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

They dismounted their bar stools. Jack could put his feet right to the ground. Sadie had to slide and drop. Samuel Beckett climbed down slowly and deliberately, chary of the pivot, as though his head were a tray of brimming glasses he was afraid of spilling, but then he didn’t stop—his knees folded, and he went almost to the floor before Jack caught him by the elbow.

“You are wearing a ladies’ scarf,” the man told Jack. Up close he looked less like Samuel Beckett. For instance, he was wearing a jacket with little cloth button-down epaulets and a tag that said MEMBERS ONLY, and his eyes were too far apart, like a hammerhead shark’s.

“That’s all you got?” Jack said. “You’ll catch your death.”

“Not if it catches me first,” said Samuel Beckett gloomily.

Sadie and Jack pulled on their winter coats, red down for her, black wool for him. Gloves, hats. Somehow it was agreed that they would walk arm in arm, Samuel Beckett in the middle, Jack and Sadie on either side.

“I live on Marlborough,” he said. “You know where that is?”

“I do not.”

“I do,” said Sadie. “So were you mugged?”

The weight of Samuel Beckett pulled at them as they walked. They followed him as though he were a dray horse. The cold had turned bitter: they’d drunk right through the start of real winter.

“Careful,” said Jack.

“You’re a beautiful couple,” said Samuel Beckett. Sadie was laughing as they slipped on the icy sidewalk. “I pronounce you man and wife. No I was never mugged. But sometimes in the snow I get too sad to keep on. So I sit. And then I put my head down. And one night I slept out all night and I woke up in jail.”

“Heavens,” said Jack.

“Too sad to keep on,” said Sadie. “I get that.”

“Do not, do not. My dear,” he said. “Or we could. Shall we sit? Look, a curb. Look, another one. It’s nothing but curbs this part of town.” He began to go down and then gave Jack a dirty look. “Why are you pulling at my arm?”

“I’m keeping you afloat, man,” said Jack, who by then was inexplicably smoking a cigarette.

“I thought you didn’t smoke,” said Sadie.

“Not much. Come, Sammy Becks. This way?”

“It’s this way,” said Sadie. “If we aren’t sitting down. We could sit down.”

“We aren’t.”

“Aren’t we?” said Samuel Beckett. “Perhaps all my life what I wanted was a woman who’d sit on a curb with me.”

They walked for what seemed like hours, turning corners and doubling back, through the numbered alleys and alphabetical streets of the Back Bay. With every step Sadie’s feet rang in the cold like a slammed gate. “Where are we?” she asked and Samuel Beckett pointed and said, “Exeter.”

It was possible, thought Jack, that they had walked to Exeter, where he’d worked in a theater box office and rented a room from a theatrical couple—not theatrical in the sense of working in the theater but in the sense of: she was twenty years older with a blond crew cut, smelled of burnt roses, and he wore a pince-nez and sewed all of their gaudy extraordinary clothing, pin-tucked and double-breasted and circus-striped. He’d loved both of them, was disquieted by their adoration of each other, an equation he could never quite solve.

But the Exeter in question was a cinema, the marquee said so; the cinema was named after the street. The doors opened, and costumed people walked into the night. A tall man with drawn-on eyebrows pulled a blue feather boa tight around his neck. A platform-shoed and corseted person in a sequined jacket and majorette shorts squared a top hat over ears; you could divine nothing of the person at the center of all the makeup and sequins except a sort of weary bliss. Around them, more people in sequins and tulle, lipstick and lamé. Their appearance struck Jack like the revelation at night of some kind of luminescent animal, jellyfish or firefly: a single instance would be uncanny, but the whole group made you accept the miracle and think of holy things.

“What is happening?” said Sadie.

“Midnight movie,” said Samuel Beckett, turning into an alley.

“We’ve been down this alley,” said Jack.

“There’s a bar.”

“Bars are closed.”

“We can knock on the door. They’ll let me in.”

What had seemed like a lark and good deed now felt like a con to Sadie, but she couldn’t figure out its next gambit. Let him sit on the curb after all. That might be safer. She said to Jack, “Maybe we should just take him back to Meredith.”

“Bars are closed,” Jack repeated. “Besides, if we don’t get him home, we’ll regret it forever.”

Forever? she thought. They’d known each other six hours. She cuddled up a little closer to Samuel Beckett and tried to feel Jack through him. All right, she wouldn’t go home, though she wanted to, her little studio apartment, too disordered for a visitor of any kind, particularly for one she wanted to—what verb was she looking for? Impress, she decided, followed by fuck.

The ice in the alley was glacial; she could feel its peaks and valleys through the soles of her shoes. At the end, Dartmouth Street again. She turned right. The men followed. They would go to Marlborough Street and find the man’s house. “Almost there,” she declared. Then the man said, in front of a small building with a heavy glass and oak door, “We’ve found it, we’re home.”

“I thought you said Marlborough Street,” said Sadie.

“Near,” he said. “Near Marlborough Street.”

“Where are your keys?” asked Jack.

They held him up by the crooks of his elbows as he tried to find his pockets by chopping at himself all over with the sides of his hands. But then he lurched at the door and said, “Sometimes,” and pushed the door open. “Thought so.”

Late night, a marbled alcove, three steps up. The marble did its work, awed the people. They fell quiet.

After a moment the man said, in a wondering, deciding whisper, “Top floor.”

He