Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“I was cruised by a man Friday last,” Henry volunteered. “While crossing Letná.”

“What’s Letná?” Carl asked.

“The park around Stalin’s monument. Seemed quite lively. Do you know it?”

“No,” Jacob half lied. He had read about it in his guide, but he hadn’t tried it out.

“Mmm,” Henry continued. “But all this notwithstanding, I might agree with Kaspar. I don’t see that it’s necessarily you in the last scene. Given the Henry James story and all.”

Jacob had forgotten that the essay where he’d found the plot twist had been about James. He felt caught out, and he didn’t know what to say.

“I thought for certain you had it in mind,” Henry continued, evidently unsure how to proceed.

“What story is this?” Carl asked.

“A fellow visits the grave of a woman he knew,” Henry related, “and it’s only when he sees another man weeping at another woman’s grave that he realizes he could have had a love affair. Should have done, that is.”

“A love affair with the dead woman?” Carl asked.

“Yes, sorry. He never had one in the James story. He feels he’s never really lived.”

“But it’s the guy weeping who’s never really lived,” Jacob broke out. His verdict had a prudish, disapproving sound, even to himself. “If it’s the same guy weeping over the same woman.”

“But it isn’t, is it? Isn’t that the point?” Henry asked.

“In my story or in James’s? I mean, if James was gay, it wasn’t with a woman that he would have not had a life.”

“I’m all turned around,” said Carl.

“Me too,” said Henry.

They puzzled silently for a few moments. “Hang on, I’m wrong,” Henry resumed, reconsidering. “It does matter whether it’s you at the end, and it matters whether you’re gay, because if you’re gay there’s no story, is there. It’s like what you said about my story. Your fellow’s not really in the story, once he turns out to be gay. You’re not in the story, that is. But you are in it, if you’re not.” Henry had pressed himself back and up in his chair, stiffly, in his excitement at handling an idea, homosexuality, that still carried a slight charge of taboo. “Because in the case where you’re gay, you haven’t failed to live your life, at least not yet. As you say. It’s regret that ties up the loose ends, that makes it a story. If you turn to the other fellow, it’s a kind of non sequitur. Not that I’m one to mind a non sequitur. It becomes a different story. The story turns without conclusion to another story.”

“Like a daisy chain,” said Carl.

“The Henry James is a story, and yours isn’t,” Henry summarized. “Yours doesn’t end properly. There’s something left out.”

It was a challenge. Henry was returning the blow that Jacob had struck when they had discussed his story, returning it not in a spirit of revenge, but as proof that he had taken it in good faith and liked Jacob well enough to hit him just as hard.

“I do know that Henry James story,” Jacob confessed.

“Aha,” said Henry, who seemed as pleased at the deceit as at the revelation.

“I haven’t read it, but I read an essay about it once.”

“That’s pretty postmodern of you,” Carl offered.

“I hate postmodernism.” Jacob noticed that his heart was pounding again as it had at Vyšehrad. “I hate it, and I seem to have written a story about wanting to live inside a story that’s already been written.”

“Or about not wanting to,” said Carl. “It’s a little ambiguous.”

* * *

From time to time Jacob worried that, surrounded now by expats, he was failing to get to know Czech language and culture. The day after the writing group’s meeting, for instance, the worry overtook him. He told himself he hadn’t come here to — but then he halted in his thoughts. What he was now doing was so formless he wasn’t sure how to describe it. Technically, the English, Irish, and Scots were as foreign to him as the Czechs and Slovaks were, but he couldn’t fool himself. He still couldn’t read a newspaper in Czech.

After teaching in , he headed downtown, alone, in the stern and aimless way that he had forced himself to explore the city in the fall, when he had first arrived. He bought a copy of Lidové noviny at a kiosk in Palmovka and puzzled over it during his ride. He rose from the subway at and drifted north past Mel and Rafe’s, along his old path, over the cobblestones of Melantrichova, with a dreamer’s sense of repetition, as if he were reciting a poem that he had recited so many times that the words had lost their meaning. A prayer, maybe. He decided to get lost, though he knew that with the map in his back pocket it would be hard to. He turned left. He turned left again. He found himself in a square that for a moment he didn’t recognize, but then he saw an antikvariát he knew. He hadn’t ever entered the square from this direction, but he had been here before. He had come one evening in search of a bar that he had heard was rough. It hadn’t been; none of the straight bars were. In that year, Czech drunks never did anything worse than sing and tell rambling stories. They were gentle for some reason — perhaps, Jacob speculated, because even in their cups they participated in the national mood of liberation and melancholy, the blanketing pensiveness about the old order passed away and the new one not yet come, or perhaps because they had learned, through living for decades under a regime where the smallest legal infraction could ruin a life, to get drunk quietly, and the habit hadn’t yet left them. If they lived a little longer in the marketplace, experience of rivalry and inadequacy might give them more of a wish to hurt one another. But they didn’t have much of one yet. Jacob had left the “rough” bar after half an hour, bored, and he kept walking now. Soon he was in a narrow street that he had never seen before, which didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. The river must be ahead of him, he thought vaguely, but he must have been wrong in thinking so, because he didn’t come to it. Through a tall door shutting behind a woman in a kerchief, he glimpsed a pasáž , lit at the far end by sunlight — sunlight on a pile of yellow sand — and after the woman turned a corner, he doubled back and opened the door himself.

The corridor was quiet, except for the faint echo of a bird somewhere nearby, chattering. The arched ceiling was low and of a smooth, dirty white stucco. It felt like a violation to walk down this pasáž , as it didn’t in those around Wenceslas Square or those that branched off Melantrichova. To reach the sunny patch he had to walk quite a ways through shadow, and while he was in it, a draft touched him on the forearm and chilled him. A pocket of winter air was hiding here in the darkness from the spring. In the sunlight, when he reached it, he found a shovel set in the sand, and next to it a blue plastic tub with rope handles. Next to that, someone had spilled a heap of white cobblestones. The courtyard was being repaved. He was afraid for a moment that he might have to retrace his steps, but another corridor seemed to lead out, at an angle, toward a different street. At the edge of the courtyard, from a metal trash can whose lid had been tipped up, a sparrow was fetching a thin red string. “They won’t like that,” Jacob warned the bird, as he passed into shadow again. “It’s not your string. It isn’t normal.”

Exiting into the new street, he again refrained from taking out his map. The cold air of the pasáže seemed to trail after him into the street, which was shaded by a tall First Republic building. He shivered. There was a pub in the ground floor, and Jacob realized he was hungry. He stepped inside.