Necessary Errors: A Novel (59 page)

She let the photos slip out of the envelope and held them by the edges. The little blond girl with Henry’s wide eyes was sitting in a green garden under a canopy of pink crepe paper streamers.

Henry spoke shyly. “She looks pleased in the photos.”

“Oh she does,” Melinda assured him.

“This is Barcelona?” Thom asked, taking the photos one by one from Annie, who was taking them from Melinda.

“It’s her fourth birthday.” Henry’s eyes remained on the pictures.

“She’s a beautiful child, isn’t she,” Annie admired.

“With that Czechoslovak tricycle she’ll be the envy of all the Barcelona youth,” said Thom.

“It’s a Polish tricycle, actually.”

“Will you be getting a Polish tricycle, too, then Annie?” Thom asked.

“I may do,” she replied. “All sorts of good things in Poland.”

Hans returned and, with his feet, pulled out a chair opposite Melinda and Jacob. As he set down the beers that he had brought, Melinda drew back with the photos she still had, as if they were cards and she were afraid of revealing her hand.

“Pictures of Henry’s child,” she then said to Hans, by way of explanation.

“Ah, your scattered seed,” he said. When no one laughed, he added, “Cheers,” hurriedly, and sipped his beer.

“Cheers,” Melinda answered, since she was closest, but she didn’t touch her beer.

“What a thing to say,” Annie muttered.

Hans either didn’t hear Annie or pretended not to.

Annie turned to Jacob. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, have you ever heard this notion: life is an infection of matter, and spirit is an infection of life? Is that a thing that people think?”

“I’ve never heard it before.”

“Is that from your Thomas Mann?” Melinda asked.

“I find it rather a peculiar idea,” Annie admitted. “Even to me it didn’t quite sound like proper biology.”

“An old poofter, wasn’t he,” Thom commented.

“Do you think that comes into it?” Annie asked.

“It’s part of a larger idea about death, I seem to vaguely recall,” said Melinda.

“A cheerful sod,” said Thom. “You tell me such things from that book, I don’t know why you choose to read it.”

“Oh, I find I get quite
lost
in it,” Annie replied, with some enthusiasm. “Nothing
whatever happens for pages and pages, and one doesn’t mind somehow. It’s rather like the
, actually.” There was a sudden brightness and openness in her looks, and even Henry, who had gathered up his photos and was storing them away, looked up to admire her.

“The
?” Melinda asked.

“I find. With each of us in our little rooms, like. And we have balconies.”

“I hope you don’t slip into one another’s rooms across the balconies…,” Melinda suggested.

“Nothing like that.” Annie was brought up short by Melinda’s teasing. Then, on second thought, she smiled at the suggestion, it was so unlikely. “Gah, no, not at the
. The balconies are rather high, for one thing. Twenty-six stories…

“It was a friend in Berlin gave me the Mann,” she volunteered to Jacob. “When you and I were there.”

“I don’t remember your getting a book.”

“I didn’t think at the time that I was going to read it.”

They were nearing the end of their first round, which they always drank more quickly than those that followed, and which they hardly felt except in the way one feels the looseness in a boat that has been untied from its mooring but has not yet left it. A silence fell over them, a part of the rhythm of their conversation, and Jacob watched Annie absentmindedly tug the long sleeves of her sweater up around her fists, leaving out only a fork of two fingers to hold her cigarette. At the bar, a couple of Czech boys were half dancing to the almost inaudible punk rock, in the convulsive, somewhat self-parodying style appropriate to the genre. The dancing boys’ bangs shook and tossed, obscuring their eyes. Perhaps there
were
good things in Krakow, Jacob thought. In any case Annie was right to want to make the most of their time here, which was never going to come back.

“Carl!” Henry cried out.

On the other side of the gray-yellow room, Carl shot up one of his hands in recognition.

“I have you and you and you,” Carl said, when he reached them. “I don’t have you and I don’t have you.”

“Have us how?” asked Hans, the last person indicated by Carl.

“As photographic subjects.”

“I don’t much fancy pictures of myself, you know,” said Annie.

“That’s silly.”

“It isn’t
silly
.” She wouldn’t allow even her self-deprecation to be dismissed.

“There may not be enough light.” Carl raised his little steel rangefinder to his face and squinted shut the eye it left free. “There’s not, unless you don’t move. Unless you don’t so much as quiver.”

Annie froze cooperatively. “Well, go on.”

“It won’t let me take an exposure.”

She held herself in place a moment longer, anyway, her back arching slightly, her mouth neutral. Then he did manage to take a picture.

“Down and out in Prague and Krakow,” Carl captioned.

“Do you really think so?”

“He doesn’t think so,” Melinda said, raising her eyes from the table for the first time since Carl’s arrival.

“I mean the
ambience.
” His eyes drifted to Melinda’s, but he and she were careful not to look at the same time.

“I need Jana, too,” Carl said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Thom offered, “but tonight I make no promises.”

“I don’t want promises. I want results. Speaking of which, I also want a beer. Anyone?”

The call for another round became general. Jacob rose to offer funds and carriage, and as he walked with Carl to the bar, his feet placing themselves in a path without his conscious design, he noticed that he was no longer standing apart from the room; he was no longer holding himself separate from his experience of it. He had become a part of its pattern, together with his friends, or perhaps it was the case that he and his friends had imposed a pattern of their own upon the establishment, or at least upon the corner of it that they had taken. He wondered if this feeling was what had come to take the place of what he had once been seeking. The feeling that they were exceptional together. It was their being together that was exceptional, rather than anything any of them did or might do. It wasn’t necessary for anyone outside their group to recognize it; they were in that way independent.

He knew that the feeling wasn’t rational. He didn’t care. He was
going to believe in it anyway. He carried drinks to the table and he returned to the bar, where Carl was paying, in order to explain it to him. He knew Carl wouldn’t need to be persuaded. He knew Carl also felt it. He just wanted the pleasure of trying to articulate it to him. He wanted to say that they had all become somehow permanent to one another, that Carl was right—leaving didn’t matter, leaving wasn’t going to change the relation that they were all in with one another. Even Rafe and Kaspar, who weren’t here tonight. The connection was going to outlast the time that they were going to share, and somehow they felt the afterlife of it now, while they were still together, almost as a physical thing, casting a retrospective aura, which they felt prospectively. And it was terribly sad, as it turned out, and something else, too—exhilarating, somehow, maybe because they hadn’t lost one another quite yet—and he wouldn’t even be trying to talk about it if he weren’t drunk. They had become the world to one another, both those who had fallen in love and those who hadn’t.

“Is that what I’m feeling?” Carl interrupted.

“Is what what you’re feeling?”

“The future?”

Henry unbent himself from the table and came toward them. “What are the two of you conspiring?”

“Phenomenology,” Carl told him, as usual somewhere between joking and not joking.

“Of?”

“That’s harder to say.”

“Often the case with phenomenology.”

The straight men would turn it into mere thinking if Jacob let it get away from him. “I was trying to describe the feeling that you have when you want to keep someone with you,” Jacob said.

“The feeling of wanting to stay with the one story,” Henry glossed.

“Yes.”

“I understood the three of us to be partisans of the other story,” Henry countered.

“Are we?” Jacob asked.

“We’re fellow rogues,” Henry said.

“Rogues!” Carl echoed, appreciating the return of the word.

“To roguery!” Henry toasted. “And rodgery.”

“To rodgery, anyway,” Carl repeated, clinking his glass. “That’s a
terrible
pun.”

In the silences that naturally punctuated their conversations, Jacob sometimes found that he noticed Carl’s presence in a way that he didn’t when they were exchanging words, as if Carl’s presence were lying under water by the side of their boat, like a man enchanted in a fairy tale, and became easier to see when they stopped rowing and the surface of the water went still. He noticed it now, not in any single detail—not in his beard or his eyes—but in the quality of his whole person and in its reality. It embarrassed Jacob to become aware of the fact and process of his observation, and he wondered if he was staring and embarrassing Carl. He saw, however, that Henry was looking at Carl just as fondly. Melinda was right; they were all taken with him.

“But even you must feel it sometimes,” Carl accused Henry, resuming their talk. “In fact I know you do.”

“Feel what?” Henry asked.

“The one-story feeling.”

“Maybe.”

“The way you miss Frieda,” Carl pressed him.

Jacob was puzzled.

“My daughter,” Henry explained. “It’s different,” he continued.

“Of course,” Carl said. “I have no idea.”

“Well,” said Henry, tilting his head.

“Okay, true,” Carl replied to what hadn’t been spoken.

Henry looked away, and when he turned back to them, he caught Jacob’s eye for a second, as if he were trying to measure the distance between the two of them, or to estimate how much Jacob had understood of his near-wordless exchange with Carl. Then he hid himself by taking a deep drink from his beer.

Melinda rose from the bench in the corner. As she approached the three of them across the empty center of the room, she fell into a comic swagger, a dame in a bar, play-acting so as to channel the attention that her beauty drew to her. “Has one of you blokes got a light?”