Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“I’m the grateful type.”

“I said I’ve come round to it.”

“You can’t deny that you’re always doing things for other people.”

“In this case, however, it is for myself.” She surveyed the room, as if taking stock of the moment that she had decided to enjoy. “Why is it no one goes on the stage, I wonder.”

She narrowed her eyes at Jacob, who dodged the hint by looking toward the stage.

“It’s taboo,” Carl answered, “unless one is performing.”

“One might perform,” Melinda suggested.

“If the audience wanted a performance. If they believed in you as a performer.”

“And if the audience were to?” she persisted. “If the ticket holder of C-4 were to believe in you…,” she said, naming her own chair.

“Oh, the ticket holder of C-4…”

More softly, she said, “Imagine that I’m serious.”

For a moment he was at a loss. “What would you want to hear?”

“Can you sing?”

“Sing! My god.”

“Well, then.”

“I think I know a speech of Rosalind’s.”

“Did you play her?” Melinda asked.

“I wish. I played one of the fools. But she had the best lines, and she gave them every night, so I ended up learning her speeches, too.”

“Give us Rosalind, then.”

“Come on,” nodded Thom. “Up you go.”

“Wait, wait.”

“Too late,” Henry declared.

“I’m not backing out. I’m…thinking.” He sidled out of his row, and in the aisle raised a hand to stroke the beard he no longer wore. Discovering its absence, he nervously adjusted his glasses. “Okay,” he said, seeing that his friends were observing him. He backed up against the proscenium and then pulled himself up to sit on it, dangling his legs like a child in a chair too tall for him.

“It is of a play by Shakespeare?” Kaspar asked.

“It is,” said Carl. Continuing the conversation with his friends in the stalls protected him somewhat from the display he was beginning to make of himself. “And because it’s Shakespeare, you have to imagine that I’m a man acting the part of a woman.”

“Shouldn’t be too much of a challenge,” said Thom.

Carl folded his legs up under him and then unfolded them so that he now stood on the stage. Jacob turned in his seat to see what Carl saw; here and there in the room patrons were shifting their attention to the stage. “It’s so high up here,” Carl reported. “I’m so much higher than all of you.”

“Awfully bold,” said Thom, “for a lass like you to take the stage.”

“Actually it’s a little more complicated. I’m a man playing a lass dressed as a man, about to propose that you pretend I’m a lass.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” said Thom. “I was talking to the first lass.”

“I’m not going to do the drag part of it. I hope that’s okay.”

“There’s a great deal of prefatory matter, isn’t there,” Melinda said, aside.

“Okay,” said Carl, taking a breath and making a show of settling himself. “Okay, I’m ready. You have to ask me, first, whether I ever cured anyone of love by mere talk.”

Melinda, taking this upon herself, rose. “Did you ever cure any so?” she called out, in a voice that rang through the theater, summoning the people in it out of their separate conversations.

A quiet fell naturally over the room. “One,” said Carl, taking a half step forward as he began to speak,

and in this manner. He was to imagine

Me his love, his mistress; and every day

To woo me. And I to be a moonish youth,

Grieving, changeful, longing, liking, proud,

Fantastic, apish, shallow, full of tears

And smiles, as boys and women mostly are.

He paused for breath. The feat of memorization held them, if nothing else. He didn’t let anyone catch his eye, perhaps afraid that it would break his luck.

He was to feel that every day his heart

Was wounded by my eye, yet flew to me,

Who wounded it, for succor; to feel that my heart,

Flutter’d, fearing, turn’d about with love,

Sought the wild alike, though I, heartless,

For safety ventured not: And so by feigning

That I, who loved him, loved him not, and he,

Who loved not me, did love, we made ourselves

A pair of doveless cotes, and coteless doves

Too shy and too high-flown for any keeping.

He held his pose after he finished the poetry, and they waited, in case there might be more, until Melinda, in the same voice as before, answered:

O youth, I would not be cured so.

Some wags at the back of the theater hallooed and applauded, and the friends joined in as the applause became polite and general.

Melinda came forward to hand Carl down from the stage. “I had no idea,” she said.

“It was my secret.” He held on to her hand for a moment, even after he had come to ground. The two of them, let alone by the others, leaned together against the edge of the stage, resting their drinks on it. They began to look at each other less guardedly.

“He wasn’t so terrible,” said Thom to the others, as they all made an effort not to pay attention. “Did you know your flatmate to be a thespian?” he asked Jacob.

“Thomas,” scolded Annie.

“He hadn’t come out to me as such,” Jacob answered.

A gangly young Czech — a college student, probably — scrambled up onto the stage. “Být, anebo nebýt,” he said, in a cracking voice. “To je otázka, že jo.” To be or not to be; it’s some question, isn’t it.

A companion followed him to the edge of the stage. — Get down, you idiot.

Carl and Melinda remained in deep conversation. Now and then Jacob’s eyes strayed to them. The freedom that they were taking frightened him. It was threatening. It was exhilarating, too. It suggested that there was no longer any reason to protect whatever it was that he had been trying to preserve. Jacob himself would be able to destroy so much, he felt, and there was so much that he was looking forward to destroying, once he himself reached the point of not having anything to lose.

“I told Melinda she could have my bed and I’ll sleep on the floor,” Carl told Jacob, sometime after midnight.

“Yeah?”

“So as not to get Annie in trouble again.”

“You don’t have to ask me for anything,” Jacob said.

“We thought we should clear it with you.”

“That’s…don’t worry about it.”

It didn’t matter whether they were lying, Jacob told himself, or whether they knew they were lying, but he found himself studying them, with eyes made unsteady by drink and with a perception loosened by it, and he noticed that their way even just of standing together had become a subtle dance, that there was one spirit in the rhythms and angles of their limbs.

“It isn’t what you think,” Melinda said to Jacob later, as they sat together in the back of a night tram, which rocked them noisily down the tracks. But by then he had gotten beyond caring whether they were lying, to themselves or to him. He was merely impressed by the courage of their bodies, which he sensed beside him from beneath eyelids that he kept mostly closed, resting as he gauged the tram’s progress through the city by the torques and tugs that had become familiar. He was impressed by their confidence in wanting to be together. They were braving the consequences. This was how the future came into being.

At Carl’s bedroom door, Melinda said, “Good night, then. You know of course that nothing is happening.”

“Of course not,” Jacob replied.

“Thank you,” she said, and the door was shut.

* * *

While Jacob was lying in bed listening to rain, Carl and Melinda stole silently through his room, holding their shoes. He saluted them.