Necessary Errors: A Novel (53 page)

“But I don’t know if you should give up on chemistry,” Jacob felt obliged to say. It was harder to communicate, now that it was between them that Ivan wanted the use of something Jacob controlled. “There’s a
demand for English teachers now, but science will be more important in the long run.”

They were nearing the bus stop, and Ivan let Jacob step away from him. “But this is perhaps something, that I cannot wait for.”

Jacob thought of Ota, but Ivan was a scientist, and he probably saw things more clearly than Ota did. It would be a kind of rudeness to keep warning him. He would risk seeming stingy and repressive. He reached out to shake Ivan’s hand, which startled the fragile-looking man, and they parted.

*   *   *

In the Havelská arcade that led to Mel and Rafe’s apartment, plastic lamps had long ago been drilled into the stone medieval ceiling. When Jacob arrived, their yellow light had not yet crystallized against the evening; it still offered itself only as a supplement to the dark but vivid light from the sky, which, though clear, was the color of lake water before a storm. Jacob’s hand, as he raised it to Mel and Rafe’s buzzer, seemed to partake of the conflicting elements; a faint gilt rested on the tops of his fingers, while his palm seemed dripping with a shadowy blue, below.

He heard footsteps and then a scratching as the lock was worked. “Would you like to come up, or are you in a rush?” Melinda asked. She had changed into a white linen blouse with a high, almost clerical collar.

“Either way,” said Jacob.

“Well, you’re welcome to come up.” She said it a little shortly, maybe because Jacob had forced her to answer her own question. “Rafe’s here,” she added, as she preceded him up the narrow stairs.

She called her boyfriend’s name as she nudged open the door to their apartment and as Jacob followed her in. Rafe emerged from their bedroom, grinning, unkempt. “Jacob! Feeling better?” he said. “You look better.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean, you look well. I’ve never actually seen you look worse, so you can’t look better, can you. Sorry I can’t join you,” he said, explaining, apologetically: “Work.”

“What are you working on?”

“Will you have a drink? Slivovits? Becher?”

Jacob looked to Melinda, but she gave no sign. “I don’t want to put you to the trouble…”

“Oh, come on. Have a drink.”

“Some water would be fine.”

“Water? You’re such a cheap date! I bet you’re easy, too, aren’t you?”

“The water drinkers rarely are, in my experience,” Melinda interposed.

“In
your
experience,” Rafe continued to goof from the kitchen, as he poured Jacob a glass from the tap. He looked into the pantry, as if he might take something stronger for himself.

Jacob drank his water half down for lack of knowing what to say. “So what are you working on?” he again asked Rafe.

“Oh, a white paper,” he answered. “Now that there’s only one superpower, I have to prove to the Europeans that mutually assured destruction is a game that can be safely played as a solitaire.”

“Can it really? How does it work?”

“If anyone looks cross-eyed at America, we blow ourselves up!”

“Brilliant!” Jacob said, hoping to match Rafe’s ironic enthusiasm.

“‘Brilliant,’ yes,” Rafe repeated. “You sound like Carl,” he added, after a pause.

Jacob apologized: “He’s practically the only person I’ve seen for weeks, until today.”

“Oh, me too!” Rafe exclaimed. “He stops by, you know. Today he photographed me, for a keepsake. ‘This was Melinda’s “boyfriend,”’ I imagine. He’s
very
devoted to everything about Melinda. Including me.”

“He’s joking, though it may not be apparent,” Melinda said.

“I’m not joking. He did photograph me.”

“I meant your tone.”

“What’s my tone? I’m not Jealous. No, that’s not true, I
am
jealous. But jealousy is great. Jealousy is the spice of married life.”

“It doesn’t seem quite right for you to enjoy the spice without having committed yourself to the bread and butter,” Melinda suggested.

“I get away with all sorts of things,” Rafe answered. “Now you two enjoy your date.”

Jacob didn’t feel it was safe to go. “You know, Rafe, there’s something I—,” he began.

“Darling, he’s taking the piss out of you,” Melinda interrupted. “As it happens, I told him about you the other night.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m not jealous,” Rafe said. “A romantic dinner on a spring night with a beautiful woman.”

“Oh,” was all Jacob could think to say.

*   *   *

“I’m an awful person and if you don’t want to have dinner with me I’ll understand.”

“Of course I want to have dinner with you.”

“It became a strategic necessity. I don’t know if I can hope to make you understand, given that your longest involvement to date has been, what, two months? And even then without the bother of fidelity.”

“I understand the concept.”

“No, you have no idea, but here I am, berating you when I’m at fault. When you have had some experience, you’ll find that
that’s
typical, too. The worse one sins, the more of a moralist one becomes.”

“Has there really been sinning?”

“As if I would tell! But no, there hasn’t been. It’s all in Rafe’s head.”

“All of it?”

“Except for what’s in Carl’s head, I suppose.”

“And none in yours.”

“Darling, I am like Victoria upon the discovery of her destiny: ‘I will be good.’”

The restaurant, only a block away, bore no sign. It was located in a shop front, the vitrine of which was white and empty. Inside, a palisade of unfinished bamboo sheltered the diners from the sight of the street. There was a wallpaper of silver and gold ferns on a pale green ground, and there were four potted palms, each a distinct variety, spaced among the modest tables. In the center of the room, a small aquarium, so low one might trip over it, burbled and glowed. While Jacob was admiring the décor, a petite Vietnamese woman gave a slight bow of greeting and wordlessly showed them to a table.

The chairs were standard socialist-issue, as were the light fixtures above and the alloy cutlery wrapped tight in paper napkins. Even the tablecloth was a common red-and-white gingham that Jacob recognized from U
. So the effect of the restaurant, as one settled into it, was not of sudden transport to Asia; it was of having been invited into a child’s make-believe of such a journey, where the props of everyday life have been rearranged so as to suggest a new meaning, and then accented
by a few precious objects, loaned perhaps by an indulgent aunt. Its success depended on one’s own complicity. When the menu arrived, it was a mimeograph, muddily typed and reproduced in violet, as in every Prague restaurant, and it listed no Vietnamese names for the dishes, not even in transliteration, but only generic Czech descriptions. Soup with onions and with lemon, read the entry that Melinda pointed to. The prices were as low as anywhere. The whole enterprise was a gesture of goodwill, Jacob felt. It was a gift that the Vietnamese were offering to the Czechs, on the occasion of their progress beyond socialism—an unassuming gift, because it was hardly an occasion that a still-socialist nation could officially acknowledge. It might have felt wrong for Jacob as an American to intercept it, if so many of the tables around them had not stood empty.

“And how are you, then, love?” Melinda asked, after both had ordered the soup.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Jacob answered. “It’s a little odd, the way I drop out and then drop back in,” he continued, thinking of the life he led when alone in his apartment. “I’m like a movie that goes in and out of focus.”

“That sounds a little alarming.”

“I didn’t even know the war was over.”

“Carl didn’t tell you?”

“He must have forgotten to. I think mostly he just thinks about you.”

“How wrong of him, and how wrong of you to tell me.”

“What did you two do today?”

“I don’t know what we do ever. We walk, mostly, along the embankments. And keep up our defenses with droll commentary.” She sighed lightly. “You mustn’t think anything is going to happen.”

Jacob shrugged, to disclaim prediction of any kind.

“How did you hear of the peace, then?” she continued.

“From Kaspar. He doesn’t believe I’m gay.”

“No doubt you’re to be Jewish, as he hopes to be.”

“He hasn’t mentioned that lately.”

“Playing coy, I fancy.”

“Playing goy.”

“That’s terrible, Jacob.”

“Sorry.”

“There’s evidently a woman in the case,” Melinda said. “But he’s bound
to finish Catholic in the end—Mother Rome always gathers in the wanderers. Don’t let him sweep you up while you’re vulnerable. Unless you mean to be swept up, of course.”

“Vulnerable?”

“You haven’t got a lover again already, have you?”

“No, but what does that have to do with it?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing. But one does worry about you, darling.”

He was aware that he liked to hear that she worried. “How so?”

“I don’t think Kaspar’s path should be yours. He is seductive in his way, though not perhaps to the likes of me.”

“I don’t think he’s—”

“Oh, I don’t mean in that way. You do turn everything to that account, don’t you.”

Their soup arrived. In deep white porcelain bowls, clear, thin hoops of onion floated in an amber broth. Ribbons of something green drifted in and out of the hoops—spinach, perhaps. Seaweed seemed unlikely so far from any shore. The warmth, after he swallowed, descended slowly through his chest. He began to sweat gently. There was a taste in it of something like nutmeg.

“Do you see?” Melinda asked.

They sipped silently for a little while. “Jacob, what am I to do?” she at last broke out, in a tone that both suggested she meant it and mocked the melodrama of her own manner. “No, don’t answer that. Can I trust you? Will you tell him everything? You do live together.”

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Confidentially, then. What am I to do? You still shouldn’t answer, I suppose.” He didn’t. She had called him to attention and then bidden him be silent, and her eyes rested on him in the silence, appreciating him. He sensed that it suited her to see Carl through him for a moment—to let him stand in for Carl and yet not be him, and not be capable of replacing him—to have him be, in fact, as close to her as to Carl, if not closer. He felt a flicker of pride in this ambiguous role. It was like passing a finger through a candle flame too quickly to be burned, though it wasn’t altogether impossible for him to be burned. She was so beautiful. “The puzzle of it,” she resumed, “one puzzle, anyway, is that the pathos seems to be all on his side, between us. He pines, yet it is everyone’s understanding that
he is to leave shortly. All this horrid memorial photography. It isn’t clear to me that it’s hard-hearted of me to resist breaking off a relationship of years for one that will only last weeks. It’s hardly in my interest to, is it.”

“You know the answer to that,” Jacob replied.

“It’s haggling,” she guessed.

“I wouldn’t put it so harshly.”

“But it is.”

“Carl doesn’t believe in time,” Jacob said.

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“He doesn’t think a relationship is more meaningful if it lasts, or less if it doesn’t.”

“He hasn’t explained that to me. How very ideal. And also quite male, I think.”

“Is it?”

“Annie wouldn’t let him get away with it for a second.”

“But I let it pass.”

“Oh, you’d let him get away with murder. You’re as bad as I am. As is Henry. And Thom, for that matter.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“You are. The lot of you, but you in particular. I have to watch out for you.” After a pause, she added, “I’m only pretending not to understand, you know.”

She stopped their waitress. “
bysme dát si,
máte, vietnamské knedlíky.” The waitress nodded.