Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“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.

“You didn’t tell me they had dumplings,” Jacob said.

“Do you know this dish the Czechs serve,” she asked, “‘Jewish pocket’? Rafe and I had some the other night. In Josefov, no less. It’s a pork cutlet folded around an egg. A sort of pork cordon bleu.”

“How was it?”

“Rubbery, I’m afraid. But the name of it — what’s curious is they seem to have no idea of giving offense. The joke is so old they no longer hear it as a joke. It’s just the name of the dish, to them.”

She didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what she was saying. Her mention of Rafe had abstracted her, and she had slipped into playing the docent, which was, after all, a role that she and Rafe often played for Jacob. “I don’t know why I ordered dumplings,” she said, trying to recover herself. “I’m not at all hungry any more. Are you?” He shrugged. “You’re always game, aren’t you,” she continued.

The murmurs that reached them from the other tables were in English and in French, so they had leaned in over their plates and were speaking more softly than they did in other Prague restaurants, where they had the freedom of not being understood.

“Is Rafe always game?” Jacob asked, since he knew she was thinking of him.

“He is,” she answered. “He wants everything and wants to know everything. Prague is too tame for him now. Have I told you this? He wants to go farther east.”

He felt a twinge of panic at the thought of her departing. “Will you go with him?”

“It’s under discussion.”

“When does he want to go?”

“Sooner than anyone thinks, but it isn’t entirely up to him.”

“Who’s it up to?” he risked asking.

“It would be poor form for him to leave the ministry before his appointment there has run its course,” she carefully answered.

“Some people wonder if…”

She let his suggestion hang unfinished while she paddled about in her soup. “The question is whether that’s my story, too,” she finally said, without looking up.

“Which?”

“Whether I’m game to go farther east,” she specified. “Whether it’s my life and adventures as well, or only his.”

“You mean you can’t decide whether you want to go?”

“No, I can’t tell whether, if I did go, it would be my story. Does that make any sense? I am hopeless, I know.”

“I think I see what you mean.”

“And that isn’t the question I ask about Carl,” she confessed.

“What is?”

“I—,” she began, but immediately she gave up. “Oh, it’s absurd. I am too grand. I suppose I just fancy a scrum, is all.” The waitress intervened, laying a platter of pale wet dumplings on the table between them. Once the waitress excused herself, Melinda continued: “Don’t look so gobsmacked, my god.”

“No, it isn’t — I don’t know the word—”

“Scrum? How mortifying. Jesus. A scrum. I don’t know. Like two football squads. A tumble. Jacob, please.”

“Oh. Like a scrimmage.”

“What you must think of me.”

“I don’t think anything of you.”

“That’s hardly reassuring. I feel I ought to say that that isn’t exactly it, lest you take me at my word. I mean, I would fancy a tumble, but I’m not so simple a personality as for that to decide the question, however much I might wish that I were. It’s a question of wanting to know how the story turns out. And one can only know that about one story, ever.”

“How do you think the story ends, with Carl?”

“Oh, it isn’t with Carl that it ends, if I choose him. I know that. I’m not a schoolgirl.”

“He’s a nice guy,” Jacob said, in Carl’s defense.

“Is he? But that isn’t why one fancies him.” She crossed her arms and seemed to fold in on herself, as if she were cold. “I worry that I’m tempted to choose his story for the sake of what isn’t in it rather than what is.”

“Kaspar’s advice is to resist any choice that feels like you have to make it, because it would be a choice not to understand.”

“Ought we to be taking romantic advice from Kaspar? And risk falling in love with our landladies?”

“He would say you and Carl must be keeping something about yourselves apart from yourselves. Helping each other keep it apart.”

“The present and the future,” she said.

“Is that it?”

“With Carl I don’t want to think about the future, and with Rafe I can’t think of anything else. Will I dread it if I stay, will I lose it if I give him up.”

“That’s sort of how Carl gets out of it, too. The meaning of love has to be independent of the future, because we all die.”

“But one rarely dies right away. And so there are consequences. In the meantime, as it were, which does happen to be the rest of one’s life.” She folded her napkin neatly and tucked it against the base of her soup bowl. “Shall we order tea?”

It came in a traditional Czech stoneware teapot, white and glossy, printed with lacy blue designs.

“If I’ve told you this much,” Melinda said, after starting a Petra, “I feel obliged to tell you the balance of it, because I can’t reasonably expect you to tell him nothing, given my own shoddy record in the secret-keeping department. It may seem as if things are progressing toward, you know, but in real life things needn’t, as you also know. I’ve told him as much, but I think he only pretends to believe me, and that’s another reason to tell you the balance, because I think you shall believe me. You aren’t in the case, and you can see it more clearly. And the balance is—”

She paused to choose her words carefully. She was in a boat not too far from shore, and a shift in the wind had showed her that she didn’t know how to sail, after all, as she had thought she did. But nothing would be worse than being rescued.

“The balance of it is that I am quite attached to Rafe. It sounds miserable to say it like that, so backhandedly, but it’s nonetheless true. It’s so much who one is, when one is in it, that I’m not certain it’s even possible to imagine oneself outside it. It’s hardly his fault if I’m reluctant to go to Kyrgyzstan, or what have you, and I don’t know, as you say, that I’m not simply imagining that I would be happier with Carl, or that I would be anything with Carl, really. Or that I’m unhappy with Rafe, in any serious way. Perhaps I simply want to have a secret.”

“A secret?”

“Not that there’s anything to keep secret, mind you. A secret even from myself, in a way.”

“Like Rafe and his secret.”

“His secret,” she repeated. She flushed; patches of blood came into her face clumsily. “You think I can’t leave Rafe alone with it — is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know.”

“And I’ve brought Carl in only so as to bind myself more tightly to Rafe. What a horrible thought. It would be impossible for me to choose Carl freely, if you’re right. Or if Kaspar is right. Whoever is making this argument.”