Necessary Errors: A Novel (19 page)

“The Czechs will yell at me if they see me.”

“I expect they’ve already forgotten about it, but we could keep them from seeing you, if you like.”

“Could you get my coat and hat? I can’t go back in there.”

“Do you want to go home?”

“No, no, I’m fine. I just can’t go back in there.”

“I’ll fetch your coat, and then we’ll walk you out, all of us in a ring, if that’s agreeable. The way they do for heads of state, when they pass through a crowd that might have snipers.”

“That would be—that would be great. You’re a prince.”

It was a little too much to say, Jacob sensed, as soon as he spoke. From inside his metal box, he couldn’t see Thom’s face.

Left alone, Jacob inspected his clothes for spatter. He was clean. Gingerly he rose, let himself out of the stall, washed his hands and face, and drank from the tap. To feel a nation’s guilt was as spurious and grandiose as to take credit for its triumph. Yet both the guilt and the triumph were real, and the emotions were powerful. In the detachment of his half sobriety, somewhat like an invalid, Jacob handled the feelings as if they were dry pages that he could inspect or shuffle or fold up, as he chose.

“Are you all right, Jacob?” Annie asked, when his friends met him outside the men’s room in a group, as Thom had promised. Hans had stayed behind. “We were so concerned about you.”

“Go, go, go,” Jacob said, slipping into their midst and crouching so as not to be seen. He was already cheerful enough to make a game of it.

*   *   *

In the morning, Jacob lay for a while in bed in a state of dry alertness, looking up toward the blank plaster of his ceiling, until he heard four gentle knocks on his apartment door.

He shuffled into last night’s pants. “You have telephone,”
said, speaking softly and pantomiming a phone call, as if she weren’t sure her English would get through at such an hour. Perhaps she had heard him come in late the night before. “Is brother,” she added.

“Brother?” Jacob asked. He didn’t have one.

She shrugged. “Yes, brother.” She continued in an even softer voice: “He say—excuse me, he say-s—to Father, that is your brother.” He could tell from her smile that she was ahead of him, but he could not figure the puzzle out. “Family—telephone—okay,” she hinted. “Father allow. Father allow-s.”

“Oh,” Jacob said, at last following.

She held up a finger to her lips. “Is American brother. Not Czech brother. I know, because I have spoke—have spok
en
—to him, also.” Being in on Jacob’s secret seemed to have given her confidence in her English.

“Thank you,” Jacob said, as they mounted the stairs. He tried to imagine who it was.

“Not at all,” she answered.

Beneath the African-style carvings of Tragedy and Comedy, Mr. Stehlík was sunk in his sofa, distrustfully eyeing a document propped on his knees. “So you have brother. I do not know this. I think, that you have only sister.”

“I do have a sister.” That much was true.

“Your brother says, that telephone is important,” Mr. Stehlík continued, waving Jacob toward the phone, with an exaggerated deference. “Please.” He took an ashtray and a handful of papers with him to the kitchen.

Jacob didn’t dare sit down. “Hello?” he said wonderingly into the phone.

“Jacob? This is your brother Carl.”

Carl was one of the straight men whom Jacob had fallen for the year before, in Somerville. They had met at a dinner party thrown by a man who was having a nervous breakdown, of which the dinner party had been in several ways a symptom, and the spirit with which they had gotten through that evening—a shared recognition of the irrationality, an unspoken agreement to treat it as lightly and tactfully as possible—had been continued in their friendship, where it had made it relatively easy for them to finesse Jacob’s brief, awkward confession of romantic interest. By the time Jacob had been disabused, the two had become a little more than friends—they were conspirators, confidants. There was always melody in Carl’s voice, and hearing it now—it rose on Jacob’s name, then fell from even higher during the pronouncement that followed, as if it were a serious revelation, only to curl up in a chuckle at the end, over Carl’s own name, as if that were the biggest joke of all—Jacob thought that he had fallen for its music more than anything else.

“It’s so good to hear from you,” Jacob said. Then, confused by the delay in the transatlantic line, they both spoke at once:

“I apologize for the—”

“Are you coming to vis—”

They waited for the echoes to subside.

“You go first,” Jacob said.

“It’s hard to reach you, man. Is that your landlord? Is he listening now?”

“Yes. Not to you.”

“Okay, well, that guy, he’s got a serious pole up his ass.”

“It really is very good to hear from you.”

“He’s like, ‘Telephone busy. Is family? Only family!’ I’m sorry if I get you in trouble, but I had to get through.” Carl gave Mr. Stehlík a Russian accent when he imitated him, rather than a Czech one—gluey and sonorous, rather than spare and flat. The wrongness of it gave Jacob a flash of homesickness. He felt a nostalgia for not knowing the difference.

“Are you coming to visit?”

“I’d like to, but that’s not why I’m calling, I’m afraid.” He stopped. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.”

“What?”

“Your friend Meredith?” Carl paused, but then he evidently decided to get it over with. “She died. She killed herself, actually.”

“She—”

“Matthew called me, because I had your number. He wasn’t up to telling you. I’m sorry.”

Jacob said nothing for a little while.

“How’re you doing?” Carl asked.

“Fine. Is Matthew all right?”

“He’s all right. I mean, he sounds really broken up. But he’s all right. They stopped going out a while ago. She was going out with another guy.” Carl gave the man’s name.

“I don’t know him,” Jacob said. He didn’t at that moment feel as if he knew Meredith, either, but he found that he was crying. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw
poke her head into the living room for a nervous look, and then bow out apologetically.

“I’m sorry,” Carl repeated. “I wish I had known her better and could talk about her with you. I did meet her that one time, at your house for dinner.”

“That was the last time I saw her, too,” Jacob realized.

“She was a poet, I think you said.”

“I can’t talk about her right now.”

A suicide makes a fault in a novel, as suicides make a fault in life, and only the shadow of Meredith’s story falls on this one, as if in leaving a movie theater she had walked across the path of the projector.

Jacob asked for details. Carl told him about a hotel room and an overdose, and then a second hotel room and a rope.

“Why didn’t anyone lock her up?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it isn’t so easy, you know.”

“It should be.” He held on to his anger long enough to end the phone call. The stubborn little motherfucker, he thought.

—My friend died, he told the Stehlíks, in their kitchen. The dogs padded over to where he stood and sniffed him. —Herself to herself.

—Self-murder,
supplied the word. —Jesus Mary.

—She was your girlfriend? Mr. Stehlík asked.

—She was, several years ago. It was a little more than the truth, and much more than he had meant to say.

—It is a great pity,
said, with none of her usual tentativeness. —It is a mess. It always is, in such a case.

Mrs. Stehlíková wrung her hands, classically. —If you will want to smoke a cigarette, it doesn’t matter when, you will come to see me.

—Yes, if you will want anything…, Mr. Stehlík offered.

Jacob thanked them.

—To sit with us, Mrs. Stehlíková continued. —Or if you will want to borrow one of the dogs for company.

—Yes, take Aja, but not Bardo,
elaborated. —Bardo is tiresome. The boxer and poodle looked up intelligently at the sound of their names. —Yes, you,
told the poodle.

—Oh, he’s not so tiresome, Jacob said. —I have to teach today, he added, and they excused him.

It was a relief to fall into the routine of teaching. He walked his students through dialogues about having a watch fixed and having a ticket refunded. He found himself thinking not of Meredith but of Luboš, with an urgency that surprised him. They had a date for Saturday night, but Jacob wanted to see him sooner. No one answered, though, when he called Luboš’s number from the faculty lounge between classes.