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

must be preserved at all costs. No dancing allowed. Any sudden movement might knock the bar into the turnpike. No jukebox. Never a band. In the ladies’ room, you could pay a dime, press a plunger, and get misted with perfume.

“Bar stool?” he said, their first negotiation, but bar stools were made for long, lean fellows like him, not for women as short and squat as she. The bar stools were red-topped and trimmed with ribbed chrome.

“Let’s see,” she answered.

He gave her his hand. “Allow me.”

The bartendress was a middle-aged woman with brown hair and auburn eyebrows and the oversized eyes of a cartoon deer. If she were a man they might have thought she looked like a cartoon wolf. She wore a bow tie and a skirt with suspenders. It was an era in America between fancy cocktails, before American pints of beer or decent glasses of wine in bars like EATING DRINKING PIANO.

“What’ll you have?” the bartendress asked them.

“What’ll I have indeed,” said Jack. He tried to remember what you drank in America. “Gin and tonic.”

“You?”

“Vodka soda with lime.” She said to him, “My mother calls that the alcoholic’s drink. Goes down easy and odorless.”

“Are you?”

“No,” she said, though if you’d known her then you wouldn’t be certain.

Beer nuts on the bar top. The drinks came in their little glasses crammed with ice, and Jack remembered why he liked the place, what he’d missed about America. Ice, and narrow straws you used to extract your drink as though you were a hummingbird.

They clinked glasses.

At the end of the bar a greasy-looking man drank a boilermaker. “Lovebirds,” he said. “How very revolting.”

Jack put his hand on the bar and pivoted on his stool in order to give the man a serious look. “Hold on, there, Samuel Beckett,” he said.

“Samuel who, now.”

“Beckett,” said Jack. “You look like him.”

“You look like him,” said the false Beckett from his bar stool. It was hard to tell whether he was Irish or drunk.

“How about that,” said Sadie. “You do.”

“I know,” said Jack, irritated.

“You’re wearing a scarf,” she observed, and touched the fringe of it.

“It’s cold.”

“You’re wearing a woman’s scarf. It’s got polka dots on it.”

“Are polka dots only for women?” said Jack.

“I do not look like Samuel Beckett,” said Samuel Beckett at the end of the bar. “I look like Harry Dean Stanton.”

“Who?” Jack asked.

“The actor,” Sadie explained. “You know.” She tried to think of a single Harry Dean Stanton movie and failed.

“Unfamiliar.”

“Another?” asked the bartendress, and Jack nodded. She put down the drinks and scooped up the money from the pile Jack had left on the bar.

“He’s my cousin,” said the man.

“Samuel Beckett?”

“Harry Dean Stanton,” said Samuel Beckett.

“Sorry,” said Jack. “I lost track.”

“He’s my cousin.”

“Really?”

“No. But sometimes people buy me drinks because they think so.”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Sadie, and she flagged the bartendress.

“Ah,” said Samuel Beckett, “maybe it’s me she loves.”

“It is not,” said Jack.

She was the sort of person who liked bar stools, after all. It felt easier to talk to somebody next to you than across, a slantwise intimacy in which you looked at the person less but could bump shoulders or elbows more. Even so she was astounded when his hand landed in her lap. It didn’t feel carnal, but architectural: whatever they were building wouldn’t work unless they put things down right the first time.

“You mind?” he asked.

His fingers were nowhere too personal. Just the outer part of her thigh. They were pleasant there. The bar balanced on the edge of the turnpike; she balanced inside of the bar.

Everything was a haze of smoke. Sadie lit a cigarette and offered one to Jack.

He shook his head. “Must protect the voice.”

“Protect it for what?”

“The opera,” said Jack.

“You sing opera?”

“I might one day. I’m thinking of going to clown college. I have aspirations.”

“Clown aspirations? I hate clowns.”

“Too late. You’ve met me, you like me, I’m a clown.”

“Aspiring clown.”

“I’ve clowned a bit. I’m more of a sad clown.”

“I’m suing you,” said Sadie. “For alienation of affection. Clowns.”

“Everyone thinks they hate clowns. But they’re not actual clowns they’re thinking of.”

“They’re actual clowns I’m thinking of. A clown pinched me once. At a circus.”

“Pinched.”

“On the.”

“On your arse,” he said, laughing.

She laughed, too. “Arse, is it. What sort of man are you?”

“What a question.”

“I mean, from where? Your accent’s American, but you don’t talk like an American.”

“I am,” he said, turning on his English accent, “of dual nationality. English and American. What do you call it? Aaaassss.”

“Aaaassss,” she agreed.

“Too many As and too many Ss.”

“My mother would call it a bottom.”

“Now that,” said Jack, “I cannot condone.”

“I do hate clowns,” she said wickedly, loving the taste of wickedness in her mouth.

That was the thing about being in love: you were allowed to hate things. You didn’t need them anymore. When the clown had pinched her, she’d wondered what it meant, whether the clown was attracted to her, whether she should engage him in conversation.

“Well, then,” he said, “I’d better be a puppeteer. No, that’s right, you hate puppets as well. What is it that you like?”

She thought about it. “Boats,” she said.

“All right,” he said. “I’m off to be a shipwright.”

From the end of the bar Samuel Beckett called, “I have a favor to ask.”

The bartendress said, “Keith, knock it off.”

“Keith,” said Samuel Beckett.

“Your name’s Keith?” Sadie asked. She was already fishing in her pockets for some money to slip him.

“In this life, yes,” said the man with exaggerated dignity. “Meredith I may ask them anything I like.”

The bartendress said, “Half an hour and I’ll walk you home.”

“Meredith I must go home now and these fancy people will walk me.”

“Keith—”

“It is not far away,” said Samuel Beckett, or Keith—it was hard to think of him as Samuel Beckett now that he was definitively Keith, but they put their minds to it—“But I could use some assistance.”

They looked at the bartendress.

“He’s harmless,” she said. “But he’s afraid of the dark.”

“With reason Meredith.”

“With reason,” agreed the bartendress.

“We’ll walk you home,” said Sadie.

“I guess