Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— He’s sympathetic, Jacob said. — How long does he stay?

— Until he finishes the plumbing? She shrugged in embarrassment. — And now I must empty his rooms. Do you want to help me?

— I’m sick, he said, and he crossed his arms over his chest and hunched his shoulders for effect.

— But perhaps you are bored?

— I’m writing.

— That’s a good one! About our family, no doubt.

— No, no. It’s fiction.

— Yes, well, I understand. But be nice.

— But really! I write about something else.

— Yes, well, yes, well. It will be quite a beauty! she said, as if she were already steeling herself. — Our crazy family in a book.

In fact Jacob was trying to write about Meredith. The doctor at the clinic had given him two weeks “to start with,” and though Jacob wasn’t sure he could afford two weeks now that so much of his income came from private students, he had them, and he had their peace and quiet. Between chapters of Stendhal, therefore, he sat at his typewriter.

A blank sheet sat fixed in his machine so long that the platen set a curl in it. It seemed wrong to write about Meredith and wrong not to write about her. He knew he was angry with her. She had been the poet of their generation — all her friends had thought themselves lucky to have met her in her youth — and she had thrown away her talent with her life. She had also thrown away an understanding they had shared, a little prize they had conspired to give themselves, that no one their age could have deserved: the sense not merely that they were going to give their lives to writing but that somehow they already had.

What killed her, however, was another thing, a darker one, which she and Jacob had joked about together at lunch one day, while their companions at the table had sat by, puzzled.

“Its relation to writing isn’t causal,” Jacob had said.

“No, no,” she had dismissively agreed, tapping her fork dangerously. “‘Causal’—that’s vulgar. ‘Contiguous’?” she had suggested.

“Perhaps the territories are contiguous,” Jacob had replied.

“‘Congruent’?” she had also suggested but at once took it back. “No, no. ‘Contiguous.’” Suddenly she let down her fork with a clatter. “A Venn diagram!” She covered her mouth. “A Venn diagram is needed.” She always wore a bright red lipstick to lunch, as if to defy any shame or awkwardness that might be associated in some minds with the process of eating.

“What are you talking about?” a young man beside her had complained, and now, in Prague, Jacob couldn’t remember for certain the specific noun whose relation to writing they had been trying to find an adjective for. It might have been “unhappiness.” He had tripped over the thing beneath the word later, when he and Meredith had tried very briefly to become lovers.

Was there a connection, or wasn’t there? He decided to write about visiting her grave and rebutting there the answer that her death seemed to imply. She had no doubt been buried by her family in Virginia, but for the purposes of his story, he imagined the cemetery in the Massachusetts town where he himself had grown up. He knew what that cemetery looked like. If she were buried there, her plot would be down the hill, in the contemporary area where the lawn was smoother and the headstones were thicker and more polished. He imagined himself standing before hers. Unfortunately, he couldn’t bring the character based on himself to say what was on his mind, and he couldn’t write intelligibly about the romantic confusion that that character and the character based on Meredith fell into. He labored at the story anyway. He invented another character, a man who also came to the grave and cried there unabashedly. He had once read an essay about a short story in which something similar had happened. Very confusedly, he tried to make the character based on himself seduce the character who cried, but he couldn’t make the seduction plausible. The whole thing refused to come to life. It was no more than a series of described gestures.

He hid the pages in the evening when he heard Carl’s key in the door. “Hey,” Carl would call out, and then set down his bag with a thump beside the refrigerator. Jacob would come into the kitchen, sit at the table, and listen to the sound of running water as Carl washed his hands and face. Then Carl would sit down across from him with a glass of water to report on his day. His beard was now full, and his hair, too, was growing longer. He combed drops of water out of his beard with his fingers as he spoke.

Sometimes he had fallen in with American tourists at a café and had spent the day flirting with the women and debating philosophy with the men. Often he had met Henry at his office in Josefov, the old Jewish quarter, and they had gone for lunch. Henry worked at the Czechoslovak office for visiting foreign students, which stood in relation to the international students union, where Hans worked, roughly as the government had stood until recently in relation to the party, and was therefore slightly less doomed and much more busy. Carl reported that Henry took his job seriously and always returned to his office within an hour, no matter how far their confidences and arguments took them. Carl was then left to wander on his own in the district with a head full of ideas. Once he came home with a set of cream-colored plates, bowls, teacups, and saucers, freckled with age and embellished with delicate red and silver tracery, which he had purchased in an antikvariát for ten dollars probably because, he said, he and Henry had been talking about whether it was possible to reconcile the need for a home with the search for beauty. He presented them as a gift for the apartment, saying that he didn’t think they’d survive transport to America.

One evening, Carl told Jacob that he had dropped in on Mel and Rafe in Havelská and had drunk slivovitz with them.

“How was that?” Jacob asked.

“They send their love,” Carl replied. His face still seemed a little muddied by the liqueur they had given him. “Kaspar’s coming to see you tomorrow,” he reported. “Melinda says he was very grateful for your visit, and apparently he’s back from Berlin.”

“I didn’t know he had gone there.”

“His father’s sick. The one in the Stasi.”

“I didn’t know about that, either.”

“That may not be exactly right. Melinda said he was in the Stasi, but Rafe said he thought he was just an informer. But Melinda said Kaspar hated him so much he couldn’t just have been an informer. I guess he was a professor?”

“I bet if you were a professor, you had to cooperate.”

They fell silent for a moment. Jacob noticed that Václav’s water dish was empty and refilled it.

“I won’t be here tomorrow,” Carl said. “I told Melinda I’d go with her to the castle to see the mediocre Impressionists they have.”

“Rafe doesn’t mind?”

“It’s just bad art. I’m always missing Kaspar. I wonder if I’ll see him even once before I leave Prague.”

“You’ll see him.”

“Not seeing him would be like going to Bern and not seeing the bear.”

“He’s just a person,” Jacob said.

“I don’t know,” Carl said facetiously. “This whole ‘Could you spare a little crust of eating bread?’ routine, where he goes to town on Mel and Rafe’s refrigerator?”

“He doesn’t have a lot of money. He’s very principled.”

“I guess so, if he won’t speak to his father.”

“I thought you said he went to Berlin.”

“But he wouldn’t speak to him, is what Melinda said. He just saw him.”

The sun had set while they had been talking, and the light that still fell into the apartment was now even and gray. “Are you hungry?” Carl asked.