Necessary Errors: A Novel (50 page)

“No, but only because we don’t eat them. We have crackers.”

“That’s right. ‘Crackers.’”

Jacob put teabags into cups and a kettle of water on to boil and fetched the pages about Meredith from the bedroom. Kaspar fluttered them in his hands to get a sense of how many there were, and then took from a pocket somewhere beneath his sweaters a pair of glasses with silver frames. “If I am to think while I read, I must either smoke or eat,” he said, as Jacob began to cut slices from a loaf of caraway-seed bread. Jacob put the slices on one plate and then opened the tin of anchovies on another.

“A fork, I think,” Kaspar suggested.

Jacob hadn’t focused on the actual eating of the anchovies. He handed Kaspar a fork and watched him spear one of the tiny pink-and-silver filets out of the oil and uncurl it on a slice of bread. Since no harm came to Kaspar after swallowing, Jacob imitated him. The flavor was mostly salt and sourness. He had been afraid he would be able to feel the prickle of the fish’s bones as he chewed, but he couldn’t.

“It is good,
že jo
,” Kaspar said.

“It is,” Jacob said, polite and unconvinced.

Kaspar began to read. Jacob took up last week’s newsmagazine, which Carl had bought for him, and stared at it in his lap, pretending that he was reading also. He guessed that Kaspar wouldn’t notice if he didn’t eat any more anchovies, and in fact Kaspar didn’t notice. The room fell silent, except for the rustle of pages and Kaspar’s slow chewing. When the kettle whistled, Jacob rose and poured the water and brought the cups to the table.

For camouflage, Jacob continued to run his eyes emptily over the columns of the magazine. That was the trouble, wasn’t it, he thought to himself—that he was angry with Meredith. It was interfering somehow. She had been murdered, and it was unfair to be angry at her. On the other hand, because she had done the murdering, he was right to be angry at her. She had taken away her recognition of him when she left. Was he trying to take it back? Maybe what interfered was guilt. Maybe telling her story was too much like stealing it from her. He was calling attention to himself by writing the story, after all, making himself out to be something he hadn’t in fact been. While she was alive, he hadn’t even been able to
say
he was in love with her. Then again there might be no moral factor at all; a part of him might just be trying to protect himself, to push Meredith and what he had shared with her away.…The longer he thought about it, the less able he was to tell the difference between what was his doing and what was, at least in his own mind, Meredith’s. It also became hard to tell the difference between what he wanted and what he was afraid of. It was a way of thinking that didn’t lend itself to storytelling. There was no knight to pick up the sword, no growling bear to slay, no princess who asked to be married. Everything was also its opposite; nothing was capable of change. Perhaps he didn’t want anything
to change, as if by making reluctance into a principle, he could keep Meredith alive. In that case his story was like Henry’s, without his having intended it to be. In that case it was a story about not wanting to tell a story.…

Abruptly, in an interruption of his own thoughts, Jacob realized that in giving Kaspar the pages, he had forgotten all about the main character’s attempt to seduce another man.

He watched Kaspar nervously. After finishing the last page, Kaspar picked up the others, which he had set down one by one as he read, and tapped the sheaf on the table to align it.

“At the end, where the angry man makes a pass at the other one, I think I was thinking it was a symbol,” Jacob said. It was almost painful how badly Jacob wanted Kaspar to make sense of what he’d written. The schoolboy in him was impatient, too, to hear whether he had done well.

“May I?” Kaspar asked, with his pack of Petry in his fist. Jacob gave permission but didn’t take one himself. “And the trouble,” Kaspar continued, “you think, it is that you are angry, you say, like the angry man.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps, perhaps.” In automatic movements, Kaspar opened the double windows beside him a crack, and some of the bitter smoke from his cigarette flitted out. “A symbol…It is a symbol of what?”

“Of union,” Jacob said, but the answer sounded too grand. “Of wanting to know what the crying man is feeling.”

“But he doesn’t want that,” Kaspar said, with his crooked smile.

“Yes he does,” Jacob insisted. “The man who isn’t crying wants to know why he’s angry at the other man.”

“No, he wants to not-know,” Kaspar said. “The nature of what he wants is not-knowing.”

Jacob took a breath. “Because it’s two men?”

“Because such a union is the thing itself. It is not the symbol of it. It cannot be a symbol.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are no words for it.”

Again Jacob was suspicious. “No words for love between men?”

“No, no.” Kaspar seemed to brush away the misunderstanding. “For sex. There are no words.”

“You can write about sex.”

“But if you do, the words become the thing itself, again,” Kaspar explained. “It cannot be
put
into words.”

“You mean it turns into porn.”

“If you will.”

Jacob thought of the character he had tried to create, and of his own frustration, which he had tried to put into the character. “But he does want to know,” Jacob said, “and he doesn’t know.”

“But he will want also to not-know. To be alive in not-knowing. To be with his friend in not-knowing.”

“His friend?”

“The one in the ground.”

“But he wants to be with the man. That’s what he says. He doesn’t want to be with her.”

“He is in anguish. He is lying to himself.”

“What if he’s really gay?” Jacob asked.

“You have not written that story,” Kaspar calmly answered.

“But what if he’s really gay?” Jacob repeated.

“It will make no difference.” He blinked a few times, perhaps irritated by the smoke. “He is in two,” he continued. “That is what it means, to want another in order to have union. He is in two.”

“You mean he wants to be with him and with her.”

“No, no. He is in two in order to be with her.”

“Because he shouldn’t be with her? Because that’s not who he is?”

“No, no.” He stubbed out his cigarette abstractedly. “Listen,” he suggested, “perhaps it is not you who were in two. Or not only you. Do you see?” He looked out the window as if to leave Jacob the freedom to approach the idea. The sky was gray and near as if it might snow, but it had been gray yesterday as well, and it hadn’t snowed then. “She was two, and so you were two in being with her. And she killed one of them. One that was she killed the other that was she.”

“You didn’t know her.”

“No. This is true.”

“That’s also the fake part of the story,” Jacob said with some agitation. “About the other man. That’s the part I made up. I didn’t intend
for it to seem real. It’s the part I added, that I was conscious of adding. I didn’t have a real person in mind. If anything, it’s a little forced. Do you know what I mean?”

“It is possible that the sense of having made it up,” Kaspar slowly replied, “is the cover under which you have hidden it from yourself.”

Jacob repeated Kaspar’s sentence silently. He remembered having read a similar thought once before. “Freud says something like that about dreams,” Jacob said. “When you say, within a dream, that it’s just a dream…”

“Like in Freud, yes.”

“But I’m really gay.”

“Are you?” joked Kaspar, because it didn’t feel to either of them like a revelation.

“Yes, I am,” Jacob said, a little angrily.

“But you were in love with a woman. With this woman.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Why do you write about her?”

It seemed to Jacob that Kaspar failed to realize how selfish Jacob was. “There was a thing that we had, that we were both writers,” Jacob said, “and now I don’t know if I have the right to keep it any more.”

“You had a calling,” Kaspar said. His face took on the pleased look that Jacob so distrusted, the look he had given to the typewriter.

“Like a religious calling? I don’t believe in God.”

“That doesn’t prevent him from calling to you.” Kaspar was so confident of his better understanding that now he was making jokes at the expense of what he considered Jacob’s ignorance.

“I don’t believe in that,” Jacob repeated.

“You had a calling, and you had the good fortune to know someone else with a calling,” Kaspar said, with more diplomacy.

“That’s making too much of it. We hadn’t earned it. I hadn’t earned it.”

Kaspar shrugged. “You do not earn a calling.”

Kaspar had misunderstood so much there seemed no hope of correcting him. “So does this mean I’m not gay, in your opinion?”

“I don’t know if I believe in this, the question of gay or not gay.”

“I do.”

“And I believe in God. So.”

“I think you’re missing the point,” Jacob said.

“Yes, perhaps,” Kaspar cheerfully admitted.

*   *   *

“There’s something else,” Jacob added that evening, Václav in one crook of his folded arms, as he came to the end of his narration to Carl of Kaspar’s visit. “Something he said about love.”

He glanced instinctively at Carl as he said the word, because Carl had become identified in his mind as the Lover, and the identification was so conscious, though tacit, between the two of them that Jacob worried for a moment that Carl might take personally what he said next. He reminded himself that Carl was too generous for that kind of misunderstanding. It was to some extent by virtue of his generous spirit that he had become the Lover, after all, though it was also true that he looked the part, tonight especially. His shirt was half-unbuttoned, his hair was long, and his face seemed to have caught and held the white gold of the winter sun that he had spent the day walking in. He sat in his chair with a touch of swagger, managing to enjoy the white-painted plywood thing. He was sprawled across it, his legs apart, humanizing its angularity with a slouch, which the curve of his spine inverted from time to time, when he yawned, and arched himself up and over the chair’s back. Faced with such physical confidence in a stranger, Jacob would have tried to convince himself that he hated it because it was unearned, but of course it wasn’t hatred that he felt, and it wouldn’t have had the same charm if it were earned, whatever earning it might mean. In Carl, he told himself, the confidence was like the resistance in metal that makes it possible to sharpen it, and he knew that it was being sharpened, in Carl’s case; Carl was in love.

“What did the two of you decide love is?” Carl asked.

“Kaspar made it sound as if it’s always a mistake. As if it isn’t even possible for a healthy person to
be
in love.” Jacob tried to remember how Kaspar had put it: “When you think you have to have somebody, it’s because you yourself are in two.”

“That’s classic, though, isn’t it?” Carl pulled a hand over his beard. “We’re severed halves, looking for our complements.”

Jacob spoke quickly because Kaspar’s suggestion had irritated him and it irritated him again to repeat it: “At first I thought he was trying to say that being in two was a problem that only gay people had, or people
who think they’re gay, because they haven’t accepted their own sexual nature and would rather find it in someone else, in another man, but now I think it has to be true for straights as well, if it’s true at all.”

“He knows you’re gay?”

“Sort of. That was part of it. But he said it didn’t matter. He didn’t even seem to believe me, necessarily. What’s bothering me is, if he’s right, if love is a way to keep from understanding what’s missing in yourself, shouldn’t you always resist it? You’re not supposed to go to bed with your therapist, because it’s better for you to understand what you’re feeling. But if that’s true, why should you ever go to bed with anyone? Wouldn’t it always be better not to?”

Carl listened to Jacob’s idea, which Jacob was afraid must sound crazy, with more attention than Jacob was sure it deserved, Carl’s two arms wrapped over and behind the back of his chair and gripping the posts on either side of it, as if to pin himself in it. He fidgeted in place. “Would you still fall in love?” he asked.

“I think so,” Jacob answered. “I think that’s the whole point. But not do anything about it.”

“I seem to be falling into that condition,” Carl said. “The
cavaliere sirvente.
Or
non sirvente,
rather.”

“Who?”

“Like in Renaissance love poetry. Did you ever read any of that? I took a class in it. I was in a Shakespeare play, and I sort of went through a phase. The heart is free to ride out to the tournament of love, only because its master cannot follow.”

“There is a kind of freedom to it,” Jacob said carefully. He had been hoping that Carl would show him that somehow Kaspar was wrong.

Jacob’s stomach growled. It was dark, and neither of them had yet suggested a plan for dinner, but Jacob didn’t want the conversation to be interrupted. He took his cigarettes out of the cabinet nearest the stove and lit one to dispel his hunger. Carl accepted one, too. They could talk all night if they wanted to. They were young. For years and years still, they were going to be able to live this carelessly.

“So you’re saying it’s not real, in a way,” Carl mused.

“
I’m
not saying it.”

“Only the mistake of it is real,” he said, as if he were accepting the idea.

“How was the castle?”

“There was almost nobody there. There aren’t any crowd pleasers. It’s all young men in pain—Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch. Young men in pain in the castle. So we had it to ourselves. One white room after another. I told Melinda the castle belonged to us the way the day did.” He got up and started to pace. “But it’s real as long as it lasts, even if it is a mistake. And if it doesn’t last…Even if you don’t go to bed with each other, it doesn’t last.” Jacob could tell from Carl’s scowl that Carl was looking at a picture of Melinda in his mind’s eye. “Because we’re
mortal
.” He made the portentousness of the word into a kind of punch line.