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

doesn’t live here, Sadie thought. We are trespassing. She could not say so.

The elevator was old, with an iron accordion gate, and could fit only one person at a time, a rocket to the moon in a silent film.

“All right,” whispered Jack to Sadie. “You put him in. I’ll run up and call for the elevator. Then you come next.”

Jack went up the stairs light-footed as he could. He thought he might love the strange young woman he’d met just outside a puppet, on the coast of a puppet, in the harbor of a puppet, and as always with women he was trying to decide how much to lie about and how much to be disconcertingly truthful about—he’d never hit the right cocktail in his twenty-seven years on earth—panting now, at first he’d been ahead of the elevator and he heard it gaining on him, a capsule full of drunkenness, so he took the stairs two at once—it felt impossible—and ended up with time enough to stand at the top and wait. Jack didn’t want to see the man’s apartment: he imagined a depressing disaster, vivid in his mind because he himself might end up in such a place, piles of magazines, empty glasses with the merest tint of drink left in, a veil of intoxication over everything. The lights in the hallway were on. Lights blazed in hallways around the clock in America. Forget the streets of gold. Here came Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett in a Members Only jacket. By the time he got there he seemed to have forgotten where he was going.

“Oh, good, it’s you!” he said to Jack, full-voiced, catching his finger in the accordion gate. “Son of a bitch.”

Then Sadie ran up the stairs, too. The two men waited for her at the top, as though she were a bride at a wedding.

“Which door,” she whispered. There were only two, one that said PH and the other with no marking at all. It wasn’t too late to leave. They could deliver the man to the police department like a foundling infant.

“Keys?” Jack said to Samuel Beckett.

The man said, “Oh I never.” He faced the unmarked door, either unlocking it with the power of his mind or trying to make the doorknob hold still in his drunken eyesight. Then he reached and turned it and the door swung open.

They stepped together into the hallway. In the dark, Jack inhaled, waiting for any one of the scents of sadness: human urine, animal urine, years of cigarette smoke, mildew, chronic and ashamed masturbation. But it smelled fine. Pleasant even, some old-fashioned pine cleaner at work.

Samuel Beckett—he wasn’t actually Beckettian, just possessed of a triangular head, which was also true of Jack himself—found the light switch, and revealed a small, tidy, beautifully furnished apartment. Snug, with a green chesterfield sofa, a brown leather chair. Sadie felt more drunkenly certain that they were trespassing. She examined the man for evidence, then the apartment itself. Did they belong to each other? No photographs but art, muddy etchings down the hallway, abstract alabaster sculptures on the end tables. She needed a glass of water.

“What now?” said Jack, and Samuel Beckett said, “Bed.”

“You need to go to the bog first,” said Jack.

“The what?”

“The toilet.”

“The restroom,” said Samuel Beckett. “Winston Churchill’s advice.”

“Don’t call me Winston Churchill,” said Jack. “Of all the Englishmen I might be mistaken for!”

“His advice,” said Samuel Beckett. “Never pass up the opportunity to use the loo.”

“Ah. You need help?”

Samuel Beckett shook his head. “In this field I got nothing but experience.”

The bathroom door closed and for a moment there was nothing to do. Bar the door, thought Jack. We live here now. But the girl looked nervous, and he understood it was his job to calm her.

“You’re all bundled up,” he said. He had taken off his black peacoat and hung it on a hook by the door. Now he came over and unzipped her down jacket, then thrust his left arm down her right sleeve so that both their arms lay along each other. He felt her wrist. She put her hand beneath his sweater, then beneath his T-shirt, and rested it on his bare boyish waist. They had not kissed. No matter what happened, this was a story, a good one. She was already working on how to tell it. Something thumped in the bathroom.

“Should we break down the door?” said Sadie.

“No!” shouted Samuel Beckett from the other side.

He emerged pantless, in his jacket with the epaulets, a white button-up-the-front shirt, blue-striped boxer shorts as baggy as bloomers. He seemed ready for bed in another century, future or past: hard to tell. “Ah, the newlyweds. I’m drunker,” he explained. “I do believe I’m drunker. Scientific fact. Bed, I think.”

“You need help?”

“Kind sir,” he said to Jack.

The two men bumped down the narrow hallway. Just over the threshold Jack picked up a frame from a dresser top and said, “Is that—”

“Me,” said the man.

“But with you,” he said. “Is that—Dorothy Parker?”

“Dear Dorothy,” the man agreed.

“Why are you dressed as—”

“Costume party. Railroad theme.”

“Do you want your jacket off?”

“Why, where are we going?” But he shrugged it off. His shirt beneath also had epaulets.

“Epaulets all the way down,” said Jack.

“Epaulette,” he answered. “Nice girl. French.”

Dear Dorothy! Thank God! thought Sadie, and realized she, too, needed the bog, the loo, the toilet. She went in. Everything was white except the toilet paper, which was pink, the scented kind, and the toilet seat was cushioned and it hissed beneath her, and between those details and an actual photo of himself with an actual famous person, she could relax. Who was he? Not important. The apartment was his. She was alone for the first time in hours, and she consulted her soul: Yes, it was a good night. The photograph explained everything. They had solved a problem together, and that was a good sign, a fine foundation for whatever came next. She scooped some water into her mouth from the tap and realized she