Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

As only a few of Carl’s offers and none of my threats have as yet been taken up, we are free to spend most of our days sightseeing. We have a 1909 Baedeker of Central Italy, which I bought for 75 crowns in that in that you’re so taken with, so we are a proper Mitteleuropaïsche couple, Carl and I, visiting the museums and monuments of the West with our outdated guidebook and our igelitka of homemade lunch. The Baedeker is very good on which pastilles to burn in your bedroom at night so as to fend off malaria and also on the age and authenticity of particular rocks. In fact, when confronted with a rock, Carl consults it with a fidelity that is quite touching really. But as a guidebook it does show its age. “There don’t seem to be any Constables in this room any longer,” I am characteristically reduced to saying. “In fact there seem to be only marbles of defeated Huns.” Carl, however, perseveres. “This is where Nero put his circus,” he tells me, and I answer, “Let’s have a gelato, then, darling, shall we? Because I’m afraid I don’t happen to see a circus.”

Rome is fearfully beautiful even when one doesn’t know what one is looking at. But as a Hun myself, what I like best is not the statuary but simply our apartment. If from the Campo dei Fiori, where they sell me fresh strawberries every morning, you walk north along a cobbled road, intermittently canopied with antique brick and just wide enough for a Vespa and two pedestrians to walk abreast, you find our building at the crick in the road just before the road surrenders its privacy to a vulgar corso. The building is quite narrow and tall, the apartments within stacked one atop the other like children’s blocks, precariously. Our apartment is at the top — fifth floor, ten flights, no elevator. On the landing just outside the door an extraterrestrial cactus blooms in a pink and suggestive manner, under the warmth of the stairwell’s skylight. The apartment proper has two floors. The lower consists of a living room mostly filled by a sofa, a bedroom mostly filled by a bed, and a bathroom perpetually damp, whose shower opens onto a balcony as if to encourage a parade of oneself, an encouragement that I suspect you will enjoy hearing that Carl has once or twice failed to resist. He stands, Baedeker in hand, purporting to identify hills in the distance, of which Rome is famously said to have a certain number — seven? nine? — I can’t recall. Up a rickety spiral staircase is our second floor, such as it is, a sort of aerie: a kitchen with a tiny table, windows on three sides, and another balcony, this one generous enough that one may cart table and chairs out onto it, of an evening, evenings being always mild, and dine there, overlooking the city’s makeshift rooftops of wavy red clay tiles.

I don’t know where any of this is going any better than I did when we left Prague. You will no doubt be appalled to hear that we have even discussed marriage — I know my mother is appalled. Married? In Rome? I hear you say. Isn’t that permanent? But I don’t think it is, not any more. Modernity and all that. And it’s being discussed as something tactical, mostly. The US immigration officers are going to suspect us of it anyway, Carl warns me, if we keep traveling together. Don’t mention this to Annie just yet; she’ll think me quite mad.

I have thought often of the conversation that you and I had in the Vietnamese restaurant, and the question of how to know whether one is choosing or whether one is giving in to something one hasn’t understood. I wonder if the answer is that a choice always feels a little supplementary, a little unnatural — because it’s unforced it also feels unnecessary — as if one had figured out a way to get away with something for a while. Something that usually came with a punishment of some kind and this time didn’t. The loss, I suppose, is that in such a case one will never quite feel at home, one will never feel quite certain one knows where one is. What is it Freud says — as if, in the middle of a play, someone in the audience were to stand up and cry “Fire!” or “Help!”—one won’t have that sensation, which is such an interesting one. Yet a play is real, in its way, even a play that never turns into an “emergency.” But then there will always remain the dangerous possibility of hearing such a cry later and running off after its siren call, I suppose. One will never feel settled in — zabydlený, as the Czechs say. (I once overheard Henry nattering on to you about that word, but ask one of your lovers, if you’ve forgotten.)

It occurs to me upon rereading what I’ve so far written that you might be as likely as Annie to take alarm at the M word mentioned above, but you mustn’t, you must justify my confidence in your unshockability. The word is after all love’s opposite, or so I recall being told at university, with a certain asperity, when we came to read Flaubert. They’re very keen on disillusioning young women at British universities, you know, I suppose to make us resigned and grateful later on.

Report everything in your reply, especially the answers to questions that you will have understood I daren’t ask in case my letter should fall into the hands of the objects of my curiosity. We hope desperately that you will decide to go home to America via Rome instead of that nasty Paris you’re so keen on — or simply come to Rome indefinitely. Our sofa is at your disposal, as are we, entirely. Neváhej, lásko.

And write soon.

s velkým srdcem,

Melinda

* * *

Jacob considered calling Milo. He considered walking to Milo’s father’s apartment and surprising him. He was afraid that Milo might reproach him. He hadn’t really done anything wrong. He hadn’t meant to hurt him. He had just wanted to be alone for the day. He was afraid of not being able to explain himself. The wish for solitude had sneaked up on him. It was gone now, but he had to be careful — it would come back. From hour to hour, he put off calling, because when he tried to think of what he was going to say, his explanations were so elaborate that he worried that they would sound like a justification rather than an apology. He hesitated, though, to simplify them, because if he were to give up too much of himself, he would be returning under the cover of a lie, which he wouldn’t be able to prevent himself from tearing apart later. He wanted Milo to take him back, but it would be no good unless Milo understood — unless Jacob was able to stand up for himself or at any rate for the idea that he had been seized by on Saturday, which he was bound to be seized by again.

There was a new pay phone, bright orange and open to the air, on the avenue next to the new bakery near Jacob’s apartment, and in order to force himself out of the mental circles that he was running in, Jacob ordered himself to leave the house and call Milo from the pay phone on his way to buying cornflakes. Twice he put his crown in to the pay phone’s slot and then, unsure of what to say, pressed a lever to retrieve it. The third time, though, he dialed Milo’s number. As the phone rang, he heard the coin descend into the heart of the machine.

— Please, Milo answered.

— Jacob here.

— Well, clearly.

— Are you angry?

— So it’s not the end yet, Milo answered.

Jacob felt a light panic; he hadn’t expected that they would come so quickly to the point. — I don’t want the end, he said. In saying this, he said more than he had meant to, as one often does in a language one doesn’t quite know, but he found that he wanted to be saying it. He was new to lover’s quarrels and unfamiliar with the way a possibility of loss pricks appetite. — I did incorrectly, he continued. — I think maybe, that I was rehearsing for being without you.