Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“You weren’t a prick.”

“I think I was trying not to care,” he continued. “But I couldn’t go through with it.”

* * *

The following Wednesday, Henry arrived after dinner with a sack of beers and, unexpectedly, Thom, who apologized for adding himself: “This one said he would be so lonely on the tramvaj , and I took pity on him.”

“You should write for us, too, man,” Carl invited Thom.

“Perhaps I shall, perhaps I shall…I’m willing to help out with the drink, in any case.”

Jacob had turned on all the lights in the kitchen, as if they had gathered for a matter of business, and a window was ajar to ventilate the smoke from their cigarettes, so it was bright and cold. For a while they chattered aimlessly. They had agreed to discuss only one story at each meeting, and no one was in a hurry to be the one to reveal himself tonight; no one wanted to seem eager to go first. When Thom asked if anyone else had seen Henry’s picture of his daughter, Frieda, they urged Henry to take the snapshot out of his wallet, and he was happy to, and they saw that she shared his natural grin and deep dimples, was blond, and held up a green pail of sand. In the little girl the force of Henry’s wide-set, outward-pushing eyes was softened and became beautiful. Jacob was made uneasy by the photo, though the girl looked so joyful and Henry so proud that he pretended he wasn’t. Earlier in the day, when Jacob had typed out some pages about Meredith, it had stirred up a childish and willful part of him, and it bothered him now that the picture suggested that Henry wasn’t wholly theirs; according to the photograph, a part of Henry belonged to a child playing on a sunny beach in northern Spain — he belonged to this girl in a way that could never be challenged. His fate wasn’t free for Jacob to dispose of, even in imagination, as Thom’s or Carl’s were — or Annie’s or Melinda’s or even Rafe’s — and the strange jealousy that this threw Jacob into puzzled him.

“We should, we should get started,” he said.

“She’s adorable,” Carl crowed. “She’s going to be trouble when she grows up.”

“Like her da,” Thom said.

Henry put away the photo, and gradually the members of the group allowed their easy talk to give way to the artificial purpose they had set for themselves. First they had to devise rules. Should they read silently, or aloud? Aloud. Would each read his own story? Yes. Who would start?

Carl raised his left palm, like a boy in a classroom. “I have a confession,” he said. “Um, I didn’t write anything.” As usual, he seemed to be inviting his friends to laugh, but since his confession put the purpose of the evening in jeopardy, they took it seriously.

“But a writer’s group was your idea,” Jacob protested.

“It was Henry’s idea! I only seconded the motion.” He looked from Jacob to Henry and back to Jacob again, and then pulled himself away from the table. “All right, I’m a disappointment.”

“No, no,” said Henry quickly. “We only want to be sure you have the same chance to make a fool of yourself that we do.”

“I see that it’s to be my fault,” Thom volunteered. “For lowering the tone.” The friends ignored his joke.

“I tried ,” Carl said. Turning to Jacob: “Didn’t you hear me typing?”

“I did. So you must have something.”

“It’s too personal.”

“Mine is rather personal as well,” said Henry, as if he too were backing out.

“Mine isn’t personal about me,” Carl clarified. “I mean, it is, but that’s not what I mind about it. It’s personal about someone else.”

“A woman,” Henry suggested.

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

“I see,” said Henry.

“Do you fancy Melinda, then?” Thom said. No one spoke for a moment. “A right eejit I am tonight, as Annie would say. Trying to be clever. I had no idea.”

“Well, you had some idea,” Henry observed.

“She’s a fine one, Melinda is,” Thom continued, in sympathy.

“Indeed,” said Henry.

“If you could keep it to yourselves,” said Carl. “That could be one of our rules.” The others agreed. Only in consenting to this secrecy did it occur to Jacob that he wasn’t sure his own pages would make any sense to Henry or Thom unless he told them about himself, and that he wasn’t ready to do so. But a few moments later, he was spared a decision, when Henry, in order to take the spotlight off Carl, volunteered to read what he had written.

“I don’t mind being the goat,” Henry said, unfolding a typescript. He looked up to check their faces. “I’m just to read it?” he asked, and they reassured him. “Well, then,” he began.

Ezekiel

He was the architect of a malady. Of a milady, of a melody. He was a piston firing in a chamber, he was all the engine, and he saw a woman die and be reborn, and both sorts came to her through the prick that he thrust between her legs, that he tore her with. From the porch he strayed into the forest of broken glass set into the top of a wall around her, which he had always wanted to climb. A crowd of wolves were watching, janissaries whose teeth were their own lovers. Rooks flew out of a furnace and pecked the woman’s eyes and the man’s eyes, the wolves lapping the man’s blood and the woman’s blood. The man howled, too, and stones fell into a cavern like a building that was being unmade, a film in reverse. He became a fry-cook in a port city, where the thermometer stripped away even his undershirt. To his ecstasy contributed the jigsaw and the underside of her knee, the angry floodlight of a locomotive before it cut into a peach tree and savaged the stagnation of a hanging fern.

“Whoa,” Carl said in the following silence.

“Whoa?” Henry prompted, gingerly.

“That’s amazing,” Carl continued. “I think you have to read it again, though. It’s dense, man. Read it again.”

It seemed to Jacob that they were all keenly aware for the first time how dangerous Carl’s habitual irony might be in such a situation. But perhaps it only seemed that way to Jacob because Henry’s text had dismayed him and because it was in bad faith that he himself now said, “The metaphors are very rich.” He felt that the social context required him to settle the ambiguity in Carl’s tone but he was afraid he might instead be adding to it.

“I for one would enjoy a second hearing,” Thom said. He sounded earnest, and it may have been only to satisfy him that Henry proceeded to read the piece once more, this time more deliberately.

As Henry spoke the words again, Jacob found that he had as much trouble focusing his attention on them as he had had during their first reading. The images that were called up by the words distracted him. He seemed to see Henry’s hands bleeding, after he heard the narrator describe the jagged-topped wall, and he wondered what in real life had the capacity to hurt Henry so sharply, the gentle Henry, who explained the mysteries of Czech politics without calling attention to his knowledge, who drew out both the radical Hans and the conservative Rafe intelligently, without provoking an argument with either, yet who, if this story was to any extent the free association that it appeared to be, evidently imagined himself amid teeth and blood and hacksaws. He was violent inside, perhaps. The story was ending again, and Jacob still had no idea what to say.

“I like the image of the unbuilding of the building,” Carl said. “That’s really neat.”

Henry nodded, a little curtly. He turned his eyes, painfully open, toward Jacob, but Carl continued: “And the teeth of the wolves. That’s intense.”

Henry nodded again, beginning to make a game of his mute reactions. “Am I allowed to speak?” he asked.