Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

They decided to go on a Tuesday. Jacob was free from teaching that afternoon; the only hitch was that they had to wait for Jacob’s landlord to stop by and pick up the June rent. To pass the time, they drifted into the bedroom and lay crosswise on the red-and-black checkerboard of the duvet, and its design suggested to them another game with simple rules, often played with little strategy.

The landlord had no suspicion that he was interrupting. He was too genial. In the negotiations for the apartment, he had invited Jacob to pay in a combination of cash and English lessons; Jacob had insisted on cash, but now, in Jacob’s kitchen, the man began to ask in English how Jacob found the stove, the refrigerator, the sink. He gestured for nouns he didn’t know, and Jacob was too polite and by now too much by second nature a teacher to fail to supply them. The only escape that Jacob could think of was to explain that he and Milo were on their way to and to invite the man to accompany them to the tram. Jacob wanted, and knew Milo wanted, to finish what they had begun, but Jacob couldn’t couldn’t think of a suitable lie. By the time they had waved good-bye to the landlord, they were already on their way.

It may have been the state of yearning that reminded Jacob of Daniel; yearning was after all as far as Jacob had ever really got with him. He wondered what Daniel would think of Milo. In practice, although Daniel hadn’t wanted Jacob for himself, he had never approved of anyone Jacob had shown an interest in. But in theory, at least, Daniel would have to recognize in Jacob’s new indifference to consequences, in his capacity to embrace the example of Carl and Melinda, evidence that Jacob had at last reached the sort of skeptical, adult perspective that Daniel had despaired of his attaining. And it wasn’t going to be possible for Jacob to be hurt. Nothing like what had happened with Luboš could happen now. He was moving too fast.

He and Milo walked up the broken escalators of the Malostranské station behind two conscripts in uniform. Each conscript’s cap, neatly folded, was tucked into the buttoned-down epaulet loop on his jacket’s shoulder, above where his stripes would go if he ever earned any. Jacob wondered if conscripts were instructed to carry their caps this way or whether it was a perennial innovation, which every cohort came up with by themselves. The conscripts took the steps lightly and steadily, their faces unflushed, their voices not winded. In a crowd, conscripts always looked healthier than their fellow citizens. Jacob didn’t think it was only on account of their youth. Was it the effect of regular exercise? Maybe the economy had been planned so as to give them a better grade of food.

— Must you go into the service sometime? Jacob asked Milo.

— That’s how Dad found out. I told him, that I didn’t have to.

— Because you’re gay.

— Many say it. So he can’t be quite sure.

— A pity.

— It isn’t.

— A pity, I mean, that you had to present yourself as…

— As I am.

— Well, yeah, you have the truth. But your friends from university, what with them?

— A lot are in the service, Milo admitted. They were arriving in the glass box that topped the subway station. — But I thought to myself, that at the moment there are opportunities, and I have to make use of them.

They headed down the long blank street where Milo had a week or so before shown Jacob the door to the Renaissance gardens. They walked past the door this time. They crossed . A few minutes later, they came to the American embassy, a Prague palace that Jacob’s country had somehow infused, in occupying it, with the national qualities of blandness and force.

— When my friends went off to the service, I got to know Ota.

— Downstairs? Jacob asked. The word had been one of Ota’s ways of referring to T-Club.

— Downstairs, exactly.

Two American soldiers, armed but in relaxed postures, stood in a driveway that led under an arch to gardens in back of the embassy, which were forbidden to visitors. The soldiers paid no attention to Jacob and Milo, even though Jacob, made a little hungry by the sight of men who were such types of blandness and force, stared at them and at as much of the gardens as he could catch a glimpse of. On the sidewalk, a dozen or so Czechs were in a line, waiting with familiar patience to file visa applications.

— I remember, said Jacob, — that he was funny, when I met him.

— He’s witty. Such friends I didn’t have before. And even if…

— Even if?

— Nothing, Milo backpedaled. — I wasn’t going to say anything. It’s complete shit, what I was going to say. The street twisted sharply as it climbed a hill. — We’re living through a time of changes.

They didn’t need to look back at all of them. — I still have his cassette, Jacob said.

— Of what?

— Depeche Mode.

— That is fearfully typical of him.

Beyond the embassy, the street ran along the crown of an escarpment, curved left, and turned into a grassy path that led into . Nothing sheltered Jacob and Milo from the midafternoon sun, and they were conscious that they remained visible to any one on the street behind them. The castle overlooked them, far above, and anyone looking out a rear window of the American embassy could also have seen them. Out of caution, it wasn’t until the path began to wind between trees, which were burgeoning with green, that Jacob took Milo’s hand. Milo didn’t resist. It was a weekday afternoon and the park was empty. They were once again in a version of what Czech speakers of English tended to refer to as “the nature.” It seemed to be Milo’s instinct to bring Jacob into it.

— Here are apple trees, Milo said, using a word different from the one for the fruit, though similar enough that Jacob was able to recognize it.

Jacob backed Milo up against one of them. He remembered the dark, clear bark from orchards in Grafton.

— It isn’t a bother? Jacob asked, after he kissed him.

— It isn’t a bother, Milo replied. He tugged at the hair at the back of Jacob’s neck, which had grown a little long. — You need a clipping.

— Do you know how?

— Absolutely not. But maybe you want to be a longhair.

After a while Jacob noticed that they were walking among a different kind of tree, which had blossomed so recently and so abundantly that papery and translucent petals were still scattered in the grass below.

— Cherries, Milo explained. — When I was a little boy, Mother liked to come here, when the flowers for the first time open.

— It’s pretty.

— Now they’re gone by. You’ll have to return, if you want to see them.

It wasn’t a thing that could last, Jacob told himself, for the sake of discipline. Milo suggested they sit down in the sun.

— How is the school, which you will attend in the fall? Milo asked.

— It’s English literature, but it’s not important.

— No?

— I’m going to be a writer, he reminded Milo.

— And you won’t need literature?

— I’ll write my own.

Because he was going to leave, he had been keeping himself on good behavior. Since it wasn’t going to last, a lifetime of effort wasn’t necessary, only a couple of months — a matter of weeks, really — and he was better for this moderate exercise of willpower, he was sure, than he had ever been before. But because it wasn’t going to last, it was just as feasible to get away with bad behavior — to be in some ways worse than he had ever been before — to let Milo think he was someone he wasn’t, for example, or wasn’t yet, in any case — to play out what was between them as if it were a daydream of getting everything he wanted. As if the story could be made to run according to his wishes, free of all checks. One day, when he was a child, he had been playing with another boy in the backyard of his parents’ home in Houston, and he had made something up. There had been a sprinkler; the boys had been wearing their swimsuits. He had invented a game. Did it go back as far as that? He had put his arms around the boy. The leaves of grass in Texas lawns were paler and fatter, less mixed with the straw of what died in winter.