The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  I had packed the bottle of bourbon, the apples, my cosmetic bag, but had forgotten a nightgown. Who was looking? I built my drunkenness like a fire, patiently, enough space so it might blaze.

  You shall know a rich man by his shirt, and so I did. Breakfast time in the breakfast room. The décor was old but kept up. Space-age, with stiff sputnikoid chandeliers. Dark pink leather banquettes, rosy pink carpets. Preposterous but wonderful. I’d eaten there in the past: they had a dessert cart, upon which they wheeled examples of their desserts to your table: a slice of cake, a crème brûlée, a flat apple tart that looked like a mademoiselle’s hat.

  I had my own hangover now, not terrible, a wobbling threat that might yet be kept at bay. I had taken three baths; my toenails were vampy red. I had watched television till the end of broadcast hours, which was a thing that happened then: footage of the American flag waving in the breeze, then here be monsters. In my other life, the one that happened outside of the Narcissus Hotel, I worked in the HR department of a radio station. I lived with voices overhead. That was why I didn’t have a television. It would have been disloyal. I’d found a rerun on a VHF station of squabbling siblings and had proceeded to weep for hours, in the tub, on one double bed, then the other. Even at the time I knew I wasn’t weeping over anything actual that I’d lost, but because I’d wanted love and did not deserve it. My soul was deformed. It couldn’t bear weight.

  The rich man sat at the back of the breakfast room in one of the large horseshoe booths built for public canoodling. His pale green shirt, starched, flawless, seemed to have been not ironed but forged, his mustache tended by money and a specialist. His glasses might have cost a lot, but twenty years before. In his fifties, I thought. In those days fifties was the age I assigned people undeniably older than me. I never looked at anyone and guessed they were in their forties. You were a teenager, or my age, or middle-aged, or old.

  The waiter went to the man’s table and murmured. The man answered. At faces I am no good but I always recognize a voice.

  “Dr. Benjamin,” I said, once the waiter had left. He looked disappointed, with an expression that said, Here, of all places. He inclined his head to recognize my recognition. “I listen to you,” I told him.

  He hosted an overnight advice show, eleven p.m. to two a.m., on another AM channel, not mine. He had a beef bourguignon voice and regular callers. Stewart from Omaha. Allison from Asbury Park, New Jersey. Linda from Chattanooga.

  “Thank you,” he said. Then added, “If that’s the appropriate response.”

  “I’m in radio, too,” I said. “Not talent. HR.”

  The waiter stood by my table, a tall young man with an old-fashioned Cesar Romero mustache. When I looked at him he smiled and revealed a full set of metal braces.

  “I will have the fruit plate,” I said. Then, as though it meant nothing to me, an afterthought, “and a Bloody Mary.”

  It is the fear of judgment that keeps me behaving, most of the time, like the religious. Not of God but of strangers.

  “Hair of the dog,” the radio shrink said to me.

  “Hair of the werewolf,” I answered.

  “You could be. On air. You have a lovely voice.”

  In my head I kept a little box of compliments I’d heard more than once: I had nice hair (wavy, strawberry blond), and nice skin, and a lovely voice. I didn’t believe the compliments, particularly at such times in my life, but I liked to keep them for review, as my mother reviewed the scrapbooks from her childhood in a small town, when her every unusual move—going to England on a trip, performing in a play in the next town over—made the local paper.

  Who in this story do I love? Nobody. Myself, a little. Oh, the waiter, with his diacritical mustache above his armored teeth. I love the waiter. I always love the waiter.

  The Bloody Mary had some spice in it that sent a tickle through my palate into my nose. A prickle, a yearning, an itch: a gathering sneezish sensation. One in ten Bloody Marys did this to me. I always forgot. I took another drink and the feeling intensified. Beneath the pressure of the spice was a layer of leftover intoxication that the vodka perked up. I thought, not for the first time, that I had a sixth sense and it was called drunkenness.

  “No good?” the radio shrink asked me.

  “What?”

  “You’re making a terrible face.”

  “It’s good,” I said, but the sensation was more complicated than that. “What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”

  “Is it a neck?” He touched his own neck with the tips of his fingers. “I like the rooms here.”

  “You probably have a nicer room than I do. The presidential suite. The honeymoon.”

  “I’m neither the president nor a honeymooner.”

  “Those’re the only suites I know,” I said. It was possible to be somebody else in a hotel; I was slipping into a stranger’s way of speaking. I said, “Far from Chicago.”

  “Far from Chicago,” he agreed. He picked up his coffee cup in both hands, as though it were a precious thing, though it was thick china, the kind you’d have to hurl at a wall to break. “Business,” he said at last. “You?”

  “I live here.”

  “You live in the hotel?”

  “In town.”

  “Oh, you’re merely breakfasting, not staying.”

  “I’m staying.” I started to long for a second Bloody Mary as though for an old friend who might rescue me from the conversation. “Somebody was mean to me,” I said to the radio shrink. “I decided to be kind to myself.”

  He palmed the cup and drank from it then settled it back in the saucer. The green shirt was a sickening color against the pink leather. “It’s a good hotel for heartbreak. Join me,” he said, in his commercial break voice, deeply intimate, meant for thousands, maybe millions, of people.

  There were other radio hosts in those days, also called doctors, who would yell at you. A woman who said to heartbroken husbands, You better straighten up and fly right. A testy man—No, no, no, no: listener—he called his listeners listener—listener, this is your wake-up call.

  But Dr. Benjamin practiced compassion, with that deep voice and his big feelings. Once you forgive yourself, you can forgive your mother, he would say. Or perhaps it was the other way around: your mother first, then you. He told stories of his own terrible decisions. Unlike some voices, his had ballast and breadth. For some reason I had pictured him as bald, in a bow tie. I pictured all male radio hosts as bald and bow tied, until presented with evidence to the contrary. Instead he had a thatch of silver hair. The expensive shirt. Cowboy boots.

  I listened to his show all the time, because I hated him. I thought he gave terrible advice. He believed in God and tried to convince other people to do likewise. Sheila from Hoboken, Ann from Nashville, Patrick from Daly City. On the radio it didn’t matter where you lived, small town or the suburbs or New York City (though nobody from New York City ever called Dr. Benjamin): you had the same access to the phone lines and radio waves. You were allowed to broadcast your loneliness to the world, in the hours between eleven p.m. through two a.m. Central Standard Time. Every so often a caller started to say something that promised absolute humiliation and I would have to fly across the room to snap the radio off. My husband cannot satisfy me, Doc—

  So long ago! I can’t remember faces but I can remember voices. I can’t remember smells but I remember in all its dimensions the way I felt in those days. The worst thing about not being loved, I thought then, was how vivid I was to myself.

  Now I am loved and in black and white.

  Up close he seemed vast. Paul Bunyan-y, as though he’d drunk up the contents of that swimming pool to quench his thirst, though he didn’t look quenched. Those outdated glasses had just a tinge of purple to the lenses. Impossible to tell whether this was fashion or prescription, something to protect his eyes. His retinas, I told myself. He was all the way at the bottom of the hoop of the horseshoe, his body at an angle. I sat at the edge of the booth to give him
room.

  He said, “Better?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Are you a real doctor?”

  He stretched then, the tomcat, his arms over his head. His big steel watch slipped down his wrist. “Sure.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m not a medical doctor,” he allowed.

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Then yes. Yes, I’m a doctor.”

  The table had an air of vacancy: he’d eaten his breakfast, and it had been tidied away except for the vest pocket bottles of ketchup and Tabasco sauce, and a basket filled with tiny muffins. I took one, blueberry, and held it to the light. The waiter delivered the second Bloody Mary I hadn’t ordered, unless by telepathy. “You have a PhD,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s strange.”

  “That I have a PhD?”

  “That we call people who study English literature for too long the same thing we call people who perform brain surgery.”

  “Oh dear,” he said. “Psychology, not English literature.”

  “I’d like to see your suite.”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m married,” he said. “You know that.”

  I did. Her name was Evaline. He mentioned her all the time: he called her Evaline Benjamin, the Love of My Life.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said, and I tore the little muffin in half, because maybe it was what I meant. No, I told myself. Every time I walked down a hotel hallway I peered into open doors. Was there a better room behind this door? A better view out the window of the room? Out of all these dozens of rooms, where would I be happiest, by which I mean, least like myself? I only wanted to see all the hotel rooms of the world, all the other places I might be. I was waiting to be diagnosed.

  He said, “You’re a nice young woman, but you won’t cut yourself a break. All right,” he said. “Okay. We can go to my suite. They’ve probably finished making it up.”

  Even the hallways were pink and red, the gore and frill of a Victorian valentine: one of those mysterious valentines, with a pretty girl holding a guitar-sized fish. The suite was less garish, less whorehouse, less rubescent, with a crystal chandelier, that timeless symbol of One’s Money’s Worth. The two sofas were as blue and buttoned as honor guards. A mint-green stuffed rabbit sat in a pale salmon armchair.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He looked at it as though it were a girl who’d snuck into his room and had taken all her clothes off and here came the question: throw her out, or . . . not.

  “A present,” he said.

  “Who from?”

  “Not from. For. Somebody else. Somebody who failed to show up.”

  “A child.”

  He shook his big head. “Not a child. She must have lost her nerve. She was supposed to be here yesterday.”

  “Maybe she realized you were the kind of man who’d give a stuffed bunny to a grown woman.”

  He regarded me through the purple glasses. Amethyst, I thought. My birthstone. Soon I would be twenty-eight. “You are young to be so unkind,” he observed. “She collects stuffed animals.” He turned again to the rabbit and seemed to lose heart. “This is supposed to be a good one.”

  “What makes a good one?”

  “Collectible. But also it’s pleasant.” He plucked it from the chair and hugged it. “Pleasant to hug.”

  “Careful. It’s probably worth more uncuddled.” I put myself on the chair where the rabbit had been. I don’t know why I thought the chair might be warm. He sat in one of the corners of the sofa closest to me.

  “I thought you might be her,” he told me. “But you’re not old enough. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Not nearly old enough.”

  “Do I look like her?”

  “Oh. I mean, I’m not sure.” He made the rabbit look out the window, and so I looked, too, but 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 sh
ifted 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 slid a little on the marble. Now he looked entirely undone. In another version of this story I’d be made modest by a little cocktail dress of bubbles, but no person who really loves baths loves bubble baths, nobody over seven, because bubbles are a form of protection. They keep you below the surface. They hide you from your own view. He looked at me in his bathtub with that same disappointed look: just like you to bathe in your birthday suit.