Necessary Errors: A Novel (81 page)
Read Necessary Errors: A Novel Online
Authors: Caleb Crain
Having thought all these thoughts, he observed that his laundry was still dirty and that he still didn’t want to wash it. Milo had promised to come over, but he didn’t want to see Milo, either. He put his Olivetti on the kitchen table and unzipped it from its case. The windows in the bedroom were open, as were those in the kitchen, which faced the building’s inner courtyard, and a rather savage crosswind blew between them.
The wind was hot and somewhat pleasant as it beat against his face, but it kept scattering the papers that he set beside the typewriter, and he had to weigh them down with a glass of water. It didn’t matter because he wasn’t in the middle of anything, so he didn’t really need to look at the papers; he was going to have to start something new. It occurred to him to write about the time that
had taken him to the hospital in the middle of the night. He liked the idea of writing about himself in a state of collapse. A collapse suggested that there was something underneath it, a foundation of some kind to collapse into, and it added a color of significance.
He typed a couple of lines.
He didn’t know how he was going to explain to Milo why he hadn’t showered yet and why he didn’t want to spend the day with him. Milo would just have to accept it. It would be wrong for him to make too much of it. It didn’t have to do with him, or with Jacob’s feelings for him, except insofar as Jacob felt the apprehension, despite his decision to spend the day writing, that once Milo arrived, he would lose himself in Milo, as he usually did. When Milo was around, he wasn’t able to hear himself any more. He was only able to hear what he had to say to Milo. That was the problem with other people; that was the problem with just living your life. He ought to have written a second novel during the time he’d spent in Prague. If he had, he wouldn’t have had to lie when he’d wanted Milo to continue looking at him the way he’d looked at him that day on
hill. What a lot of reproaches he was making of himself today. He was awfully grand, even in misery, wasn’t he. He was feeling the sort of frustration whose pettiness inclines one’s better self to wish to dismiss it, if it were possible to.
“Ahoj,” he heard, through the huffing of the wind. The bell didn’t always work, and sometimes Milo hollered up to Jacob’s bedroom window. He was standing on the street below, looking up with untroubled cheerfulness. Jacob tossed the house keys down to him and then made a point of sitting at his typewriter again.
—I have your photos, Milo said a minute later, as he let himself in.
“Okay,” said Jacob in English, not looking up.
—I picked them up, since they were ready.
—How much do I owe you?
—Ach, I don’t know. Can we look through them?
“Okay,” Jacob agreed.
—Are you writing? Milo asked, as he pulled a chair up beside Jacob.
—Maybe.
With time, the documentary function in their relationship had fallen almost entirely to Milo, but one day a few weeks ago Jacob had rebelled against the division of labor and put film in his Minolta. He had taken a roll of pictures of Milo in the Žižkovižkov apartment and on the empty streets around it. He would have felt self-conscious taking pictures of Milo downtown, in front of other people, though Milo himself seemed to have no such shyness, perhaps because photography was his art and he had become accustomed to the kinds of indecorousness incidental to it.
Jacob had used one of the last rolls of a stock of Tri-X film that he had brought with him from America. There was a small, disorienting thrill in the discrepancy between the black-and-white images of Milo that they were leafing through and the flesh-and-blood Milo beside him. In the prints, Milo’s beauty was almost classical, it seemed to be a matter of line and form, but the Milo holding the prints was pink and sweaty and his hair was a little longer, a little softer than in the photos. He hadn’t cut it since the pictures were taken.
—Well, that’s a magnificent man, Milo observed. —Did you sleep with him?
—Once.
—You can show him off to your friends.
—I told them about you.
—What did they say?
—I told them you took me to Amerika, and the Scot’s girlfriend said, that we must to Šárka.
—I’d like to escort you to Šárka, said Milo. He flipped through a few more prints, but he had sensed Jacob’s mood, and neither he nor Jacob were still looking at them carefully.
—I have to wash the laundry, Jacob said flatly.
—Do you want help?
—No. I also have to work, probably. I have to write. He didn’t look at Milo as he said it. It sounded like an excuse to get rid of him. —Do you still photograph for yourself sometimes?
—How so, for myself?
—As art.
—Just the documentary about a co-laborer from the brotherly socialist republic of America.
It was unkind to throw Milo out. But it was unfair that Jacob should have to feel guilty about it. He hadn’t given his life away. If he did feel guilty, he foresaw, he wouldn’t be able to write anything, even if he were left alone.
—I don’t know what I want to do, said Jacob. He felt awfully sorry for himself. Why shouldn’t he? He couldn’t be what he wanted to be, not for a long time, maybe never. It was as if over the past year or so he had taken a few steps away from a paved road. For a while longer he was still going to be able to justify his digression by pretending that he might soon retrace his steps. If things got bad enough, in fact, he might actually retrace them. For a while longer he was going to continue to be able to minimize the delay that his ever-lengthening detour involved. At some point, though, his justifications were going to start to sound like lies, and he was going to have to admit, to himself and maybe to other people, that he had gone astray. He was going to have to admit not only that he had been walking deliberately away from the road but also that for a long time he had been accomplishing little other than walking away from it. The effort might never come back to him. He might never get anything for his pains but the experience of having wandered, which as someone who actually had wandered he wouldn’t be likely to idealize. He didn’t know for sure that he was headed anywhere, because, to phrase it more carefully, he didn’t know if he was going to live long enough to reach a place that he could learn, in retrospect, to call a destination. He didn’t know how far away such a place might be; certainly he didn’t seem to be progressing very rapidly toward it right now. He had to try to write something while he could. Time was running out. He was probably going to have to give up soon—he was probably going to have to double back to the paved road—but he didn’t have to give up quite yet, so he should at least write a little. —Better if I’m alone today, he told Milo.
—Mushrooms and vinegar, Milo replied, and left.
* * *
“Such a spa you are!” Annie observed with amusement, in the school’s tiled smoking room between classes. “To send him away like that. Poor sod.”
“Who, him or me?”
“I suppose the both of yehs, but I was thinking more of him. How was he to know you had this, ehm, idea, you might call it, in your head?”
“Should I call him?”
“Well, if you can’t be fagged to call him…”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you still fancy him?”
“I do.”
“Then I think you’d do well to call him. If you still fancy him, that is. Though I wonder if he’ll have you again. I don’t know that I’d have you back, frankly.”
“You think it’s too late.”
“When was it?”
“Saturday.”
“Maybe if you make it up to him, like.”
“How?”
“How am I to know? You’re understood to be the great expert in what a bloke fancies.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No, not if you don’t want to see him again.”
“Can’t I want to spend the day by myself?”
“But not sudden like. You can’t surprise a person. And he offered to do your bloody washing with you, and you’re an American.”
“What does that mean?”
“I only mean you’re sure to be very particular about your washing. The Americans in the
are, is why I say it. It’s like chemistry for them. Science, you know. I watch how they do it. They make measurements.”
“You think I fucked it up.”
“I don’t say that. I say you
might
have done.”
* * *
Around this time a letter from Melinda arrived for Jacob care of the
language school. She had managed to type it.
,
Has it really been a month and a half? It feels like bloody forever. Don’t think that I have forgotten that
you
were to write
me
first, or that I consider you any less remiss merely because I
neglected to give you our Roman address before departure. But seeing as how I
did
neglect to give it you, there’s nothing for it, I suppose, and it must be I who writes. Herewith, then…
How the hell are you, darling? Do you miss us half as much as we miss you? Don’t answer that. Carl by the way fully intends writing you a long letter himself, apologizes for not having written sooner, sends regards, etc., so I mustn’t steal his thunder and shan’t except to say that here in Rome he has grown almost unrecognizably industrious, plastering campuses with photocopied offers to give private English lessons out of purloined Czech instruction manuals. (He didn’t purloin them from you, I hope? He did from someone, so perhaps it’s better to keep this bit of the epistle rather close.) My contribution to our financial wellbeing is to offer to sell the car, an offer I repeat almost daily, because I am sure we are running afoul of some nuance of Italy’s vehicular registration protocol and foresee the day when I shan’t be able to flirt my way out of an encounter with a carabiniere. Either that or we shall turn the old Ford into a gypsy cab, so as to profit from our liability. It is widely believed here that all you need do is shout at tourists from a car for money to tumble out of them. Fancy me bawling at timid American matrons from a rolled-down window…
As only a few of Carl’s offers and none of my threats have as yet been taken up, we are free to spend most of our days sightseeing. We have a 1909 Baedeker of Central Italy, which I bought for 75 crowns in that
in
that you’re so taken with, so we are a proper Mitteleuropaïsche couple, Carl and I, visiting the museums and monuments of the West with our outdated guidebook and our igelitka of homemade lunch. The Baedeker is very good on which pastilles to burn in your bedroom at night so as to fend off malaria and also on the age and authenticity of particular rocks. In fact, when confronted with a rock, Carl consults it with a fidelity that is quite touching really. But as a guidebook it does show its age. “There don’t seem to be any Constables in this room any longer,” I am characteristically reduced to saying. “In fact there seem to be only marbles of defeated Huns.” Carl, however, perseveres. “This is where Nero put his circus,” he tells me, and I answer, “Let’s have a gelato,
then, darling, shall we? Because I’m afraid I don’t happen to see a circus.”
Rome is fearfully beautiful even when one doesn’t know what one is looking at. But as a Hun myself, what I like best is not the statuary but simply our apartment. If from the Campo dei Fiori, where they sell me fresh strawberries every morning, you walk north along a cobbled road, intermittently canopied with antique brick and just wide enough for a Vespa and two pedestrians to walk abreast, you find our building at the crick in the road just before the road surrenders its privacy to a vulgar corso. The building is quite narrow and tall, the apartments within stacked one atop the other like children’s blocks, precariously. Our apartment is at the top—fifth floor, ten flights, no elevator. On the landing just outside the door an extraterrestrial cactus blooms in a pink and suggestive manner, under the warmth of the stairwell’s skylight. The apartment proper has two floors. The lower consists of a living room mostly filled by a sofa, a bedroom mostly filled by a bed, and a bathroom perpetually damp, whose shower opens onto a balcony as if to encourage a parade of oneself, an encouragement that I suspect you will enjoy hearing that Carl has once or twice failed to resist. He stands, Baedeker in hand, purporting to identify hills in the distance, of which Rome is famously said to have a certain number—seven? nine?—I can’t recall. Up a rickety spiral staircase is our second floor, such as it is, a sort of aerie: a kitchen with a tiny table, windows on three sides, and another balcony, this one generous enough that one may cart table and chairs out onto it, of an evening, evenings being always mild, and dine there, overlooking the city’s makeshift rooftops of wavy red clay tiles.
I don’t know where any of this is going any better than I did when we left Prague. You will no doubt be appalled to hear that we have even discussed marriage—I know my mother is appalled. Married? In Rome? I hear you say. Isn’t that
permanent
? But I don’t think it is, not any more. Modernity and all that. And it’s being discussed as something tactical, mostly. The US immigration officers are going to suspect us of it anyway, Carl warns me, if we keep traveling together. Don’t mention this to Annie just yet; she’ll think me quite mad.
I have thought often of the conversation that you and I had in the Vietnamese restaurant, and the question of how to know whether one is choosing or whether one is giving in to something one hasn’t understood. I wonder if the answer is that a choice always feels a little supplementary, a little unnatural—because it’s unforced it also feels unnecessary—as if one had figured out a way to get away with something for a while. Something that usually came with a punishment of some kind and this time didn’t. The loss, I suppose, is that in such a case one will never quite feel at home, one will never feel quite certain one knows where one is. What is it Freud says—as if, in the middle of a play, someone in the audience were to stand up and cry “Fire!” or “Help!”—one
won’t
have that sensation, which is such an interesting one. Yet a play is real, in its way, even a play that never turns into an “emergency.” But then there will always remain the dangerous possibility of hearing such a cry later and running off after its siren call, I suppose. One will never feel settled in—zabydlený, as the Czechs say. (I once overheard Henry nattering on to you about that word, but ask one of your lovers, if you’ve forgotten.)
It occurs to me upon rereading what I’ve so far written that you might be as likely as Annie to take alarm at the M word mentioned above, but you mustn’t, you must justify my confidence in your unshockability. The word is after all love’s opposite, or so I recall being told at university, with a certain asperity, when we came to read Flaubert. They’re very keen on disillusioning young women at British universities, you know, I suppose to make us resigned and grateful later on.
Report everything in your reply, especially the answers to questions that you will have understood I daren’t ask in case my letter should fall into the hands of the objects of my curiosity. We hope desperately that you will decide to go home to America via Rome instead of that nasty Paris you’re so keen on—or simply come to Rome indefinitely. Our sofa is at your disposal, as are we, entirely. Neváhej, lásko.
And write soon.
s velkým srdcem,
Melinda
