Free Necessary Errors: A Novel by Caleb Crain

Seeing that Jacob was at a loss, he remained seated. The long, empty tables were covered in coarse white linen, sterile and unwelcoming, as in a surgery tent before a battle. Jacob’s friends had forgotten about him. They must have decided to try yet another pub. He felt hurt that Annie hadn’t gotten a message to him somehow; he thought that, since she hadn’t, someone ought to have stayed behind to intercept him. He knew objectively that the first was impossible—he hadn’t been to the school, after all, and Annie didn’t have the Stehlíks’ phone number—and the second unreasonable, because no one knew that he planned to show up. But the prospect of a night alone, when he had been looking forward to seeing his friends, seemed unbearable.
    He walked south, hesitantly at first but then determinedly. Through the windows of the Automat, he saw that the servers were shutting down the buffet, wheeling away trays of food, leaving behind only clearsteaming water in steel troughs beneath. He nerved himself for a second disappointment; he was going to try Uagain, in case they had gone back there. It reassured him to see the bears. His friends weren’t in the first room, but it was loud with arguments and endearments, and the light was soft. It was the sort of place they ought to be found in, Jacob thought. And in the second room he did find them, so deeply taken with one another that none of them looked up until he was nearly upon them, at which point they all rose with cries and greetings and embraced him. Thom had a back-up beer—the house beer at Uwas Budvar, and he was very fond of it—which he donated to Jacob as a welcome. “It’ll give me a chance to order yet another from the bugger when he comes back,” Thom said. “He thinks I’m a champion, and I don’t want to disappoint him.”
    *   *   *
    Every few days, Jacob saw Luboš, and from time to time they went to bed together, but Luboš did not lend himself to it, not fully. Jacob understood that he seemed to Luboš too young, too unsure of himself. Once, when he had learned the word, and more to show it off than for any other reason, Jacob referred to himself and Luboš as a couple. —But officially we are not, Luboš said, solemnly. There were no promises. Each was at liberty. Jacob made a point, therefore, of going back to T-Club. He didn’t meet anyone else he wanted to sleep with; every so often, in fact, he found Luboš there, who always handled the unexpected encounters graciously and usually let Jacob take him home.
    “Why do you stand here, there is nothing to see. You will sit with us.” When Luboš was absent from T-Club, it was Ota who captured Jacob, though he took him no further than his table. “I have all the pretty men.”
    Each time Jacob saw him, Ota seemed more preppy. To the polo shirt he added a lavender wool sweater, which he wore draped over his shoulders like a lady’s mink. A thin Czech leather belt, bluish where it was meant to be black, was in time replaced by a woven one, striped like a rep tie and fastened with a shiny brass clasp. Yet his complexion, never good, did not improve. There was always a patch of red spots breaking out where his sideburns would have been, if his whiskers were not so blond and delicate, or in the cadaverous hollows of his cheeks.
    He quizzed Jacob on the words to American pop songs as they were being played, because he liked to be able to sing along, and he took showy note of any new man in the bar who was reasonably attractive.
    “He is for you, this one, in the blue shirt. He will not say no to American cow.”
    “Beef, you mean.”
    “No, what is word, for baby beef.”
    “Veal?”
    “That drinks milk only, not even eats grass. This one will not refuse. But I am forgetting. You are, how do you say it, occupied.”
    “You make me sound like a table in a restaurant.”
    “Is that not the word? And I am the waiter. ‘May I help you, sir?’ Do you love Luboš? Is that right? Or do I