“Oh, yeah, fine. You were owed.”
“I hope you sort things out with Cat. She’s lovely.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Good night. Sleep well.”
Tucker went back downstairs, but Cat had gone. She had used his absence as an excuse to go to bed without him, and without explanations. They mostly slept in separate rooms now, but they were at a peculiar stage in their relationship where this wasn’t accepted as a given: they talked about it every night. Or it got mentioned, at least. “Are you okay in the spare room?” Cat would say, and Tucker would shrug and nod. A couple of times, after a really savage argument that seemed to push them to the point of no return, he’d followed her into their bedroom, and eventually they’d swung things around. There was no talking about it tonight, though. She’d just vanished.
Tucker went to bed, read a little, turned the light out. But he couldn’t sleep. It isn’t you really, is it? that woman had asked, and he started to phrase answers to the question in his head. Eventually he got up and went downstairs to the computer. Annie was going to get more than she’d bargained for.
five
From: Tucker
horizon.com
Subject: Re: Re: Your Review
Dear Annie,
It really is me, although I can’t think of a good way of proving it to you. How about this: nothing happened to me in a restroom in Minneapolis. Or this: I don’t have a secret love child with Julie Beatty. Or this: I stopped recording altogether after I made the album Juliet, so I don’t have two hundred albums’ worth of material locked away in a shed, nor do I regularly release material under an assumed name. Does that help? Probably not, unless you are sane enough to believe that the truth about anyone is disappointing, the truth about me especially so. This is due to an unfortunate turn of events: the longer I spent doing nothing at all, aside from watching TV and drinking, the more a small but impressively imaginative number of people seemed to be convinced that I was doing a whole procession of outlandish things—making hip-hop albums with Lauryn Hill in Colorado, for example, or making a movie with Steve Ditko in Los Angeles. I wish I knew Lauryn Hill and/or Steve Ditko, because I admire both of them greatly (and because I’d make myself some money somehow), but I don’t. The fact is, some of these myths are so colorful that they have deterred me from re-entering the world; it seems to me that people were having more fun with me gone than they could ever have if I was around. Can you imagine, if I were to give an interview, for example, to the kind of music magazine still interested in someone like me? “No, I didn’t. No, I haven’t. No, we weren’t . . .” It would be so dull as to be unconvincing. Anyone can say they haven’t done anything.
Today I learned that I am going to be a grandfather. As I don’t really know the pregnant daughter in question—I don’t really know four of my five children, by the way—I was not able to feel joyful. For me, the only real emotional content of the news was the symbolism, what it said about me. I don’t feel bad about that, particularly. There’s no point in pretending to feel joy when someone you don’t know very well tells you she’s pregnant, although I suppose I do feel bad that various decisions I’ve made and avoided have reduced my daughter to the status of a stranger.
Anyway, the symbolism . . . Learning that I was about to become a grandfather felt like reading my own obituary, and what I read made me feel really sad. I haven’t done much with whatever talents I was given, whatever your friends on the website think, nor have I been very successful in other areas of my life. The children I never see are products of relationships I messed up, through my indolence and my drinking; the child I do see, my beloved six-year-old son, Jackson, is the product of a relationship that I’m in the process of messing up. His mother has been supporting me for a few years now, so I owe her a lot, but understandably I have begun to irritate her, and her irritation makes me grouchy and defensive.
She thought that our relationship might work because we are different. And though it’s true that she is practical and financially astute (she is a wholesaler of organic produce), and can enjoy lengthy business meetings with people who care about money and fruit, these qualities have turned out to be of little use to us when it comes to getting along. I don’t value them as much as I should, and in any case my impracticality is no longer allied with my ability to write songs, since I no longer write songs. The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product. (I must confess to being as confused as I have ever been, when it comes to the subject of compatibility. I have tried to live with women whose sensibility is similar to mine, with predictably disastrous consequences, but the opposite route seems every bit as hopeless. We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons. I am coming to the conclusion that I need a woman who admires fecklessness and indolence in a man; whether that woman is the CEO of a Wall Street investment firm or a graffiti artist makes no difference to me.)
I had completely forgotten about the existence of those Juliet demos until a few months ago, when somebody I used to know found them on a shelf somewhere. He was the one who arranged to release them on CD, but I didn’t mind, even though I agree with every word you said about their crudity: I worked and worked on the official versions of those songs, and so did my band, and the idea that a person with ears could listen to those two sets of recordings and decide that the shitty, sketchy one is better than the one we sweated blood over is baffling to me. (To be honest, I would drop every single one of that guy’s bootleg collection, all the one hundred and twenty-seven albums he foolishly boasts about owning, on his head, and ban him from listening to music ever again.) But the release of Naked was a way of reminding myself that I was once capable of some kind of action; and in any case, I was given a small advance, which I was able to hand straight over to my wife. For an afternoon, I almost felt like a man, bringing home the bacon for his family.
I have given you too much information, I suspect, but I don’t see that you can seriously doubt whether I am me. I am very much me, and today I am very much wishing I wasn’t.
With best wishes,
Tucker Crowe
Tucker’s reply was waiting for Annie when she arrived at work. She could have checked her e-mail on her home computer, before breakfast, and of course she’d been excited enough to have wanted to. But if there had been a reply, there was a chance that Duncan might have seen it, and easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret. It had been the best thing even yesterday, when all she’d received were two functional but still amazing messages that gave very little away, but now she had information that Duncan would have regarded as the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. She didn’t want him to have that key, for all sorts of reasons, most of them ignoble.
She read the e-mail twice, three times, and then went to get her coffee early. She needed to think. Or rather, she needed to stop thinking about the stuff she was thinking about, if she were to have a chance of thinking about anything else today; and what she was thinking about, more than Tucker Crowe and his complicated life, even, was how Naked had poisoned the air that she breathed in her home.
The night before, Duncan had come home late and smelling of drink; he was monosyllabic, curt even, when she’d asked him about his day. He’d fallen asleep quickly, but she had lain awake, listening to him snoring and not liking him. Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping? A partner was supposed to be some mark of success: anyone who shared a bed with someone on a nightly basis had proved herself capable in some way, no? Of something? But her relationship now seemed to her to betoken failure, not success. She and Duncan had ended up together becaus
e they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.
“Hello, gorgeous,” said Franco, the man in the coffee bar.
“Hello,” she said. “Usual, please.”
Would he have said “Hello, gorgeous” if she were bad at sports, as it were? Or was she reading too much into a cheesy greeting from a man who probably said it twenty times a day?
“How many times a day do you say that?” she said. “As a matter of interest?”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“Only once.”
She laughed, and he looked mock hurt.
“You don’t see who comes in here,” said Franco. “I could say ‘Hello, gorgeous’ to people who look like my mother or my grandmother. I used to. But it feels wrong. So I keep it for you, my youngest customer.”
His youngest customer! Was everything an accident of geography? She could believe it about this town. Franco wouldn’t have said what he said if his coffee bar were in London or Manchester; she wouldn’t have sleepwalked through fifteen years with Duncan if she lived in Birming ham or Edinburgh. Gooleness was the wind and the sea and the old, the smell of fried food that somehow clung on even when nobody seemed to be frying anything, the ice-cream kiosks that seemed to be boarded up even when there were people around . . . And there was the past. There was 1964, and the Rolling Stones, and the dead shark, and the happy vacationers. Somebody had to live there. It might as well be her.
On the way back to the office she realized that it was Thursday, and Thursday was the day that Moira worked at the front desk. Moira was a Friend of the Museum who was convinced that Annie’s childlessness was the result of some lack, a lack that could be cured. She was right, probably, but not in the way she thought. There had been absolutely no conversation prior to Moira’s intervention, which had apparently been prompted entirely by Annie’s age, rather than by any longing that she had articulated to this woman she didn’t actually know. Annie hated Thursdays.
Today it was celery. Moira, a sprightly octogenarian with a fine head of purple-tinged hair, was standing there waiting for her, with a big bunch.
“Hello,” said Annie.
“The leaves are what you want. What he wants, anyway.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you got a blender?”
“I think so.”
“Just whizz the leaves up in that and make him drink it.”
“Nothing for me? No tea, or seeds, or fruit dipped in milk?”
“Well, we’ve tried everything for you. So it must be him.”
Technically, Moira was right: it was him. He wore a condom.
“I’ll try it tonight.”
“If you try it tonight, you have to try everything. If you see what I mean. Down in one and upstairs.”
“I’ll try it Saturday night, then.”
Oh, dear God. Why on earth was she giving this woman information about their sexual timetable?
“Oh. He’s a Saturday-night man, is he?”
“I should get on with some work.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not ashamed.”
But of course she was. She was ashamed of the implied monotony and she was ashamed of her inability to tell the meddling old crone where to get off.
“Oh. Alan. Hello. We don’t see you in here very often.”
Moira was addressing a man in his seventies who appeared to be wearing both an overcoat and a raincoat, as well as two or maybe even three scarves. He was clutching a jam jar containing what looked like a rotting pickled onion swimming in murky vinegar.
“Someone said you were interested in the shark.”
“We are,” said Moira, firmly. “Very.”
“I’ve got his eye.”
From: Annie Platt
Subject: Beyond Reasonable Doubt . . .
. . . It’s you. I read enough fiction to know it’s detail that makes a story seem real, and anyone who has gone to all the trouble of making that lot up deserves a reply anyway. And if it’s not you, I don’t really care, to be honest. I’m having an e-mail conversation with an interesting and thoughtful man who lives a long way away, so where’s the harm? (I suppose there’s another way of looking at this, which is that you’re a lunatic, and all your children and grandchildren are simply the product of a damaged mind. If it turns out that you’re a lunatic I might actually know, then I swear to God I will kill you. But please ignore that if you’re not. And I’m proceeding on the basis that it’s you.)
As you have probably worked out, I know people who think a lot of your work, and who think a lot about you. I have thought about you sometimes, but not that often, until relatively recently. Your name cropped up once or twice on a trip I took recently. And your new album, Juliet, Naked—or rather, the response to it that a couple of overenthusiastic fans had—got me thinking more about you, and about Juliet, than I’d ever done before. I have never written anything like that before, either, but the two albums helped me to see some things that I suspect I’ve always thought about art and the people who consume it ravenously, but which weren’t quite in focus. Of course, there are a lot of things I would like to ask you about your missing two decades, but you probably don’t want to be interviewed.
I’m sure that if you put any two random strangers in a room together and got them to talk about their lives, all sorts of patterns and themes and opposites would emerge, to the extent that it would look as though they hadn’t been chosen randomly at all. For example: you have too many children who you don’t know, and it’s making you unhappy. I have none, and I don’t think I will have any, and that’s making me unhappy, more so than I would have believed possible, three or four years ago. So all the time I’ve spent with the man that I’m not having children with is beginning to look like all the time you’ve spent drinking and not making albums. Neither of us will get that time back. And yet, agonizingly, it’s not quite too late either. Do you ever think that? I hope you do.
I am writing this from my office, which is in a small seaside museum in a small town in the northern half of England. I am supposed to be preparing an exhibition about the summer of 1964 in this town, but we don’t have very much to exhibit, apart from some rather unpleasant photos of a dead shark that got washed up on the beach that year. And, as of this morning, an eye that apparently belonged to the shark, once upon a time. A couple of hours ago, a man came into the museum with something, very possibly a shark’s eye, floating in vinegar in a jam jar. The man claimed his brother had cut it out of the shark with a penknife. So far, it’s our prize exhibit. You wouldn’t like to write a concept album about the summer of 1964 in a small English seaside town, would you? Although it still wouldn’t give me much to show.
She stopped typing. If she’d been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn’t a satisfying equivalent with e-mail, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a fuck-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it. What was she doing? She’d just received communication from a recluse, a man who had been hiding from the world for twenty-odd years, and she was telling him about the shark’s eye in a jam jar. Did he really want to know about that? And what about her need to have a child? Why not tell someone else? A friend, say. Or even Duncan, who as far as she knew was unaware of her unhappiness.
And she was flirting, in her own reserved and complicated way. She wanted him to like her. How else to explain the circumlocutions about the Tucker Tour of America, and her relationship with “people who think a lot” of his work? It would have been much simpler to say that the man she lived with, the man she wasn’t having babies with, was a Tucker Crowe obsessive, but she didn’t want Tucker to know that. Why not? Did she think he was going to jump on a plane and impregnate her, unless he found out what kind of person she lived with? Even if they embarked on a pass
ionate affair, she could imagine it would be difficult to persuade Tucker not to take precautions, given the unwieldy and unhappy family he already had. Oh, God! Even the self-directed sarcasm was pathetic. It still involved jokes about contraceptive arrangements with a man she had never met.
But if she didn’t write about shark’s eyes, what was she going to tell him? He’d read everything she had to say about his work, and she couldn’t just bombard him with questions—she sensed that would be a good way of never hearing from him again. She was the wrong person to engage in an e-mail correspondence with Tucker Crowe. She didn’t know enough, she didn’t do enough. She wouldn’t reply.
She was supposed to be composing a delicate letter to Terry Jackson, the town councillor who’d had the stupid idea for the 1964 exhibition in the first place, but she couldn’t concentrate. She reopened the e-mail to Tucker.
Where did Juliet come from? Do you know? Have you read Chronicles, Bob Dylan’s autobiography? There’s a bit in there where someone, a producer maybe, tells him that they need a song like “Masters of War” (was it that one?) to finish the album off—this is in the eighties, when he was recording
But she couldn’t remember the name of the album either, and she couldn’t remember what Dylan said when the producer whose name she couldn’t remember asked Dylan for a song like the song she couldn’t remember, to finish off whatever the album was. She deleted what might have been an interesting line of inquiry. Duncan would know it all, of course, and Duncan should be the one writing to Tucker, except that Tucker wouldn’t want to hear from him. And, of course, she still hadn’t told Duncan about what she’d found in her in-box, and she didn’t want to, either.
She didn’t need to know anything about Dylan, she realized eventually. She was just using a book to make her point for her, the way academics do.