Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

They took turns exchanging kisses hello.

“Is it this way?” Jacob asked. He had unfolded his blue city map, which these days he kept flat against his handkerchief in a back pocket. Since he had given up men he had taken up geography. He visited a new sight or a new neighborhood nearly every weekend. “Is this it?” he asked, pointing through the plate glass at a concrete landscape. “Did they pave it?”

“This is the Palace of Culture, so-called,” Melinda said. “Vyšehrad is farther on. Shall we?”

They stepped out onto the ungiving white plateau, which was angry with winter sun. “We’re high up,” Carl noticed.

“On a cliff, I’d say,” Annie commented. A highway bridge of the same white concrete stretched north from the subway station and spanned a valley of villas and bungalows. They could see no way of descending to the valley; the elevation seemed to confine them to the concrete plinth of the Palace of Culture. The palace itself was a bleak vault of pale marble and brown-tinted glass. It focused the wind, which pushed and shoved them as it blew past, buffeting the hollows of their ears with a sound like that of a luffing sail.

“ Is there culture? Should we go inside?” Jacob asked.

“It was for party congresses, and now I believe trade shows and such like. Rafe dragged me along for a function once, I can’t remember what. I can’t say I recommend it.”

“Rafe is returning tonight, isn’t he,” Annie said, reminded of the news by the mention of his name.

“Oh? Mr. Stehlík just came back to our house,” Jacob said.

“That’s the father?” Melinda inquired.

“He yelled at us,” Carl volunteered.

“He yelled at me, ” Jacob corrected him.

They came to the end of the white cement and tumbled off the corner of it into a regular Prague street of shops and family dwellings. The wind softened, and it became easier to talk.

“What were your crimes?” asked Melinda.

As they walked, Jacob described the bell and the string he had persuaded to install, and then described how Mr. Stehlík had stormed through Jacob’s bedroom and into Carl’s that morning; pointed a finger, crooked as if he couldn’t bear to straighten it, at the bell on Carl’s bedside table; and asked, “Mr. Jacob, what is it please?”

“And what did you say?”

“Je to jenom , a díra už tam byla.”

“Darling, ‘ ’ is a bit much.”

Jacob translated for Annie: “It’s only a tiny little bell, and the hole was already there.”

“He shouldn’t have minded,” Annie loyally said, “if the hole was indeed already there.”

“I think your speaking Czech made it worse,” Carl said.

“He didn’t like it that we offered to pay him, either.”

“You were offering to pay for what, exactly — indulgences?” Melinda asked. The vulgarity of their offer seemed to delight her.

“We’re American,” said Carl. He made it seem unsporting to resist appearing crass.

“Mr. Stehlík said he had waited ten years to get a phone,” Jacob concluded.

They came to a ruined stone gate, patched on top with a red chalet roof. It marked the outer limits of the castle grounds, and though they could have walked through abreast, they walked through in single file, the women preceding. On the other side, low grassy banks sheltered the road, which felt less like a road than a path. As the road curved, a finger of sun touched them, though too lightly to bring much warmth. There didn’t seem to be any groundskeepers, perhaps because it was midwinter. There was no sign of any other visitors, either.

“It’s a gorilla problem,” Carl ventured.

“Is that an American term?” Melinda asked.

“It’s a term of my own devising,” he said. “It’s when an argument isn’t rational because it’s really about deciding who’s the top gorilla.”

“Jacob was challenging the man’s authority,” Melinda said, as she followed the line of thought.

“Jacob’s mistake is to think about the problem, when he should be thinking about the gorilla.”

“Then can you use the phone at all any more?” Annie asked.

“Not while Mr. Stehlík is in town, I don’t think,” Jacob said.

“Shame,” Annie said.

They came to a second gate. This one was a sort of grand façade set across the road, with no building behind it. Set in the façade above the passageway were three relief cartouches, two of them apparently empty. “Is that all there is to it?” Melinda asked of the structure, skeptically. Beyond the gate, the sloping banks that channeled the road were taller, and in the shade of them she shivered. “Tell me again, why is it we’re here?”

Wind slowly bent the bare, fine-fingered trees above them and fluttered a short-trimmed, chartreuse lawn. “It’s part of my quest,” Jacob answered.

“Would you take my scarf,” Carl suddenly said to Melinda, irony absent from his voice.

“Oh, please,” Melinda refused.

“I don’t need it,” he said, unwinding it.

“I’m a married woman, more or less. I can’t go about borrowing men’s scarves.”

“My nana knitted it,” Carl assured her. “Your nose is as red as a button.”

“How awful,” she said, covering her nose. “In that case, then.”

The scarf was long and loosely woven, mostly grays and whites, but sprinkled with red and royal purple. Carl made as if to wrap it around Melinda by circling her, but she tugged it out of his hands—“I won’t if it’s to be my winding sheet”—and allowed it to drape her only loosely, so that the line of her neck was still visible.

“It is fetching,” Annie said. “Will your nana knit me one, do you think?”

“It’s dashing,” Carl declared.

“Oh, well, ‘dashing,’” Melinda half mocked.

Carl’s throat was left open to the air, and the women noticed a pendant he wore, which Jacob had often noticed but had never asked about. “Is there a figure on it?” Melinda asked.

“Saint Christopher. The patron saint of travelers.” He drew it out from beneath his shirt. It was made of a dull, light metal, a cheap alloy, and it was about the size of a nickel.

“Was it given you?”

“I picked it up in Paris. In a religious shop near the Luxembourg Garden.”

“I thought you might have won it in some way,” Melinda explained. While she fingered it, he stood very still.

“Like a medal,” he suggested.

“Yes. Or as a love token,” she said, dropping it.

The openness of the flirtation was their permission. Melinda seemed to enter into Carl’s game with perfect naturalness — to catch his way of handling feelings with doubled irony. Maybe it had always been her way, too. Jacob watched her turn away and hike ahead as if she had no interest in standing close to Carl any longer than she already had, no interest in tucking back into the neck of his shirt the pendant that he was now tucking back in himself, the metal once more against his skin. Jacob was sure that nothing was going to happen between Carl and Melinda — he was as convinced of that as he was that something sweet and painful now attached them. He wouldn’t have been very good at talking about his impression. If asked, he might have said he “felt bad for them,” but he would have sensed, in saying this, that the formulation was wrong or at least inadequate, because in another way he felt good for them; he was glad they felt alive, as they must have felt if in fact they felt anything like what he imagined. Of course there was no need to talk about it — no need for the two of them or for anyone else — no need that couldn’t be put off. It was like what he had said to Henry in their writer’s group. There was such a thing as a resistance to story. There was even a pleasure in resisting it, a somewhat violent pleasure — and then there was the pleasure of having the two of them near him, the pleasure he took in their beauty, as his friends, which was like a wealth he shared in, without any responsibility for it.