Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  Abruptly, in an interruption of his own thoughts, Jacob realized that in giving Kaspar the pages, he had forgotten all about the main character’s attempt to seduce another man.

  He watched Kaspar nervously. After finishing the last page, Kaspar picked up the others, which he had set down one by one as he read, and tapped the sheaf on the table to align it.

  “At the end, where the angry man makes a pass at the other one, I think I was thinking it was a symbol,” Jacob said. It was almost painful how badly Jacob wanted Kaspar to make sense of what he’d written. The schoolboy in him was impatient, too, to hear whether he had done well.

  “May I?” Kaspar asked, with his pack of Petry in his fist. Jacob gave permission but didn’t take one himself. “And the trouble,” Kaspar continued, “you think, it is that you are angry, you say, like the angry man.”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps.” In automatic movements, Kaspar opened the double windows beside him a crack, and some of the bitter smoke from his cigarette flitted out. “A symbol…It is a symbol of what?”

  “Of union,” Jacob said, but the answer sounded too grand. “Of wanting to know what the crying man is feeling.”

  “But he doesn’t want that,” Kaspar said, with his crooked smile.

  “Yes he does,” Jacob insisted. “The man who isn’t crying wants to know why he’s angry at the other man.”

  “No, he wants to not-know,” Kaspar said. “The nature of what he wants is not-knowing.”

  Jacob took a breath. “Because it’s two men?”

  “Because such a union is the thing itself. It is not the symbol of it. It cannot be a symbol.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there are no words for it.”

  Again Jacob was suspicious. “No words for love between men?”

  “No, no.” Kaspar seemed to brush away the misunderstanding. “For sex. There are no words.”

  “You can write about sex.”

  “But if you do, the words become the thing itself, again,” Kaspar explained. “It cannot be put into words.”

  “You mean it turns into porn.”

  “If you will.”

  Jacob thought of the character he had tried to create, and of his own frustration, which he had tried to put into the character. “But he does want to know,” Jacob said, “and he doesn’t know.”

  “But he will want also to not-know. To be alive in not-knowing. To be with his friend in not-knowing.”

  “His friend?”

  “The one in the ground.”

  “But he wants to be with the man. That’s what he says. He doesn’t want to be with her.”

  “He is in anguish. He is lying to himself.”

  “What if he’s really gay?” Jacob asked.

  “You have not written that story,” Kaspar calmly answered.

  “But what if he’s really gay?” Jacob repeated.

  “It will make no difference.” He blinked a few times, perhaps irritated by the smoke. “He is in two,” he continued. “That is what it means, to want another in order to have union. He is in two.”

  “You mean he wants to be with him and with her.”

  “No, no. He is in two in order to be with her.”

  “Because he shouldn’t be with her? Because that’s not who he is?”

  “No, no.” He stubbed out his cigarette abstractedly. “Listen,” he suggested, “perhaps it is not you who were in two. Or not only you. Do you see?” He looked out the window as if to leave Jacob the freedom to approach the idea. The sky was gray and near as if it might snow, but it had been gray yesterday as well, and it hadn’t snowed then. “She was two, and so you were two in being with her. And she killed one of them. One that was she killed the other that was she.”

  “You didn’t know her.”

  “No. This is true.”

  “That’s also the fake part of the story,” Jacob said with some agitation. “About the other man. That’s the part I made up. I didn’t intend for it to seem real. It’s the part I added, that I was conscious of adding. I didn’t have a real person in mind. If anything, it’s a little forced. Do you know what I mean?”

  “It is possible that the sense of having made it up,” Kaspar slowly replied, “is the cover under which you have hidden it from yourself.”

  Jacob repeated Kaspar’s sentence silently. He remembered having read a similar thought once before. “Freud says something like that about dreams,” Jacob said. “When you say, within a dream, that it’s just a dream…”

  “Like in Freud, yes.”

  “But I’m really gay.”

  “Are you?” joked Kaspar, because it didn’t feel to either of them like a revelation.

  “Yes, I am,” Jacob said, a little angrily.

  “But you were in love with a woman. With this woman.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Why do you write about her?”

  It seemed to Jacob that Kaspar failed to realize how selfish Jacob was. “There was a thing that we had, that we were both writers,” Jacob said, “and now I don’t know if I have the right to keep it any more.”

  “You had a calling,” Kaspar said. His face took on the pleased look that Jacob so distrusted, the look he had given to the typewriter.

  “Like a religious calling? I don’t believe in God.”

  “That doesn’t prevent him from calling to you.” Kaspar was so confident of his better understanding that now he was making jokes at the expense of what he considered Jacob’s ignorance.

  “I don’t believe in that,” Jacob repeated.

  “You had a calling, and you had the good fortune to know someone else with a calling,” Kaspar said, with more diplomacy.

  “That’s making too much of it. We hadn’t earned it. I hadn’t earned it.”

  Kaspar shrugged. “You do not earn a calling.”

  Kaspar had misunderstood so much there seemed no hope of correcting him. “So does this mean I’m not gay, in your opinion?”

  “I don’t know if I believe in this, the question of gay or not gay.”

  “I do.”

  “And I believe in God. So.”

  “I think you’re missing the point,” Jacob said.

  “Yes, perhaps,” Kaspar cheerfully admitted.

  * * *

  “There’s something else,” Jacob added that evening, Václav in one crook of his folded arms, as he came to the end of his narration to Carl of Kaspar’s visit. “Something he said about love.”

  He glanced instinctively at Carl as he said the word, because Carl had become identified in his mind as the Lover, and the identification was so conscious, though tacit, between the two of them that Jacob worried for a moment that Carl might take personally what he said next. He reminded himself that Carl was too generous for that kind of misunderstanding. It was to some extent by virtue of his generous spirit that he had become the Lover, after all, though it was also true that he looked the part, tonight especially. His shirt was half-unbuttoned, his hair was long, and his face seemed to have caught and held the white gold of the winter sun that he had spent the day walking in. He sat in his chair with a touch of swagger, managing to enjoy the white-painted plywood thing. He was sprawled across it, his legs apart, humanizing its angularity with a slouch, which the curve of his spine inverted from time to time, when he yawned, and arched himself up and over the chair’s back. Faced with such physical confidence in a stranger, Jacob would have tried to convince himself that he hated it because it was unearned, but of course it wasn’t hatred that he felt, and it wouldn’t have had the same charm if it were earned, whatever earning it might mean. In Carl, he told himself, the confidence was like the resistance in metal that makes it possible to sharpen it, and he knew that it was being sharpened, in Carl’s case; Carl was in love.

  “What did the two of you decide love is?” Carl asked.

  “Kaspar made it sound as if it’s always a mistake. As if it isn’t even possible for a healthy person to be
in love.” Jacob tried to remember how Kaspar had put it: “When you think you have to have somebody, it’s because you yourself are in two.”

  “That’s classic, though, isn’t it?” Carl pulled a hand over his beard. “We’re severed halves, looking for our complements.”

  Jacob spoke quickly because Kaspar’s suggestion had irritated him and it irritated him again to repeat it: “At first I thought he was trying to say that being in two was a problem that only gay people had, or people who think they’re gay, because they haven’t accepted their own sexual nature and would rather find it in someone else, in another man, but now I think it has to be true for straights as well, if it’s true at all.”

  “He knows you’re gay?”

  “Sort of. That was part of it. But he said it didn’t matter. He didn’t even seem to believe me, necessarily. What’s bothering me is, if he’s right, if love is a way to keep from understanding what’s missing in yourself, shouldn’t you always resist it? You’re not supposed to go to bed with your therapist, because it’s better for you to understand what you’re feeling. But if that’s true, why should you ever go to bed with anyone? Wouldn’t it always be better not to?”

  Carl listened to Jacob’s idea, which Jacob was afraid must sound crazy, with more attention than Jacob was sure it deserved, Carl’s two arms wrapped over and behind the back of his chair and gripping the posts on either side of it, as if to pin himself in it. He fidgeted in place. “Would you still fall in love?” he asked.

  “I think so,” Jacob answered. “I think that’s the whole point. But not do anything about it.”

  “I seem to be falling into that condition,” Carl said. “The cavaliere sirvente. Or non sirvente, rather.”

  “Who?”

  “Like in Renaissance love poetry. Did you ever read any of that? I took a class in it. I was in a Shakespeare play, and I sort of went through a phase. The heart is free to ride out to the tournament of love, only because its master cannot follow.”

  “There is a kind of freedom to it,” Jacob said carefully. He had been hoping that Carl would show him that somehow Kaspar was wrong.

  Jacob’s stomach growled. It was dark, and neither of them had yet suggested a plan for dinner, but Jacob didn’t want the conversation to be interrupted. He took his cigarettes out of the cabinet nearest the stove and lit one to dispel his hunger. Carl accepted one, too. They could talk all night if they wanted to. They were young. For years and years still, they were going to be able to live this carelessly.

  “So you’re saying it’s not real, in a way,” Carl mused.

  “I’m not saying it.”

  “Only the mistake of it is real,” he said, as if he were accepting the idea.

  “How was the castle?”

  “There was almost nobody there. There aren’t any crowd pleasers. It’s all young men in pain—Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch. Young men in pain in the castle. So we had it to ourselves. One white room after another. I told Melinda the castle belonged to us the way the day did.” He got up and started to pace. “But it’s real as long as it lasts, even if it is a mistake. And if it doesn’t last…Even if you don’t go to bed with each other, it doesn’t last.” Jacob could tell from Carl’s scowl that Carl was looking at a picture of Melinda in his mind’s eye. “Because we’re mortal.” He made the portentousness of the word into a kind of punch line.

  “In the long run, no one’s staying in Prague, is what you’re saying.”

  “The difference can only be in the moment. Not in the number of moments.”

  “These are good lines,” Jacob said.

  “I’m serious, though.”

  They went on to debate whether to drink the beer in their pantry.

  * * *

  The next morning, Jacob wasn’t careful in placing a carrot, and the hamster escaped from his cage again. Neither Jacob nor Carl could find him. They couldn’t find Honza the plumber, either, who had recently been going in and out of their apartment during the day to use their bathroom and to shut off and turn on the water on the ground floor (the valve was in their pantry). Jacob had to teach at the language school in the morning and at the chemistry institute in the afternoon. Carl was going out, too. After consulting his French-Czech dictionary, Jacob wrote a warning in block letters—POZOR! VÁCLAV, , UTEKL—and propped it up on the kitchen table. When he went upstairs to alert , whose parents were again in Poland, it occurred to him to negotiate once more for use of the washing machine, which he had abstained from ever since the conflict over the bell. She granted the privilege immediately and asked, in turn, if she and a friend could hire Jacob for private lessons. They spent so long discussing the subject matter and the kind of instruction—prepositions were at the top of list—that the tea that Jacob had drunk at breakfast finished its course through his system.

  —Can I? he asked, gesturing to the Stehlíks’ bathroom, which he had never used before.

  —Let us hope, answered.

  While drying his hands, he noticed the wallpaper inside the bathroom door: line drawings of plump nude nymphs romping lewdly with shepherds. The style of the figures appeared somehow French, but maybe it was just their abandonment.

  —Those sketches…, Jacob began, once he was in the kitchen again. He knew the word for “sketch” from museum placards but not the word for “wallpaper.”

  —Yes? dared him.

  But he was running late, and he excused himself. Fortunately, just as he and Carl were leaving, Honza finally arrived, the hair on one side of his head matted where he had slept on it.

  —Václav escaped, Jacob told him.

  —The rascal! Honza replied. When he smiled, one saw that his teeth were tobacco yellow and as disorderly as his hair. He assured them he would watch where he stepped. Leaving the apartment unlocked for him, they exited.

  The morning sun slanted on the world, which was damp and tender, winter having left and spring not yet arrived. The light sharpened the wire mesh in the fences around the villas’ small lawns and threw into relief the stones in the road’s asphalt. In the field beside the tram stop, darkening grass lay limp and flat.

  “What are you doing?” Jacob asked.

  “Taking your picture,” Carl answered, as he released the shutter. “It’s time for me to take everyone’s picture.” Yesterday at lunch, he said, he had taken three of Henry as he sat facing the restaurant’s street window, where the light had been good.

  On the tram, they stood and stared with their fellow passengers at the street scenes rolling past, which they recognized but which the daylight was not yet full enough to have rendered common. There was a half consciousness to the silence, a provisional unity among the strangers—a shared respect for duty or at least a shared experience of obligation to it. At Palmovka they stepped out of the stillness into a milling crowd, more fully awake, already chatting and irritable. Carl turned to the subway, Jacob to the uphill tram.

  “Jacob!” Annie greeted him, jumping up from her seat as he entered the teacher’s lounge. Melinda and Thom looked up from their workbooks. The oaks outside the window were motionless, and they were bare except for delicate, dark nibs at the joints of the finer branches. The light was steeper now as it passed through them. “It is a delight to see you,” Annie continued. “How are you, then? I have any number of plans for you, I hope you don’t mind.” She pulled him to her in her awkward, birdlike way, patting him lightly on the back to let him know the embrace was over almost as soon as it had begun.

  “You’re looking well, mate,” said Melinda in her fake Cockney.

  “Seems steady enough on his pins,” Thom commented, as if it were a binge that Jacob had recovered from.

  “Ehm, tell me, Jacob, would you fancy going a journey by car?” Annie asked.

  “Melinda’s car?”

  Melinda herself answered: “Alas, no. Rafe has need of mine to shuttle ministers, and of me as a chauffeur. To an out-of-town castle that his institute has appropriated for retreats, though he won’t sa
y precisely when these retreats are to occur.”

  “But you can rent cars now,” Annie said. “It’s one of the new businesses. For the weekend, you see.”

  “You don’t have to be Czech?”

  “I telephoned, and the likes of us don’t seem to have occurred to them, but when I said that we had long-stay visas, she said well that’s all right then.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Krakow? It’s said to be quite beautiful. Your mates didn’t bomb it during World War Two, you see.”

  “Okay,” Jacob agreed.

  “In three weeks’ time, is my idea. Fancy a crisp?” She turned the mouth of a plastic bag toward him.

  “What kind?”

  “Prawn. Don’t make a face, Jacob.”

  “It’s too early.”

  “I know they’re revolting, but they suit me, somehow. They could be more revolting, I suppose. They could be cuttlefish or some such.”