“Uh,” he said. “This is going to sound way more impressive than it actually is. But Cambridge.” He said it with the kind of put-upon mortification that people get when they say they went to college “in the Bay Area” or “near Boston.” Oh, for Christ’s sake, just say you went to Stanford or Harvard. We’re all very impressed.
This train-station guy had some nerve, insinuating he was slumming it with me. Didn’t he know I was slumming it with him? I should have preferred my goddamned writerly solitude to hanging out with some Aryan-Master-Race looking preppy-cum-hippie who only read Middlemarch, a work I objected to on principle due to the eight-million-part BBC adaptation that had aired on PBS and caused Sharon Schuman, Ph.D., to monopolize the family television for all of 1994. I should have—I knew I should have—stuck to my café glowering and my artisanal travel journal, but my dirtiest secret turned out to be that I could only stand my own company for half a day.
As the heat of the afternoon finally abated—Prague’s latitude meant the sun wouldn’t set until damn near midnight—the train-station guy and I returned to Old Town Square to find that the R.E.M. poster now had CANCELED scrawled over it. “What happened?” the train-station guy asked.
“Drummer get brain aneurysm,” said the ticket-seller.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Is he dead?”
“No, is fine. But concert cancel.”
“Can we have our money back?” I asked.
The ticket-seller—who had himself sold me the very ticket I held in my hand—feigned a look at the serial number on the side. “I am sorry,” he said, “but you did not buy here.” So Prague.
Now we didn’t even have the pretense of “needing” to kill time together—and yet, the train-station guy looked at me, at my Julie Delpy dress still stuck to my back with the day’s sweat, and said: “Want to go grab something to eat?”
We went to a pub where I did my very best phonetic attempt at the question máte vegetariánské jídlo (“do you have vegetarian food”) and received an excellent plate of butter-drenched potatoes, which I washed down with a fifty-cent Pilsner Urquell. As I was meticulously cutting my fourth potato with my knife and fork (if only the Herrmanns could see me now), the train-station guy took a slug of his beer, set it down on the bare table (I’d already stolen his coaster to add to my collection), and asked: “Have you ever, like, just hooked up with a person you had no intention of being in a relationship with?”
“I guess,” I said. I changed the subject and asked him how he ended up at Cambridge in the first place. “Are you, like, a Rhodes scholar or something?”
“Hardly,” he said. “I went there for my junior year abroad on an exchange program, and then just sort of asked if I could stay, and they said yes. So, through the back door, effectively.”
By the time we finished dinner, it was after nine and the sky was finally beginning its fade from blue to that sort of nebulous blue-gray after the day and before the dusk. Old Town Square had all but cleared out for the day, and as we walked over the cobblestones, the train-station guy looked at me, and then around him, and said:
“Is this such a Before Sunrise moment, or what?”
And the thing is, it was. Technically, I was being handed everything I’d prayed that the Eurail gods would deliver, minus a few middling specifics that might have gotten lost in the cosmos. So why did I feel so weird? Really, Middlemarch fan and Kafka-underappreciator or not, did I have anything better to do at this moment? Were the voices in my head really going to be better to hang out with?
“Ha,” I said. “I guess it is.”
We decamped onto the steps of the monument to proto-Protestant martyr Jan Hus, at which point I realized that according to the Linklater-film playbook it was time to escalate matters by doing something intimate. In Before Sunrise, Jesse and Celine just up and start sucking face on Vienna’s iconic Riesenrad Ferris wheel, but I had something even more intimate in mind. I would let the three-named, Roman-numeraled train-station guy where no man (or woman) had heretofore been: deep into the pages of my artisanal travel journal. I flipped to the entry I’d written during my brief but nevertheless monumentally important moment of writerly solitude the day before. The passage I wanted was a short-story fragment I’d jotted down in emulation of all my favorite writers, who allegedly mixed in their fiction attempts with banal records of their social calls and their shopping lists. My completely original future Nobel-Prize-in-literature contender was about a nameless narrator who enters a mysterious and shadowy house, where (need it even be said) everyone already knows him and nobody likes him. I hoped it would evoke the proper response of mingled awe and trepidation.
Instead, the train-station guy gave a little laugh and said: “Ugh. That is so Kafkaesque.”
My forehead crumpled under my terrible bleached bangs, and my lower lip did the thing it does when my feelings get hurt, jutting out about a foot. How dare he? Sure, what he said was 100 percent true. My precious fountain-pen offerings—the veritable spewing-forth of my innermost writing-guts—were shallowly mimetic drivel, but still, I wasn’t expecting the opinion of some mouth-breathing preppy to cut so deep. Especially someone who used “Kafkaesque” as an insult. In Before Sunrise, a Viennese fortune-teller approaches Celine while she and Jesse are enjoying their fourteenth coffee in a courtyard. (I once did the math, and given Vienna prices, they spent about seventy-five dollars each just on coffee alone—and yet they “had” to walk around together all night, because Jesse “couldn’t afford” a hotel. Weak pretense, Linklater!) And then Jesse has the nerve to condescend to Celine and go, “I hope you don’t take that any more seriously than some horoscope in a daily syndicated newspaper,” as if Celine, a graduate of the Sorbonne, cannot compartmentalize mysticism. Yes, my prose was immature, vague, and too heavily influenced by one writer I probably liked too much. Yes, Celine probably enjoyed the fact that the fortune-teller told her she would become “a great woman” and that’s why she didn’t mind getting fleeced. But so what? Let us be us. Why can’t we be imperfect without reproach from guys who are also imperfect? What is it, I thought as I glowered, about young men and their need to police the expressions of the women they are trying to impress?
After about two minutes of feminist silence, the train-station guy said, “Aw, I feel bad. I’m sorry. Kafka has some really good stories, you know. Although I’ve only read The Metamorphosis,” he said.
“Pfft,” I said. “That’s beginner Kafka.”
“Touché.”
Then the train-station guy slid a clammy arm around my shoulder, and not only did I let him, but I emitted a minor shudder, the kind usually reserved for the acknowledgment of an electric current of attraction.
As the dusk deepened from voluptuous to near-orgasmic, we ambled down to the river for a view of the castle, now lit up gloriously against the violet sky.
“Hold on,” I said. “I have to write about this sky so I remember it.”
“Ew, don’t ever write about the sky,” cautioned the train-station guy. “It’s so trite.”
“Shhh,” I said. “I’m not writing it for you.”
Our location was so impossibly romantic that it made Before Sunrise look like Schindler’s List. The scene was set; the lighting was exquisite—it was a first-kiss moment to make any director proud, and all it lacked was a sincere feeling of romance. Instead, I was just confused: though he didn’t appreciate my art, the train-station guy was a perfectly nice person, actually very smart, and not uncute underneath his affected layer of grime. And, despite his denigration of my taste in literature both received and created, he seemed pretty interested in me. That was what I wanted, right? I would probably never have a moment like this again—young, free, and stupid on the bank of the Vltava River during sunset, with a guy who clearly wanted to kiss me. I basically had no choice but to realize it fully. So we kissed.
And it was monumentally gross.
I had by no means been expecting a great frenching session like Celine and Jesse’s epic spit-swap on that Ferris wheel, but the train-station guy’s unfortunate combination of stale nicotine saliva and mealy-mouthed lapping technique was lacking enough in physical chemistry that even the perfectly curated romantic moment couldn’t save it. And yet. Have you ever gotten to the point in an ill-conceived venture when you decided, for whatever reason, that you’d sunk enough time and effort into it that you might as well see it through? (See also: obtaining a literature Ph.D. But I digress.) So, I agreed to wipe the following day clean of plans (I’d intended to venture out to the suburbs to visit Kafka’s grave for the first time, alone, an activity I’d been putting off largely due to my fear of the Prague metro map) and meet up with the train-station guy in the morning. At that point, we would ditch our respective Hostelling International accommodations and, as the kids say, “get a room” together. It was, to this day, the firmest advance commitment to Verkehr that I have ever made.
While the relentless staging of the previous evening had all but coerced me into making out, the next day’s ordeal gave me ample time to think over my decision and back out of it. And yet, as we were turned away from one after another hastily erected tourist-accommodations office because nothing in our budget was available, my determination to see the day’s events through wore on—nay, strengthened, on par with the train-station guy’s increasing perspiration. This despite the fact that I assumed that the attendants everywhere we inquired knew instinctively that we were seeking a spot for a tryst, and heartily disapproved.
“No, idiots,” I imagined them saying to themselves in Czech, “I will not furnish lodgings for your hasty, ill-advised sex-plans.”
After four hours sweating around the city with my “small” secondary suitcase in tow, we finally found ourselves back at the grimy main train station, where the rail-side accommodations office catering to the truly desperate (desperate to have sex, I assumed they assumed) made a reservation for us and armed us with a map and extensive metro directions to what appeared to be an abandoned hospital deep in the boonies (where obvious havers of poorly thought-out sex should well be banished).
“Are you sure this is it?” he asked as we approached a sad concrete building so brutal that even the term brutalism didn’t do its architecture justice.
“Look,” I said, pointing to a small cardboard sign scrawled with HOTEL that someone had stuck in a window diagonally. The receptionist spoke no English, but she did speak about as much German as me, and that was the only way we were able to check in.
“Still think it’s a terrible language?” I asked, as we used our huge old-fashioned key to unlock a pocket-sized, whitewashed room with a twin bed flush against each wall, presumably unmoved since the tuberculosis patients, or unmedicated schizophrenics, or Soviet political prisoners slept there last.
“Well,” he said, “for twelve dollars I don’t think it’s all that bad.”
“Oh holy shit,” I said. “It’s our own bathroom. With a bath!” I’d only been enjoying youth-hostel bathing facilities for a few weeks, but that was long enough that I couldn’t believe this place had seen fit to give us our very own cardboard-stiff washcloth that posed as a towel and a bar of soap. Sure, that soap was so desiccated it almost certainly predated the Velvet Revolution, but at my normal caliber of lodgings, if you didn’t bring it on your person, you couldn’t use it to clean your person.
“Um…” said the train-station guy, reaching out for me expectantly as instead I raced to the tub and filled it, both to kill time and to model excellent bathing-behavior. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” I shut the door behind me.
When at last I emerged and sat, with hesitation, on one of the tiny beds, he squeezed himself in next to me (still, alas, unbathed), and said:
