Juliet, Naked

by Nick Hornby

  He didn’t want to listen to Juliet, Naked straightaway. He was still too angry, both with Annie and, more obscurely, with the album itself, which seemed to belong to her more than him. So he was grateful for the time it took to name the tracks (he took a gamble on the track listing being the same on Naked, as he was already learning to call it, as it was on the original album—the long last song, six minutes even in its demo form, suggested that it would be), and then for his machine to inhale the music into itself. What had she been thinking of? He wanted to find a benign interpretation for her behavior, but there just wasn’t one. It was malevolence, pure and simple. Why did she hate him so much, all of a sudden? What had he done?

  He plugged his iPod in, transferred the album with a still-miraculous click of the finger and flick of the wrist, picked his jacket up from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and went out.

  He went down to the seashore. He’d grown up in the London suburbs, and still couldn’t get used to the idea that the sea was five minutes’ walk away. It wasn’t much of a sea, of course, if what you wanted was a sea that contained even the faintest hint of blue or green; their sea seemed committed to a resourceful range of charcoal gray blacks, with the occasional suggestion of muddy brown. The weather conditions were perfect for his needs, though. The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull, and the vacationers who still, inexplicably, chose to come here when they could fly to the Mediterranean for thirty quid all looked as though they’d been bereaved that morning. Fallacies really never got more pathetic than this. He got himself a cup of takeout instant coffee from the kebab stand by the pier and sat down on a bench overlooking the ocean. He was ready.

  Forty-one minutes later, he was scrabbling around in his pockets for something he could use as a handkerchief when a middle-aged woman came over and touched him on the arm.

  “Do you need someone to talk to?” she said gently.

  “Oh. Thank you. No, no, I’m fine.”

  He touched his face—he’d been crying harder than he’d realized.

  “You sure? You don’t look fine.”

  “No, really. I’ve just . . . I’ve just had a very intense emotional experience.” He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. “On here.”

  “You’re crying about music?”

  The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert.

  “Well,” said Duncan, “I’m not crying about it. I’m not sure that’s the right preposition.”

  She shook her head and walked off.

  He listened from beginning to end twice more while sitting on the bench, and then started to walk home during the third play. One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it. What did it matter that Annie had heard the album before he’d had his chance? Imagine all the people who’d heard the original album before he’d discovered it! Imagine all the people who’d seen Taxi Driver before him, come to that! Did that deaden its impact? Did it make it less his? He wanted to go home, hug her and talk about a morning that he would never forget. He wanted to hear what she had to say, too. He valued her insights into Crowe’s work—she could be surprisingly shrewd, sometimes, given her unwillingness to immerse herself in the subject, and he wanted to hear whether she’d noticed the same things that he’d picked up: the lack of chorus in “The Twentieth Call of the Day,” for example, which gave the song a relentlessness and a self-loathing that you couldn’t really detect in its “finished” form. (He’d play this version to anyone who dared to trot out that tired old line about Crowe being the poor man’s Dylan. “The Twentieth Call of the Day,” in Duncan’s opinion, was “Positively Fourth Street,” but it had more texture and heft. And Tucker could sing.) And who’d have thought that “And You Are?” could sound so ominous? On Juliet, it was a song about two people making a connection straightaway—in other words, it was a simple (but very pretty) love song, a sunny day before the psychic storms started rolling in from the sea. But on Juliet, Naked, it was as if the lovers were standing in a little pool of sunlight that was becoming smaller even while they were talking for the first time. They could see the thunder and the rain already, and it made the album more complete, somehow, more coherent. It was a proper tragedy, with the doom about to befall them implied from the very beginning. The flat restraint of “You and Your Perfect Life,” meanwhile, gave the song a staggering power that was muffled by the histrionics of the rock ’n’ roll version.

  Annie was still in the kitchen when he got home, reading the Guardian at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. He went up behind her and hugged her, probably for longer than she was comfortable being hugged.

  “What’s that for?” she said, with moderate but determined affection. “I thought you were annoyed with me.”

  “I’m sorry. Stupid. Petty. What does it matter who hears it first?”

  “I know. I should have warned you it was a bit on the dreary side. But I thought that would make you even crosser.”

  He felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach. He let go of her, took a breath, waited for the impact to fade a little before he spoke again.

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “Well, it was all right. Mildly interesting, if you’ve heard the other one. I don’t suppose I’ll play it again. What did you think?”

  “I think it’s a masterpiece. I think it blows the other one out of the water. And as the other one is my favorite album of all time . . .”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “ ‘Dreary’! My God! What else is dreary, according to you? King Lear? The Waste Land?”

  “Don’t do that, Duncan. You always lose your powers of reason when you get angry.”

  “That’s anger for you.”

  “No, but . . . We’re not having an argument. We’re trying to discuss, you know, a work of art.”

  “Not according to you. According to you we’re trying to discuss a piece of shit.”

  “There you go. You think it’s King Lear, I think it’s a piece of shit . . . Get a grip, Duncan. I love the other one. I suspect most people will feel the same way.”

  “Oh, most people. We all know what most people think about everything. The wisdom of fucking crowds. Jesus. Most people would rather buy an album made by a dancing midget from a reality TV show.”

  “Duncan Thomson, the great populist.”

  “I’m just . . . I’m so disappointed in you, Annie. I thought you were better than that.”

  “Ah, yes. That’s the next step. It becomes a moral failing on my part. A character weakness.”

  “But I’m sorry to say that’s how it is. If you can’t hear anything in this . . .”

  “What? Please. Tell me. I’d love to know what that would say about me.”

  “The usual stuff.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Which is, I don’t know. You’re a moron.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t say you were a moron. I said you were a moron if you can’t hear anything in this.”

  “I can’t.”

  He left the house again, then, and went back to the bench overlooking the sea with his iPod.

  Another hour or so went by before he even thought about the website. He’d be the first to write about the album, if he were quick. Better than that: he’d be the first to alert the Crowe community to its existence, even! He’d listened to Juliet, Naked four times, and he had already thought of a great deal he wanted to say about it; in any case, to wait any longer would be to risk his advantage. He didn’t think Paul Hill would have contacted anyone else from the message boards yet, but copies would have been pushed through all sorts of mailboxes this morning. He had to go home, however much hostility he felt toward Annie.

  He managed to avoid her anyway. She was on the phone in the kitchen, probably to her mother. (And wh
o wanted to speak to a member of the family, immediately on return from holiday? Didn’t that prove something? What, he wasn’t precisely sure. But it seemed to him that anyone still so connected to family—to childhood, essentially—was hardly going to be able to respond to the kind of stark adult truths spread generously through the ten songs on Juliet, Naked. She’d get it one day, maybe, but clearly not for a few years yet.)

  Their shared office was on the half landing. The real estate agent who sold them the house was inexplicably convinced that they would one day use the tiny room as a nursery, before deciding to move out of town and buy a house with a garden. They would then sell this house to another couple who would, in time, do the same thing. Duncan had wondered whether their childlessness was a direct response to the depressing predictability of it all— whether the real estate agent had, inadvertently but effectively, made their minds up for them.

  It was the opposite of a nursery now. It contained two laptops, placed side by side on a workbench, two chairs, a machine that converted vinyl into MP3s and about two thousand CDs, including bootlegs of every single concert Tucker Crowe had performed between 1982 and 1986, with the exception of the September 1984 show at KB in Malmö, Sweden, which, bizarrely, nobody seems to have taped—a constant thorn in the side of all serious students, given that this, according to a normally reliable Swedish source, was the night Crowe chose to do a never-to-be-repeated cover version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” He cleared away the bank statements and letters that Annie had opened and placed by his computer for his attention, opened a document and began to type. He produced three thousand words in just under two hours and posted it on the website shortly after five o’clock that afternoon. By ten o’clock that night, there were 163 comments, from fans in eleven different countries.

  The next day, he would see that he’d overcooked it a little. “Juliet, Naked means that everything else Tucker Crowe recorded is suddenly a little paler, a little too slick, a little too digested . . . And if it does that to Crowe’s work, imagine what it does to everyone else’s.” He hadn’t wanted to get into arguments about the relative merits of James Brown, or the Stones, or Frank Sinatra. He’d meant Crowe’s singer-songwriter peers, of course, but the literal-minded hadn’t wanted to take it that way. “This version of ‘You and Your Perfect Life’ makes the one you’re familiar with sound like something off a Westlife album . . .” If he’d waited, he’d have found that the “Dressed” version (inevitably, Juliet came to be known as Dressed, for ease of distinction) reasserted its superiority quite comfortably, after its initial shock. And he wished he hadn’t mentioned Westlife at all, seeing as some crazed Westlife fan would come across the reference and spend a day posting obscene messages on the message boards.

  In his naïveté, he hadn’t really expected anger. But then he imagined himself checking the website idly for some tidbit of gossip—news of an interview with the guy who did the cover art for the EP, say—and discovering there was a whole new album out there that he hadn’t heard. It would have been like turning on the TV for the local weather forecast, only to find that the sky was falling in. He wouldn’t have been happy, and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to read some other bastard’s smug review. He would have hated the reviewer, certainly, and he would probably have decided there and then that the album was no good. He began to worry that his ecstatic praise might have done Naked a disservice: now nobody—none of the real fans, anyway, and it was difficult to imagine that many other people would bother with it—would be able to listen to it without prejudice. Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.

  The responses that meant the most to him came via e-mail, from the Crowologists he knew well. Ed West’s e-mail said, simply, “Fuck me. Gimme. Now.” Geoff Old-field’s said (with unnecessary cruelty, Duncan thought), “That, my friend, was your moment in the sun. Nothing quite as good will ever happen to you again.” John Tay lor went for a quote, from “The Better Man”: “Luck is a disease / I don’t want it near me.” He created a mailing list and started sending them all the tracks, one by one. Tomorrow morning, a handful of middle-aged men would be regretting that they had gone to bed much too late.

  three

  Annie had thought she might be stuck teaching forever, and she’d hated the job so much that, even now, simply arriving at the museum ten or fifteen minutes late made her happy. For a teacher, those fifteen minutes would have represented a humiliating disaster, involving riots, reprimands and disapproving colleagues, but nobody cared whether she arrived three minutes or thirty minutes before a small and infrequently visited museum was due to open. (The truth was that nobody really cared if she arrived three or thirty minutes after it was supposed to have opened, either.) Wandering out for a mid-morning takeout coffee was a frequent and rather pitiful daydream in her old job; now she made sure she did it every day, whether she needed the caffeine or not. Okay, there were some things she missed: that feeling you got when a lesson was going well, when it was all bright eyes and concentration so thick it felt almost humid, something that might cling to your clothes; and sometimes she could do with some of the energy and optimism and life that you could find in any child, no matter how apparently surly and damaged. But most of the time, she was happy still to have made it under the barbed wire that surrounded secondary education and out into the world.

  She worked on her own, for great chunks of the day, mostly trying to raise funds, although this was beginning to feel like an increasingly pointless task: nobody, it seemed, had the spare cash for an ailing seaside museum anymore, and possibly never would again. Occasionally, she had to speak to visiting parties of local schoolchildren, which was why she’d been given the chance to escape from the classroom. There was always a volunteer at the front desk, usually Vi or Margaret or Joyce or one of the other old ladies whose aching need to show that they could be useful broke Annie’s heart, when she bothered to think about them at all. And when there was a special exhibition being planned, then she worked with Ros, a freelance curator who also taught history at Duncan’s college. (Duncan, of course, had never been able to bring himself to talk to her, in case he “got stuck” with her during one of his visits to the staff room.) Ros and Annie were attempting to prepare an exhibition at the moment, a photographic record of the heat-wave summer of 1964, when the old town square was redeveloped, the Stones played the ABC cinema up the road and a twenty-five-foot shark had been washed up on the beach. They had asked for contributions from residents, and they had advertised on all the relevant local- and social-history websites they could think of, but so far they had received only two snapshots—one of the shark itself, which had clearly died of some kind of fungal condition much too gruesome for an exhibition intended to celebrate a golden summer, and one of four friends—coworkers?—having fun on the boardwalk.

  This photograph had arrived through the mail a couple of days after they’d posted their Internet ads, and she couldn’t believe how perfect it was. The two men were in suspenders and shirtsleeves, and the two women were in floral sundresses; the teeth were bad, the faces were lined, the hair was Brylcreemed, and they looked as if they had never had so much fun in their lives. That’s what she said to Ros, when she saw it—“Look at them! It’s like this is the best day out they’ve ever had!” And she laughed, so convinced was she that their enjoyment was due to a happy trick of the camera, or alcohol, or a dirty joke, anything but the day out and the surroundings. And Ros said simply, “Well. That’s almost certainly true.”

  Annie, who was about to have a moderately good time on a three-week tour of the United States—pleasant, but not world-shaking, those mountains in Montana—felt humbled. In 1964, five years before she was born, it was still possible for English people to feel ecstatic about a day off in a northerly seaside town. She looked at them again and wondered what they did, how much money they had in their pockets at that precise second, how long their holidays were, how long their liv
es were. Annie had never been rich. But she’d been to every European country she wanted to see, to the United States, even to Australia. How, she wondered, had we got to here from there, to this from that? She suddenly saw the point of the exhibition that she’d conceived and planned with no real enthusiasm or sense of purpose. More than that, she suddenly saw the point of the town she lived in, how much it must have meant to people that she and everyone else she knew were losing the capacity to imagine. She always took her job seriously, but she was determined to find a way of making visitors to the museum feel what she felt.

  And then, after the dead shark offering, the photos just dried up. She had already given up on 1964, although she hadn’t told Ros that yet, and had been trying to think of a way of broadening the hunt without making the exhibition unfocused and sloppy. Being away for three weeks had restored her hope, not least because she had eighteen days’ worth of mail to sort through.