Necessary Errors: A Novel by Caleb Crain Read Free Book Online Page A

stared at each other hesitatingly for a few moments, not touching,proposed that they walk downto Café Slavia, which overlooked the Vltava, and Jacob agreed. They walked slowly and with uneven steps, not yet adjusted to each other’s gaits. They soon gave up on French and German. Luboš asked simple questions in Czech, and Jacob acted out words he didn’t know, which Luboš supplied as soon as he could identify them. When Jacob turned the same questions back on Luboš, Luboš then drew on this fresh vocabulary, as in a card game where you may take from another player’s discards. By this means, as they walked, Jacob made thecommonplace revelations of a first date: that his parents had divorced when he was a child, that he had only come out a year and a half ago, that he did not have a boyfriend. For all the struggle required to communicate—though whether it was despite the struggle or because of it he could not have said—Jacob found that his own sense of his meanings burned clear and bright in his mind, unshadowed by the misstatements he threw off on his way to them. The misunderstandings were too numerous to stop for; they were only temporary. Luboš, however, was more cautious; when Jacob asked about his parents, for example, he answered only that he did have parents, he was fairly sure, and his smile stopped Jacob from asking more. He had always known he was gay.
    Just before they reached the river, they stepped to the right through two sets of glass double doors into Slavia. It was crowded and indifferent to them, but Luboš found a welcome by sharing a word with the cashier in a low and confidential tone. He then led Jacob down the long L of the café, past a fragile-looking upright piano jammed into its elbow, to a table littered with previous visitors’ plates and cups but otherwise abandoned. He had walked to it as if he had known it would be there. Through the wide windows that faced the embankment, they could see the violet, dying sky across the river, too weak now to cast any illumination. The café was lit by brass sconces of a timeless ugliness. The chairs were heavy and upholstered in a pinkish fabric. It was an ugliness that Jacob was beginning to recognize. There wasn’t anything like it in the West. The taste of the 1970s had been here an elaboration of that of the 1950s rather than a rebellion against it—the gaudiness and shapelessness had been made somehow to serve propriety instead of challenging it. Yet the mood of the people in the room seemed to defy the decor, or at least ignore it.
    —Your dissidents came here, Luboš said.
    “Is it a gay place?” Jacob asked, in English. Too late he wondered if the question might seem disrespectful.
    —No, Luboš answered. Jacob tried to take his hand, but he pulled away. —Not here, Kuba. Here is not yet America.
    Jacob didn’t take the refusal seriously, and after Luboš ordered a glass of white wine, and Jacob a Becherovka, a liqueur with a medicinal taste, like peppermint tea left to steep too long, he slid a foot forwardunder the table so that it lay just beside one of Luboš’s. In Boston, Daniel had informed Jacob that muscles were the currency of gay life, and that one worked to have them in order to be attractive to the men one wanted because they had them. Jacob, not having them but wanting Daniel anyway, had thus been a kind of poor relation. In Prague, however, no one seemed to have muscles of the American kind, and Jacob foresaw for himself a field of romantic opportunity that Daniel’s economics had priced out of his reach. He could see no reason for someone like Luboš, who liked him—Daniel, too, had liked him; that hadn’t been the problem—to stickle and resist him. If there was any resistance, he was going to push until he found out the reason for it.
    —Kuba, I called you three times, Luboš said.
    —Three?
    —Perhaps, boys are always calling you.
    Jacob took his French-Czech dictionary from his jacket pocket and pointed