by Caleb Crain
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.”
“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 t
o 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.
“Sleep, sleep,” Carl urged him.
“I’m already awake.” He couldn’t resist keeping them company. He wanted too badly to know what they were going to do. For decency’s sake he put on last night’s clothes, which still had the sour smell of cigarettes.
“Perhaps I should press on,” Melinda suggested, once they had assembled in the kitchen.
“Have you met Václav?” Jacob asked.
“I haven’t.”
“He needs some water,” Jacob noticed, and took the hamster’s dish to the sink to refill it.
“Why don’t you eat something first?” Carl said.
“We have one kind of rohlík and four kinds of jam,” Jacob offered. He opened the refrigerator to show off the preserves. “Land of plenty.”
“Do the two of you have the stomach for breakfast?” she asked.
“I always do,” Jacob answered.
“If I wait a bit, Rafe will have gone to the ministry,” she thought out loud.
“Better stay.”
“I’m no good at this.”
Jacob insisted. “I know that French people like warm chocolate milk for breakfast, but I don’t know what English people like.”
“Are those eggs in that tell-tale white paper sack? Perhaps one could make an omelet.”
She cracked the eggs efficiently. She flinched slightly when the butter sputtered and slid across the hot pan. Carl stood beside her as he waited for the water to boil. Jacob could tell that the two of them were willing their bodies not to speak. Jacob felt more than ever that he was living in Prague in a way that he had never lived in America. Even the commonest thing was an adventure. Nothing like this had ever happened to him in America, even if it wasn’t quite to him that this, whatever it was, was happening.
“What?” Melinda asked, provoked by Jacob’s observation of her. “I swear, you look at me sometimes as if you think I’m starkers.”
“No.”
“You’re having thoughts, I can tell.”
“You can stay here if you like,” Jacob offered.
“You mean, if I have to. That’s very kind, but I can doss down at the , you know. It’s my right as a teacher. Annie will set me up. She’s offered to before.”
“Don’t they keep track of your comings and goings?”
“Oh, it’s socialism. There’s no mistaking it. It would be like taking to a nunnery at the end of a novel.”
“After the rogue leaves,” suggested Jacob.
“Hey,” said Carl.
Jacob offered to take his shower, to give them time alone, but Melinda said the omelet was ready. She folded it over and cut it into thirds. They ate it fiercely. In the end, they all had jam on rohlíky, too.
In his room, Jacob spent a long time there pretending to choose what he was going to wear. Eventually Melinda came to find him. “Now I really must go.”
“Do you remember how to get out?”
“Perhaps you could offer a hint.”
Jacob padded back into the kitchen—where Melinda gave Carl a hurried embrace—and leaned out the door of their apartment. “Just out that door,” Jacob said, pointing to the building’s entrance, “then left around the building, and left again at the street. The tram stop is at the corner.”
“Brilliant, love.”
Honza was emerging from his apartment. Melinda didn’t stay for introductions, and when Jacob waved good morning, Honza nodded and winked knowingly, before heading upstairs to check in for the day with his employer.
“Honza saw us,” Jacob reported.
“Honza’s a man of the world,” Carl said, and went back to bed.
They were never to know whether Honza told or whether Mr. Stehlík found out on his own. The knock came just ten minutes later.
Mr. Stehlík seemed to have to stoop to come in through the door, his anger made him so tall. He took a position beside the kitchen table, his feet planted wide, his gray hair stiff and martial.
“Mr. Jacob, we must talk,” he began.
“Okay.”
“Mr. Jacob, this is not right,” he said, pointing at the stovetop, where the omelet pan lay, still wet with butter.
“We were just cooking breakfast,” Jacob said. “I was going to clean the pan in a minute.”
“No, Mr. Jacob. This.” He was pointing, Jacob now saw, not at the pan but spots of old pancake batter, sauce, and soup on the stovetop itself. Jacob had been putting off scrubbing it. “Mouses will come,” Mr. Stehlík added.
“Sorry,” said Jacob. “I’ll clean it tonight.”
“You have shoes on carpet,” Mr. Stehlík continued, pointing at the path that they walked through the kitchen en route to their bedrooms. In the course of his construction work, Honza had scattered debris in the foyer, and Jacob and Carl had tracked some of it inside. It didn’t look ineradicable.
“In America we don’t take off our shoes indoors.”
“In Czech, yes. In Czech nation, no shoes.”
“I’ll take them off if it’s important to you. If I could borrow your vacuum cleaner…,” Jacob proposed, but Mr. Stehlík didn’t seem to recognize the word for the device and moved impatiently to his last and gravest charge.
“And Mr. Jacob, is not hotel.” He glared at Jacob after delivering the words. His face was ashen with rage.
“We were out with some friends,” Jacob said as pleasantly as he could, “and one of them lives on the other side of town, so it was easier for her to stay over here.”
“Is not hotel!” Mr. Stehlík shouted.
Mr. Stehlík was a powerful man, in the prime of his life. Jacob’s heart thudded effortfully, thickly. What he could see of the world shrank to just Mr. Stehlík at the center. Mr. Stehlík was a man accustomed to punishing, but Jacob had come out of that box and did not want to go back into it. What’s more, Jacob was innocent. He had on his side the counterposing fury of innocence.
“What’s going on?” asked Carl, who had come quietly in from his room.
Mr. Stehlík ignored him. “You are my guest, Mr. Jacob. Mr. Carl is your guest and my guest. But is not hotel. No.”
“Oh, I see,” said Carl.
“Is dirty, Mr. Carl,” Mr. Stehlík said, pointing to the stovetop again.
“So I heard,” said Carl. “Mouses will come.”
Jacob wished Carl hadn’t taken the risk of being detected in mockery. “It’s normal to have guests,” Jacob said. “It’s part of living somewhere.”
“Not in my house. One, two. No more.”
It occurred to Jacob that Mr. Stehl�
�k might not know that he was supposed to be charging for wear and tear. “Maybe we’re still not paying you enough,” Jacob suggested. “Under capitalism the rent is supposed to be high enough that the landlord can afford to repair the damage that happens in normal use.”
Mr. Stehlík stepped forward. “Is not money,” he said quietly in Jacob’s face, so close that Jacob winced at his stale smoker’s breath. “Is my house.”
Jacob remembered, in what did not at first seem to be a consecutive thought, the ski bags that had held grandparents. He recalled the strangeness of their presence by the driveway.
Carl was to go to Henry’s the next day, anyway. Jacob himself could stay at the , if he had to. But he probably wouldn’t have to. There was a market for Prague apartments now. And in the interim maybe he, too, could stay with Henry.
“Fine,” Jacob said, turning away from Mr. Stehlík coldly. “We will leave.”
“Pardon?” Mr. Stehlík asked. “You do not need leave.”
“But I don’t want to stay,” Jacob said. “We will leave within twenty-four hours.” He felt a princely autonomy. He left Mr. Stehlík behind in the kitchen and went to his bedroom to begin packing.
* * *
Jacob opened the doubled set of windows in his bedroom. A drizzle was falling, and above the concrete barriers across the street, he could see heavy clouds traveling east, toward the Stehlíks’ house, and breaking up, as they approached, to reveal ribs of blue as they passed over it.
While Jacob was fussing with the zippers and compartments of his backpack, Carl came in and sat on the sofa.
“I’m sorry,” Carl offered.
Jacob shrugged and kept fussing. “I would guess it’s a puritanical thing, but there are nudie pictures in the bathroom upstairs,” he observed.
“But Honza had to get married, didn’t he.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“You have to find a new place,” Carl insisted.
Jacob shrugged again. He cared only that he would soon be without the kindness that when he looked up he saw in Carl’s face. “It’s just a gorilla problem,” Jacob said.