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.