She had to concede, reluctantly, that there was another interpretation of recent events: the problem wasn’t the empty box, but the metaphor. The short visit of a middle-aged man and his young son shouldn’t be a gourmet pastry; it should be a store-bought egg-salad sandwich, a distracted bowl of cereal, an apple snatched from a fruit bowl when you didn’t have time to eat. She had somehow constructed a life so empty that she was in the middle of the defining narrative incident of the last ten years, and what did it consist of, really? If Tucker and Jackson did after all decide that their lives should be lived elsewhere—and so far, anyway, they had given very little indication to the contrary—she had to make sure that, if they did ever come back, their stay would be an irritation, something she could have done without, something she wouldn’t even remember a couple of weeks after they’d gone. That was how it was supposed to be with houseguests, wasn’t it?
When she came downstairs she was wearing a skirt and some makeup, and Tucker looked at her.
“Oh, shoot,” he said.
It wasn’t what she might have hoped for, but at least it was a reaction. He’d noticed, anyway.
“What?”
“I’m going to have to go like this. I guess I might have a clean T-shirt, but I think it might have the name of a lap-dancing club on it. It’s not like I’m a customer, or anything. It was a thoughtful present from somebody. What about you, Jack? Got anything clean left?”
“I put a couple of things in the wash,” said Annie. “There’s a new Something-Man T-shirt on your bed.”
A lot of women had to say a version of that sentence every single day of the week, probably, without feeling particularly emotional about it. Or rather, the emotion they were most likely to feel was a very deep self-pity, rather than an ache of love and loss and longing. That seemed like an ambition, of sorts: to get to a stage where she wanted to hang herself because putting a T-shirt on a child’s bed seemed indicative of the slow and painful death of the spirit. At the moment, she wanted to hang herself because it seemed like the first tiny glimmers of a rebirth.
“Spider. Is Spider-Man okay for your party?”
“I’m the only one who has to go dressed up,” she said. “You’re the exotic special guests.”
“Only because we’ll be wearing T-shirts,” said Tucker.
“And you come from the U.S. When we first started thinking about a Gooleness in 1964 exhibition, we really weren’t banking on American visitors.”
“The exchange rate was bad back then,” said Tucker. “You watch, there’ll be hordes of us.”
Annie laughed with inappropriate volume and vigor, and at preposterous length, and Tucker stared at her.
“You nervous?”
“No.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I was just thinking about you leaving. I don’t want you to. And that made me laugh too loudly at your joke. For some reason. Maybe just in case it was the last joke you made in this house.”
She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything. And then, after the regret had flared and burned out, she didn’t care. He should know, she thought. She wanted him to know. She felt something for somebody, and she’d told him.
“Okay. Who said we’re leaving, anyway? We like it here, don’t we, Jacko?”
“Yeah. A bit. But I wouldn’t want to live here or anything.”
“I could live here,” said Tucker. “I could live here in a heartbeat.”
“Really?” said Annie.
“Sure. I like the sea. I like the . . . the lack of pretension.”
“Oh, it’s not pretentious.”
“What does that word even mean?” said Jackson.
“It means, the town doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t.”
“And some towns do that? What do they pretend to be?”
“Paris. Giraffes. Whatever.”
“I’d like to go somewhere that pretends to be somewhere else. That sounds fun.”
He was right: it sounded fun. Who wanted to be in a place that prided itself on its lack of ambition, its pig-headed delight in its own plainness?
“Anyway,” said Jackson. “I have to see Mom, and my friends, and . . .”
And even then Annie hoped for some clinching argument from Tucker, as if she were watching a courtroom drama, and Jackson was the slow-witted and obstructive juror. But he just put his arm on his son’s shoulder and told him not to worry, and Annie gave another inappropriate laugh, just to show that nothing was serious and everything was funny and it didn’t matter that Christmas was nearly over. She was nervous now.
Tucker was worried for Annie when they walked into the cold and ominously empty museum, but then he remembered that she was the host, and she had to be there first. And they didn’t have to wait very long before people started turning up; late wasn’t a fashion option in Gooleness, apparently. Before long, the room was full of town councillors and Friends of the Museum and proud owners of shark pieces, all of whom seemed to have taken the view that the later you turned up, the narrower the choice of sandwiches and potato chips.
Once upon a time, Tucker hated going to parties because he couldn’t introduce himself without people making some kind of a fuss when he told them his name. It turned out to be the same at this party, except the people who made the fuss were people who’d apparently never heard of him.
“Tucker Crowe?” said Terry Jackson, the councillor who owned half the exhibition. “The Tucker Crowe?”
Terry Jackson was probably in his sixties, and he had a weird gray hairdo, and Tucker was surprised that his name had any currency in weird-gray-hairdo circles. But then Terry gave Annie a big wink, and Annie rolled her eyes and looked embarrassed, and Tucker understood that something else was going on.
“Annie wanted you to be the special guest tonight. But then I pointed out that nobody knew who the bloody hell you were. What was your big hit, then? Just kidding.” He patted Tucker on the back mirthfully. “But you really are from America?”
“I really am.”
“Well, then,” said Terry, consolingly. “We don’t get many American visitors to Gooleness. You might be the first one ever. That’s special enough for us. It doesn’t matter about the rest of it.”
“He really is famous,” said Annie. “I mean, if you know who he is.”
“Well, we’re all famous in our own living rooms, aren’t we? What are you drinking there, Tucker? I’m going to get myself another one.”
“Just a water, thanks.”
“I don’t think so,” said Terry. “I’m not getting Gooleness’s only American visitor a glass of bloody water. Red or white?”
“I’m actually . . . I’m in recovery,” said Tucker.
“All the more reason to have a drink, then. Always helps me, when I’m under the weather.”
“He’s not under the weather,” said Annie. “He’s a recovering alcoholic.”
“Oh, you’d just be normal here. When in Rome and all that.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Oh, well. Suit yourself. Here they are, the real stars of the evening.”
They had been joined by two men in their forties, obviously uncomfortable in jackets and ties.
“Let me introduce you to two Gooleness legends. Gav, Barnesy, this is Tucker Crowe, from America. And this is Jackson.”
“Hello,” said Jackson, and they shook his hand with exaggerated formality.
“I’ve heard that name before,” one of the men said.
“There’s a singer named Jackson Browne,” said Jackson. “Also there’s a place called Jackson. I’ve never been there. Which is kind of weird, if you think about it.”
“No, not your name, sonny Jim. His. Tucker Wotsit.”
“I doubt it,” said Tucker.
“No, you’re right, Barnesy,” said the other one. “It’s come up recently.”
“Did you get here okay?” said Annie.
“You were going on abou
t him,” said the man who had to be Gav, triumphantly. “That night we met you. In the pub.”
“Was I?” said Annie.
“Oh, she’s always going on about him,” said Terry Jackson. “In her head, he’s famous.”
“You’re country and western, is that right?”
“I never said that,” said Annie. “I said I’d been listening to you recently. Because of Naked, I suppose.”
“No, you said he was your favorite singer,” said Barnesy. “But . . . is he the person you said you were seeing? In America?”
“No,” said Annie. “That was someone else.”
“Bloody hell,” said Barnesy. “You know more Americans than an American.”
“I’m sorry,” said Annie, when they’d gone. “We seem to keep bumping into people who think we’re together.”
“You just told him you were seeing some other American.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“I guessed.”
Tucker had known for some time that Annie had some sort of crush on him, and he was too old to feel anything other than a childish sense of delight. She was an attractive woman, good company, kind, younger than him. Ten or fifteen years or so ago, he would have felt obliged to enumerate all the individual items on his baggage carousel and point out that their relationship was doomed, that he always made a mess of everything, that they lived on separate continents and so on; but he was almost certain that she’d been paying enough attention to what he’d been saying, so caveat emptor. But then what? He didn’t even know if he was capable of having sex, or whether having sex would kill him if the capability was there. And if sex was going to kill him, then would he be happy to die here, in this town, in Annie’s bed? Jackson wouldn’t be happy, that was for sure. But was Tucker prepared not to have sex until Jackson was capable of looking after himself? He was six now . . . Twelve years? In twelve years, Tucker would be almost seventy, and that would raise a whole lot of other questions. For example: who’d want to have sex with him when he was seventy? If he was even capable of having sex?
The worst thing about his little medical event was the questions, which had started to come in an apparently unstoppable flood. Not all of them were about whether anyone would want to have sex with him when he was almost seventy; there had been a few really tricky ones related to the empty decades since Juliet, and the decades—he liked to think of a plural—to come. There weren’t going to be any answers to these tricky questions, either, which made them seem tauntingly rhetorical.
If he were a character in a movie, a few days in a strange town with a kind woman would renew his faith in something or other, and he’d go straight home and make a great album, but that wasn’t going to happen: the tank was as empty as it had always been. And then, just as Tucker was about to give in to his gloom, Terry Jackson pressed a button on a boom box, and the room filled with the sound of a soul singer Tucker recognized—Major Lance? Dobie Gray?—and Gav and Barnesy started doing backflips and headspins on the museum carpet.
“I’ll bet you could do that, Dad, couldn’t you?” said Jackson.
“Sure,” said Tucker.
Annie was stuck with the most faithful Friend the museum had ever had, but out of the corner of her eye she saw an elderly lady having her picture taken beside the photograph of the four workmates on their day off. Annie made her excuses and went over to introduce herself.
“Hello, Annie the Museum Director,” said the elderly lady. “I’m Kathleen. Kath.”
“Do you know any of those people?”
“That’s me,” said Kath. “I knew my teeth were bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad. No wonder I lost them.”
Annie looked at the photo, then back at the old woman. As far as Annie could tell, she was seventy-five now, and she’d been sixty in 1964.
“You’ve hardly aged a bit,” Annie said. “Really.”
“I know what you’re saying. I was old then and I’m old now.”
“Not a bit of it,” said Annie. “Do you keep in touch with the others?”
“That’s my sister. She’s passed on. The lads . . . They’d come up for the day. From Nottingham, I think. I never saw them again.”
“You look like you were having fun.”
“I suppose so. I wish we’d had a bit more though. If you know what I mean.”
Annie made an appropriately scandalized face.
“He wanted to. His hands were everywhere. I fought him off.”
“Well,” said Annie, “you can never go wrong not doing something. It’s only when you do things that you get into trouble.”
“I suppose so,” said Kath. “But now what?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m seventy-seven and I never got into any trouble. So now what? Have you got a medal for me? You’re a museum director. Write to the queen and tell her. Otherwise it was all a bloody waste of time, wasn’t it?”
“No,” said Annie. “Don’t say that.”
“What should I say instead, then?”
Annie smiled blankly.
“Would you excuse me for a moment?” she said.
She went to find Ros, who seemed to be giving an impromptu lecture on the typography of Terry Jackson’s Rolling Stones poster, and told her to take Jackson away from his father and stuff him full of Twiglets. Then Annie pulled Tucker into the corner where they had displayed Terry Jackson’s old bus tickets, which weren’t attracting as much traffic as they’d hoped.
“You okay?” said Tucker. “Seems to be going pretty well.”
“Tucker, I was wondering whether, whether . . . If you’d be interested.”
“In . . .”
“Oh. Sorry. Me.”
“I’m already interested in you. The conditional is unnecessary.”
“Thank you. But I suppose I mean sexually.”
The blush, which she had more or less kept in check over the last few days, was returning with a pent-up force; the blood had clearly been pooling, frustrated, somewhere in the region of her ears. She really needed her face to do something different when she asked a man to sleep with her. It seemed to her that the very act of asking made the request irritatingly unlikely.
“What about the party?”
“I meant later.”
“I was kidding.”
“Oh. I see. Anyway, I told myself I’d . . . I’d broach the subject. I’ve done it now. Thank you for listening.” And she turned to go.
“Pleasure. And, of course, I’m interested, by the way. If the answer to your question isn’t beside the point.”
“Oh. No. It isn’t. Good.”
“I would have jumped on you by now if it hadn’t been for my little scare the other day. And it still worries me.”
“I did actually look that . . . side of things up on the Internet.”
Tucker laughed.
“This is what constitutes foreplay, when you get older—a woman who’s prepared to look your medical condition up before she sleeps with you. I like it. It’s kind of sexy. What did the Internet have to say?”
Annie could see Ros leading Jackson toward them.
“You don’t get breathless going up stairs?”
“Nope.”
“Well, you should be okay, then. As long as, as I, well, do the work.”
She was, she felt, the color of an eggplant now, a kind of purply black. Maybe he’d like that.
“That’s the way I’ve always done it! We’ll be fine!”
“Right. Well. Good, then. I’ll see you later.”
And she went to give her little welcome speech to the great and the good of Gooleness.
Later, home and drunk, she felt a kind of precoital tristesse. Most of her tristesses were precoital, she thought gloomily. How could they not be, seeing as most of life was precoital? But this one was sharper than most, possibly because the coitus was a more real prospect than most. It began with an attack of nerves, a sudden lack of self-confidence: she’d seen pictures of Julie Beatty, a
nd Julie Beatty had been breathtakingly beautiful. True, she’d been twenty-five or so when Tucker was with her, but Annie hadn’t looked anything like that when she was twenty-five; Natalie was still beautiful, and she was older than Annie. They all must have been, she realized, the ones she knew about and the scores—hundreds?—she didn’t. And then she tried to console herself with the knowledge that Tucker must have lowered the bar by now, and, of course, that was no consolation at all. She didn’t want to be the dying embers of his sex life, and she certainly didn’t want to be a low bar. While Tucker was putting Jackson to bed she made tea and looked for something else to drink; when he came downstairs she was pouring some very old banana liqueur into a tumbler and trying not to cry. She really hadn’t thought the museum thing through, when she first took the job. She hadn’t worked out that it would make absolutely everything, even a one-night stand, feel as though it were already over, behind glass, a poignant relic of an earlier, happier time.
“Listen,” said Tucker, “I’ve been thinking,” and Annie was convinced that he had come to the same conclusion himself, that he was about to tell her that, yes, though his bar was no longer at Olympic height, it hadn’t dropped that far just yet, and he’d come back to her in a decade or so. “I should look at this stuff myself.”
“Which stuff?”
“The stuff on the Internet that told you whether sex will kill me.”
“Oh. Of course. No problem.”