by Nick Hornby
He spent the weekend almost entirely in Gina’s company. They ate good food, watched two movies, went for a walk along the beach, had sex twice, on Saturday night and Sunday night. And everything felt wrong, off, peculiar. Duncan couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living somebody else’s life, a life that was much more enjoyable than his own had been recently, but which didn’t suit him, or fit him, or something. And then, on Monday morning, they cycled into work together, and when it was time for the first classes of the day, Gina kissed him good-bye, on the lips, and squeezed his bottom playfully while colleagues watched, stupefied with excitement. By lunchtime, everybody in the college knew that they were a couple.
eight
What to say? Tucker couldn’t think of anything. Or rather, he couldn’t think of anything that would help in any way. “Let’s give it one more try”? “I’m pretty sure I can change”? “Would you like to go to counseling”? His previous and extensive history of messing up relationships was useful only up to a point: effectively, all it did was make him give in to the inevitable much more quickly. He was like a mechanic who could take one look at an old car and tell its owner, “Well, yes, I could try. But the truth of it is, you’ll be back here again in two months, and you’ll have spent an awful lot of money in the meantime.” He’d attempted to change before; he’d been to marriage counseling, he’d given it another try, and all of this had merely served to attenuate the agony. Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.
It was news to him that Cat had been “kind of seeing somebody,” if only in a “pretty much semi-platonic” way. (He was tempted, in a spirit of devilment, to press for a definition of “semi-platonic,” but he was afraid that Cat might actually try to provide one, and neither of them could cope with the ensuing embarrassment.) Try as he might, however, he couldn’t see it as front-page news, or even a headline in the sports section. She was a young woman and as a consequence didn’t subscribe to the idea that monogamous sexual relationships between men and women were doomed, pointless, miserable, hopeless; she’d get there, he felt, but not for a while yet. Of course she was seeing somebody. Tucker wondered whether he knew the man who was being kind of seen and then wondered whether to ask if he knew him. In the end, he decided against it. He could see what would happen: Cat would tell him that, yes, Tucker had met him before, and Tucker would have to confess that he couldn’t bring him to mind. Unless Cat was kind of seeing a friend of his, the name she provided was unlikely to mean much.
Cat was staring at him. He was stirring his coffee and had been for the last few minutes. Had she asked him a question? He rewound until he heard her voice.
“I think we’ve reached the end of the road,” is what she’d said, which wasn’t actually a question, although it clearly required an acknowledgment of receipt, at least.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. But I think you’re probably right.”
“And that’s all you have to say?”
“I think so.”
Jackson walked into the room, saw Tucker and Cat sitting there expectantly and ran out again.
“I told you,” said Tucker. He tried to keep it to that, but he was actually really angry. Jackson was a smart kid, and it had taken him three seconds to sense the danger in that room: the silence, his parents’ obvious nervousness.
“Go get him,” said Cat.
“You go get him. This was all your idea.” And then, when he could see Cat was going to react, “Telling him was your idea, I mean. Telling him like this. Formally.”
Tucker wasn’t sure how they should have done it, but he knew they’d got it wrong. Why had Cat decided that the den was the right place? None of them ever used it. It was dark and smelled musty. They might just as well have woken him up in the middle of the night and yelled, “Something weird and upsetting is going to happen!” at him through a megaphone. And the formation, Cat and Tucker side by side on a sofa, never happened much in real life, either. They were a head-on couple.
“You know I can’t,” Cat said. “He won’t come unless you do it.”
And this, of course, was a neat illustration of the trouble she faced. Shortly—not today, not here and now, but sometime soon—Jackson would be forced to choose which parent he was going to live with, and really that was no choice at all. Cat, like your average American dad, hadn’t seen much of Jackson since the first six months of his life. She’d been too busy keeping food on the table. Cat knew she wouldn’t be eating breakfast with her son much in the near future, which made her determination to end the relationship even more impressive, Tucker thought. And his security, the reassuring knowledge that the apparently unavoidable split couldn’t come between him and his son, probably sucked a great deal of the desperation out of his efforts to smooth things over. He and Jackson were the couple, and they didn’t need a lawyer.
Jackson was in his room, bashing the hell out of the buttons on a cheap computer game. He didn’t look up when Tucker opened the door.
“You want to come back downstairs?”
“No.”
“It’ll be easier if the three of us talk.”
“I know what you want to talk about.”
“What?”
“ ‘Mommy and Daddy are having problems, so we’re going to split up from each other. But it doesn’t mean we don’t love you, blah, blah, blah.’ There. Now I don’t have to go.”
Jesus, thought Tucker. Six years old and already these kids can parody the language of marital failure.
“Where did you get all that from?”
“Like, five hundred TV shows, plus five hundred kids at school. So that’s a thousand, right?”
“Right. Five hundred plus five hundred makes a thousand.”
Jackson couldn’t prevent a tiny flicker of triumph from crossing his face.
“Okay. You don’t have to come down. But please be kind to your mother.”
“She knows I want to live with you, right?”
“Yeah, she knows, and she’s upset about it.”
“Dad? Do we have to move to another house?”
“I don’t know. Not if you don’t want to.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“So it doesn’t matter that you don’t have any money?”
“No. Not at all.”
Tucker was pleased with the dismissive tone. It suggested that only a kid with no knowledge of the way the world worked would even have brought the subject up.
“Cool.”
Tucker went back downstairs to explain to his wife that she’d have to give up both her child and her house.
Tucker now accepted, without question, that he couldn’t make a marriage, or anything resembling a marriage, work. (He had never been absolutely sure whether he was married to Cat or not. Cat referred to him as her husband, and it always sounded a little off to him, but he’d never been able to ask her directly whether there was any legal basis for her description of his status. She’d be hurt that he couldn’t remember. Certainly there’d been no ceremony since sobriety, but anything could have happened before that.) He was one of those people whose flaws remained consistent whoever he was with. He’d had friends who’d had good second marriages, and they always talked about the relief they’d felt when they realized that the first had gone wrong because of the dynamic, rather than any inherent failing in themselves. But as several women, women who didn’t really resemble one another in any way, had all complained of the same things, he had to accept that dynamics had nothing to do with anything. It was all him. At the beginning, something—infatuation, hope, whatever—helped disguise his real shape. But then the tide went out, and all was revealed, and it was ugly, dark and jagged and unpleasant.
One of the chief complaints was that he never did anything, which Tucker couldn’t help but feel was unfair; not because the complaint was groundless, because it obviously wasn’t, but because, in certain circles, Tucker was one of the
most famous do-nothings in the United States. All of these women had known that he hadn’t done anything since 1986; that, it seemed to him, was his unique selling point, and it was a never-ending source of fascination. But when he’d continued to do nothing, there was outrage. Where was the justice in that? He could see that several of these women, Cat included, had presumed, without ever articulating it or possibly even acknowledging it to themselves, that they’d be able to redeem him, bring him back to life. They’d appointed themselves muses, and he would respond to their love, inspiration and care by making the most beautiful and passionate music of his career. And then, when nothing happened, they were left with an ex-musician who sat around the house drinking, watching game shows and reading Victorian novels in his sweatpants, and they didn’t like it much. Who could blame them? There wasn’t much to like. With Cat it had been different, because he’d sobered up and taken care of Jackson. But he was still a disappointment to her. He was a disappointment to himself, but that didn’t help anyone much.
It wasn’t as if he was a happy slacker, either. He’d never been able to shrug away the loss of his talent, for want of a better word to describe whatever the hell it was he once had. Sure, he’d got used to the idea that there wouldn’t be a new album, or even a new song, anytime soon, but he’d never learned to look on his inability to write as anything other than a temporary state, which meant that he was permanently unsettled, as if he were in an airport lounge waiting for a plane. In the old days, when he flew a lot, he’d never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he’d spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that’s what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he’d known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he’d have made different travel arrangements, but instead he’d sat there, sighing and fidgeting and, more often than was ever really acceptable, snapping at his traveling companions.
“What are you going to do?” they asked, all the Cats and Nats and other wives and lovers and mothers of his children whose names sometimes blurred regrettably together. And he always told them what he thought they should want to hear. “I’m gonna look for a job,” he said, or, “I’m retraining as an accountant.” And they’d sigh and roll their eyes, which for him merely underlined the impossibility of his situation: how else to answer, other than to say he was going to look for a job, do something else, stop being a former something? A few months back, he’d called Cat on the eye-rolling, asked her for some suggestions. After some deliberation, she announced that she thought he should be a singer-songwriter, but one who actually sang and wrote songs. She hadn’t articulated the idea exactly in those terms, of course, but that was pretty much what it amounted to. He’d laughed a lot. She’d gotten angry. One more finger had been prised off the rope they were clinging to.
Up until a couple of years ago, Tucker’s best and only friend in the neighborhood had been known as Farmer John, after the old Premiers song, because his name was John and he lived on a farm. Then something strange happened, and one of the eventual consequences was that Farmer John became known affectionately to his nearest and dearest as Fucker. (This select group included, to Cat’s mortification and Tucker’s childish delight, Jackson.) The strange thing that happened was this: sometime in 2003, one of the half-crazed fans who refer to themselves as Crowologists drove up the dirt track that led to Farmer John’s farm, apparently in the belief that Tucker lived there. While John was walking down to the stranger’s car to talk to him, the driver’s door opened, the fan emerged and he started frantically taking pictures of John with a fancy-looking camera. Tucker had never really learned how John earned a living; he was no farmer, that was for sure. And every time anyone asked him, he was impressively and sometimes even aggressively evasive. The general presumption was that there was some harmless, low-level illegal activity involved somewhere, which was probably why John went for the photographer, who kept snapping pictures even as he got into the car to make his escape. Within days, the scariest of these photos (and John, a grizzled man with long, matted gray hair, never looked anything less than intimidating anyway) was being passed from website to website. Neil Ritchie, the photographer, became almost famous, the man who’d stolen the first shot of Tucker Crowe in over fifteen years. It was still, even now, the first image you saw if you went to find a picture of Tucker on the Internet.
At first, Tucker was baffled by the easy passage the photo had through cyberspace. Nobody ever asked how a man who looked like that in 1986 could look like this in 2003. Hair can grow long and get dirty and go gray, sure. But could noses change shape that easily? Could eyes start creeping closer together? Could mouths get wider, lips thinner? But then, the photo was never used anywhere that it was likely to get fact-checked; Tucker had long since drifted away from the mainstream media and into the backwaters where all the screwballs and conspiracy theorists did their fishing. And anyway, to talk about plausibility was to miss the point. The few people who hadn’t forgotten him, people who had turned his songs into hymns that contained profoundly helpful guidance on just about everything, wanted him to look like Farmer John. Tucker was a genius, according to these people, and he’d gone mad, and that’s what mad geniuses looked like. And John’s anger was perfect, too. Neil Ritchie almost certainly had other shots of John ambling toward his car, but they just didn’t fit with the idea of someone who was clearly so obsessive about his privacy. The moment John went nuts was the moment he turned into Tucker Crowe, damaged recluse. Tucker, meanwhile, the real one, the one who drove Jackson to Little League games, kept his silver hair neatly trimmed, wore moderately fashionable rimless spectacles and shaved every day. He felt like Fucker on the inside, which was why he’d always made sure he looked like somebody you’d be happy to buy insurance from.
Anyway, Farmer John became known to Tucker and Cat (and Jackson) and a few other friends and neighbors as Fake Tucker, and Fake Tucker became, inevitably, Fucker. And when Tucker needed to get out of the house and out into the world, it was Fucker he took with him—not because the confusion was helpful in any way, but because he didn’t really know any other men anymore. It was always slightly complicated, though, a night out with The Fuck. Tucker couldn’t drink, and Fucker couldn’t not drink, and though Tucker could watch someone sipping liquor slowly and in moderation, it didn’t do him much good to watch somebody get slammed. So the deal was this: Fucker had to be given an hour’s notice, and in that hour he’d work his way through several fingers of Bushmills and get a glow on. By the time Tucker came to pick him up he’d only need a small top-up, and occasionally he’d be ready for a mug of coffee.
Fucker wanted to listen to a band that was playing in a local bar.
“Why?”
“Because it might be fun.”
“Oh, man,” said Tucker. “Do we have to?”
“You don’t drink, you don’t listen to music . . . Why do you even ask me to go out at night? How about this? You want to see me, we’ll meet for breakfast. Except you probably disapprove of eggs. Or you used to snort them, back in the eighties, so you can’t be in the same room as them now.”
“I need to talk, I think.”
“Why? You screwed it all up with Cat?”
“Yep.”
“Wow. Who could have seen that coming?”
Tucker actually valued John’s blunt sarcasm. It felt bracing, like one of those sponges Cat liked that were supposed to remove dead skin.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should go see a band. That way I don’t have to listen to you.”
“I’ve said all I have to say. Apart from you’re an idiot. How’s Jackson?”
“He’s okay. He’s not amazed, either, really. He just wanted to make sure that he could be with me and stay in the house.”
“And is that possible?”
“Apparently. Cat’s going to look for an apartment in town, somewhere Jackson can sleep when he wan
ts to.”
“So you stole Cat’s house from her?”
“For now.”
“What’s going to change?”
“Either I start earning some money, or Jackson turns eighteen and goes to college.”
“You taking bets on what happens first?”
“Maybe Juliet, Naked will make me some money.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot you had a new album out. There must be a million people who want to hear crappy versions of songs they forgot about years ago.”
Tucker laughed. John had never heard his work before he moved into the neighborhood, but one night, drunk, he’d told Tucker that he’d played Juliet incessantly when he’d split with his wife. He’d been dismissive of Naked, for pretty much the same reasons as that English girl, although he was less eloquent in his expression of them.