Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Congratulations,” said Jacob, as he and Melinda filed into the gap between the front row and the proscenium. “Mazel tov,” he added for good measure.

“Why thank you, sir,” Thom responded. He and Jana rose to accept Jacob’s and Carl’s embraces.

“Boy or girl?”

“He is a boy,” said Jana, “and he will come in September.”

They all looked at one another stupidly and happily for a few moments. Jacob had never before been in the presence of friends his age who had announced a pregnancy, and the vague but powerful geniality that the couple gave off was a novelty to him. The aura was different from that of other achievements; it was more like one of greeting than of congratulation.

“You will pardon me,” a delicate voice said, “but I thought, that I heard you say, ‘Mazel tov.’ Is it so?”

“Kaspar, this is my friend Carl,” Jacob responded.

“Ah, the poet,” Kaspar said, bowing slightly.

“Poet?” Carl echoed.

“You direct what is called the poetry corner, do you not?” Kaspar asked, with a glance at Henry, his evident source.

“Oh it’s Henry’s poetry corner. I’m just an unindicted co-conspirator.”

“Now you’re in for it,” Rafe murmured.

“And what is this, if you please, an unindicted co-conspirator?” Kaspar asked, carefully repeating the syllables.

Kaspar had risen to his feet when the others did, and he now swayed slightly, holding on with his stubby fingers to the back of Jana’s chair for support. His clothes were so loose on him that half the collar of a polka dot shirt — another gift of Rafe’s? — had slipped beneath the neck of his sweater. One of his eyes was wandering as usual, and the inward-sloping, almond shape of his eyes, Jacob saw, contributed to the expression he seemed always to wear of appealing for the answer to a question.

“It’s a reference to our great leader Richard Nixon,” Carl explained. “It’s a way people had of referring to him during Watergate.”

“Carl’s a great one for the names of things,” said Henry, at Carl’s side. “It’s he who came up with ‘coddling the juggernaut.’”

“Ah yes,” said Kaspar. “That was very fine.” The fullness of the gratitude embarrassed Jacob on Kaspar’s behalf, but Carl let it go by. “But why do you call yourself so?” Kaspar persisted.

“Because I maintained plausible deniability. I never read any poetry to the boys here. Or any prose, for that matter.”

“Didn’t you?” Annie queried.

“We know he wrote something,” Jacob volunteered. “I heard him typing.”

“He is a bit ‘dissi,’ perhaps,” Kaspar suggested.

“Like dissident?”

“It is a style. Always joking. Always with secrets. Keeping your things in a bag, for if they come to knock in the night, and writing only for the drawer.”

“There’s nothing to dissent from in America,” Jacob said, rehearsing his old argument with Kaspar. “There’s just — other voters.”

“I bet you could find something,” Carl demurred.

“It alarms him, when I speak so,” Kaspar told Carl, conspiratorially.

“He’s not ready,” Carl agreed.

The group soon broke into smaller conversations. “She let me know in March,” Thom explained to Jacob and Carl. “It was her wish to have the child, a reasonable decision considering the lad’s attractive father, but it’s quite common here the other way. Bit of a shock to learn how common, even to a man of such a liberal mind-set as myself. Seems they’re much more likely here to take care afterward than to trouble themselves in any way before.”

“It’s thought to be an unintended side effect of the command economy,” said Henry. “No one compares costs. Sort of the way there’s a dry cleaner on every street but no Laundromats.”

“A weightier matter than that, I trust. It’s my scattered seed we’re discussing, as I believe your man Hans has called it.”

“No doubt some of that has made it to a Laundromat.”

“A pity that not even a father comes in for respect in the new world order. A father of his country, no less.”

“And of other countries, too.”

“Just the one other, to the best of my knowledge.”

“And you’re going to get married?” Jacob asked.

“She’s quite stern. I had to promise to divorce her.”

“ You promised?” Jacob asked.

“I had to. But I tell her she’s allowed to have second thoughts as she comes to a deeper appreciation of my merits.”

Jana turned in her seat at this.

“How well you know your mind,” Annie complimented Jana.

“But you have not said, how was your trip to Poland,” Jana replied.

“They’re quite jolly, the Poles, I find,” Annie said. “Wouldn’t you say? They want more and they give more, but it isn’t you that they want, not quite as it is here. You know how it is, that if you open a map on a Prague street, a Czech will appear to help you find your way and to talk to you for fifteen minutes. That didn’t happen in Krakow. On the other hand they were quite nice in the shops.”

“Oh, in shops we Czechs are barbarians,” Jana admitted.

“Not if one is a regular,” Annie qualified. “They’re quite fond of me in my Palmovka sweet shop, for example.”

“Because they know you,” Jana said. “You are theirs. But that is not yet civilization. It is only…family.”

“But in exchange perhaps one feels that it means more, somehow.”

“Still we must leave it behind,” Jana said.

Thom slid down beside her. Jacob clambered over two rows to sit behind Kaspar; Melinda and Carl came down the aisle and met him there. Rafe was already sitting beside Kaspar, rolling in his long fingers the foil wrapper from inside a cigarette pack, and Jacob wondered if it cost Rafe an effort not to turn around — not to examine the way Carl and Melinda sat down beside each other, behind him, and faced as carefully forward as he did.

After they had sat for a little while in the twilight together, Carl said, as if speaking a thought in all their minds, “It’s as if we’re waiting for the show to begin.”

“Don’t say that,” said Melinda. “In the next scene you leave us, you know.”

“That’s right, I guess.”

“What was it like to leave us for Krakow?” Melinda continued. “That was your rehearsal.” She said it brightly. Jacob thought he understood. If this was the last time she was going to see Carl, she had the right not to stint it.

“It was…,” he began, buoyantly enough, but he paused, and they waited with him, in the half dark, while he searched his memory and then his invention for something to say that was dishonest but not ungallant. “It was sort of beside the point. It was outside the story, as we say in the poetry corner.” The tone of the sentence was not quite right. “It made me wonder, what if the rest of my life will be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like tourism.”

“You would see the sights,” she consoled him.

“I suppose I would try to.”

She hesitated. “Would you miss us as much as all that?”

Without looking up, Rafe suddenly, quietly attacked her. “Do you want him? Do you want him so badly? Is he going to give it to you?”

“Give it to me?” She seemed shocked by the words he used.

“That thing that you’re supposedly looking for. The thing that gives you permission never to know what you want.”

Rafe delivered his lines without turning around, and Melinda spoke hers while staring at the back of his head and then, when he persisted in refusing her gaze, at the back of his seat. Neither voice was raised, despite the bitterness of the words.

“Should we be having this discussion here?” she asked.