The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (essential books to read .txt) 📗

the sheers were closed and all I perceived was light.

“A listener,” I said. “A caller. You’re meeting somebody. Linda from Chattanooga!”

“Not Linda from Chattanooga,” he said contemptuously. He put the rabbit next to him, as though aware of how silly he had looked. After a while he said, “Dawn from Baton Rouge.”

I couldn’t remember Dawn from Baton Rouge. “What does she look like?”

“I only know what she tells me.”

“Should’ve asked for a picture.”

He shrugged. “But: cold feet. So it doesn’t matter.”

“And now you’ve invited me instead,” I said, and crossed my legs.

“Oh God, no,” he said. “No, darling—”

I was aware then of what I was wearing: a pair of old blue jeans but good ones, a thin black sweater that showed my black bra beneath. Alluring, maybe, to the right demographic, slovenly to the wrong one.

“Sweetheart,” he said. He got up from the sofa. It was a complicated job, hands to knees and a careful raising of the whole impressive structure of him. “No, let’s have a drink.” He went to the minibar, which was hidden in a cherry cabinet and had already been unlocked, already been plundered, already been refreshed. Imagine a life in which you could approach a minibar with no trepidation or guilt whatsoever.

He lifted a midget bottle of vodka and a pygmy can of Bloody Mary mix; he didn’t know I’d only ordered a Bloody Mary because it was acceptable to do so before ten a.m. He was a man who drank and ate what he wanted at any time of day.

“We’ll toast to our betrayers,” he said.

Because it was something he might say to a midnight caller, I said, “I thought we only ever betrayed ourselves.”

“Sometimes we look for accomplices. No ice,” he said, turning to me. “To get through this we’re gonna need some ice.”

For a moment it felt as though we were in a jail instead of a reasonably nice hotel, sentenced to live out our days—live out our days being another way to say hurtle toward death.

In those days it was easy to disappear from view. All the people who caused you pain: you might never know what happened to them, unless they were famous, as the radio shrink was, and so I did know, it happened soon afterward, before the snow had melted. He died of a heart attack at another hotel, and Evaline Benjamin, the Love of His Life, flew from Chicago to be with him, and a guest host took over until the guest host was the actual host and it slid from a call-in advice show to a show about unexplained phenomena: UFOs. Bigfoot. I suppose it had been about the unexplained all along. All the best advice is on the internet now anyhow. That person who broke my heart might be a priest by now, or happily gay, or finally living openly as a woman, or married twenty-five years, or all of these things at once, or 65 percent of them, as is possible now in our world. It’s good that it’s possible. A common name plus my bad memory for faces: I wouldn’t know how to start looking or when to stop.

The minibar wasn’t equal to our thirsts. He sat so long, staring out the window, that I wondered whether something had gone wrong. A stroke. The start of ossification. Then in a spasm of fussiness he untucked his shirt.

He said, “In another life—”

“Yeah?”

“I would have been a better man. How long?”

“How long what?”

“Was your relationship with whoever broke your heart.”

“He didn’t break my heart.”

“‘Was mean to you,’” he said, with a playacting look on his face.

I did the math in my head, and rounded up. “A month.”

“You,” he said, in his own voice, which I understood I was hearing for the first time, “have got to be fucking kidding me.”

It had actually been two and a half weeks. “Don’t say I’m young,” I told him.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “But someday something terrible will happen to you and you’ll hate this version of yourself.”

“I don’t plan on coming in versions.”

“Jesus, you are young.” Then his voice shifted back to its radio frequency, a fancy chocolate in its little matching rustling crenellated wrapper. “How mean was he?”

“He was nice, right up until the moment he wasn’t.”

“Well,” he said, “so. You’re making progress. Wish him well.”

“I wish him well but not that well.”

But that wasn’t true. I wanted them both dead.

“The only way forward is to wish peace for those who have wronged you. Otherwise it eats you up.”

I wished him peace when I thought he was doomed.

How can it be that I felt like this, over so little? It was as though I’d rubbed two sticks together and they’d detonated in my lap.

“I bet you have a nice bathtub,” I said.

“You should go look.”

I got myself a dollhouse bottle of bourbon. At some point he’d had ice delivered, in a silver bucket, with tongs. I had never used ice tongs before. I have never used them since. The serrations bit into the ice, one, two, five cubes, and I poured the bourbon over, a paltry amount that didn’t make its way to the bottom of the glass, it just clung to the ice, so I got another. The bathroom was marble—marble, crystal, velvet, it would be some years before hotels stopped modeling opulence on Versailles. There was a phone on the wall by the toilet. I ran myself a bath and got in. This was what I needed, not advice or contradiction, not the return of the person who broke my heart, because I would not be able to trust any love that might have been offered. It took me a long time, years, to trust anyone’s.

The door opened, and another miniature bottle of whiskey came spinning across the floor.

“Irish is what’s left,” said the radio shrink through the crack of the door.

“You’re a good man,” I said. “You are one. If you’re worried that you’re not.”

Then he came in. He was wearing his cowboy boots and