Had he made his bed, or had somebody made it for him, the white sheet folded with precision over a sky-blue blanket, white pillows that had been plumped and smoothed. Sadie herself had not made her own bed in years: it was one of the most liberating things about being a grown-up. Jack, though, was a maker of beds, a love letter you mailed to yourself in the morning that arrived at the end of the day. They never should have married, probably. They couldn’t know all the ways their marriage would be mixed: she was punctual, he was late; she would never willingly drink a gin and tonic, she had a sweet tooth, he liked bitter greens and smoked haddock and oversalted his food. He didn’t drive, and she didn’t like to; he was (he would have denied it) gregarious, she was a misanthrope of the purest kind, one who didn’t let on but cloaked her misanthropy with manners. He didn’t mind a bit of thievery—restaurant salt and pepper shakers he took a fancy to, flowers from other people’s gardens—while she was a rigid moralist about ill-gotten gains, returned every extra bit of money, corrected sales clerks who rang her up wrong. They were both cowards. She was an only child, he had three sisters. He liked horror movies, she liked dirty jokes, he was deep down a prude, they were both bad with money. All the dives where they drank in those days are gone, that’s how old they are now.

Sadie pulled the covers back, and Jack helped their drunk into bed.

“Should we put him on his side?” she said. “So he doesn’t choke.”

“Choke on what,” said Samuel Beckett.

Sadie waited a moment before she said, “Your own vomit.”

He opened his eyes, which drunkenness and gravity had pulled so far apart they seemed in danger of sliding off opposite sides of his head. “I don’t get sick.”

“I think we better,” she said to Jack.

“If not tonight then another,” he answered, and even he did not know whether he meant He’ll choke another night or We’ll sleep together another night. “Heave-ho,” he said to Samuel Beckett, who allowed himself to be turned.

They had delivered him home, they had saved him, they went to go. “Where’s Dorothy Parker?” whispered Sadie. But the photo was nothing like she’d imagined, a giant group shot, and she said, “Where?” and Jack said, “There and there,” but they were so far apart! and she wasn’t convinced, honestly, that it was either one of them.

The Souvenir Museum