Necessary Errors: A Novel (40 page)

She flushed. “
I
don’t know. You can’t ask a person that.”

“You were, is what you’re saying. You had a happy childhood and you miss it.”

“Don’t we all?” she answered. “No, I suppose that’s a terrible thing to say. There are unhappy childhoods.”

“But those people miss them even more, so you’re not wrong.”

“I’m going inside, before I embarrass myself further.”

“You haven’t. You couldn’t,” he said into the night air. Soon Jana, too, excused herself, and the two friends were left. They turned and looked frankly in at the party behind the glass.

The cold had whitened Carl’s face and reddened his fingers, Jacob saw as Carl lifted a cigarette to his lips. “I can fall for her, can’t I?” Carl asked. “I don’t want anything to happen. I mean, I know it isn’t going to.”

*   *   *

When Jacob had first fallen in love with a boy, three years before, he had seen that it was possible simply to turn away. The boy was straight; he was never going to fall in love with Jacob; and moreover Jacob then hoped that he himself would turn out not to be gay. It would have been
correct to withdraw in silence, and it would have been prudent. But in giving up the misery he would also have had to give up the joy he found in his friend’s company, and so he stayed and eventually came to understand and name for himself the joy as well as the misery, though the boy never understood, never heard him name them, and perhaps never even knew the half of it. Ever since, it had been a principle with Jacob not to side with righteousness against feeling. Righteousness was a trap, he felt, and he had been lucky to get out as quick as he had. He therefore now set about being broad-minded about Carl’s crush. The happiness of their circle didn’t seem much threatened; as Jacob’s own experience suggested, nothing comes of most wishes. Furthermore, in Rafe’s absence, Carl and Melinda were careful with each other the next time they met. They weren’t distant, as they might have been if they were frightened. There was nothing for anyone to notice, and no one did.

The group, meanwhile, accepted Carl completely. When he announced that he had found another hospitable pub near Wenceslas Square, the group trusted him and for variety’s sake took his suggestion. In two cavelike rooms, whose low arched ceilings had been yellowed by decades of cigarette smoke, he led them to flimsy tables crammed together so tightly that you couldn’t get into or out of your seat without the cooperation of the people at the next table. Whenever you rose and made your way down the aisle to the men’s room, chair legs caught at you like brambles and had to be shaken off. The beer on tap was Pilsner Urquell; Carl recommended the goulash; the waiters were businesslike and did not try to pass off a tourist menu instead of the regular one. For a week the friends returned almost nightly, until their coats stank of the place and even by day their eyes were red from its haze.

At that point they decided to go back to the jazz club in
. They all wanted to show it to Carl, especially Annie, who had first discovered it. Jacob steeled himself, but when they went, no one there reminded him of his misadventure. Probably none of the staff even remembered it. Carl crowed over the jazz club, to Annie’s gratification. Not only the lofty rooms and loud, careless audience delighted him but also the music, which he alone among the group was connoisseur enough to appreciate. “They’ve got a New Orleans sound,” he tried to explain to Jacob. “A bigger sound. Do you know
anything
about jazz?”

“Nothing,” Jacob confessed, shamelessly.

After three or four rounds, Annie would ask one of the men to dance, and if he refused, Melinda and Jana would in solidarity insult him, so that soon a number of the friends would find themselves together on the dance floor. Annie snapped her fingers soundlessly and stepped lightly in the pattern of a square; Melinda swayed from side to side while swiveling her bent arms; Thom always nodded solemnly. Returning to the table, flushed, the dancers were told how good they had looked by whoever had remained behind, usually Carl or Henry. “You ought to have joined us,” Annie would say in reproach.

The only weak link in their chain of pleasure was communication. At the pay phone near their local
hospoda
, Jacob and Carl could make outgoing calls, but they were rarely able to receive an incoming one. Mr. Stehlík, who would have hung up on their friends, was in Poland with his wife for more than a month, but once their friends began calling regularly, thanks to Carl’s more gregarious nature,
decided that it was unthrifty to leave the phone off the hook for the time it took to walk downstairs and find out if they were home. For a while she hollered to them from the top of the stairs, but they never heard her, so she gave that up. Instead she took messages, which were almost always incomplete, because she was too polite to tell callers when she hadn’t understood. “But
where
?” Jacob would ask, his patience thinning, and
would translate his question into Czech for herself—“Ale kde?”—and then shrug helplessly. “I don’t know. He said something—‘elephant’?
Nevím, nevím. To jsem asi
.
”

“Elephant?” Jacob would desperately echo, miming a trunk.

“Asi ne,” she would skeptically reply. Maybe not, after all.

The problem preoccupied Jacob. Two lodgers had a stronger claim than one on the Stehlíks’ phone. It seemed almost unjust. If only there were a way for
to signal to them and spare herself the stairs. All the windows in the house were doubled, and in the outer frame of the one in Carl’s bedroom, Jacob had noticed a small hole in the lower left corner, which had once admitted a wire of some kind. On the top floor of the Rott hardware store in Malé
, downtown, he bought string and a small brass bell. If the bell were set on the edge of the table near Carl’s bed, and Carl’s inner window were left ajar, and a string were threaded from the bell through the hole in Carl’s outer window up the outside of the house to the Stehlíks’ living room directly above, where the end
of the string could be held until needed by closing it in their outer window, then
would be able to ring for them by opening her window and giving a tug.

—But when Father returns?
asked.

—But we aren’t doing anything! Jacob pleaded. —The hole already exists. A tiny little hole!