“Where are we going?” said Annie.
“Your place,” said Tucker. He was already halfway down the hall, so she could only catch his words by scurrying after him, and even then she nearly dropped them.
“My hotel? Or Gooleness?”
“Yeah. That one. The seaside-y one. Jackson needs some saltwater taffy. Don’t you, Jackson?”
“Yum.”
“Some what? I’ve never heard of it. You won’t be able to find it.”
The elevator had arrived, and she squeezed in just as the doors were shutting.
“What do you have that he’d like, then?”
“Probably rock candy. But it’s pretty bad for your teeth,” said Annie.
What, she wondered, was her immediate ambition here? Did she want to become the wanton lover of a rocker, or a home-care nurse? Because she suspected that the two careers were incompatible.
“Thanks,” said Tucker. “I’ll watch out for that.”
She looked at him, to see if there was anything in his expression other than impatience and sarcasm. There wasn’t.
The elevator pinged, and the door opened. Tucker and Jackson strode out onto the street, and immediately they started trying to hail cabs.
“How do you know when they’re busy? I can’t remember,” said Tucker.
“The yellow lights.”
“Which yellow lights?”
“You can’t see it because they’re all busy. Tucker, listen . . .”
“Yellow light, Dad!”
“Cool.”
The cab pulled over, and Tucker and Jackson got in.
“Which railway station do we need?”
“King’s Cross. But . . .”
Tucker gave the cabdriver complicated instructions involving a west London address, which Annie presumed was Lizzie’s place, and a long journey back across town to the station. She was pretty sure they’d need to stop at an ATM. He had no money and he’d be shocked by the fare.
“You coming with us?” said Tucker, as he tugged on the door handle of the cab. It was, of course, a rhetorical question, and she was tempted to decline the invitation, just to see what he said. She jumped in.
“We have to get our luggage from Lizzie’s place first. Do you know the train schedule?”
“We’ll miss the next one. But probably we’ll only have to wait half an hour or so for the one after.”
“Time for a comic book, a cup of coffee . . . I don’t know if I’ve ever been on an English train.”
“Tucker!” said Annie. The word came out shrill and unpleasant, and much louder than she had intended; Jackson looked at her in alarm. If she were him, she would be wondering how much fun this seaside holiday was going to be. But she had to interrupt the constant deflecting flow of chatter somehow.
“Yes,” said Tucker mildly. “Annie?”
“Are you okay?”
“I feel fine.”
“I mean, are you allowed to just walk out of hospital without telling anybody?”
“How do you know I haven’t told anybody?”
“I’m just guessing. From the speed at which we left the hospital.”
“I said good-bye to a couple people.”
“Who?”
“You know. Friends I’ve made in there. Hey, is that the Royal Albert Hall?”
She ignored him. He shrugged.
“Have you still got any balloons inside you? Because you won’t find anyone to take those out in Gooleness.”
This wasn’t turning out right. She was talking to him as if she were his mother—if, that is, he’d been born somewhere in Yorkshire or Lancashire in the 1950s, to parents who ran a boardinghouse. She could almost hear the bare linoleum and the boiled liver in her voice.
“No. I told you. I might have some little vent thing left in there. But it won’t bother you.”
“Well, it will bother me if you keel over and snuff it.”
“What does ‘keel over and snuff it’ mean, Dad?”
“Doesn’t mean anything. English crap. We don’t have to come and stay, okay? If you’re uncomfortable, just drop us off at a hotel somewhere.”
“Have you seen all your family?” If she could just get through her list of questions, she would turn herself into a host—a good one, welcoming and worldly and obliging.
“Yep,” said Tucker. “We had a jolly old tea party yesterday afternoon. Everyone’s fine, everyone got on, all good. My work there is done.”
Annie tried to catch Jackson’s eye, but the boy was staring out of the taxi window with a suspicious intensity. She didn’t know him, but it seemed to her that he was trying not to look at her.
She sighed. “Okay, then.” She had done her part. She had checked on his health, and she had checked on whether he had fulfilled his paternal responsibilities. She couldn’t refuse to believe him. And she didn’t want to do that anyway.
Jackson was happy enough on the train, mostly because he was taking a crash course in English sweets; he was allowed to go to the café car whenever he felt like it. He came back with “pastilles” and “biscuits” and “crisps,” and he rolled the exotic words around his mouth as if they were Italian wines. Tucker, meanwhile, was sipping litigiously hot tea from a Styrofoam cup and watching the little town houses roll out in front of him. It was all very flat out there, and the sky was full of ill-tempered dark gray swirls.
“So what is there to do in your town?”
“Do?” And then she laughed. “Sorry. The combination of Gooleness and an active verb took me by surprise.”
“We won’t be staying long, anyway.”
“Just until your children have given up on you and started traveling the thousands of miles back home.”
“Ouch.”
“I’m sorry.” And she was. Where was this disapproval coming from, all of a sudden? Wasn’t his checkered past half the attraction? What was the point of becoming attracted to a rock musician, if she wanted him to behave like a librarian?
“How was Grace, anyway?”
Jackson flashed his father a look, and Annie caught it, before examining it and lobbing it along to its intended recipient.
“Yeah, Gracie’s doing good. Living in Paris with some guy. Studying to, to be something.”
“I know you didn’t see her.” Shut up. God.
“I did. Didn’t I, Jacko?”
“You did, Dad, yeah. I saw you.”
“You saw him seeing her?”
“Yeah. I was watching all the time he was looking at her and talking to her.”
“You’re a little fibber, and you’re a big fibber.”
Neither of them said anything. Maybe they had no idea what a fibber was.
“Why that one?”
“Which one?”
“Why Grace?”
“Why Grace what?”
“How come you don’t mind seeing the others, but she scares you?”
“She doesn’t scare me. Why would she scare me?”
Maybe Duncan should be sitting on the train listening to this stuff. She knew already that Duncan would give an eye and several internal organs to be sitting on the train listening to this stuff; she meant that it would do him good to be here, that his obsession with this man would dwindle away, perhaps to nothing. Any relationship, it seemed to her, was reduced by proximity; you couldn’t be awestruck by someone sipping British Rail tea while he lied shamelessly about his relationship with his own daughter. In her case, it had taken about three minutes for passionate admiration and dreamy speculation to be replaced by a nervous, naggingly maternal disapproval. And that, it seemed to her, was a pretty good description of how some of her married female friends felt, some of the time. She had married Tucker somewhere between the hospital room and the taxi.
“I don’t know why she would scare you,” said Annie. “But she does.”
There was something about the journey to Gooleness that reminded Tucker uncomfortably of The Old Curiosity Shop. He didn’t think he was crawling through the
English countryside to die, although English trains surely didn’t move much faster than Little Nell and her dad, and they’d had to walk to wherever the hell they were going. (The train had stopped three times already, and a man kept apologizing to them all through the loudspeaker, in a blank, unapologetic voice.) But he definitely wasn’t at his best, and he was heading north, and he was leaving a whole lot of shit behind. He certainly felt more like a sick young girl from the nineteenth century than he’d ever felt before. Maybe he was coming down with something—a sickness of the soul, or one of those other existential bugs that was going around.
Tucker liked to think that he was reasonably honest with himself; it was only other people he lied to. And he’d ended up lying to people about Grace her whole life, pretty much. He’d lied to her quite a lot, too. The good news was that these lies were not constant, that there were long periods of time when he didn’t have to bullshit anybody; the bad news was that this was because Grace was way off his radar most of the time. He’d seen her two or three times since she was born (one of these times was when she made a disastrous trip out to stay with him and Cat and Jackson back in Pennsylvania, a visit that Jackson remembered with unfathomable fondness), and thought about her as little as possible, although this turned out to be much more than he was comfortable with. And here he was, on a train a long way from home with someone he hardly knew, lying about Grace again.
The lies weren’t so surprising, really. He couldn’t have a third-person existence—“Tucker Crowe, semilegendary recluse, creator of the greatest, most romantic breakup album ever recorded”—and tell the truth about his eldest daughter. And as he didn’t really have a first-person existence anymore, hadn’t had since that night in Minneapolis, it had been necessary to get rid of her. He’d gone into therapy when he’d given up drinking, but he’d lied to his therapist, too; or rather, he’d never helped guide his therapist toward Grace’s importance, and the therapist had never done the math. (Nobody ever did the math. Not Cat, not Natalie, not Lizzie . . . ) It had always seemed to Tucker that talking about Grace meant giving up Juliet, and he wasn’t prepared to do that. When he turned fifty, he began to think about what he’d done, like people do at that age, and Juliet was pretty much it. He didn’t like it, but other people did, and that was just about enough: surely a man could sacrifice a kid or two to preserve his artistic reputation, especially when there wasn’t much else to him? And it wasn’t like Grace had suffered, really. Oh, sure, she was probably fucked up about fathers, and men generally. And somebody, her mother or her stepfather, had had to shell out for her therapy sessions, just as Cat had paid for his. But she was a beautiful, smart girl, as far as he could tell, and she’d live, and she already had a boyfriend and a career path, although he couldn’t recall what the hell it was. It didn’t seem like she was paying such a big price for her old man’s vanity. That wouldn’t be how they saw it on Maury Povich’s show, if Grace ever forced him to go on the show to confront his inadequacies. But the world was more complicated than that. It wasn’t just good guys and bad guys, great dads and evil dads. And thank God for that.
Annie was frowning.
“What’s up?”
“I was just trying to work something out.”
“Can I help?”
“I would hope so. When was Grace born?”
Fuck, Tucker thought. Someone is doing the math. He felt nauseous and relieved, all at the same time.
“Later,” said Tucker.
“Later than who or what?”
“I think I might be ahead of you.”
“Really? I’d be surprised. Seeing as I don’t know why I want you to tell me how old Grace is.”
“You’re a smart woman, Annie. You’ll get there. And I don’t want to talk about it until later.”
He cocked his head toward Jackson, whose head was deep in a comic book.
“Ah.”
And when she looked at him, he could see that she was halfway there already.
When they arrived in Gooleness, it was already dark. They dragged their bags out to the taxi stand at the front of the station, where one malodorous taxi was waiting. The driver was leaning against his car, smoking, and when Annie told him her address he threw his cigarette down on the ground and swore. Annie shrugged at Tucker helplessly. They had to put their own luggage in the trunk, or rather, Annie and Jackson had to do it. They wouldn’t let Tucker lift anything.
They passed overlit kebab shops, and Indian restaurants offering all-you-can-eat specials for three pounds, and bars with one-word names—“Lucky’s,” “Blondie’s,” even one called “Boozers.”
“It looks better in the light,” Annie explained apologetically.
Tucker was finding his bearings now. If he translated some of the ethnic foods into Americans’ favorites and swapped a few of the bookies for casinos, he’d be at one of the trashier resorts in New Jersey. Every now and again, one of Jackson’s school friends got dragged off to a seaside town like this, either because the kid’s parents had misre membered a vacation from their youth, or because they had failed to spot the romanticism and poetic license in Bruce Springsteen’s early albums. They always came back appalled by the vulgarity, the malevolence and the drunkenness.
“Do you like fish and chips, Jackson? Shall we get some for supper?”
Jackson looked at his father: did he like fish and chips? Tucker nodded.
“There’s a good chippy down the road from us. From me. You’ll be okay if you just eat the fish, Tucker. Don’t touch the batter. Or the chips.”
“Sounds great,” said Tucker. “We might never leave.”
“We will, Dad, won’t we? Because I need to see Mom.”
“Just a joke, kiddo. You’ll see Mom.”
“I hate your jokes.”
Tucker was still distracted by the conversation they’d had on the train. He didn’t have a clue how he was going to talk to Annie; he didn’t know whether he was capable of it. If it were up to him, he’d write it all down, hand her a piece of paper and walk away. That was pretty much how he’d got to know her in the first place, now that he came to think about it, except he’d written everything down on cyberpaper.
“Have you got a computer at home?”
“Yes.”
“Can I write you an e-mail?”
He tried to imagine that he was at his computer in the upstairs spare bedroom and he’d never met Annie, and she was thousands of miles away; he didn’t want to think about having to talk to her in half an hour’s time. He told her how he’d found out he had a first daughter, and how, even then, he hadn’t rushed to see her, because of his embarrassment and cowardice, how he’d only seen her three or four times in her life. He’d told her how he didn’t even like Julie Beatty much, so he had to stop singing songs about how he’d been crushed by the weight of his sorrow and desire and blah, blah, and when he’d stopped singing those songs he couldn’t find any others.
He’d never put it all together like this before; even his ex-wives didn’t know as much as Annie would. They’d never done the math either, not that he’d helped them—he’d lied about Grace’s age more than once. And when he stared at the sum total of his crimes on the screen, it seemed to him that they didn’t amount to a whole lot. He hadn’t killed anyone. He looked again: there must be something missing. Nope. He’d done twenty years for crimes he hadn’t committed.
He called down the stairs to Annie.
“You want me to print it out? Or you going to read it on the screen?”
“I’ll read it on the screen. Do you want to put the kettle on?”
“Is that easy?”
“I think you’ll manage.”
They passed each other on the stairs.
“You can’t throw us out on the streets tonight.”
“Ah. So now I see why you wanted to wait until Jackson was asleep. You were playing on my good nature.”
He smiled, despite the churning in his stomach, went to the kitchen, found the electric kett
le, pressed its switch. While he was waiting for the kettle to boil, he spotted the picture of him and Jackson, the one that Cat had taken outside Citizens Bank Park when they’d gone to see the Phillies. He was touched that she’d taken the trouble to print it out and stick it up there. He didn’t look like a bad man, not in that photo. He leaned against the kitchen counter and waited.
fourteen
Okay,” she said, when she’d read what he’d written. “First of all, you call an ex-wife or one of your children or somebody now.”
“That’s all you have to say? About my whole career?”
“Now. Nonnegotiable. I’m presuming here that one of the things you’re owning up to is running away from Grace before she arrived at the hospital.”
“Oh. Yeah. Ha. I forgot I hadn’t owned up to that already.”
“You don’t have to speak to Grace, although you probably should. But somebody has to let her know. And you must tell them all you’re safe anyway.”
He chose Natalie. She’d be angry and cold and withering, but it wasn’t as if it mattered so much. He wasn’t counting on her to make him soup in his old age. He called her cell, she answered it, and he walked through the hailstorm of arrows to deliver the basic information she needed. He even gave her Annie’s phone number, as if he were a regular father.
“Thank you,” said Annie. “Second thing: Juliet is brilliant. Don’t lump the music in with the rest of it.”
“Have you been taking any of this in?”
“Yes. You’re a very bad man. You’ve been a useless father to four of your five children, and a useless husband to every single one of your wives, and a rubbish partner to every single one of your girlfriends. And Juliet is still brilliant.”
“How can you think that? Now that you know what a bunch of crap it all is.”
“When did you last listen to it?”
“God. Not since it was released.”
“I played it a couple of days ago. How many times have you heard it?”