“I know it was stupid,” said Duncan. “I felt terrible about it. Still do. I tried to forget it ever happened.”
“And now you’re boasting about it.”
“I just wanted to prove that I’m . . . a serious person. A serious scholar, anyway.”
“It doesn’t look as though those two identities are compatible, does it? A serious person doesn’t break into somebody’s house.”
Duncan took a deep breath. For a moment, Annie was frightened that he was going to confess to something else.
“All I can say in my defense is that . . . well, you asked us to listen. And some of us listened a little too hard. I mean, if someone had had a chance to break into Shakespeare’s house, he should have taken it, shouldn’t he? Because then we’d know more. It would have been perfectly legitimate to . . . to rummage around in Shakespeare’s sock drawer. In the interests of history and literature.”
“So according to your logic Julie Beatty is Shakespeare.”
“Anne Hathaway.”
“Jesus Christ.” Tucker shook his head bitterly. “You people. And for the record: I’m not even Leonard Cohen, let alone Shakespeare.”
You asked us to listen . . . That much at least was true. It had to be. He’d always said the right things, back in the days when he still spoke to local radio DJs and rock writers: he’d told anyone who wanted to know that there wasn’t anything he could do about being a musician, he just was one, and he’d be one whether people wanted to listen to him or not. But he’d also told Lisa, Grace’s mother, that he wanted to be rich and famous, that he wouldn’t be happy until his talent got recognized in all the ways that talent could be recognized. The money never really happened—even Juliet only provided a decent living wage for a year or two—but other stuff did. He got the respect and the reviews and the fans and the model who used to hang out with Jackson Browne and Jack Nicholson. And he got Duncan and his buddies. If you wanted to get into people’s living rooms, could you then object if they wanted to get into yours?
“This will probably sound silly,” said Duncan, “and not what you want to hear. But I’m not the only person who thinks you’re a genius. And while you might think we’re . . . we’re inadequate as people, we’re not necessarily the worst judges in the world. We read, and watch movies, and think, and . . . I probably blew it as far as you’re concerned with my silly Naked review, which was written at the wrong time, and for the wrong reasons. But the original album . . . Do even you know how dense that was? I still haven’t peeled it all away, I don’t think, even after all this time. I don’t pretend to understand what those songs meant to you, but it’s the forms of expression you chose, the allusions, the musical references. That’s what makes it art. To my mind. And . . . sorry, sorry, one last thing. I don’t think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them, and we never value things that come easy to us. But I value what you did on that album more highly than, I think, anything else I’ve heard. So thank you. And now I think I should leave. But I couldn’t meet you without telling you all that.”
And as he stood up, Annie’s phone rang. She answered it and held the receiver out to Tucker. Tucker didn’t notice it for a moment. He was still staring at Duncan, as if the words he’d just said were suspended somewhere near his mouth in a speech bubble and could be reread. Tucker wanted to reread them.
“Tucker.”
“Yeah.”
“Grace,” she said.
“Yay,” said Jackson. “Gracie.”
For most of the last twenty years, Tucker had Grace down as the key to a lot of things. She was why he’d stopped working; every time he’d taken the lid off himself and taken a peek inside, he’d had to close it quick. She was the spare room that never got tidied, the e-mail that never got answered, the loan that never got repaid, the symptom that never got described to a doctor. Except worse than any of that, obviously, what with her being a daughter, rather than an e-mail or a rash.
“Grace? Hold on a minute.”
As he took the handset from the kitchen to the living room, he suddenly saw that this strange little seaside town was perfect for the sort of reconciliation that could bring that whole sorry story to an end. He didn’t think he could ask Annie to accommodate yet another member of his family, but Grace could stay in a B&B or somewhere for a couple of days. The bleak pier they’d seen that morning . . . He could see them sitting on the boards, dangling their feet under the railings, talking and listening and talking.
“Tucker?”
“Dad” was an appellation you had to earn, he guessed, mostly by being one. Maybe that’s how their conversation on the pier would end: she’d call him “Dad,” and he’d weep a little.
“Yeah. Sorry. I was just taking the phone somewhere more private.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in this weird little seaside town on the east coast of
England called Gooleness. It’s great. You’d dig it. Grungy, but kind of cool.”
“Ha. Okay. You know I came from France to see you in the hospital?”
She had her mother’s voice. Or rather—and this was worse, really—she had her mother’s temperament: he could hear the same determination to think the best of him and of everybody else, the same puzzled smile. Neither Grace nor Lisa had ever made it easy for him: they’d both been heartbreakingly tolerant and sympathetic and forgiving. How was one supposed to deal with people like that? He preferred the chilly sarcasm that was his usual lot. He could ignore that.
“Yeah, Grace, I heard you were coming.”
“So, you know. Why did you run away?”
“I wasn’t running from you.”
He couldn’t afford too many lies, if he was really aiming at truth and reconciliation, but one or two little ones, judiciously positioned right at the beginning of the road in order to ease access, might be necessary. “I didn’t want to see you with all those other people.”
“Ummm . . . Is it unreasonable to point out that most of those other people are your children?”
“Most, sure. But not all. There were a couple of ex-wives in there. They were making me feel uncomfortable. And since I wasn’t feeling so great . . .”
“Well, I guess only you know how much you could cope with.”
“What I was thinking was, you could come up here,” said Tucker. “That way, you and I could . . .”
Some terrible words and phrases were coming into his mind: “quality time,” “heal,” “bond,” “closure.” He didn’t want to use any of them.
“What could we do, Tucker?”
“We could eat stuff.”
“Eat stuff?”
“Yeah. And I guess talk.”
“Hmmm.”
“What do you think? Should I get you the train schedule?”
“I think . . . I think I don’t want to do that.”
“Oh.”
He couldn’t quite believe it. Where was the accommodation in that?
“I didn’t really want to come to London to see you. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t quite see the point.”
“That was Lizzie’s idea.”
“I mean, the point of any sort of visit, anywhere. I don’t wish to be difficult, Tucker. I think you’re an interesting and talented guy, and I used to love reading stuff about you. Mom kept a whole heap of things. But we don’t have much going on, do we?”
“Not . . . recently.”
Grace laughed, not unpleasantly.
“Not in the last twenty-two years, anyway.”
She was twenty-two already?
“And I’m pretty sure that my very existence is sort of awkward. I mean, I’ve listened to that album. You can’t hear me in there. Or Lisa.”
“It was a long time ago now.”
“I agree. A long time ago, you chose art over . . . Well, over me.”
“No, Gracie, I . . .”
“And I understand. Really. I didn’t use to. But, you know. I like artists. I get it. So wh
at would you do with me now? I can see that there’s room for some painful conversation in a godforsaken town miles from anywhere. But there’s no room for anything after that, is there? Not unless you want to own up to being a phony. And I wouldn’t want you to do that. I’m not sure you’ve got enough going on to let go of Juliet.”
She hadn’t got that degree of perspicacity from Lisa. He could be proud of that.
He went back into the kitchen and handed Annie the handset.
“How did it go?”
He shook his head.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I blew that one a long time ago. I’ve been watching too much daytime TV.”
Duncan was making a big deal of putting his coat on, desperate to glean anything he could from what might be his last couple of minutes with Tucker.
“You don’t have to leave,” Tucker said, wearily. Duncan looked at him disbelievingly, a sixteen-year-old who’d just been told that the prettiest girl in class wasn’t going to finish with him just yet.
“Really?”
“Really. I . . . What you said before—it meant a lot. Thank you. Sincerely.”
And now the prettiest girl in class was taking off her panties and . . . Actually, this whole analogy was too weird. Weird and disturbingly self-serving, if anyone cared to examine it properly.
“If you would like to talk to me about my work, I’d be happy to do so. I can see you’re serious about it.”
What was the big deal? Why had he spent half his life trying to hide from people like Duncan? How many of them were there? A handful, scattered all over the globe. Fuck the Internet for collecting them all in one place and making them look threatening. And fuck the Internet for putting him right at the center of his own little paranoid universe.
“I really am sorry about taking a pee in Julie Beatty’s toilet,” said Duncan.
“I’m not sure I care as much as I pretended. Off the record? Among certain people, Julie Beatty has enjoyed a long and unsullied reputation as a fiery muse. In retrospect, she was kind of a pretty airhead. If someone pees in her toilet every now and again, it’s a fair price to pay.”
The two biggest parts of a man’s life were his family and his work, and Tucker had spent a long time feeling wretched about both of them. There was nothing much he could do about big chunks of his family now. Things would never be right with Grace, and he could see that his relationship with Lizzie would always wobble between something they could both tolerate and something that would hurt his ears. He wasn’t so interested in the older boys. That left Jackson, which gave him a 20 percent success rate as a father. There was no examination worth taking where you could pass with a mark like that.
It had never occurred to him that his work was redeemable, or that he was redeemable through his work. But as he listened that afternoon to an articulate, nerdy man tell him over and over again why he was a genius, he could feel himself hoping that it might actually be true.
fifteen
Councillor Terry Jackson had fifteen come to the museum for a private view and seemed pleased with what he’d seen. Indeed, he was so pleased that he now had ambitions for the launch.
“We should try and get a celebrity to come along and open it.”
“Do you know any celebrities?” said Annie.
“No. You?”
“No.”
“Oh, well.”
“Who would you invite if you could?”
“I’m not very good at celebrities. I don’t watch enough TV.”
“Anyone in world history. Fantasy guest.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “And what function would this person be serving? I mean, would we be inviting him or her to say a few words?”
“I would have thought so,” said Terry. “Something to get the local press interested. Maybe even the nationals.”
“I’d have thought that if a dead person from world history opened an exhibition at the Gooleness Seaside Museum, we’d be fighting the media off.”
“So who would you have?”
“Jane Austen,” said Annie. “Or Emily Brontë, I suppose, seeing as we’re not that far from Brontë country.”
“You think the national press would come up here for Emily Brontë? I know they would for Jane Austen. Bol lywood and all that.”
Annie had no idea what this meant and as a consequence chose to ignore it.
“Even for Emily Brontë.”
“Well,” said Terry. He was clearly dubious. “If you say so. Anyway. Let’s keep it within the realms of the possible.”
“So you’re asking me to name a famous person who might actually come to the Gooleness Seaside Museum to open an exhibition? Because that’s different.”
“No it isn’t. Aim as high as you like.”
“Nelson Mandela.”
“Lower.”
“Simon Cowell.”
Terry thought for a moment.
“Lower.”
“The mayor.”
“The mayor’s got another do on. If you’d sorted this out quicker, we could have asked her first.”
“I’ve got an American singer-songwriter from the eighties staying with me at the moment. Would he be any good?”
She hadn’t planned to mention him, but Terry Jackson’s unfair attack on her organizational skills had stung. And in any case, she couldn’t quite believe that he’d chosen to stay: Tucker and Jackson had been with her for three nights already and showed no desire to leave.
“Depends who he is,” said Terry.
“Tucker Crowe.”
“Tucker who?”
“Tucker Crowe.”
“No. No good whatsoever. Nobody’s heard of him.”
“Well, which American singer-songwriter from the eighties would have done the trick?”
He was beginning to annoy her now. Where had this sudden need for celebrity come from? It was always the way, with councillors. At the beginning of a project, it was all about the needs of the town; by the end it was all about the Gooleness Echo.
“I thought you were going to say Billy Joel or someone. Is he a singer-songwriter? He’d have got us out of a hole. Anyway, thanks but no thanks, Tucker Crowe.”
He made air quotes around the name and he chuckled, apparently at the depths of Tucker’s obscurity.
“I’ve an idea,” said Terry.
“Go on.”
“Three words.”
“Right.”
“Have a guess.”
“Three words?”
“Three words.”
“John Logie Baird. Harriet Beecher Stowe.”
“No. Neither of them. Oh. And I should probably say that one of the words is ‘and.’ ”
“ ‘And’? Like Simon and Garfunkel?”
“Yes. But not them. I think you should give up.”
“I give up.”
“Gav and Barnesy.”
Annie burst out laughing. Terry Jackson looked hurt.
“I’m sorry,” said Annie. “I wasn’t being . . . That wasn’t the direction I was looking in.”
“What do you think? They’re local legends, and a lot of people around here recognize them . . .”
“I like it,” said Annie, decisively.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Terry Jackson smiled.
“Bit of a brainwave, really. Even if I do say so myself.”
“There’d probably be no national press interest,” said Annie.
“That’s all right. That was always going to be a long shot.”
Annie had once heard someone say that in the future everyone would be famous to fifteen people. In Gooleness, where Tucker Crowe slept in her bedroom, and Gav and Barnesy were invited to open exhibitions, the future had arrived.
On Wednesday, the day of the launch party, Tucker and Jackson were still with her; their departure was postponed one day at a time. Annie didn’t want to press them on their plans, because she couldn’t bear the thought of them leaving; every morning
she was fearful that they would come into the kitchen for breakfast with their bags packed, but instead they announced plans to fish, or walk, or take a bus along the coast. She had no idea whether Jackson was supposed to be at school but again she didn’t want to ask, in case Tucker suddenly slapped his forehead and dragged his son off to the station.
She couldn’t have explained to anybody what she was hoping for—or at least, she wouldn’t have wanted to, because the explanation would have sounded pathetic, even to her. She was hoping, she supposed, that they would stay forever, in any formation that they chose. If Tucker didn’t want to share a bed with her, well, fine, although she firmly intended to sleep with someone at some stage, and if he didn’t like it, he could shove it. (These scenarios had been imagined quite fully, hence the confrontational tone; she had scripted this particular conversation on Sunday night, when she was trying to get to sleep, and she had found herself getting irritated by Tucker’s predicted indifference.) She would, of course, have to replace Cat, at least for most of the year—she fully anticipated trips back to the U.S. during the longer holidays, although Jackson would be attending school in Gooleness, maybe at Rose Hill, which had an excellent reputation and an impressive website, which she happened to have stumbled across the previous evening. How hard would that be for Jackson? He hadn’t talked about his mother that much, which gave her hope—his primary relationship was clearly with Tucker, and she was pretty sure that, if Tucker was unambiguous about what he wanted, his boy would fall into line. She would offer to e-mail Cat weekly or daily or whatever she wanted, and she could attach pictures, and they could talk on the phone, and she could download the thing that allowed you to see someone in Australia on the computer, and Cat could stay whenever she wanted . . . If everyone was determined to make it work, then it would. After all, what was the alternative? That they just went home and resumed their lives, as if nothing had happened?
The trouble was that nothing had happened, of course. If Tucker and Jackson were able to hear the inside of her head, they’d have backed slowly out of the house, with Tucker brandishing whatever weapon he could lay his hands on in order to protect his son. Did her mother entertain similar fantasies when Christmas was coming to an end, and she knew that she was going to be left with and by herself for another eleven and three-quarter months? Probably. Everything had come too soon, that was the problem. Annie would have been happy enough looking forward to Tucker’s e-mails, with the remote and tantalizing possibility of an actual meeting to be dreamed about only slowly, over months and then years. Because of the various medical misfortunes, she’d ended up scoffing the whole lot within weeks, and now she was left with an empty chocolate box and a vague feeling of nausea.