Juliet, Naked

by Nick Hornby

  He phoned Natalie as soon as Cat and Jackson had left.

  “When do you think you’ll be coming to see her?” said Natalie.

  “Oh,” said Tucker, and this time the word was airier. “As soon as I can get things organized here.”

  “But you are coming? Lizzie didn’t think you’d make the effort.”

  “Yeah, I guessed she’d think that. I know her better than she suspects. And she doesn’t know me at all.”

  “She’s very angry with you right now.”

  “Well, I guess this sort of thing stirs up all sorts of inner shit.”

  “I think you have to get used to it, as your children start to have children. It makes them see how absolutely hopeless you were.”

  “Great, I’m looking forward to it.”

  It was only much later, after he’d put Jackson to bed, that he realized he didn’t have the money to go to London. He didn’t have the money to go to New York City, was the truth of it; Cat was helping him out for the time being. What would come after that was a mystery, although not one he was particularly anxious to solve. Nobody would let Jackson starve, and that was the only thing that mattered. He called Natalie back and told her he’d been unable to make child-care arrangements.

  “His mother won’t look after him? Gosh.”

  That “gosh”—so English, so poisonous.

  “Of course she would, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “But she’s away. On business.”

  “I thought she did things with yogurt.”

  “Why can’t yogurt involve travel?”

  “Wouldn’t it go off?”

  At least he could still feel the open, festering exit wound that Natalie had left, so that was something. That combination of bitchiness and stupidity was as hard to bear now as it had been back then.

  “So bring him. I’m sure Lizzie would like to see him. She seemed quite taken with him.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it’s the school year, and . . .”

  “Lizzie said you and Cat were breaking up.”

  “That’s something that . . . that seems to have happened, yes.”

  “So you can’t afford to fly to London.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “So you can afford to fly to London.”

  “If, you know, push came to shove.”

  “That’s exactly where push has come.”

  “I can’t afford to fly to London, no. There is a little cash-flow problem at the moment.”

  “We’ll pay.”

  “No, I can’t . . .”

  “Tucker. Please.”

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  Having no money wasn’t so bad, really, as long as he never did anything other than go for coffee with Fucker once a month or so. Adults, however, especially adults with several children, sometimes found themselves in a position where they needed access to a fund more bountiful than the bedroom change jar that departing ex-spouses had generously left behind. Natalie’s husband did something . . . Actually, Tucker had no real idea what he did. He could remember that it was something he disapproved of, or had belittled, anyway, so he probably did something that involved going to meetings, possibly while wearing a suit. Was he an agent of some kind? Movies? It was coming back to him now. Simon (?) headed up the London branch of some unspeakable Hollywood agency. Maybe. He was a no-talent leech, anyway, Tucker was sure about that. It was easy to feel superior to these people while you were the talent. But when you stopped being the talent, then they were just grown-up people with a job, and you were the hopeless case who was going to have to accept charity from them.

  “Do you know people in London?” said Natalie. “Is there somewhere you can stay?”

  “Yeah,” said Tucker. “I mean, she’s not right in the center, but we can come in on the train or whatever.”

  “Where is ‘she’?” Tucker was pretty sure there were quote marks around the pronoun. It would be entirely typical of Natalie to put them there.

  “It’s a place called Gooleness. On the coast.”

  Natalie shrieked into the phone. “Gooleness! How on earth do you know anyone who lives in Gooleness?”

  “Long story.”

  “It’s hundreds of miles outside London. You can’t possibly stay there. Mark and I will find you somewhere.”

  Mark, then, not Simon. And on further reflection, Mark might not, after all, be a no-talent leech. That might well be somebody else’s husband.

  “Really? I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

  “Lizzie’s flat is empty, for a start. She and Zak are going to stay with us for a little while when she gets out.”

  Was Zak her boyfriend? Had he heard that name before? The trouble was, there were too many tangential connections. Too many kids, too many stepfathers, too many half brothers and half sisters. He couldn’t name half the people related to his children, he realized. Natalie had other kids, for example, but who the hell knew their names? Cat did, that’s who.

  “And do you still want to bring Jackson with you? Seeing as your child-care problems were completely bogus?”

  “I guess not, no.”

  So he was off to London on his own.

  “When will we get there?”

  “Ten minutes. But Jackson, you understand that we’re ten minutes from the airport. And then we have to wait for the plane. And then we wait for the plane to take off. And then we fly for seven hours. And then we wait for our bags. And then we wait for a bus. And then it’s maybe another hour from the airport to Lizzie’s apartment. If you don’t think that sounds like much fun, then it’s not too late. I could take you to your mother’s, and . . .”

  “It sounds like fun.”

  “All that sitting around waiting sounds like fun.”

  “Yep.”

  It hadn’t gone well, telling Jackson he was going to see Lizzie without him, and there had been many, many tears, followed by total capitulation. There had been times in his life when he would have paid for tears like these to be shed on his behalf: every single one of his other children had cried unstoppably when a mother had attempted to leave them in his care for a day or an afternoon or even for twenty minutes while she took a bath, and he’d felt wretched and useless every time. His own kids had been afraid of him when they were young. Now he had a child who needed him and loved him and felt anxious when he went out (because “out” was all it had ever been with Jackson, never “away”), and Tucker felt unmanned by it. Fathers weren’t supposed to engender this level of dependency. They’re supposed to miss bedtimes because of business trips and concert tours.

  So he’d had to call Natalie and ask her to fork out money for an extra ticket, which made him feel even more inadequate than he had the first time. It was one thing not being able to afford to pay for himself, but fathers were supposed to be providers, as well as bedtime-missers. This father, however, was forced to depend on the largesse of the ex-wife before last and her leech of a husband.

  They checked in, bought a small mountain of candy and a couple of dozen comic books. Tucker was feeling awful, anxious and sweaty; when he took Jackson for a pee he looked in a mirror and was alarmed by the complete absence of color from his face. Unless white could be counted as a color, which it probably could be, when it was this intense. He was almost certainly about to be laid low by flu, or pneumonia, or something, and he cursed his timing: in twenty-four hours’ time, he’d be too sick to travel. He could have stayed home without losing face, without being the worst father in the world.

  They waited in line to go through security, a process that could have been expressly designed to feed Jackson’s morbidity. Tucker told him that they were looking for guns.

  “Guns?”

  “Sometimes bad guys take guns on planes because they want to rob rich people. But we’re not rich, so they won’t come near us.”

  “How will they know we’re not rich?”<
br />
  “Rich people wear stupid watches and smell nice. We’re not wearing watches, and we smell bad.”

  “But why do we have to take our shoes off?”

  “You can fit small guns in shoes. You’d have to walk funny, but you could do it.”

  An old English lady waiting in front of them turned around.

  “It’s not guns they’re looking for, young man. It’s bombs. I’m surprised Daddy hasn’t heard of the Shoe Bomber. He was English, you know. I mean, Muslim, of course. But English.”

  Daddy has heard of the Shoe Bomber, thank you very much, you eavesdropping old crone, Tucker wanted to say. Now turn around and shut the fuck up.

  “Shoe Bomber?” said Jackson.

  Tucker could see right away that, if they ever got as far as London, they wouldn’t be coming back. Not by plane, anyway. Mark would be coughing up the dough for a couple of tickets on a cruise ship, unless Jackson knew anything about the Titanic. In which case, Mark would be paying for an exclusive English boarding-school education, and Jackson would have to grow up with one of those tony boarding-school accents.

  “Yes. He tried to blow up the plane by putting explosives in his shoes. Can you imagine? You wouldn’t need very much, I suppose. Just enough to blow a small hole in the plane. And then fssssssk! We’d all get sucked out and dropped into the middle of the sea.”

  Jackson looked up at Tucker. Tucker made a face intended to indicate that the woman was gaga.

  “I’m more and more thankful that my life is coming to its end,” said the old lady. “I lived through a world war, but I’ve got a feeling that you’re going to be seeing a lot worse than the Blitz when you grow up.”

  They stepped through the scanner and waved a cheery good-bye to the woman. And then Tucker began to tell the ingenious and preposterous lies that would enable them both to board the aircraft. He’d even had to tell Jackson that the old lady was entirely mistaken about the imminence of her own death, let alone all the other deaths she’d alluded to.

  Tucker couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a plane. The day he’d quit music, he had flown, drunk and angry and remorseful and self-loathing, from Minneapolis to New York, and he’d hit on a stewardess, and tried to hit a woman who’d tried to stop him from hitting on the stewardess, so that particular flight tended to be the one that stayed in his mind. He’d been pretty sure at the time that the stewardess was going to be the answer to all his problems. His feeling was that they wouldn’t stay together long, but probably there’d be lots of therapeutic fucking. And because she was a stewardess, she’d have to travel a lot, and in her absences he would do some writing, maybe go into a studio near where she lived, rebuild his career. These are all the things she didn’t understand when he made his play. She thought he was just grabbing her ass, but there was more to it than that, as he’d tried to explain, tearfully, and at great volume. He loved her.

  Jesus. He was lucky she’d been a reasonable human being. He could have found himself in front of a New Jersey judge. Instead he’d met someone else, and then someone else again, had kids . . . Maybe his hunch about the stewardess had been right. He wished he’d managed to convince her of their viability as a couple, although he couldn’t wish Jackson away.

  He looked down at the seat next to him. The boy was tucked under a blanket with his headphones on and was watching his fifth straight episode of SpongeBob. He was happy. Tucker had warned him that he might not like the movie they were showing on the plane, because that was what happened the last time Tucker flew across the Atlantic: they showed a bad movie you didn’t want to watch. Now they showed every bad movie ever made. Jackson had actually giggled when he realized, long before his father had worked out the sheer abundance of the entertainment system, the amount of junk he could consume; he now felt that the flight was a little on the short side. Tucker had given up on the romantic comedy he’d started watching. As far as he could figure out, the problem between the central couple, the thing that was keeping them from being together, was that she had a cat and he had a dog, and the cat and dog fought like cats and dogs, which made the couple, through some mysterious contagion that the film couldn’t properly explain, fight like cats and dogs, too. Tucker got the feeling that they’d be able to solve their problems before the two hours were up. He wasn’t worried for them. He was now failing to read Barnaby Rudge. Dickens seemed wrong among all these little screens and bleeping lights and miniature cans of soda.

  He was still feeling wretched, and he couldn’t shake off a sense of impending catastrophe, which he seemed to recall was a textbook indicator of something-or-other. Jackson had turned him into a hypochondriac—his son’s conviction that just about any cough or unexplained ache was cancer, or old age, anyway, wasn’t good for either of them—but he was pretty sure that the sweating, the arrhythmia and the foreboding were a result of his sudden and unexpected emergence from hiding. He knew the people who cared about him out there in the conjectural world of cyberspace described him as a recluse, but he’d never thought of himself that way. He went to shops and bars and Little League games, so it wasn’t as if he were Salinger. He just didn’t make music or talk to earnest young magazine journalists, and most people didn’t do either of those things. But in the airport he’d noticed himself walking around with his eyes and mouth wide open, so maybe he was a little bit more Kaspar Hauser than he’d thought. And planes were unnervingly different, and they were on their way to a big city, to hang out with an ex-wife and daughter who hated him . . . It was a miracle that his heart was able to keep any time at all, so 7/4, if that’s what it was, seemed perfectly acceptable. He put his book down and fell into a sickly, clammy doze.

  Natalie had sent a car to pick them up. They were taken to Lizzie’s apartment somewhere in Notting Hill, and the driver waited for them while they dumped their bags and changed into clean underwear. Tucker was feeling dizzy and nauseous by now, as well as spooked, and though he wanted to rest, he definitely didn’t want to puke all over Lizzie’s white rugs. Lizzie had been transferred to a regular hospital—a regular swanky hospital, anyway—because of complications, so if he had to puke, he’d try and wait until he got there.

  He remembered what it was that a feeling of impending catastrophe typically foreshadowed just as he was in the middle of pushing open the stupidly heavy glass door of the swanky hospital. Somebody, possibly a robot King Kong, put a pair of giant steel arms around his chest and started squeezing. Savage electric pain shot down his arm and up his neck, and he tried not to look at Jackson’s pale and frightened face. He wanted to apologize—not for feeling sick, but for all the lies he’d told. “I’m sorry, son,” he wanted to say. “That stuff about nobody dying ever . . . It wasn’t true. People die all the time. Get over it.”

  He walked as steadily and as coolly as he could to the reception desk.

  “Can I help you?” said the woman. He could see his reflection in her glasses. He tried to look beyond the lenses into her eyes.

  “I hope so. I’m pretty sure I’m having a heart attack.”

  There are all sorts of causes of ripples of movement across continents: floods and famine, revolution, large international sports events. In this case, however, the trigger was the sudden illness of one middle-aged man. Telephones rang in houses and apartments across the U.S. and Europe, and they were answered by attractive, still-slender women in their thirties and forties and early fifties. Hands were clapped to mouths, more phone calls were made, reassurances were given by careful soft voices. Flights were booked, passports were found, arrangements were canceled. The wives and children of Tucker Crowe were on their way to see him.

  It was all Lizzie’s idea. In real life, she was a sentimental young woman, frequently moved to tears by pets and children and romantic comedies; but life with Tucker wasn’t real life, not least because there was so little of it, and the time she had with him always became overwhelmed by the time she had never had. How could it not? It wasn’t a fair fight. Just the sight and s
ound of him made her shrill and resentful: she hated the way her voice rose by an octave when they talked. But when she went to see him in his hospital room, he was asleep, sedated and helpless, and she didn’t feel angry anymore. She could be a dutiful and loving daughter, as long as he just lay there. When he awoke, she was determined to talk to him in the same voice she used for the people she loved.

  She’d been told that he wouldn’t die, but that wasn’t the point: they had to seize the moment. If she felt more goodwill toward Tucker than she had ever managed to muster before, then surely everyone else was feeling it, too? And she couldn’t help believing that some kind of gathering, some attempt to connect a previously incoherent family, is what he would want. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know him at all.

  June 12, 1986, Minneapolis

  In the early days of his career, Tucker had collected stories of musicians’ bad behavior as if they were baseball cards. They fascinated him not because he wanted to emulate the musicians concerned, but because he was a moralist, and the stories were so unambiguously appalling that they served as a useful piloting guide: in his line of work, it didn’t take much to gain a reputation as a decent human being. As long as you didn’t hurl a girl out of a window when you’d finished with her, people thought you were Gandhi. He’d even got into fights a couple of times, in a pompous attempt to protect somebody’s honor—a girl, a roadie, a motel receptionist. Once, when he’d punched the obnoxious bassist of an indie-rock band that ended up filling stadiums, he was asked who’d died and made him fucking king. The question was rhetorical, of course, but he’d ended up thinking about it. Why couldn’t he let these young men behave like young men? Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented, so what did he think he was going to achieve by pushing a couple around when they’d had a drink? For a while, he blamed the kind of novels he read, and he blamed the decency of his parents, and he blamed his brother, who had managed to kill himself by driving into a wall when he was drunk. Books and parents and a tragic fuckup brother, he felt, had given him a solid ethical grounding. He could see now that he’d always been heading for a fall. It turned out that he was the kind of moralist who abhorred the behavior of others because he was so scared of his own weakness; the more he whipped himself into a frenzy of disapproval, the harder it would be to cave in without losing face. He was certainly right to be afraid. When he met Julie Beatty, he discovered that there wasn’t very much to him aside from weakness.