Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

Caleb Crainhas written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily , and n + 1 . A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, he is the author of the critical work American Sympathy . He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

It was October, and the leaves of the oaks around the language school had turned gold and were batting light into its tall windows. A young Irish woman was seated alone in the teacher’s lounge. She had made herself a cup of tea on the range in the corner, and she was opening a tangerine on a paper napkin, with hungry carelessness.

One of the American teachers walked in. “Are you always the first one here?” he asked.

“It’s quite far, the trip from the . I like to collect myself.” Her hair was disorderly and thick, and had all the colors between blond and red that you might find on a peach. When she wasn’t wearing her glasses, she didn’t always meet a person’s gaze.

The American sat down opposite her. He was younger than she was.

“Would you like some?” she asked doubtfully, offering the tangerine. “I wouldn’t offer if poxy Thom and all of them were here, but seeing how it’s only you…” She neatly turned off a cluster of three of the fruit’s plump wedges and put them on the corner of the napkin closest to him.

“You eat it. You need the vitamins.”

“My mother sent them to me,” she continued. “You can’t find tangerines in bloody Prague. But you’ll spoil it if you don’t take some now I’ve offered it to you specially.”

He ate one of the wedges. “Thanks,” he said. He took out his keys.

“I quite like having a cabinet with a key of my own, don’t you?” she said. “I feel as if I’m an established person.”

“It’s very grown-up.”

“Well, it may not be such a new experience for you.” She had abruptly dropped the color from her voice. “As a Harv. No doubt you had lockers and such.”

“I’ve never had a serious job before.”

“Your man Rafe”—it was spelled Ralph , but Rafe was how everyone pronounced it, even though he was American—“your man Rafe started teaching here with us but then they asked him over the castle.”

“What does he do there? No one will tell me.”

“Don’t you think it’s peculiar that there are so many of you? Harvs, I mean. You’re like rabbits or something. You’re all Agency, aren’t you. That’s what they call it, you know.”

“Agency?”

“Didn’t you know? I imagine you’re not one of them then, Jacob.”

“How do you know what they call it?”

“From the telly.”

She gathered the tangerine rind in her napkin, as if she were folding up a tiny picnic, and dropped it in the can beneath the sink. After she rinsed her hands, she sniffed the backs of her fingers quickly. “Are you coming to Mel and Rafe’s on Saturday?” she asked.

“I don’t think I was invited.”

“Melinda’s going to invite you this afternoon. She told me last night.”

He hesitated. “I was thinking of going to a bar.”

“Oh?”

“A gay bar,” he added.

“Oh? I had no idea — not that you would care if I did. It’s not the sort of thing a person would expect, to look at you.”

He glanced at the door. “No one else knows.”

“Oh, I’m good with secrets. A proper crypt.” She watched him pinch the corners of the workbooks in front of him, to square the stack. “Shall we have a smoke on it?”

“Would you like a Marlboro?”

“Ehm, do you happen to have the light ones again today?” He flashed the pack. “Do you fancy Thom, then?” she asked, as they stood up.

“He seems awfully straight.”

“He’s such a New Lad. Too much of a lad for me. I don’t fancy him, though he’s a fine specimen, really.”

“Are you telling lies about me again, Annie?” said Thom, coming into the lounge just as they were leaving it. He was a Scot with straight, tow hair and a Roman nose. “I heard the word ‘lad,’ used disparagingly I thought.”

“Oh, bugger off,” Annie answered out of habit. Then she added, “I mean…”

“Off for a smoke? Mind if I join you?”

The headmistress allowed them to smoke in what had been the shower, back in the First Republic, when the building had served as a day school for girls. There were square, cream-colored tiles on the walls and floor. Every few feet a pipe curved out of the wall, and then up and over, like an upside-down candleholder. Far above were windows, which someone kept surprisingly clean, and light came down from them as from a clerestory.

Thom hung his red jacket and his satchel on one of the hooks once intended for the girls’ towels. Jacob offered his cigarettes. “Do you mind?” Thom asked as he took one. “It’s a pleasant change from a Sparta.”

“And are you going to come to Mel and Rafe’s?” Annie asked.

“I think I will do, yes. Shall I see you there?”

She nodded as she inhaled. “You aren’t going to be gallivanting about with loose Czech women.”

“Not on Saturday night, no. And you, Jacob?”

“I’m supposed to meet a friend.”

“You could meet your friend another night, Jacob,” Annie interposed.

“Well, I’ll see.”

Later in the day, over a quick cigarette between classes, Annie told him that she hoped he was careful. “You know, poxy rubbers and all.”

* * *

A dead pig was hanging, face down, beside the door to Jacob’s apartment. Blood drained into a plastic bucket from the hollow where its guts had been taken out. One stream ran in a wet line down from the pig’s fore chest and around its neck, where it met another falling through and out of its snout and mouth. The animal’s skin was thick and pearly. Blue-and-white twine, tied around its hind trotters, suspended it from the balustrade at the top of the stairwell. The Stehlíks, who owned the building, lived up there; the pig must have come from their cottage in the country. Jacob pulled his eyes away and went inside.

He rented rooms that Mrs. Stehlík’s parents had once lived in: a bath, a kitchen, and a bedroom. Sometimes , the Stehlíks’ grown daughter, who went by the name , knocked and used the bath. The bedroom had been a living room until recently; in fact, Jacob slept on a couch, or rather, on three of its orange foam panels, which he laid end to end on the floor at night like dominoes, and covered with his zipped-open nylon sleeping bag in order to keep off the chill that sometimes rose through the floor. The furniture was plywood, painted white, and the curtains, like the couch, were orange. Along one of the bedroom walls ran a low, built-in sideboard, its shelves backed with speckled mirrors, where the Stehlíks must have displayed crystal and china while the grandparents were alive. Jacob kept a few books there: a guide to Prague, a Czech-French dictionary (all the city’s bookstores had sold out of Czech-English ones), and Pléiades of Rousseau and Stendhal from the 1930s, which he had found while looking for the dictionary. There were too few books to obscure the mirror. On the floor at night he faced away from it so he wouldn’t have to see himself not sleeping.