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

anything.
    “Have you fallen for this Luboš, then?” she asked, fussing with a corner of her book’s cellophane wrapper, which had come untucked.
    “We just met.”
    “You fancy him, in any case.” She didn’t raise her eyes to his. “I hope you’ll keep your wits about you.”
    “I’m not a romantic. I’m gay, remember.”
    “You are a romantic,” she answered, and then added, quickly, “I am, too; it’s all right.”
    “I don’t think that the other thing is here yet. I think that’s why he thought he could joke about it.”
    “But that doesn’t mean he’s on the level.” She looked up and saw that she’d hurt his feelings for Luboš. “I haven’t even met him. Don’t listen to me.”
    “There’s something very sweet about him.”
    “Oh, well, ‘sweet.’ Perhaps you aren’t very far gone, then.” The fluorescent lights and the Formica tabletop between them seemed to put them in a context incongruously childish. “You should tell Melinda, you know,” she said abruptly. “It’s absurd of you not to. There’s nothing she likes better than a secret she’s justified in keeping from Rafe.”
    “I probably will, before too long.”
    “You’ll have to, if I go, or you won’t have anyone to talk to.”
    “What do you mean, if you go?”
    “I thought I told you. I know I did. I find it quite lonely here. And gray, you know, all the time. I’m thinking of going back to Berlin.”
    “You can’t go.”
    “Well, I can, Jacob. Why don’t you come with me? There’s a real scene there. You’d be shut of all this poxy Czech mysteriousness.”
    It was as if she had ventilated the room with a draft of the cold air outside. Suddenly he saw how easy it would be to go elsewhere.
    “You could teach English, as you do here,” Annie continued. “We aren’t undesirables.”
    “I’ll think about it,” he said, but he found later that he was reluctant to.
    *   *   *
    Annie didn’t leave, not immediately. On the contrary, she grew closer to the circle of expatriates that held her and Jacob, and that circle drew tighter. They all began to feel for it. At the nucleus were the Scots—Thom, Michael, and a few others—who formed the habit, after school let out, of stopping in at a nearby pub for a drink. Sometimes they also ordered the classic Czech dinner of pork cutlets, dumplings, and boiled cabbage; sometimes they didn’t bother with dinner; more than once they stayed until eleven, when the pub closed. Henry offered to join them if they were willing to meet downtown; he neither worked nor lived near the language school. Annie also urged them to move, because it made her nervous to drink so close to where she worked. As a group, they were conspicuously not Czech, even if they were no louder and no more drunk than anyone else. She hoped, too, that the clientele downtown might be a touch more genteel and put the lads on their mettle, a bit. No one else hoped this, or expected it, and it was mostly on account of their respect for Henry that the Scots did eventually move. They began to rendezvous with him three or four nights a week at the Automat, a buffet-style diner with steam tables at the foot of Wenceslas Square, which belonged to the cheapest class of eatery that the government certified, and to progress from there to a pub nearby. Annie joined them regularly at the new pub, though not at the Automat, whose food she could not bring herself to eat, and in her wake came a few other women who taught at the school, and Jacob, too, once he sensed that there would be enough women present to camouflage any lapses he might have from perfect masculinity. Rafe rarely came, but sometimes Melinda did. They had the sense that she was on loan to them, and her dresses and coats seemed to confirm the impression that she was finer than the settings they had chosen, and so, for the sake of balance and a kind of politeness, she was always particularly foul-mouthed in herbanter, to show that her