Necessary Errors: A Novel (60 page)

The straight men let Jacob come up with it. “Sure.”

“‘Sure, podner.’”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Taking pleasure in the sound of your voice, rather. You say it so
sweetly. Like an amiable cowboy.” The straight men, during this banter, withdrew into private conversation.

“I’ll rustle up your dogies if you aren’t careful.”

“Would you. No one else bloody will.”

“Is Rafe coming tonight?”

“I’m a single girl tonight, and shall remain so.”

Jacob sensed that she, like Henry, was hiding. She was standing next to Jacob so as to stand close to Carl, but she didn’t want to engage Carl, didn’t necessarily even want to oblige him to notice her. She made no gestures, struck no poses. It was more evident than usual how delicate she was, how slender and fine.

“It is funny about Krakow,” she murmured. “My mind’s quite made up about America. You know, about your mate going there for good and all. But somehow Krakow…”

“He’s coming back from Krakow.”

“Yes, it seems so
unnecessary
.” She held Jacob with her eyes for a moment, as if she wanted him to take care not to glance in the direction of the person they were talking about. He felt the secret that they were sharing encircle and then isolate them. “He asked again what is to be
my
project, you know,” she continued. “What is to be my story.”

“What did you say?”

She hesitated. It was the same hesitation that she must have given to Carl when he had asked the question. She was repeating it; her mind was running again down the paths it had taken then in search of an answer, and failing again to find one, or anyway to find one that she was willing to speak aloud. “We had a terrible row. Didn’t he tell you?”

“No.”

“I said he oughtn’t to make it harder than it has to be.” She made an effort at laughing. “And that’s what we’ve agreed to. Not to make it harder.”

“That seems civilized.”

“I don’t know what he does with his days now.”

“I thought he was still taking walks with you.”

She shook her head. “It’s just as well, really.” She excused herself.

Jacob watched her cross the room again and slip behind the table into a seat next to Annie, who meanwhile swanned forward her neck so that her face tilted back and her red-blond hair fell clear and she could
safely touch her cigarette to Melinda’s for a light. There was something Melinda had needed to realize about herself, Jacob decided, something she had had to learn from Carl, or from the attraction that drew her to him, and having learned it, she was able now to let him go. Is that what Kaspar meant? The way one becomes willing to leave behind a notebook after a class is finished, though a mild attachment may linger because of the effort that went into taking the notes. Whereas if she had gone to bed with Carl, she would never have learned this thing, according to Kaspar’s theory, and would never have become willing to give him up. What a cold way of looking at it. The coldness was an objection that Jacob would have to put to Kaspar. And what was the thing that she had learned? It made Jacob selfishly happy to think that they were going to get to keep Melinda now. Melinda wouldn’t get to keep Carl, of course. None of them could. And come to think of it, Melinda herself might now have to go east with Rafe, and then they wouldn’t get to keep her, either. In that case, what did he mean by thinking they could “keep” her? Perhaps he meant that they would somehow be able now to keep her in memory as she had been—that there was an idea of her that they wouldn’t have to give up. That was cold, too. What was this idea of her?

And what—again—was the thing she had learned? It had to be a kind of knowledge that one could come to about oneself.…Here his reasoning, such as it was, again broke off, because he looked up and was distracted by the observation that he had been left alone. Carl was playing pool with Thom in the next room. The women were talking to each other in the corner, guarding the men’s coats and bags and ignoring Hans beside them. At the bar, to Jacob’s right, Henry was saying something in demotic Czech to a burly man in a sweat-stained T-shirt, who was laughing at him. Jacob’s friends were all near, but Jacob was on his own.

He fell again into the game of thinking about time. A year ago he had been in America, he recited to himself; two years ago he had been straight. Where would he be a year from now? It was a melodramatic question but he was young and he liked the way it singled him out. It froze the scene around him into a tableau, comparable with other tableaux, remembered or projected, as if he were in motion and it wasn’t—or as if he were changeless while it changed.

“Do you ever think,” he asked Henry, who was nearest, “a year ago I was here, and now I’m here?”

“Yes,” Henry answered, turning away from the Czech man beside him.

“And will it always be like that?”

“Will you always be wandering?”

“I guess. I mean, will there always be that break?”

“That break?”

“You’re free but you’re cut free.” Tonight the freedom excited him, like an engine that revs fiercely because it has been cut loose from what it was towing.

“Your roguery,” said Henry, seeming by his look to catch the feeling that had come over Jacob.

“Mine? Maybe.”

“Your American liberty.”

“Is that it?”

“There’s something else, isn’t there, something against it. To keep us here on the eve of beauty.” Henry’s eyes were suddenly strange. “To keep us here on the eve of beauty,” he repeated.

“What do you mean?”

“A phrase in me head. Does that happen to you ever? A phrase runs through my head, and I decide to say it aloud.” Henry had gone stiff with energy, the way little Prokop had during the marketing game. He was quivering; he was holding himself in place willfully, like a hummingbird.

“Sometimes,” Jacob said.

“I suppose it’s how one writes,” Henry said. “By abandonment.”

“Really?” Jacob was cautious.

“By ecstasy.” He said it as if he were tempting Jacob, who didn’t know what to make of what he said, or the tone in which he said it. It wasn’t how Jacob did his writing.

“I want to—,” Henry began to say, but without finishing, he walked off to the pool table. It was as if they had been swimming. If one tries to talk while dog-paddling, breathing sometimes becomes more urgent than talking and the conversation is broken off, and it isn’t to be understood as rudeness.

In the corner, Jacob challenged himself to sit down beside Hans. “How are you?” Jacob said, a little too loudly.

Hans appraised him. Jacob watched the movements of the blue eyes studying him. “Well, thank you,” Hans answered.

“You’re from…Denmark, aren’t you?” Jacob asked.

Hans’s nationality was a fact already established between them, and Jacob was surprised to hear himself speaking about it as if he didn’t remember. Perhaps he wanted to pretend that he didn’t remember much about his earlier conversation with Hans. Or perhaps he thought he would be safer if Hans took him for the kind of American whom it would be a waste of time to be disappointed in. “Yes,” Hans answered carefully. He seemed to be afraid that he had a drunk on his hands.

“Kierkegaard was Danish, wasn’t he?”

“Are you a partisan of his?”

“I’ve only read a little.”

“Too Christian for me.”

Golden hair on marble skin—Hans was like a sugar cookie, Jacob thought. “I had a friend who was very Christian,” Jacob explained. “Almost mystical. So the way Kierkegaard thinks it all through.…” It had been a small triumph for Jacob. Daniel had wanted to hear more and in the end had taken one of Jacob’s paperbacks, thereby acknowledging that it was Jacob for once who had discovered something they could share.

“Was this your friend who…?”

“No, she had been Christian, kind of an extreme denomination, but she wasn’t any more, when I knew her. I guess she was in what Kierkegaard would have called despair, which he considers an improvement over
not
being in despair, but still.” He was trying to charm Hans as he had charmed Daniel.

“It is usually Andersen whom people ask after.”

“Who?”

“The writer of fairy tales. He also was a strange one.”

A strange one. A queer, he meant. “What a funny pantheon,” Jacob said.

Hans grimaced, to communicate that the insult wasn’t new to him. A Marxist was supposed to be superior to national heroics, but as a child,
someone like Hans must have read about heroes, or he would not have grown up with the ambition to save the poor and overthrow tyrants.

“Did you ever read—I read this book as a child, a sort of fairy tale, and I’ve never been able to remember the title of it,” Jacob said. “About two boys who die and go to another world, a beautiful valley. But there’s a war in the valley, and at the end of the book they die again, and go to yet another world. I remember thinking as I read it, I can’t tell my parents, or they’ll take it away from me.”

Hans looked at him oddly; he had gone still. “It isn’t Danish,” he said slowly. “It is by a Swedish author.” He hesitated, as if he were afraid despite Jacob’s confession that Jacob was still playing the role of drunk American and might mock him or the book. “It is called
Bröderna Lejonhjärta
,” he said at last.

“
The Brothers Lionheart,
” Jacob echoed.

“Yes.” Love for the book lay suddenly between them, an awkward intimacy.

“What was it about?” Jacob said. “It was a strange story.”

“Yes, very strange,” Hans agreed.

“At the time I felt I shouldn’t talk about it.”

“It is perhaps, because, do you remember, in order to reach the other world, they…”

“Oh, that’s right,” Jacob said, recalling. The two boys jump together to their deaths, so as not to be parted.

The roar of talk in the bar continued for a little while without Jacob or Hans. “I suppose perhaps it is that,” Hans said.

“It was a lovely book,” Jacob declared, to commit himself.

Hans agreed. Their enemy was the idea that such a book shouldn’t fall into the hands of children. Jacob hadn’t expect to form a bond of any kind with Hans, let alone this one, but there was nothing that either of them could do about it now. They sat together silently. Annie rose to fetch another round. Together they watched her cross the room, and they watched her at the bar as several times she composed herself in preparation for addressing the barman, pressing forward on tiptoes, only to be ignored by him and sink back onto her heels. Henry left the pool players, apparently to assist her, and they watched him signal to the bartender with a practiced flip of two fingers of his right hand and then
confer with Annie about the order. As the small dumb show seemed to end, Hans and Jacob looked down together at the unfinished beers between them. Jacob wondered if it was part of the charm of their circle that the name of the book had been given back to him. Or maybe it was just Hans; maybe it was Hans’s nature as a missionary, as a believer, that had called up Jacob’s memory of the book. And maybe that was the cause of the awkwardness that they were now sitting in. They had both loved the book, but Jacob must have loved it because he had recognized in it a story about his own nature (because Jacob had no brother, the idea of a brother was just a metaphor to him). Hans, however, didn’t have that nature. Jacob had heard him boast about women the same way he boasted about his paramilitary adventures—with enthusiasm, callousness, and an indeterminable amount of fiction.

“I hope you’re pleased with yourself, anyway,” came abruptly Annie’s voice, addressing Jacob in sharp tones. She was standing over them, though they hadn’t seen her approach. “You must be quite pleased, I fancy. I might have known, is the thing. Given what you are.”

“What?” Jacob asked.

“Oh, don’t pretend. Not to me. Sod off. As it were.”

She turned and strode away, across the room, past the bar, up the stairs.

“What was that about?” Jacob asked.

“I ought to go to her,” Melinda said. She began to gather her things into her purse.

Thom and Carl, as their pool game was ending, had noticed Annie’s departure and now came over. “Is something troubling Annie?” Thom asked.

“She made the most astonishing speech,” Hans declared. “To Jacob, about ‘what he is.’”

“I suspect it’s to do with Henry, somehow,” said Melinda, swinging on her coat.

“Is she on about that again,” Thom replied.

“I don’t see how it could be Henry,” Hans said. He was enjoying his role as witness; Jacob wished he would be quiet. “She was angry quite particularly with Jacob.”

“Does she think you said something to Henry?” Carl suggested.

“I didn’t.”

Jacob followed Melinda across the room unthinkingly. At the foot of the stairs Melinda turned and put a palm on his forearm. “I recommend you let me sound her a bit first.”

He stopped halfway back, at the bar, where Henry was standing. “Annie’s furious at me,” he told Henry.

“Is she?” Henry didn’t seem to care. “I have a question to ask you.”

“Okay,” Jacob agreed. He was willing to be distracted.

“Do you fancy me?”

Jacob’s first thought was that he had to be careful. “What do you mean?” He looked from one of Henry’s wild eyes to the other. He saw that Henry was still shivering and taut with strange energy.

“Would you fancy a shag?”

“Is that like a scrum?”

“It could be.”

“I’m learning all the words,” Jacob said. None of what was between any of them was going to last, he saw, and this was the way the loss was dawning on them.

“If not, I know how it is.” As a gentleman, Henry was careful to leave Jacob a way to refuse him.

“Did you say anything to Annie?” it occurred to Jacob to ask.

“I may have done.”

“She’s upset.”

“Is she? Oh, I see.”

There was a reproof in Henry’s casual cruelty. If he and Jacob were to be lovers, then as lovers they shouldn’t reckon the consequences. The principle in his unconcern amounted almost to chivalry. Jacob, however, couldn’t help knowing that if he went to bed with Henry, Annie would never speak to him again. Still, he thought he was able to meet Henry on his ground—he thought that if he refused Henry, he would not be conscious of giving anything up, of making any sacrifice. There had been no touch between him and Henry, no feeling of overture. Jacob imagined that in bed Henry would be violent, not because he would want to hurt Jacob but because violence would belong to his idea of what it was, of what the thing was that he thought that he wanted with Jacob—the idea of working against the part of his nature that wanted to feel itself
brought home. Henry was straight—even straighter than Carl, in Jacob’s estimation. It was the being wanted for the sake of the impossibility that Jacob objected to.