Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

The necessity for the second loss was what Hans didn’t understand. Jacob wondered if Carl and Melinda understood it.

“Where will you go, if you don’t stay?” Melinda asked Hans.

“There is nowhere,” he said bitterly. “To Denmark,” he finished, with humorless irony. He meant that he would never return to Denmark. As a pretext for flirtation, he began to complain to a couple of the Czech women from the language school of the countries that he might have to travel to in order to carry on the struggle. The women seemed to regard his flirtation as so conscious that his politics could be overlooked; as a Westerner, moreover, he represented the end of Communism to them whether he meant to or not; and so by lust or at least a wish for company, he, too, became reconciled for the time being to the half-light of the room.

Jacob took a corner of the sofa, beside Kaspar and Melinda, and let himself sink into it. He wished that Kaspar had defended himself, because he had never quite understood how Kaspar justified his change of politics. It reminded Jacob of the way children fed animals — of the way he and his sister, in the small Massachusetts town where they had grown up, had picked tufts of grass on the near side of a wood-post fence and offered them to three llamas that a townsman had kept in a field as pets. He and Alice had always tried to feed the grass to the shyest llama, though they never got to know the llamas well enough to know whether the same one was always shy or the llamas took turns — whether the shyness was a matter of personality or of happening to be less hungry on a particular day. Sometimes a bold llama made as if to nip the shy one on the jowl, in brotherly menace, so the children feinted with their gifts, moving as if to thrust the grass over one part of the fence and at the last minute swapping the stalks to the opposite hand and thrusting them over another part, creating a game where the children’s pale arms and the llamas’ white necks waved and circled and nearly intertwined as if in impersonation of some monster out of Greek mythology. Whenever the game grew too challenging, the llamas drifted away, usually the shy llama first, and the children had to call them back. The animals were wary and greedy, like cats. Invariably the bolder llamas snatched most of the grass out of the children’s hands despite their efforts. The children’s choice wasn’t any more rational than a choice to reward the most aggressive llama would have been — it would have made as much sense to feed the grass to the animal that seemed to want it most — but they always played the game so as to reward the llama that held back. Kaspar, Jacob thought, chose his politics by a similar instinct.

Jacob was drunk enough that it wasn’t until he was halfway through sharing his analogy that it occurred to him that it could be considered disparaging to Kaspar — that Jacob might seem to be calling Kaspar sentimental or childish or even unprincipled — but he was too far along to stop and he stammered on to the end of his idea.

“The llama problem,” Carl named it. He and the others had leaned in, to hear Jacob’s explication to Kaspar.

“But can capitalism and communism be llamas?” Melinda objected. “Aren’t they rather ways of feeding llamas?”

“So it’s meta,” Carl said. “It’s postmodern.”

“Oh dear,” Melinda worried.

“I would say…,” Kaspar began. He paused to drum the fingers of one hand against his lips. He hadn’t taken offense; Jacob’s story seemed if anything to have pleased him. “I would say, why shouldn’t how a child feels be the way to decide?”

“The llama Communism himself has a touch of mystery on his hands at the moment, it would seem,” Thom alerted them. Hans, they saw, was kissing one of the women he had been talking to.

“That’s a llama of another color.”

“Quite a few llamas of that color of late,” said Thom. “How is it you have been spared the darts of Cupid, Jacob, I have sometimes wondered?”

“I had a boyfriend for a little while,” Jacob answered.

“I’m sorry? Did anyone else hear him say he had a boyfriend?” He thought Jacob was joking.

The friends waited.

“Don’t be such an eejit,” Annie said.

“ Is that what he said?” Thom asked again, beginning to be confused. He looked to Jacob. “Are you gay then?” The word sounded unfamiliar in Thom’s brogue, and Thom seemed unaccustomed to it.

Jacob nodded.

“Goodness.” Thom took two swigs from his bottle. “And you all know. How long have you known, then?” No one answered him. “Nobody tells me fuck all, do they. And me yammering on about poofters and thespians. How could you let me?” He took another swig. “I’ve never been so ashamed in me life.”

“As well you should be,” Annie said.

“That makes me feel much better.”

“I didn’t care about those words,” said Jacob. “They’re funny words.”

“You might have dropped us a hint.”

“Maybe he did drop one and you were too much of an eejit to pick it up, unlike the rest of us.”

“You let me say such things,” Thom said. “I have no choice now but to drown my sorrows.”

“I can’t stand in your way.”

“I wouldn’t, sir, after the way you have behaved yourself. Anyone else need another?”

“You could perhaps have told him sooner,” Annie said, after Thom had gone to fetch the next round.

“I should have,” Jacob agreed happily. Now there were no more secrets, or anyway no more that Jacob could tell.

* * *

By midnight they were dancing in Henry’s living room, jostling one another in the course of their movements as if by accident. The boom box had been turned up several times and was blaring as loud as it could, with a monotonous, rhythmic force. They had by this time heard the tape through twice, complained that they were bored of it, tried another, and in the end returned to it for lack of a satisfactory alternative — forced to recognize that it was their music for the night.

“I have quite nice shoulders,” Annie asserted, over the din, while dancing next to Jacob.

“You do,” Jacob agreed.

“Henry complimented me on them.”

“Did he,” Jacob acknowledged.

There was a sharpness and a greediness in her boast that Jacob took for a sign of health. They were, as a group, going to act tonight with less caution and less solicitude toward one another than usual, he thought. They were going to take risks. They were losing one another anyway, and they were healthy. They could dance with this violence all night if they wanted to, on the fuel of youth, Prazdroj, and. The Czech women wanted to prove that their zest matched any Westerner’s; Thom, that for his friends he could trample down any awkwardness. Hans was sedulously giving the Czech women’s energy a lascivious turn, Annie glowed with Henry’s new interest in her, and Henry himself, bent at the waist, his curls sweaty, his wide eyes vacant as he concentrated on his dancing, had the vigor and wildness of a faun. Only Carl and Melinda danced in the old, tender style.

“Pardon,” Jacob heard. Kaspar was touching his arm. Kaspar was too ill to share a selfish pleasure like dancing.

“Yes?” Jacob said. He cupped his ear but didn’t stop his feet at first.

“I am leaving,” Kaspar said. “I am curious, if we shall meet again.”

Jacob felt obliged to stop dancing. “Sure, we’ll see each other around,” he said. He backed Kaspar up into the cold light of the vestibule, where it was a little quieter.

Kaspar looked into Jacob’s face shyly but searchingly, as if he thought Jacob were keeping something there hidden from both of them. “But without Melinda…,” Kaspar suggested.

Tomorrow there would no longer be an apartment in Prague where Kaspar could rely on finding a bath and a plate of sausages and caraway-seed bread if he dropped in uninvited. It now seemed almost cruel of Melinda to have fostered Kaspar so generously, as if she had stocked a bird feeder with seed in November, December, and January but now it was February and moving away she had left it empty. He was an adult, but she had indulged his childishness, and he had repaid her with a readiness to believe that one could follow one’s heart by the simple expedient of listening to it.