Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Mmm,” said Melinda. “Whereas his robes cling to him in rather a nice way.”

Jacob moved on to dutifully inspect the other statues. Annie trailed him for company, and when he found a path, she agreed to explore it with him.

“Don’t be long; it’s cold,” Melinda ordered.

The path had been kept clear by a light service vehicle of some kind, whose wheels had marked it with a double rut, and the trees on either side were saplings and scrub.

“Are you certain this is part of the gardens?” Annie asked.

“No,” Jacob admitted, but there didn’t seem to be any harm in continuing. He noticed cross-paths through the thin woods where people had taken short cuts. In the shelter of the woods there were islands of snow, but where the snow was crossed by footpaths, the ground had been tramped clear. He wondered if men came here to meet in the evenings. He hoped the idea wouldn’t occur to Annie. Of course there was no one here now but his friends.

“I did think at first that you and Carl would make a couple,” Annie said. “I suppose I hoped it for your sake. He’s very fine.”

“I’m glad you like him.”

“I hope Melinda won’t be too hard on him.”

“He kind of forces her to be.”

“He doesn’t seem able to help himself, does he. How was it the other night? With the poetry club?”

“It isn’t poetry.”

“You know what I mean .”

“It went well. But I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“I didn’t ask, did I. I didn’t ask anything particular. So it went well. That’s lovely.”

“Oh, don’t—”

“I’m not, am I. I’m not. It’s your poetry club. I don’t suppose what Henry wrote was really so very ‘sexual,’ after all.”

“I think it’s more the emotions he wants to keep private.”

“Oh, he has emotions, has he.”

“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” he repeated.

“I won’t tell , Jacob.”

The path ended at the threshold of a nondescript structure: brown-tinted Czech stucco on a stone foundation. “Is this Libuše’s baths?” Jacob asked aloud. The building looked modest and utilitarian.

“It’s a shed, I believe,” said Annie.

Annie folded her arms. Jacob tried to look into a window, but he couldn’t see anything. The woods continued behind the shed, sloping downward. He took two steps and sank into a layer of black leaves that the snow had hidden.

“Please don’t, Jacob. It’s a drop and then there’s that highway along the Moldau.”

“I’m not going to fall onto a highway,” he assured her, but he returned to the path.

They began to retrace their steps. Jacob hated to give up on a search, and he became sullen.

“Are you still off men?” Annie asked.

“I’m not off them.”

“I mean not looking. Not for now.”

“Yes,” Jacob said.

“I believe I am as well.” She glanced at him. He sensed that she wanted him to ask a question, but he had noticed a scratchiness in the back of his throat and he decided to conserve his energy. “I have this feeling of sufficiency,” she continued. “I have the . I have my teaching. I’m quite good at teaching, you know. My students are quite fond of me, have I told you that? They pay us so little, yet I find myself saving crowns. I was telling Melinda, sometimes I feel as if I could go on for years here.”

“A couple of months ago you couldn’t stand it.”

“But I thought then that I was the only one, you see. But we’re all, nearly all — it’s as if we were meant to be building something in ourselves, for now. Do you see it like that? You needn’t pretend to agree with me if you don’t. It’s peculiar to talk about, I suppose.”

“I think I’m getting sick again,” he announced.

“Are you? I’m so sorry. Shall we go back?”

They returned to the clearing. For a moment they thought that Carl and Melinda had abandoned them, but then Annie spotted them standing on a sort of rampart that overlooked the river. Carl turned to face them but Melinda continued to look at the other castle, the more famous one, miles away in the distance, across the river and to the north. “Did you see the baths?” Carl asked. “They’re halfway down the hill. You lean out here as far as you can and look left and you can see the corner of them. They’re lame.”

“Jacob’s ill again,” Annie told them.

His only symptom so far was a slowness in the way he was registering his impressions. When his friends spoke, it required an effort to understand their words in the same rhythm that they were speaking them; the meaning seemed to lag behind. “It’s just a little fever,” he said.

“Ubožátko,” Melinda consoled him. Poor little one.

“Will you be able to make it home?” Carl asked.

They fell silent as they walked back toward the subway. It took a little while for Jacob to notice the silence, because he found himself counting his breaths against his steps, already slipping into the trivial self-involvement of an invalid.

“It’s too bad the church wasn’t open,” he apologized.

“It isn’t as if one could call ahead,” said Melinda.

“It was lovely, Jacob,” Annie insisted. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

On the subway platform, Annie arranged to spend the rest of the afternoon with Melinda, helping to prepare the flat for Rafe’s return. At Muzeum the women changed lines, leaving the men alone.

Changing to the tram at Palmovka took more of Jacob’s energy than he had expected. Fortunately he and Carl found seats. Jacob wrapped his fatigue around his shoulders like a blanket and shut his eyes. He felt the winter sun tapping his face as the tram crossed the spaces between buildings.

“Are you all right?” Carl asked.

Jacob sensed that Carl was trying to find out whether he was well enough to hear a piece of news. He nodded and opened his eyes. “What is it?” But he was already asking the question from inside the shell that belonged to the illness, the shell he had built for himself in the days he had spent alone with it, before Carl came.

“I asked her if she was interested,” Carl said.

Slowly Jacob asked, “What did she say?”

“She was, I don’t know, cavalier. ‘How could I not be?’ At first. You know, as if it was all nothing, which I suppose it is. Did you like it up there? It was pretty cold with that wind. And then she said, ‘But you’ve broken the rules.’”

Jacob nodded. To help himself follow, he pictured Carl and Melinda in his mind’s eye as they must have looked as they stood at the ledge of Vyšehrad, overlooking the Vltava River.

“‘We were supposed to go as long as we could,’ she said. ‘Without knowing whether the same thought was in the other’s mind.’

“I said I was sorry,” Carl continued, “and she said one isn’t sorry for such things, and I said she was right, really I wasn’t sorry, and what were we going to do. She said, ‘Just this, I think.’ I asked what this is, and she said it again: ‘Just this.’ Then you and Annie came back.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jacob.

“Nothing to feel sorry for.” He took off his gloves and folded in the thumbs so that they could lie together flat on one of his knees. “It’s sort of nice.” A shine in his eyes suggested that in fact he saw it as a victory.

* * *

Carl offered to scramble some eggs for dinner, and as he assembled the ingredients, Jacob found himself beginning to worry so intensely about whether Carl was going to measure out the right proportions of salt, pepper, butter, and egg that he removed himself from the kitchen and lay down on his sofa. He closed his eyes and made an effort to let go of the numbers. He imagined them floating up into the air above him. After a time, he heard Carl call out that dinner was ready.