The Imperfectionists

He is among the last to emerge off the afternoon flight from Frankfurt.

"Welcome," Herman says, beaming and reaching for Jimmy's bag, then changing his mind and throwing a thick arm around his narrow friend. "You got here."

He leads Jimmy to the car and they set off for the apartment. "Since I didn't know where your body clock would be," Herman explains while driving, "I have four possible di

Jimmy smiles.

"What?" Herman asks, gri

Jimmy journeyed from Los Angeles via Frankfurt, and the trip totaled almost twenty-four hours. He stays awake as long as he can, then falls asleep in the spare room. The next morning around dawn, he is padding around the living room in boxers with a design of lipstick kisses. His chest hair is white. Herman emerges in pajamas, kneading a knot in his back. "You want coffee?" he asks, and gives Jimmy the morning paper. Over breakfast, they talk politics-who's ruling America, who's ruling Italy. Soon, it's time for Herman to go to work. "You only just arrived, and I'm already abandoning you-some host," he says. "You got everything you need? You want to use the computer? It's outdated, but we have the Internet. And I got the technicians at work to install word processing so you can work on your book while you're here. Here, let me log you on."

With his rumpled copy of the paper under his arm, Herman strides into the newsroom, shooting accusatory glances. Reporters murmur "Morning," and editors compress their lips and nod at the floor. He elbows into his office, pops a sucking sweet, and spreads out the day's paper, his yellow highlighter poised to lasso any sins. A stack of unopened letters to the editor sits on the edge of his desk. Sometimes it seems the readers do nothing but complain. They're usually on the old side-he can tell from the palsied scrawl and the diction ("Dear Sir, I expect you receive a great many letters, yet I must express my dismay over…"). Admittedly, the paper's readership is only about ten thousand people nowadays, but at least they are passionate. And the postmarks come from all around the world, which is heartening. For many, especially those in remote locales, the paper is their only link to the greater world, to the big cities they left, or the big cities they have never seen, only built in their minds. The readers constitute a sort of fellowship that never meets, united by loved and loathed bylines, by screwed-up photo captions, by the glorious corrections box. Speaking of which.

He spots Hardy Benjamin gossiping at the other end of the newsroom-he still hasn't finished the Sadism Hussein correction. From the doorway of his office, he bellows, "Miss Benjamin, I'll need you later."

"Something wrong?"

"Yes, but I'm too busy to talk now."

"Is it serious?"

"What I'm occupied with now is serious. You'll have to wait, Nancy Drew." He closes his door, irritated with himself. Imagine if Jimmy saw me bossing them like this, he thinks, and yanks a book at random from the shelf, the International Dictionary of Gastronomy. He flips its pages, landing at the entry for "churros." The first time he and Jimmy shared a home was on Riverside Drive at 103rd Street, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Herman was in his first year at Columbia University, while Jimmy had just returned from three months in Mexico, where he'd been romancing an older woman, an artist who sculpted Aztec monsters and whose husband in Houston had hired a kid to thump Jimmy on the head with a brick, though the kid just threw it and missed. Jimmy claimed that this was the reason he'd returned to America. But Herman suspected, guiltily, that there was another reason: that Jimmy had intuited from Herman's letters how disheartened he was alone at college in New York. There was only a single bed in his studio apartment, so Jimmy slept on the floor without sheets or pillows, which he claimed to prefer. Within a week, he had an entourage of peculiar friends and Herman's home had been transformed from monastic cell to bustling salon, crammed with all the weird of the metropolis: Dyer, the baby-faced waiter from New Orleans, who couldn't have been sweeter until he robbed everyone and bit a policeman's horse; beanpole Lorraine, who smoked marijuana cigarettes and opened her purse to show erotic drawings of herself with spiders; and Nedra, dark eyes disco

Herman closes the International Dictionary of Gastronomy and feeds it back into its slot on the shelf. He opens the paper to the culture pages, which have improved considerably under Arthur Gopal. Nevertheless, Herman spots an offender: the word "literally." He snarls, wakes up his computer, and types:

* literally: This word should be deleted. All too often, actions described as "literally" did not happen at all. As in, "He literally jumped out of his skin." No, he did not. Though if he literally had, I'd suggest raising the element and proposing the piece for page one. Inserting "literally" willy-nilly reinforces the notion that breathless nitwits lurk within this newsroom. Eliminate on sight-the usage, not the nitwits. The nitwits are to be captured and placed in the cages I have set up in the subbasement. See also: Excessive Dashes; Exclamation Points; and Nitwits.

On his way home, Herman drives to Enoteca Costantini in Piazza Cavour to pick up a bottle of Frascati Superiore. Tonight he is preparing a traditional Roman meal for Jimmy: deep-fried fiori di zucca and carciofi alla giudia, a straightforward bucatini all'amatriciana, homemade pizza bianca to mop up the sauce, and pangiallo for dessert (this last item, alas, is store-bought).

At the apartment, he finds Jimmy flopped on the spare bed, back turned. He rolls over.

"How you feeling?" Herman asks. "Jet-lagged?" He readies di

"Sounds more successful than my day," Herman comments. "My style guide is out of control. It's ridiculous. Those poor putzes I work with!"

At di

Herman pats his gut, sauntering with intent toward the liquor cabinet. "Care for a digestivo?" he asks. "One thing I don't have, I'm afraid, is your favorite: Barbancourt rum, right?" The old Modern Library copy of Ulysses remained in Jimmy's pocket throughout the 1960s. Leopold Bloom was his hero, not least because they shared a taste for animal i