Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Okay, true,” Carl replied to what hadn’t been spoken.

Henry looked away, and when he turned back to them, he caught Jacob’s eye for a second, as if he were trying to measure the distance between the two of them, or to estimate how much Jacob had understood of his near-wordless exchange with Carl. Then he hid himself by taking a deep drink from his beer.

Melinda rose from the bench in the corner. As she approached the three of them across the empty center of the room, she fell into a comic swagger, a dame in a bar, play-acting so as to channel the attention that her beauty drew to her. “Has one of you blokes got a light?”

The straight men let Jacob come up with it. “Sure.”

“‘Sure, podner.’”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Taking pleasure in the sound of your voice, rather. You say it so sweetly. Like an amiable cowboy.” The straight men, during this banter, withdrew into private conversation.

“I’ll rustle up your dogies if you aren’t careful.”

“Would you. No one else bloody will.”

“Is Rafe coming tonight?”

“I’m a single girl tonight, and shall remain so.”

Jacob sensed that she, like Henry, was hiding. She was standing next to Jacob so as to stand close to Carl, but she didn’t want to engage Carl, didn’t necessarily even want to oblige him to notice her. She made no gestures, struck no poses. It was more evident than usual how delicate she was, how slender and fine.

“It is funny about Krakow,” she murmured. “My mind’s quite made up about America. You know, about your mate going there for good and all. But somehow Krakow…”

“He’s coming back from Krakow.”

“Yes, it seems so unnecessary .” She held Jacob with her eyes for a moment, as if she wanted him to take care not to glance in the direction of the person they were talking about. He felt the secret that they were sharing encircle and then isolate them. “He asked again what is to be my project, you know,” she continued. “What is to be my story.”

“What did you say?”

She hesitated. It was the same hesitation that she must have given to Carl when he had asked the question. She was repeating it; her mind was running again down the paths it had taken then in search of an answer, and failing again to find one, or anyway to find one that she was willing to speak aloud. “We had a terrible row. Didn’t he tell you?”

“No.”

“I said he oughtn’t to make it harder than it has to be.” She made an effort at laughing. “And that’s what we’ve agreed to. Not to make it harder.”

“That seems civilized.”

“I don’t know what he does with his days now.”

“I thought he was still taking walks with you.”

She shook her head. “It’s just as well, really.” She excused herself.

Jacob watched her cross the room again and slip behind the table into a seat next to Annie, who meanwhile swanned forward her neck so that her face tilted back and her red-blond hair fell clear and she could safely touch her cigarette to Melinda’s for a light. There was something Melinda had needed to realize about herself, Jacob decided, something she had had to learn from Carl, or from the attraction that drew her to him, and having learned it, she was able now to let him go. Is that what Kaspar meant? The way one becomes willing to leave behind a notebook after a class is finished, though a mild attachment may linger because of the effort that went into taking the notes. Whereas if she had gone to bed with Carl, she would never have learned this thing, according to Kaspar’s theory, and would never have become willing to give him up. What a cold way of looking at it. The coldness was an objection that Jacob would have to put to Kaspar. And what was the thing that she had learned? It made Jacob selfishly happy to think that they were going to get to keep Melinda now. Melinda wouldn’t get to keep Carl, of course. None of them could. And come to think of it, Melinda herself might now have to go east with Rafe, and then they wouldn’t get to keep her, either. In that case, what did he mean by thinking they could “keep” her? Perhaps he meant that they would somehow be able now to keep her in memory as she had been — that there was an idea of her that they wouldn’t have to give up. That was cold, too. What was this idea of her?

And what — again — was the thing she had learned? It had to be a kind of knowledge that one could come to about oneself.…Here his reasoning, such as it was, again broke off, because he looked up and was distracted by the observation that he had been left alone. Carl was playing pool with Thom in the next room. The women were talking to each other in the corner, guarding the men’s coats and bags and ignoring Hans beside them. At the bar, to Jacob’s right, Henry was saying something in demotic Czech to a burly man in a sweat-stained T-shirt, who was laughing at him. Jacob’s friends were all near, but Jacob was on his own.

He fell again into the game of thinking about time. A year ago he had been in America, he recited to himself; two years ago he had been straight. Where would he be a year from now? It was a melodramatic question but he was young and he liked the way it singled him out. It froze the scene around him into a tableau, comparable with other tableaux, remembered or projected, as if he were in motion and it wasn’t — or as if he were changeless while it changed.

“Do you ever think,” he asked Henry, who was nearest, “a year ago I was here, and now I’m here?”

“Yes,” Henry answered, turning away from the Czech man beside him.

“And will it always be like that?”

“Will you always be wandering?”

“I guess. I mean, will there always be that break?”

“That break?”

“You’re free but you’re cut free.” Tonight the freedom excited him, like an engine that revs fiercely because it has been cut loose from what it was towing.

“Your roguery,” said Henry, seeming by his look to catch the feeling that had come over Jacob.

“Mine? Maybe.”

“Your American liberty.”

“Is that it?”

“There’s something else, isn’t there, something against it. To keep us here on the eve of beauty.” Henry’s eyes were suddenly strange. “To keep us here on the eve of beauty,” he repeated.

“What do you mean?”

“A phrase in me head. Does that happen to you ever? A phrase runs through my head, and I decide to say it aloud.” Henry had gone stiff with energy, the way little Prokop had during the marketing game. He was quivering; he was holding himself in place willfully, like a hummingbird.

“Sometimes,” Jacob said.

“I suppose it’s how one writes,” Henry said. “By abandonment.”

“Really?” Jacob was cautious.

“By ecstasy.” He said it as if he were tempting Jacob, who didn’t know what to make of what he said, or the tone in which he said it. It wasn’t how Jacob did his writing.

“I want to—,” Henry began to say, but without finishing, he walked off to the pool table. It was as if they had been swimming. If one tries to talk while dog-paddling, breathing sometimes becomes more urgent than talking and the conversation is broken off, and it isn’t to be understood as rudeness.

In the corner, Jacob challenged himself to sit down beside Hans. “How are you?” Jacob said, a little too loudly.

Hans appraised him. Jacob watched the movements of the blue eyes studying him. “Well, thank you,” Hans answered.

“You’re from…Denmark, aren’t you?” Jacob asked.

Hans’s nationality was a fact already established between them, and Jacob was surprised to hear himself speaking about it as if he didn’t remember. Perhaps he wanted to pretend that he didn’t remember much about his earlier conversation with Hans. Or perhaps he thought he would be safer if Hans took him for the kind of American whom it would be a waste of time to be disappointed in. “Yes,” Hans answered carefully. He seemed to be afraid that he had a drunk on his hands.