Necessary Errors: A Novel (54 page)

“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.

They asked one another how work was, or in Carl’s case, how tourism was, without much listening to the answers. “Shall we?” Henry suggested, after each had placed a pack of cigarettes on the table before him.

“Let’s do it,” said Carl.

“Have you heard any of this already, in your capacity as flatmate?” Henry asked.

“Not a word.”

It was strange to read the story out loud. There were things in it that Jacob had said out loud before, if only to himself, when he was first grieving over Meredith, and there were other things that he had imagined saying out loud about her but had never actually spoken. He wasn’t ashamed of the words, or the feelings behind them, or the exposure he was trying to make of his feelings. What troubled him was his sense that he
wasn’t
exposing them. As he was reading, he began to feel that he was revealing, instead, no more than the fact that he had made a theater of his feelings, by himself and for himself, before he had come into the presence of Henry and Carl and without any reference to them. He felt dull and heavy. He wondered if he was clever enough to improvise, and when he decided he wasn’t, he began to resent his script a little. The words weren’t representing anything; he himself had got in their way somehow. He and they had trapped each other, and perhaps because of his growing resentment, he wasn’t able, while reading, to remember the words before he came to them in the course of reading, and he began to be startled by how many details he had included, however clumsily, and to become as apprehensive about where the story was headed as if he didn’t know—it was headed toward a description of his own frustrated lust, which he still couldn’t think of a way to avoid. He told himself he didn’t mind what Henry or Carl might think of the description, but he knew that he did mind letting them hear how solitary he had been while writing it. That was what was shameful. They could hear the size and emptiness of the imaginary room where he had thought the words up.

The silence afterward was first broken by Carl: “I didn’t see that coming.” Henry took in a breath but then let it go without saying anything.

“I let Kaspar read it,” Jacob said. He wanted to make it seem as if at least Kaspar had been somehow present in the room with him. “He didn’t think the story ended the way it did because I was gay.”

“Mmm,” said Henry. “You aren’t, are you?”

“Actually I am.”

“Oh, I see.” After a pause, Henry asked Carl, “Did you know about this?”

“I did,” said Carl. “I think Thom still doesn’t.”

“It’s how Carl and I met,” Jacob announced.

“No it isn’t,” Carl objected. “We met because of Louis.”

“I know, but Louis thought
he
was gay.”

“He did?”

“For a couple of weeks. He was hoping it was that instead of what it turned out to be.” To Henry, Jacob explained: “It turned out to be schizophrenia.” He knew he was being glib about Louis’s misfortune, but he felt rudderless, unable to stop himself without a sign from Henry, a suggestion of which way he was going to turn. “I did have hopes,” Jacob continued, addressing Carl again, “which you crushed.”

Henry spoke up: “There’s less fuss about that sort of thing, isn’t there, when both parties are men.”

“It’s live and let live,” Jacob quickly replied. This was one of Daniel’s ideas, and he liked the bragging rights that it entailed, though he didn’t really have enough experience himself to know for certain that it was true.

“Because you both know how men are,” Henry continued. He looked from Carl to Jacob and back to Carl again. He seemed to be deciding that he liked to be in on the secret, however belatedly. “It’s sort of Bloomsbury, for the two of you to become flatmates in the end.”

“It’s not
that
Bloomsbury,” Jacob hurried to say.

“It’s sort of Prague,” Carl suggested.

“The old regime falls, but no one gets laid,” Jacob glossed.

“It’s postrevolutionary,” Carl said. “The Prague Non-orgy.”

Václav heard something they couldn’t and scrambled under the shredded magazine pages in his cage. The three humans sat drinking their beers. The white-plastered walls and the white-painted furniture of the apartment had become so familiar to Jacob that he rarely asked himself any more what difference it made that he was living in Prague, but it now occurred to him that he wasn’t sure he could have read this story aloud in Boston. He couldn’t fairly ascribe the freedom that he felt to the Czechs’ and Slovaks’ revolution, now that he was spending so much time among expats. The society he and his friends were making
together was more or less the opposite of what was usually claimed for Europe: they owed less to tradition, they could make fewer assumptions about one another. It was a second America, in a way; they were immigrants, living on a frontier, as Carl had called it, though an economic rather than a geographic one. A conversation about writing might have been richer in Boston, but Carl and Jacob would probably have been too absorbed in their romantic lives and their careers to have time for it. And in Boston Jacob would not have known anyone like Henry: a person on a quest. Nor, come to think of it, would Jacob have been as conscious of the questing side of Carl. Prague called it out in them. Here Carl and Henry could talk for hours over lunch about the purpose of life, without embarrassment. Without too much embarrassment, anyway. Carl couldn’t stop himself from kidding, but here he could have the conversation despite the kidding. What made it possible was the fact of Prague—the fact of being away from home (Henry had explained that even the Czechs sometimes worried about
nezabydlenost
, or not feeling at home, in Prague, which had been overrun, after all, by Austrians, Germans, Russians, and now Americans)—and the candor with which someone like Henry was willing to talk about his experiment. In England, Henry had had girlfriends, he had had a child, he had had a career, and he had left all of them in order to come here, learn Czech, and master the country’s politics without any apparent wish to intervene in them. He had come for adventure only, and in the light of his devotion to adventure, they were able to see their own steps in that direction more distinctly. Of course Henry wasn’t going to mind about Jacob. Jacob began to see why Carl made such a hero of him—why the two made such heroes of each other.