The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken [bill gates best books .txt] 📗

don’t go away, you’re in luck. We have here on exhibition a mythical creature: the man and wife in truly love with each other. Look!” said the shopkeeper. “Marvel!”

“I love my wife,” said the bread-seeking American.

“No,” said the liquor-store owner, “you don’t.”

In the middle of the night Sadie jolted awake. It took a moment to realize that the dark, dazzled field she was looking at was the surface of the canal. Nobody was on the street in front of the Anne Frank House. Wait. Here came a man and woman, walking along, no idea that Sadie was watching. She felt like a character in a European movie: perhaps the couple would dance. Perhaps one would murder the other, then toss the body into the canal. They kept on without talking. She looked at the water. A glittering something floated winkingly along the surface, sparkling, Tinker Bell gone for a dip—no, a slowly turning plastic bottle.

She’d lied: she did feel different married, in an entirely practical way. For all the years of their life together, they’d never fully merged their finances—she’d arrived with debts, student and credit card, of which she’d felt ashamed, and burdened by—and she’d had a series of jobs, never particularly lucrative: working at oddball magazine after oddball magazine, writing for an alternative alternative newspaper—the actual alternative newspaper, the good one, had folded years ago—and lately she was teaching editing at Bunker Hill Community College. Jack had tenure at BU, and was kindly, and paid for most things. She hated the kindliness. Perhaps they would apply for joint everything, but no matter: now, if they divorced, she could get some of his money. She had no plans to, but she wondered at the thought of it. They were family now. She could demand things of him, because they were also hers.

“Goddammit,” said Jack in the morning, sitting on a white chair in the white kitchen, peering at his phone.

“What’s the matter?”

“Fucking Anne Frank,” he said to be funny, then thought better of it, “House. I’m about the thousandth in line to buy tickets for today.” He showed her the screen. It had a little animation of a stick figure walking.

“That doesn’t sound promising.”

“It doesn’t. I already bought tickets for the Van Gogh Museum for later today. Everything’s timed. Shall I make you a coffee, darling?”

“Yes please.” She picked up her book and read it while Jack stared at his phone and made a coffee in the little humming coffee maker. The book had been recommended by a friend, and Sadie found it simultaneously fascinating and boring, a near and mere transcript of life. She wasn’t sure she hated the book, but she hated books like it, though she’d never read any of them—they were international, these books, Norwegian and English and Irish and Canadian, novels in which people bought coffee and had long conversations and felt sorry for themselves and reached no conclusions. How we live now, if by we you meant white people without much in the way of money problems. She, Sadie, was one of those. Perhaps if she had read it at home, she would have been riveted. Or perhaps she was riveted: she kept picking it up to read it, to see if anything had happened while she’d been away, she missed it in a way she didn’t miss other books.

“You want milk in this?” Jack asked.

“I got cream,” she said.

“I am sorry to report,” said Jack, “that you got buttermilk.”

“Oh. I should have known. Milk’s great, thank you.”

“Goddammit,” said Jack, looking at his phone.

In the Van Gogh Museum, Sadie leaned on the wall and declared, “This whole city is pitching.” It was a new shining building, crammed with people, near the Rijksmuseum. The boat did move, it turned out, a gentle rocking from side to side, barely noticeable on board, which got into your own personal canals and knocked you off balance later.

“I think we were lucky to get tickets,” said Jack.

“I might have to sit down. You don’t feel it?”

He tilted his head, to think, to recalibrate his inner ear. “No.”

They hadn’t realized that the paintings in the Van Gogh Museum were displayed in chronological order, and they accidentally started at the top, at the very end, not at Van Gogh’s death but at his brother Theo’s, who’d died months after Vincent’s suicide, in an asylum.

“I hadn’t known that,” said Sadie. “I thought he was the steady one.”

“Me too,” said Jack. He thought of Thomas—it seemed foolish to have come here, all things considered—and also of Thomas’s twin, Robin, who’d come to their wedding but had left before the meal. A nice man, Robin: ordinary, as Thomas had never been.

Everyone had been so devastated by Thomas’s death, Jack felt he should lock up his own sorrow. There was something in him that always deferred to other people in this way, he measured his own grief and found it smaller, something that could be attended to later: he had a cactus soul, he sometimes thought—it needed water, too, but it could wait. When Sadie’s mother died of course he deferred to Sadie; when Fiona died, to his parents, and to Piet; when Thomas died to everyone in the family but then, too, to Sadie. His own grief was larded with helplessness, with the certainty that he was wrong to live so far from his family, that he had abdicated his position accidentally. The wedding had helped with that, but that was past, and he felt now with the force of a premonition worry over Robin, Robin the ordinary, Robin the sturdy. Robin worked for an estate agent in the Cotswolds, and Jack wanted to pull up his Facebook page to make sure he was okay. He got his phone out.

“Not here,” said Sadie. “Let’s just look at the art for now. Do you think we should start at the beginning?”

“No,” said Jack. “Let’s fight the current.”

Stick to your mistake. They rewound Van Gogh’s life. The colors got more ordinary. A certain uninteresting prettiness