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

acquired down his breastbone, the allover insufficiency of him. Nights he sat with Lottie on the sofa and they watched TV. English television was shockingly dull. One night they showed a documentary about the ‘60s. “I slept with her,” said Lottie, all of a sudden, when they showed footage of a clothing designer with a short black bob.

“Oh!” said Jack.

“I slept with everyone for a while,” she said. Even at home, she favored a kind of dated glitz, rough blue lamé blouses and toreador pants. Her feet were bare, her toenails coral. “Men and women. What about you?”

It occurred to him that he’d shipped himself off to another country so that he could attend to his late puberty alone, like the injured animal he was. Why boys joined the navy in the old days. Why anyone went to sea.

“That’s all right,” she said. “You don’t need to know.”

Even later he could not decide whether she was trying to seduce him or be a listening friend.

Think of B while saying D. Think B, say D. But all his life he could only say what he thought. He never got any better at it.

He practiced with the hen, whom he loathed. He wouldn’t do it in front of Lottie. “The boy bought a ball,” he said to his reflection. The doy dought a doll. You could try it with Gs, too. The goy got a gall. That at least was a sentence. Maybe he hated the whole enterprise. With the hen on his hand he could feel half his soul, more, leak from his body into the puppet, Siamese twins, the hen the twin with the major organs. The thing he could never do—he saw, looking in the mirror—was hold still. The hen spoke. Jack raised his eyebrows, pecked at the air. He had no talent for making believe. He could not stop being himself.

He could hear his father say it. You just can’t stop being yourself, can you?

He’d thought he’d feel at home in England. In upstate New York they all were foreigners: despite his accent, Jack’s childhood clothes were English, ordered through the mail, and his packed lunches, and his particular snobberies that drove his classmates crazy. He did not have friends at school because he felt superior to everyone, and also inferior.

But London was no better. Maybe he would enlist in the navy, but which one? He didn’t want to run away to join the circus: he loathed animals, and contortionists, and the sound of the whip. Perhaps he could sign back on with the crew of the QE2, and travel between countries for the rest of his life.

In England he could drink. It was legal. That was stunning. So he did. He accompanied Lottie on gigs: a glamorous one in a fancy house on Holland Park, where Lottie stood in the foyer and people lined the stairs to watch her; a depressing one in a basement theater near Brick Lane where nobody showed up. She always had to sing her song with the parrot, “You’re My Bird.” She asked Jack to come on television with her, not as a performer but an assistant, who took the figures in and out of their cases. She could have done it herself, she always did, but she dressed him in a suit that made him look like a dummy himself. “Not a dummy,” said Lottie, “we don’t call them dummies. Ventriloquial figure.”

One of these nights he woke up—it was dark—not in the narrow bed in the room with the mirror, but in Lottie’s bed, with Lottie. He’d not been so drunk that he couldn’t remember what had happened—it would be years before he drank like that—but he could not remember how it had begun, or whether he should be ashamed of himself.

In the morning she was blasé at the breakfast table.

“I hope you feel relieved,” she said.

“Yes,” he said while thinking, No.

“We could get married. Do you need to get married?”

“What do you mean?”

“To stay in England.”

“I’m English,” he said, and she laughed out loud. He had to show her his passport to prove it.

They didn’t sleep together every night, just once in a while, and he could never tell whose idea it was, who first inclined a head for a kiss, put a hand to the other’s waist. They seemed to be operating each other’s bodies. He wondered whether she felt it, too, whether the whole world did. The Sex Act, his father had once called it in an unsuccessful conversation: in which another body compelled your body to move in a lifelike way. It was a negotiation, but you were still yourself, there in your head, more than ever, actually. There were so many things to worry about. You could never lose yourself.

Why had she taken him in? Into her flat; into her bed (beneath which the puppets were stowed, a fact that Jack could never forget). There had to be a reason. An unhappy childhood? A child given up for adoption? She’d been beaten, she’d beaten somebody else, she’d been raised in a religion that forbid idolatry. She had a thing for teenagers. Once, in the middle of the night, he asked her.

“Why do I need a secret to be a terrible person?” she said.

“You’re not a terrible person.”

No solution to the puzzle of Lottie. No solution to the puzzle of Lenny.

Mornings, he thought about running away from running away, but where could he go? He could call his parents, who would give him the address of one of his older sisters, or some cousins—he remembered visiting an elderly person in a house in Kent when he was seven. But nobody was in London. He went out walking for hours, down Notting Hill Gate to Kensington Gardens, across Kensington Gardens to Exhibition Road, down the old Brompton Road. Everyone in London was from somewhere else. A game he invented: he would look at people, guess where they were from, then get close enough to hear them speak. Shoes