, dog-eared spy thrillers, the Catholic catechism, the boxer shorts.
A smile crosses her face. She glances at him. She sweeps the boxers into her duffel bag. “Now that’s a deposit.”
“You can’t take those!” he exclaims. “What am I gonna wear?”
“What have you been wearing this past week?”
At the espresso bar, she tells Annika about the Irishman. “And I stole his boxers.”
“Why would you take some old guy’s underwear?”
“He’s a kid, actually. From Ireland. Has blond dreadlocks.”
“Dreadlocks on a white guy? That is sad.”
“I know, but he’s tall, which makes it slightly less horrific. Doesn’t it? I’m a total idiot, though—I ran out without leaving him my contact details.”
“Look, you’ve got the guy’s underwear—he’ll turn up.”
But he doesn’t. She phones the number on his business card and leaves a message. He doesn’t call back. She leaves another. Again, no response. Finally, she visits his address, which looks like a boarded-up garage. He answers the door, blinking at the daylight. “Well, hello there!” He stoops to her low altitude and kisses her cheek. She pulls away in surprise. He says, “I clean forgot. You know that—I clean bloody forgot about your window. Aren’t I terrible! I am sorry. I’ll sort that out for you right now.”
“Actually, I’m going to have to file that insurance claim.”
He toys with a dreadlock. “I should get rid of these stupid things. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bit of a tradition about them. One of my odysseys.”
“Odysseys?”
“Like, trademarks.”
“You mean ‘oddities’?”
“Daft, though, aren’t they. Come on—you chop them for me. All right?” He beckons her in.
“What are you talking about?”
“I give you scissors. You cut them off.”
His place was clearly not intended as a living space. It is windowless and illuminated solely by a halogen lamp. A yellowing mattress is pushed against the wall, with a battered backpack beside it, a heap of clothing, juggling balls and clubs, a toolbox, and his spy thrillers and catechism. It smells of old pizza. He rummages in the toolbox and emerges with a pair of industrial scissors.
He sits on the closed toilet seat. He’s now almost the same height as she is standing. She rises on the balls of her feet and snips, handing him the ?rst amputated strand. “This is actually kind of fun,” she says, and cuts another. The discarded locks pile up like kindling. His ears, bared now, are bent slightly, like a rabbit’s. He raises a mirror. Both are reflected: Rory studying his shorn head; she studying him. He grins at her and she laughs, then catches sight of her own face and recoils, shaking hair from her shoes. “That look okay to you?”
“Looks brilliant. Thanks very much. My head feels so light.” He shakes it, like a wet dog. “You know, I’m starting to think getting robbed wasn’t so bad after all. I got my stuff back and I got a free haircut out of it.”
“Fine for you, maybe. I didn’t get all my things back.”
The next morning, Hardy awakens thinking of Rory. At noon, she sends him a text message. Thereafter, whenever a mobile beeps she checks hers. But it’s never him. She rues having sent that pathetic message (“I still have your underwear!”) and hopes that somehow he never received it. After a few hours, she can’t bear waiting any longer, so she phones him. He picks up and promises to “pop by” later.
It’s almost 1am when he appears, grinning, on her doorstep. She makes a point of looking at her watch. “It’s kind of freezing if you leave the door open like that.”
“Should I come in, then?”
“I guess.” She fetches the plastic bag containing his underwear. “I hope those weren’t your only pairs.”
“Course not.” He takes them. “I wondered before why a thief would want my underpants. But now I see they’re a pretty popular item.”
“So, okay, I guess that’s all. Or, uhm, did you want a drink or something?”
“Yeah, nice one, yeah. Lovely.”
“I have stuff to eat. If you want.”
“Super, super.” He follows her into the kitchen.
She opens a bottle of Valpolicella and heats up a lasagna that she had planned to bring to the office. She cooks expertly but eats none of it; she has seen the bricks of butter that disappeared into the mix, ready to reappear on her hips. So her gourmet creations end up at the paper, spread out for the staff, nibbled by distracted editors, as she observes from her desk, feeding only on their praise.
Rory devours the lasagne, downs most of the wine, and chatters, all at once. “Lovely. Super.” He tells her about his father, who owns a plumbing company outside Dublin, and his mother, a secretary at a medical-supplies company. He attended university in Ireland but quit short of a degree and travelled to Australia, Thailand, Nepal. Next, he was in New York, working at pubs and taking classes in improv comedy. After that, he trekked through Europe ending up in Rome.
She fills his glass. “I’d never have the courage to teach a class in anything. Not that I’m qualified to. Let alone in a foreign city. It’s pretty brave.”
“Or plain stupid.”
“Brave,” she insists.
He asks about her work. “Hate to admit it,” he says, “but I’ve hardly read a newspaper in my life. So bloody small.”
“Small?”
“The writing. You need to make the writing bigger.”
“Mm,” she says. “Maybe.”
“What do you write about then, Hardy?”
“Business.” She sips her wine. “Sorry, I’m not keeping up with you here.”
“You won’t keep up with me,” he replies good-naturedly.
“Can I pour you some more?” She does so. “Well, I was hired to write about luxury goods. But lately, I seem to be a one-woman business section.”
“Nice one, Hardy.” He notices something in her expression. “What’s funny?”
“Nothing—I just like how you call me Hardy.”
“That’s your name, is it not?”
“Yes. But I mean how you say it.”
“How’s that?”
“Say it again.”
“Hardy.”
She smiles, then resumes: “Basically, financial reporting is this sinkhole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until, finally, you can’t fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.”
“That bad, is it?”
“Not really. I tend to dramatise. The sad truth is that I’m secretly into this stuff—I’m the kind of person who reads Morningstar stock reports on vacation. My feeling is that, at heart, every story is a business story.”
“Ah, right,” he says.
“But I’m weird that way.”
He carries his dirty plate to the sink. She jumps to her feet. “No, no—you don’t need to do that.” She stumbles. “Oh—I think I’m a bit drunk.”
In the restricted space of her kitchen, they are close. She looks up.
“You’re irritatingly tall. It’s like an indictment of everything I stand for.”
“You’re not so short.”
“Who said I was short? I’m a minimalist.”
He leans down and kisses her. “Your nose is freezing, Hardy.”
She touches it. She’s no longer trying to sound clever. “Can you do that again?”
“What?”
“That thing you did before.”
“Calling you Hardy?”
“No, the thing you did after that. The thing you just did.”
“What thing?”
She kisses him. “That thing. Keep doing it, please.”
Activities shift into the bedroom.
Afterward, they lie in the dark, side by side on her bed. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, no, Hardy. I’m lovely.”
“I quite agree. A last bit of wine, maybe?”
“A wee dram wouldn’t hurt.”
She pours him a glassful and speeds back to the bedroom. Before entering, she says, “I wasn’t cold before, I was just nervous.” She hands him the glass. “My nose, I mean.”
The next day at the espresso bar, Annika asks for details. “Did your Irishman fix the window?”
“We got slightly drunk, actually.”
“Oh really? Continue.”
“No, nothing.”
“No, something.”
“OK, something.”
“And the window?”
Hardy hires a glazier—she doesn’t want Rory to feel pressured about it each time he drops by. But a week later he hasn’t dropped by again, hasn’t called, hasn’t answered her messages. She visits his place, ready for a sad scene. But when he opens the door he kisses her on the mouth and asks where on earth she’s been. She ends up taking him home, feeding him, watering him, giving him lodgings, as before.
“I like coming here,” he says, propped up in her bed as she dresses for work next morning. “You have a proper bathtub.”
“Is that the extent of my appeal? You’re overlooking my shower.”
“I prefer baths myself.”
“You’re not going to vanish again, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Vanish. As in absence of Rory. Deficit of Rory. Apartment devoid of Rory.”
“Don’t be batty. I’ll give you a ring.”
“When?”
“How’s about tomorrow?”
“When you say tomorrow, do you mean two weeks from tomorrow?”
“I mean tomorrow. Actual tomorrow.”
He doesn’t call. She wants to scream. But this is how he is: easygoing, which means tough-going for everyone else. His time without her, as far as she can tell, is occupied by reading books on the CIA and drinking plonk with his Italian hippie friends. His improv classes turn out to be more hypothetical than real. But everyone needs something they do, she decides, especially if they’re not doing it.
His dream is to make it as a comedian and he’s convinced that fame is around the corner, though how he might achieve this in Italy is beyond her. What’s more, while he is a cheery fellow, he’s not a markedly funny one. Hardy refuses to hear his stand-up routine. She’s polite about this but firm.
One afternoon, Annika asks her, “What if I found Rory a one-off gig?”
“How would you do that?”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”
“No, I am. Tell me.”
Annika saw a flyer advertising a fundraiser at a local pub for the Vatican Radio soccer team. The organisers already have a band arranged but are looking for other acts. “It wouldn’t pay, but it’d be practice,” Annika says.
Hardy and Rory meet up with Annika and Menzies at the pub. The crowd is large and boisterous, and a drum kit is set up on the stage at the back, with a microphone stand before it. They find a free table.
“This is marvellous, this is,” Rory says.
Hardy grips Annika’s leg under the table. “I’m so nervous.”
“You’re nervous?” Annika says. “You’re not the one doing it.”
The emcee—an Englishman who normally delivers sombre bulletins on Vatican Radio but is this evening dressed as a Harlequin—jogs across the stage. “Ready, everybody?”
The crowd murmurs as Rory climbs onto the stage. He tugs the microphone baf?e down tight, shades his eyes from the spotlight. “All right,” he says.
“Who is this guy?” a drunk bellows.
Rory identifies himself.
Derisory hellos spray back at him.
Hardy squeezes Annika’s leg again. “I can’t bear this.”
“What are you worried about?”
Rory begins his routine. “The internet is amazing, isn’t it.” He clears his throat. “Did you realise the US military invented it? It’s true. I read that. They wanted to be sure that if there was a nuclear war everyone would still be able to get pornography.” He pauses.
No one laughs.
“And,” he persists, “come to think of it, if the world was at the brink of destruction, with Armageddon and all that, perhaps a bit of a wank would be in order.”
A few dubious snorts.
Hardy closes her eyes and lets go of Annika’s leg.
“Since this is a Vatican crowd,” he continues gamely, “I thought I’d talk about religion. I’m a Catholic myself. In the Bible there’s that section on God killing everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. But I don’t get it. I mean, we know why everyone in Sodom got punished. But what did the Gomorrans ever do to anybody?”
Once more, the room is silent.
“I feel like I’m going to be sick,” Hardy says. “I have to get out. Is it going to be obvious? I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“Maybe it’ll get better.”
Rory changes topics. “Let me tell you about my girlfriend. Have you heard of the biological clock? Hers is at about half-past midnight. She is so desperate, you have no idea.”
“Maybe,” Annika suggests hurriedly, “you should take this opportunity to go to the toilets.”
Hardy hustles away.
As she passes the bathroom mirror, she raises her hand to block the reflection and enters a stall, sits, her chin on her hands. The echo of Rory’s voice drifts in. She plugs her ears. After ten minutes, Annika taps on her stall. “It’s safe to come back now.”
“I drank too much—that’s the story if he noticed.”
“Gotcha.”
“You seem kind of weird,” Hardy says.
“Did you not hear his act?”
“No. Why?”
“It was totally inappropriate. All sorts of private stuff about you. I’m extremely pissed off right now.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“I’m tempted to punch him.”
“What should I do?” Hardy asks.
“I can’t tell you.” Her expression, however, does.
Rory is at the bar, seeking the bartender.
“So?” Hardy says, trying to sound enthused. “How’d you think it went? Did you enjoy it?”
“Brilliant.” He clearly didn’t notice her absence.
“Let’s snag that table in the corner,” she says.
“We’re not going back with the others?”
“They’re in the middle of a talk.”
A U2 cover band plays its first set. During the intermission, Annika and Menzies, their coats on, stop at Hardy and Rory’s table. “We’re off now, I’m afraid.”
Hardy stands and gives Annika a hug.
“You all right?” Annika asks.
Hardy doesn’t respond.
For the rest of the week, she finds ways out of their afternoon coffee break.
“Kathleen has me slaving away on a massive takeout,” she tells Annika by phone.
“What’s the subject?”
“It’s supposed to be called ‘Europeans are lazy.’ ”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m serious. What kind of deranged person lies about differential rates of labour productivity?”
“You, probably. I want coffee. You must come. I command you.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.” Hardy adds, “I know you don’t like him, by the way.”
“What does that have to do with anything? And I don’t dislike him. I just… He’s sucking all the funny out of you.”
“I’m still funny. I’m just not funny ha-ha. More funny weird.”
“Nothing new there.”
“I don’t want to get into my situation with Rory. It’s fine. I’m happy about it.”
“You don’t seem any more happy than you were before.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
“I just think you have to have standards.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t mean it like that.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Hardy says. “Be furious? Outrage hasn’t gotten me anywhere, ever.”
“Are you in love with this guy?”
“Look, I stopped waiting for that particular sentiment sometime around 1998. At this stage, I’m satisfied if he can reach the top shelf without using my ladle.”
“But this guy?”
“You have to understand, Annika, that I have pretty much resigned myself to spinsterhood since, I don’t know, since approximately my entire life. But just because I act chirpy about it doesn’t mean that I’m chirpy about it. You have Menzies. Me? I dread weekends. How depressing is that? I wish I didn’t have vacation time—I have no idea what to do with it. It’s like a four-week reminder of what a loser I am. I don’t have anyone to go anywhere with. Look at me—I’m practically 40 and I still resemble Pippi Longstocking.”
“Quit it.”
“Are you saying I should dump him? Wait for true love? And if that doesn’t happen? I can’t count on my friends. You guys all have other things to do—husbands, families. Anyway, it’s not as if your man is about to set the world ablaze.”
“Menzies is Menzies. At least he’s smart.”
“Brains don’t keep me warm at night.”
“This guy is taking advantage of you.”
“No one takes advantage of me. Not without my say-so.”
After this, their tradition of afternoon coffee breaks ends.
But Hardy barely notices. Rory is set to move in.
When the day arrives, his Italian hippie friends turn up to help. She has promised to cook a hearty meal in exchange, and the loading and unloading is a jolly affair, sploshed with cheap red wine. Fortunately, Rory owns nothing of value and his few possessions survive the increasingly inebriated moving team.
“Is that it?” she asks.
“I think so.” He pats her on the top of her head.
She pulls him down by the shoulders to her height and kisses him, pressing as hard as she can, then draws back. “I’m going over to your place to give it a final clean. You stay here with your friends”
His old apartment is a terrible mess. She wipes down the stubble-clogged sink, gathers a discarded razor and a strand of dental floss. Old pizza boxes are everywhere. She sweeps and airs out the walk-in closet, which tinkles with metal hangers.
She notices something: dumped in the corner is her old Rubik’s Cube, the one that the burglars stole.
She is still for nearly a minute.
Beneath the toy are a few of her CDs that were never recovered, and rings that went missing, too; Rory must have helped himself before she arrived at the police station. On the panels of the Rubik’s Cube are letters in her father’s handwriting. It was a present on her 14th birthday and he wrote a wish in marker on the squares, then scrambled the puzzle so that she had to solve it in order to read the message. But the cube is scrambled again now, spelling nonsense. Mechanically, she twists it back into its correct position, reviving the message, written in three-letter segments around the cube: AVE RYH APP Y14 FOR DEA RHA RDY ALL MYL OVE DAD.
To this day, her father in Boston is the only person who Hardy knows esteems her. With the rest, she must be clever, must cook sublimely. Her father’s affection alone is unconditional. Yet it has been years since she has returned home. Each time they meet, his expression states so fixedly: how is it possible that you are still alone?
When she goes back to her apartment, Rory and his friends are debating which spy agency is the best—MI6, the CIA, or the Mossad. She proceeds past them, her overcoat pocket heavy with the stolen toy. She lays the coat across a kitchen chair and finishes preparing the meal.
The men drink heartily and gorge themselves on her food. She herself doesn’t eat, instead clattering about the kitchen with dirty pots, opening cupboard doors just for somewhere to stare. Must she mention what she found?
“Rory,” she calls out, “I’m so dumb—I left something over at your place.”
In the dark of his apartment, she digs her nails under the stickers on the Rubik’s Cube. She peels off the squares one by one. The Rubik’s Cube is smooth now, plain black. She reaches for the farthest point in his closet and drops the toy. It lands with a clatter on the CDs and the rings that he stole.
Back home, she finds the men boozily debating Guantánamo Bay. She asks if they have everything they need, then excuses herself to the kitchen. She washes her hands, dries herself. She ought to go in there and confront him.
“Hardy!” he calls merrily. “Hardy, where are you?”
“Coming.”
She catches sight of herself in the silver kettle and studies the reflection, not recoiling this time. She tucks her carrot hair behind her ear and grabs a fresh bottle of Valpolicella.
On the arm of his chair she sits, watching him struggle with the cork.
“Pop,” he says finally, pouring the first dash into his glass.
“Pop,” she says and presses a kiss into his shoulder. No reason to mention anything at all.
