Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“Oh, where else? You won’t talk about it when we’re alone.” The piece of foil in his hands had been worried into strips but he continued mechanically to fold and unfold it.

“I think that’s enough,” she told him.

“Yes, perhaps it is,” he said, rising. “I’m going, then. You, stay.”

“I think perhaps I shall stay. And I shall stay with Annie tonight, later, now she’s back.”

“As you like,” he replied. He stood still for a moment, as if he were going to add something.

“Don’t,” she requested of him.

“Why would I?” He walked away.

The friends traded glances apprehensively.

“I’m sorry,” ventured Carl.

“Rubbish,” Melinda answered. “I’m sorry that any of you had to be a party to that. Would you accompany me, Annie?”

“Ehm, let me just find my wrap and my bag. Are those they, on the next chair, Thomas?”

“Oh, only to the loo, for now,” Melinda clarified.

“Just the bag, then,” Annie instructed Thom.

After the two women left, Thom shook his head and said, “I’ve never seen him in such a state.”

“It must be difficult,” said Henry, “if he wants to go and she doesn’t.”

No one was moved to comment further. They shifted in their seats and drank for a while without talking. A trio of strangers came near in search of a place to sit and then sheepishly withdrew, sensing from the silence that they had intruded.

It was disconcerting to sit quietly in a theater not serving its purpose.

“Have you seen the bridge?” Kaspar turned and asked Jacob, with his customary sly smile. He pointed to where the Charles Bridge would be, if it were visible through the walls of the theater.

“I saw it when we came in.”

“But there is a further garden.”

“There is?” Jacob asked.

“I show you?” Kaspar invited.

They left the others and walked out into a blue-green darkness. There were no lights, only a glow that fell from the mist-haloed iron lamps of the bridge, which loomed over them like an ocean liner over passengers in a rowboat. Water was lapping both sides of the low, tapering strip of land. Old, thin trees were planted in the cobblestones, and from their branches new-fledged leaves drooped like limp gloves and trembled.

There were lovers, here and there, under the trees. Kaspar and Jacob walked out into the garden, taking care not to stumble on the uneven stones. They had already drunk enough not to take too much notice of the chill.

“Tell me, how is your story?”

“I haven’t thought about it much,” Jacob admitted.

“There is so much happening for you.”

“Is there? Happening around me, maybe. Why do you ask?”

In the dark he sensed Kaspar’s shrug. “I am interested in your progress,” he said, again.

At the top of each of the bridge’s massive, diamond-shaped piers, a black saint had turned his back to them. “When I first heard about my friend I threw flowers off the bridge.”

“A pretty thing to do.”

“They weren’t such pretty flowers.”

“Well,” Kaspar said.

They found an empty bench and sat down.

“We stopped at Auschwitz during our trip to Poland,” Jacob told him.

“Did you?”

“I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the idea of going there.”

“It is a horrible place.”

“I mean, I worked myself up into an argument about it. That it wasn’t even right to go there, somehow. That we as tourists didn’t have a moral right to. I was childish about it.”

“You felt the place,” Kaspar said.

“Or something.”

The bridge above them was quiet, but now and then a lover in the garden murmured or laughed. “Is it not beautiful here?”

“It is,” Jacob admitted. It felt imprudent to admit it. It might make it more painful to remember later — to remember that he had had to leave it. “How are you feeling? Should you be out here in this cold? You left your coat inside.”

“Do not worry so. You are like Melinda.”

“What do you think she’ll do?”

“She is turning at last to her own garden.”

“I don’t want her to leave Rafe.”

“It is not on you or me,” Kaspar reasonably objected.

“I told her she should give Carl up, so she could find out what he meant to her. You know, your idea.”

“Mine?”

“You said you don’t believe in that kind of love. Where you leave someone because of an idea about yourself.”

“But once they do leave…”

“She could still patch it up with him.”

The question must not have interested Kaspar, because he let it pass without comment.

A figure approached them through the darkness and from ivory face, hands, and ankles crystallized as Melinda herself.

“La, do the rest know this is here?”

“Sit, sit,” said Kaspar, making room for her between them. “It is our secret.”

“Between two handsome men. I ought to have quarreled with my boyfriend sooner.”

Each man felt the warmth of her thin torso beside him.

“What are you going to do?” Jacob nervously asked.

“I shall stay with Annie tonight.”

“Will they make a fuss? I thought her overnight guests had to be registered in advance.”

“Oh, I shall tumble her into the soup again, shan’t I?”

“It’s all right,” Jacob assured her.

“Tell me that it will be.”

“Of course it will be.”

“Good,” she said cheerfully. She sat upright as if to improve her posture as well as her outlook and peered into the gray sky. “Do they have stars in Central Europe, do you think?”

“Not in Prague,” Jacob answered. “They have clouds.”

“They are pretty clouds, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes one does wish for a star or two. At night clouds can be rather…indistinct.”

“Do you know the constellations?”

“Oh god, are they all different here?” She took out her cigarettes but then didn’t smoke one. They were so close to the bridge that it, mist, and the river were all their view. “From here it looks less like a bridge than the wall of some great fortress,” she said.

“With a moat,” said Jacob.

“Yes. Defending what, exactly?” She shivered. “I think I shall go back inside. This is nearly Carl’s farewell party, isn’t it, and I shouldn’t like for a row to be his last memory of me.”

* * *

Returned to the theater, they fell into the empty stalls between their friends like pieces into a puzzle. “Another round?” suggested Henry. Annie helped him fetch it.

When the drinks arrived, Melinda proposed a toast. “Carl’s restoration to capitalism,” she suggested, sensing perhaps that her friends were waiting for her to grant them permission to be lighthearted again.

“Hear, hear,” seconded Henry.

“Is that a fate to wish on anyone?” Carl objected.

“It’s not much of a wish at all, really,” said Henry, “since you’ll be restored to it whether you stay or go. There’s no alternative any more.”

“What about the Third Way?” Carl asked.

“Oh, darling, the Third Way,” said Melinda consolingly.

“It’s the only way left.”

“You’re not meant to believe in it literally, I don’t think,” she explained. “Here’s to eating in restaurants late,” she further proposed.

“Not too late. I’m going home to Boston.”

“As late as half-seven, say.”

Carl acknowledged the toast by drinking. “You don’t have to be jolly, if you aren’t up to it,” he told her.

“Am I doing it badly?”

“Not at all. I just mean, you don’t have to do it for me.”

“But that’s one of the things I’ve come round to about you. Your wish to believe that it’s for you that people do things.”