Necessary Errors: A Novel

by Caleb Crain

  “‘Brilliant,’ yes,” Rafe repeated. “You sound like Carl,” he added, after a pause.

  Jacob apologized: “He’s practically the only person I’ve seen for weeks, until today.”

  “Oh, me too!” Rafe exclaimed. “He stops by, you know. Today he photographed me, for a keepsake. ‘This was Melinda’s “boyfriend,”’ I imagine. He’s very devoted to everything about Melinda. Including me.”

  “He’s joking, though it may not be apparent,” Melinda said.

  “I’m not joking. He did photograph me.”

  “I meant your tone.”

  “What’s my tone? I’m not Jealous. No, that’s not true, I am jealous. But jealousy is great. Jealousy is the spice of married life.”

  “It doesn’t seem quite right for you to enjoy the spice without having committed yourself to the bread and butter,” Melinda suggested.

  “I get away with all sorts of things,” Rafe answered. “Now you two enjoy your date.”

  Jacob didn’t feel it was safe to go. “You know, Rafe, there’s something I—,” he began.

  “Darling, he’s taking the piss out of you,” Melinda interrupted. “As it happens, I told him about you the other night.”

  “Doesn’t mean I’m not jealous,” Rafe said. “A romantic dinner on a spring night with a beautiful woman.”

  “Oh,” was all Jacob could think to say.

  * * *

  “I’m an awful person and if you don’t want to have dinner with me I’ll understand.”

  “Of course I want to have dinner with you.”

  “It became a strategic necessity. I don’t know if I can hope to make you understand, given that your longest involvement to date has been, what, two months? And even then without the bother of fidelity.”

  “I understand the concept.”

  “No, you have no idea, but here I am, berating you when I’m at fault. When you have had some experience, you’ll find that that’s typical, too. The worse one sins, the more of a moralist one becomes.”

  “Has there really been sinning?”

  “As if I would tell! But no, there hasn’t been. It’s all in Rafe’s head.”

  “All of it?”

  “Except for what’s in Carl’s head, I suppose.”

  “And none in yours.”

  “Darling, I am like Victoria upon the discovery of her destiny: ‘I will be good.’”

  The restaurant, only a block away, bore no sign. It was located in a shop front, the vitrine of which was white and empty. Inside, a palisade of unfinished bamboo sheltered the diners from the sight of the street. There was a wallpaper of silver and gold ferns on a pale green ground, and there were four potted palms, each a distinct variety, spaced among the modest tables. In the center of the room, a small aquarium, so low one might trip over it, burbled and glowed. While Jacob was admiring the décor, a petite Vietnamese woman gave a slight bow of greeting and wordlessly showed them to a table.

  The chairs were standard socialist-issue, as were the light fixtures above and the alloy cutlery wrapped tight in paper napkins. Even the tablecloth was a common red-and-white gingham that Jacob recognized from U . So the effect of the restaurant, as one settled into it, was not of sudden transport to Asia; it was of having been invited into a child’s make-believe of such a journey, where the props of everyday life have been rearranged so as to suggest a new meaning, and then accented by a few precious objects, loaned perhaps by an indulgent aunt. Its success depended on one’s own complicity. When the menu arrived, it was a mimeograph, muddily typed and reproduced in violet, as in every Prague restaurant, and it listed no Vietnamese names for the dishes, not even in transliteration, but only generic Czech descriptions. Soup with onions and with lemon, read the entry that Melinda pointed to. The prices were as low as anywhere. The whole enterprise was a gesture of goodwill, Jacob felt. It was a gift that the Vietnamese were offering to the Czechs, on the occasion of their progress beyond socialism—an unassuming gift, because it was hardly an occasion that a still-socialist nation could officially acknowledge. It might have felt wrong for Jacob as an American to intercept it, if so many of the tables around them had not stood empty.

  “And how are you, then, love?” Melinda asked, after both had ordered the soup.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Jacob answered. “It’s a little odd, the way I drop out and then drop back in,” he continued, thinking of the life he led when alone in his apartment. “I’m like a movie that goes in and out of focus.”

  “That sounds a little alarming.”

  “I didn’t even know the war was over.”

  “Carl didn’t tell you?”

  “He must have forgotten to. I think mostly he just thinks about you.”

  “How wrong of him, and how wrong of you to tell me.”

  “What did you two do today?”

  “I don’t know what we do ever. We walk, mostly, along the embankments. And keep up our defenses with droll commentary.” She sighed lightly. “You mustn’t think anything is going to happen.”

  Jacob shrugged, to disclaim prediction of any kind.

  “How did you hear of the peace, then?” she continued.

  “From Kaspar. He doesn’t believe I’m gay.”

  “No doubt you’re to be Jewish, as he hopes to be.”

  “He hasn’t mentioned that lately.”

  “Playing coy, I fancy.”

  “Playing goy.”

  “That’s terrible, Jacob.”

  “Sorry.”

  “There’s evidently a woman in the case,” Melinda said. “But he’s bound to finish Catholic in the end—Mother Rome always gathers in the wanderers. Don’t let him sweep you up while you’re vulnerable. Unless you mean to be swept up, of course.”

  “Vulnerable?”

  “You haven’t got a lover again already, have you?”

  “No, but what does that have to do with it?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing. But one does worry about you, darling.”

  He was aware that he liked to hear that she worried. “How so?”

  “I don’t think Kaspar’s path should be yours. He is seductive in his way, though not perhaps to the likes of me.”

  “I don’t think he’s—”

  “Oh, I don’t mean in that way. You do turn everything to that account, don’t you.”

  Their soup arrived. In deep white porcelain bowls, clear, thin hoops of onion floated in an amber broth. Ribbons of something green drifted in and out of the hoops—spinach, perhaps. Seaweed seemed unlikely so far from any shore. The warmth, after he swallowed, descended slowly through his chest. He began to sweat gently. There was a taste in it of something like nutmeg.

  “Do you see?” Melinda asked.

  They sipped silently for a little while. “Jacob, what am I to do?” she at last broke out, in a tone that both suggested she meant it and mocked the melodrama of her own manner. “No, don’t answer that. Can I trust you? Will you tell him everything? You do live together.”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “Confidentially, then. What am I to do? You still shouldn’t answer, I suppose.” He didn’t. She had called him to attention and then bidden him be silent, and her eyes rested on him in the silence, appreciating him. He sensed that it suited her to see Carl through him for a moment—to let him stand in for Carl and yet not be him, and not be capable of replacing him—to have him be, in fact, as close to her as to Carl, if not closer. He felt a flicker of pride in this ambiguous role. It was like passing a finger through a candle flame too quickly to be burned, though it wasn’t altogether impossible for him to be burned. She was so beautiful. “The puzzle of it,” she resumed, “one puzzle, anyway, is that the pathos seems to be all on his side, between us. He pines, yet it is everyone’s understanding that he is to leave shortly. All this horrid memorial photography. It isn’t clear to me that it’s hard-hearted of me to resist breaking off a relationship of years for one that will only last weeks. It’s hardly in my interest
to, is it.”

  “You know the answer to that,” Jacob replied.

  “It’s haggling,” she guessed.

  “I wouldn’t put it so harshly.”

  “But it is.”

  “Carl doesn’t believe in time,” Jacob said.

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “He doesn’t think a relationship is more meaningful if it lasts, or less if it doesn’t.”

  “He hasn’t explained that to me. How very ideal. And also quite male, I think.”

  “Is it?”

  “Annie wouldn’t let him get away with it for a second.”

  “But I let it pass.”

  “Oh, you’d let him get away with murder. You’re as bad as I am. As is Henry. And Thom, for that matter.”

  “I’m not that bad.”

  “You are. The lot of you, but you in particular. I have to watch out for you.” After a pause, she added, “I’m only pretending not to understand, you know.”

  She stopped their waitress. “ bysme dát si, máte, vietnamské knedlíky.” The waitress nodded.

  “You didn’t tell me they had dumplings,” Jacob said.

  “Do you know this dish the Czechs serve,” she asked, “‘Jewish pocket’? Rafe and I had some the other night. In Josefov, no less. It’s a pork cutlet folded around an egg. A sort of pork cordon bleu.”

  “How was it?”

  “Rubbery, I’m afraid. But the name of it—what’s curious is they seem to have no idea of giving offense. The joke is so old they no longer hear it as a joke. It’s just the name of the dish, to them.”

  She didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what she was saying. Her mention of Rafe had abstracted her, and she had slipped into playing the docent, which was, after all, a role that she and Rafe often played for Jacob. “I don’t know why I ordered dumplings,” she said, trying to recover herself. “I’m not at all hungry any more. Are you?” He shrugged. “You’re always game, aren’t you,” she continued.

  The murmurs that reached them from the other tables were in English and in French, so they had leaned in over their plates and were speaking more softly than they did in other Prague restaurants, where they had the freedom of not being understood.

  “Is Rafe always game?” Jacob asked, since he knew she was thinking of him.

  “He is,” she answered. “He wants everything and wants to know everything. Prague is too tame for him now. Have I told you this? He wants to go farther east.”

  He felt a twinge of panic at the thought of her departing. “Will you go with him?”

  “It’s under discussion.”

  “When does he want to go?”

  “Sooner than anyone thinks, but it isn’t entirely up to him.”

  “Who’s it up to?” he risked asking.

  “It would be poor form for him to leave the ministry before his appointment there has run its course,” she carefully answered.

  “Some people wonder if…”

  She let his suggestion hang unfinished while she paddled about in her soup. “The question is whether that’s my story, too,” she finally said, without looking up.

  “Which?”

  “Whether I’m game to go farther east,” she specified. “Whether it’s my life and adventures as well, or only his.”

  “You mean you can’t decide whether you want to go?”

  “No, I can’t tell whether, if I did go, it would be my story. Does that make any sense? I am hopeless, I know.”

  “I think I see what you mean.”

  “And that isn’t the question I ask about Carl,” she confessed.

  “What is?”

  “I—,” she began, but immediately she gave up. “Oh, it’s absurd. I am too grand. I suppose I just fancy a scrum, is all.” The waitress intervened, laying a platter of pale wet dumplings on the table between them. Once the waitress excused herself, Melinda continued: “Don’t look so gobsmacked, my god.”

  “No, it isn’t—I don’t know the word—”

  “Scrum? How mortifying. Jesus. A scrum. I don’t know. Like two football squads. A tumble. Jacob, please.”

  “Oh. Like a scrimmage.”

  “What you must think of me.”

  “I don’t think anything of you.”

  “That’s hardly reassuring. I feel I ought to say that that isn’t exactly it, lest you take me at my word. I mean, I would fancy a tumble, but I’m not so simple a personality as for that to decide the question, however much I might wish that I were. It’s a question of wanting to know how the story turns out. And one can only know that about one story, ever.”

  “How do you think the story ends, with Carl?”

  “Oh, it isn’t with Carl that it ends, if I choose him. I know that. I’m not a schoolgirl.”

  “He’s a nice guy,” Jacob said, in Carl’s defense.

  “Is he? But that isn’t why one fancies him.” She crossed her arms and seemed to fold in on herself, as if she were cold. “I worry that I’m tempted to choose his story for the sake of what isn’t in it rather than what is.”

  “Kaspar’s advice is to resist any choice that feels like you have to make it, because it would be a choice not to understand.”

  “Ought we to be taking romantic advice from Kaspar? And risk falling in love with our landladies?”

  “He would say you and Carl must be keeping something about yourselves apart from yourselves. Helping each other keep it apart.”

  “The present and the future,” she said.

  “Is that it?”

  “With Carl I don’t want to think about the future, and with Rafe I can’t think of anything else. Will I dread it if I stay, will I lose it if I give him up.”

  “That’s sort of how Carl gets out of it, too. The meaning of love has to be independent of the future, because we all die.”

  “But one rarely dies right away. And so there are consequences. In the meantime, as it were, which does happen to be the rest of one’s life.” She folded her napkin neatly and tucked it against the base of her soup bowl. “Shall we order tea?”

  It came in a traditional Czech stoneware teapot, white and glossy, printed with lacy blue designs.

  “If I’ve told you this much,” Melinda said, after starting a Petra, “I feel obliged to tell you the balance of it, because I can’t reasonably expect you to tell him nothing, given my own shoddy record in the secret-keeping department. It may seem as if things are progressing toward, you know, but in real life things needn’t, as you also know. I’ve told him as much, but I think he only pretends to believe me, and that’s another reason to tell you the balance, because I think you shall believe me. You aren’t in the case, and you can see it more clearly. And the balance is—”

  She paused to choose her words carefully. She was in a boat not too far from shore, and a shift in the wind had showed her that she didn’t know how to sail, after all, as she had thought she did. But nothing would be worse than being rescued.

  “The balance of it is that I am quite attached to Rafe. It sounds miserable to say it like that, so backhandedly, but it’s nonetheless true. It’s so much who one is, when one is in it, that I’m not certain it’s even possible to imagine oneself outside it. It’s hardly his fault if I’m reluctant to go to Kyrgyzstan, or what have you, and I don’t know, as you say, that I’m not simply imagining that I would be happier with Carl, or that I would be anything with Carl, really. Or that I’m unhappy with Rafe, in any serious way. Perhaps I simply want to have a secret.”

  “A secret?”

  “Not that there’s anything to keep secret, mind you. A secret even from myself, in a way.”

  “Like Rafe and his secret.”

  “His secret,” she repeated. She flushed; patches of blood came into her face clumsily. “You think I can’t leave Rafe alone with it—is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And I’ve brought Carl in only so as to bind myself more tightly to Rafe. What a horrible thought. It
would be impossible for me to choose Carl freely, if you’re right. Or if Kaspar is right. Whoever is making this argument.”

  “The only free act would be to give Carl up altogether.”

  “Oh lord, I’d rather not be free then, not quite yet. It’s like Immanuel Kant or something, isn’t it, your theory. But it’s not true, Jacob, though I can’t say why exactly. He isn’t an idea, for one thing. You’ve seen him. No doubt I shall give him up in the end, but not that way. No, not that way.”

  * * *

  Carl did find Václav. The hamster seemed no worse for his spree, but the day had exhausted Jacob, so much so, in fact, that the next morning, after teaching a class in , he went back to bed, where he stayed for most of the afternoon, failing, in his waking moments, to think of a way to avoid presenting his story to the writer’s group, which was to meet in the evening.

  “It’s your funeral,” Carl said, when Jacob explained his dilemma.

  Jacob walked out into the Stehlíks’ backyard for a few minutes in the midafternoon, to admire the thin, hard light. He could feel the rawness of the spring, its lack of moderation.

  After night fell, Henry rapped at the kitchen window, and Carl went out to fetch him. “My man,” Jacob heard Carl salute him, in the corridor. “Thom couldn’t make it?”

  “He and Jana are having a talk.” As Henry stepped through the door frame, he unhitched his knapsack from his shoulder. His curls were damp; he must have showered just before coming.

  “Is everything all right?” Carl asked.

  “I believe so. I believe it will be, at any rate.” Henry had brought beers again, and he set them on Jacob’s table. “Jacob, sir,” he said, as a greeting. “It’s your turn tonight?”

  “I guess.”

  It was to Henry that Jacob would have to make a revelation. It was Henry, though, who had a vulnerable air, perhaps because he was recalling their last session. Or so it seemed, at first, to Jacob, who was conscious of the shell he himself was hiding in, his wish to seem familiar and genial. On second thought, however, Jacob decided that he was only noticing Henry’s usual manner. Henry wasn’t able to hide behind the lids of his eyes the way a person like Carl could; the most he could do for protection was to affect a certain blankness.