Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Aren’t your kind like that as well?”

“I guess they are.”

“I don’t hold it against you. I don’t even hold it against Carl, really. He seems quite taken with Henry, doesn’t he,” she said, nodding ahead, and added, hypothetically, “You aren’t jealous.”

“Carl is free to have arguments about aesthetics with people besides me.”

At Na , they turned the corner that housed the gallery where Jacob and Luboš had seen the work of the children’s book illustrator. It was empty now, between shows. Jacob wondered what the next show would be. He noticed that he wasn’t sentimental. In fact he was disloyal, he told himself; he was careless. He didn’t point the gallery out to Annie, and he didn’t say anything about the cart man selling párky a block further on, where the avenue ended and the raised cobblestone paving kept out cars. After all, he and Annie were going to turn before they reached the cart. “I heard that your little club is to have a meeting,” Annie resumed. “The one with Henry.”

“On Wednesday night.”

“I suspect Henry’s quite a good writer. Otherwise I shouldn’t care to join, I don’t think. I don’t mean that I shouldn’t like to read your writing, and Carl’s too, if he would let me. But if it were just you and Carl, it would be your private thing, wouldn’t it, living together as you do.”

“Chastely.”

“I have your word for it. But Henry makes it a group.”

“Oh, Annie. Just come if you want to so badly.”

“But Henry doesn’t want it, you see. He as good as said as much.”

“Did he really?”

“In so many words. It wasn’t anything to do with me, he said. He would be embarrassed, because it’s rather blue, what he writes.”

“Blue?”

“Blue. Off. But I’m not a prude, so I’m not certain I believe him. I mean, don’t you think it’s no more than a piece of gentleness — something to put me off with? He is quite gentle, you know, in his way.”

It was too delicate for Jacob to meddle with. He didn’t want to have Annie excluded, but there seemed to have been a negotiation of some kind between her and Henry, and he hesitated to tamper with it.

Once inside the familiar warmth of U , the friends again teased Carl for having led them astray with the Canadians. “One brick of Semtex in there,” Carl joked in return, “and capitalism would never come to Czechoslovakia.”

“A whole brick wouldn’t be necessary,” said Henry. “You can cast it quite thin. That’s why it does so well for letter bombs.”

“And who told you all this, Henry?” Thom asked. “Your friend Hans?”

“One sheet of Semtex,” Carl modified.

“They power the detonator with the battery from a piece of Polaroid film.”

“Ingenious,” said Carl.

“I find it quite morbid, rather,” Annie objected.

“But I don’t see that it would stop capitalism,” Henry added.

“It would stop it here,” Carl claimed. “The thing about capitalism is, you have to be really nice to it. Really polite.” He glanced at Melinda, who was fingering a box of Petra cigarettes she had dropped on the table at her elbow, as if she were admiring the russet color of its cover. She looked up from time to time to let him catch her eye, and when she did, they could see that Carl was amusing her. She was letting him look at her a little longer and more often, Jacob thought, than she would have if Carl hadn’t made a false step earlier in the evening that he still had to atone for. “Otherwise it won’t roll over your country and destroy life as you know it,” Carl continued. “It’ll roll over someone else’s.”

“And why should capitalism be so sensitive to the fate of one of its nightclubs?” Melinda asked.

“It’s the people inside not the nightclub itself. They would ‘tell.’”

“‘Tell’?”

“‘You killed our infant bankers.’ ‘You made it hard for us to loan you money.’ ‘You failed to coddle the juggernaut.’ And it’s off to Poland, or Hungary.”

“Not bloody likely the Czechs would let that happen,” said Melinda.

“I don’t know,” said Carl, with comically exaggerated doubt.

“Coddle the juggernaut — I’ll have to remember that one,” Henry complimented Carl.

There was a bit more flourish in Carl’s silly talk than usual. He seemed to be laying it out for Melinda’s unacknowledged admiration, and perhaps comfort, like a coat over a puddle, to be taken for granted. It was as if the two of them had been more frightened than the others by Carl’s inattention and needed to reestablish their footing without seeming to be concerned to reestablish it with each other in particular, and were therefore forced into a nervous, general jollity.

“God, what was that all about,” Carl said at the end of the night, as he and Jacob walked down empty streets, which the snow fell into but never seemed to land in. In , beside the Lucerna pasáž , gated for the night, they waited for a tram.

“Don’t know.”

A young couple were flirting in half whispers on a stoop. A man with heavy gray hair stood beneath the enameled-steel tram sign, gripping a worn leather satchel, as rich in color as the wood of a violin, and staring dully past them down the tracks. Jacob read the time of the next tram’s arrival off the placard; Prague trams always ran on schedule. “Eighteen minutes,” he told Carl.

“Would it be terrible if we took a cab?” There were three of the square, black cars at the corner, where met Wenceslas Square, the drivers talking as they leaned against their hoods, the engines idling for warmth. Carl continued: “What is it, fifty crowns?” Drivers were a distrusted caste, Jacob had learned from his students. Or rather, only the corrupt took taxis instead of public transportation, and drivers had necessarily taken some of the poison in handling them.

“It might be as much as a hundred,” Jacob said.

“So three dollars. Don’t look so horrified. For me it’s three dollars.”

“Okay,” Jacob consented.

“I’m a fucking tourist, okay?”

They negotiated a fare before they got in, and Jacob asked the driver to follow the track of the night tram that they would have taken, so that as they traveled he would be able to know where they were. The driver didn’t speak to them; perhaps he found Jacob’s request insulting. Carl, too, was silent, and Jacob watched the tram signs trundle past, unstopped at, with their white squares for the numbers of day trams and blue squares for the numbers of night ones. At this hour there was almost no one else on the roads, and scenes passed by so much faster than Jacob was accustomed to that he felt a vague anxiety, which he knew was groundless but couldn’t quite shake, like a sense in a dream that you are forgetting something important, or that you’re about to lose something. All the windows in all the buildings they passed were dark. Everyone in Prague went to bed so early, and Jacob and his friends had stayed out so late.

“What a prick I was,” Carl said when they were nearly home. He had the hood of his pullover up for warmth, and it blocked Jacob’s sight of him.