by Nick Hornby
“Oh. Okay.”
They both walked to the door, peered right and then left, and beckoned their mother toward them.
“He wants you to, though.” And then, after a pause long enough to accommodate dissent, “I don’t know why.”
“She doesn’t really want to come in,” said Cooper.
“But she’s coming in,” said Jesse.
“Okay.”
She didn’t come in.
“So where is she?”
They had readopted their previous positions, standing stiffly side by side, staring straight ahead. Maybe when they’d turned their iPods off they’d somehow turned themselves off, too. They were in standby mode.
“Maybe the restroom?” said Cooper.
“Yeah, I think so,” said Jesse. “The restroom. And maybe there was someone in there already?”
“Oh,” said Tucker. “Sure.”
Tucker suddenly became wearied by the pointlessness of the exercise that Lizzie had planned. These kids had flown thousands of miles to stand in a hospital room and stare at a man they no longer knew very well at all; this debate about whether their mother had gone to the bathroom or not was the most animated conversation the three of them had managed so far. (Tucker would miss it when it was over, but to extend it any further would probably entail scatological detail that he wouldn’t feel comfortable with, although the boys might enjoy it.) And then, in a moment, the ambient room temperature would become further chilled by the arrival of an ex-wife—not one he was particularly afraid of, nor one that bore him a great deal of ill will, as far as he knew, but not a person he’d had any real desire to see again during the time remaining to him on the planet. And then, sometime in the next hour or two, this ex-wife would bump into another one, when Nat came back with Jackson. And these two boys would stare at a half sister they’d never seen before and mumble at her, and . . . Jesus. There had been a part of him that was half joking when he’d asked English Annie to get him out of here, but that part was gone now. There was nothing funny about this.
The door opened, and Carrie peered around it cautiously.
“This is us,” said Tucker cheerily. “Come on in.”
Carrie took a few steps into the room, stopped and stared at him.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Tucker.
“Sorry. I just meant . . .”
“It’s okay,” said Tucker. “I got a lot older, plus the light in here isn’t so flattering, plus I had a heart attack. I accept all of these things with equanimity.”
“No, no,” said Carrie. “I just meant, I guess, Jesus, it’s been a while since I saw you.”
“Okay,” said Tucker. “Let’s leave it at that.”
Carrie, of course, looked good, healthy and sleek. She’d put on weight, but she’d been too skinny when he’d left her anyway, due to the misery he’d inflicted on her, so the few extra pounds indicated only psychic health.
“How’ve you been?” she said.
“Today and yesterday, not so bad. The day before, not great. The last few years, mostly not so bad.”
“I heard you and Cat split.”
“Yeah. I managed to mess up another one.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll bet.”
“No, really. I don’t suppose we have a whole lot in common, but we all worry about you. It’s better for us if you’re in a relationship.”
“You’re all in some sort of recovery group together?”
“No, but . . . You’re the father of our children. We need you to be okay.”
Carrie’s choice of words allowed him to imagine that he was some kind of polygamist in an isolated religious community, that Carrie was here as the elected representative of the wives. It was certainly hard to think of himself as a single man. He tried, for a moment. Hey! I’m single! I have no ties to anyone! I can do what I want! Nope. Wasn’t working, for some reason. Maybe when he was off the drip attached to his arm he’d feel a little more footloose.
“Thank you. How have you been, anyway?”
“I’m fabulous, darling, thank you. Work’s good, Jesse and Cooper are good, as you can see . . .” Tucker felt obliged to look, although there wasn’t too much to look at, apart from a brief flicker of animation at the sound of their own names.
“My marriage is good.”
“Great.”
“I have a fantastic social life, Doug’s business is solid . . .”
“Excellent.” He was working on the basis that if he threw enough approving adjectives in her direction she’d stop, but this policy showed no signs of working.
“Last year I ran a half marathon.”
He was reduced to shaking his head in speechless admiration.
“My sex life is better than it’s ever been.”
Finally the boys came out of standby. Jesse’s face creased into a mask of distaste, and Cooper crumpled as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
“Gross,” he said. “Please. Mom. Stop.”
“I’m a healthy woman in her thirties. I’m not gonna hide.”
“Good for you,” said Tucker. “I’ll bet your bowels work better than mine, too.”
“You’d better believe it,” said Carrie.
Tucker was beginning to wonder whether she had actually gone crazy at some point in the last decade. The woman he was talking to bore no resemblance to the one he used to live with: the Carrie he knew was a shy young woman who had wanted to combine her interest in sculpting with her interest in disabled children. She loved Jeff Buckley and REM and the poetry of Billy Collins. The woman in front of him wouldn’t know who Billy Collins was.
“There’s a lot to be said for being a suburban soccer mom,” Carrie said. “No matter what people like you think.”
Oh, okay. Now he got it. They were fighting some kind of culture war. He was the cool rock ’n’ roll singer-songwriter who lived in the Village somewhere and took drugs, and she was the little woman he’d left behind in Nowhere County. The fact was that they lived remarkably similar lives, except Jackson played Little League, not soccer, and Carrie had almost certainly been to NYC more recently than he had. She’d probably even smoked a little pot at some time in the last five years, too. Maybe everyone was going to come in here swinging their insecurities like baseball bats. That would certainly spice things up a little.
They were saved by the return of Jackson, who ran the length of the room in order to punch both Jesse and Cooper in the stomach. They responded with smiles and whoops: finally, somebody was speaking their language. Natalie’s entrance was a little more stately. She waved a greeting to the boys, who ignored her, and introduced herself to Carrie. Or maybe she was reintroducing herself, Tucker couldn’t remember. Who knew who had already met before? They were definitely checking each other out now. He could tell that Natalie had absorbed Carrie completely and then somehow spat her out again, and that Carrie knew she’d been spat out. Tucker accepted completely that women were the fairer and wiser sex, but they were also irredeemably vicious when the occasion demanded.
The boys were still fighting. Tucker noted gloomily that Jackson was responding to the appearance of his half brothers with enormous relief and enthusiasm; their chief attraction was that they showed no signs of being about to die, unlike their father. Kids could smell these things. The rats who left sinking ships weren’t morally culpable. They were just wired that way.
“How was the zoo, Jackson?”
“It was cool. Natalie bought me this.” It was a pen with a monkey’s head precariously attached to its cap.
“Wow. Did you say thank you?”
“He was impeccably behaved,” said Natalie. “A pleasure to be with. And he knows more or less everything there is to know about snakes.”
“I don’t know how long all of them are,” said Jackson modestly.
The boys stopped wrestling, and a silence fell on the assembled company.
“So here we all are,” said Tucker. “Now what?
”
“I suppose this is where you read your last will and testament,” said Natalie. “And we find out which of your kids you love the best.”
Jackson looked at her, and then at Tucker.
“It was Natalie’s idea of a joke, son,” said Tucker.
“Oh. Okay. But I suppose you’d tell us you loved us all the same,” said Jackson, and the tone of his voice implied that this state of affairs would be unsatisfactory and possibly mendacious.
He’d be right, too, thought Tucker. How could he love them all the same? Just seeing Jackson and his ill-concealed bundle of neuroses in the same room as those two solid and, let’s face it, dull and kind of dumb boys exposed the lie for what it was. He could see that fatherhood was important when you actually were a father—when you sat with kids in the middle of the night and convinced them that their nightmares were as insubstantial as smoke, when you chose their books and their schools, when you loved them however hard they made it for you to feel anything other than irritation and occasionally fury. And he had been around for the twins during the first few years, but ever since he’d left their mother, he’d cared for them less and less. How could it be any other way? He’d tried to pretend to himself that all five of them were equally important, but these two annoyed and bored him, Lizzie was poisonous, and he didn’t really know Gracie at all. Oh, sure, most of this was his fault, and he’d like to think that, if he and Carrie had survived, Jesse and Cooper wouldn’t be quite so fucking characterless. But the truth was that they were fine. They had a perfectly serviceable dad with his own car-rental company, and they were mystified by everybody’s insistence that their relationship with a man who lived far away was somehow important to their well-being. Meanwhile, Jackson tweaked some kind of nerve in his dad’s gut simply by turning the TV on when he was still half-asleep in the morning. You couldn’t love people you didn’t know, unless you were Christ. Tucker knew enough about himself to accept that he wasn’t Christ. So who did he love, apart from Jackson? He ran through a quick mental checklist. No, Jackson was pretty much it, nowadays. With five kids and all the women, he never thought for a moment that a shortage of numbers was going to be his particular problem. Weird how things turned out.
“I’m pretty tired,” he said. “How about you all go and visit Lizzie?”
“Will Lizzie want to be visited by us, though?” Carrie asked.
“Sure,” he said. “That’s part of the point of all this. That we get to know each other as a family.” And if it all happened in somebody else’s hospital room, then so much the better.
They came back a couple of hours later, giggly and apparently melded together into a coherent unit. They had picked up an extra member, too, a young man with a ridiculous bushy beard who was carrying a guitar.
“Have you met Zak?” said Natalie. “He’s your something or other. Your common-law son-in-law.”
“Big fan,” said Zak. “I mean, really big.”
“That’s nice,” said Tucker. “Thank you.”
“Juliet changed my life.”
“Great. I mean, great if your life needed changing, that is. Maybe it didn’t.”
“It did.”
“So, great. Happy to have helped.”
“Zak wants to play you a couple of his songs,” said Natalie. “But he was too shy to ask, himself.”
How bad could death be, really, Tucker wondered. A quick heart attack and out, and he would have avoided hearing songs by bearded common-law sons-in-law for his entire life.
“Be my guest,” said Tucker. “You got a captive audience.”
“Who’s yours?” Gina asked Duncan.
They were listening to Naked again. For a week they’d been living off bootleg performances of the Juliet songs: Duncan had made nine different playlists that followed the running order of the album, each taken from different nights of the ’86 tour. Gina eventually professed a preference for studio albums, though, on the grounds that drunk people didn’t shout all the way through her favorite tracks.
“Who’s my what?”
“Your . . . What does he call her? ‘Princess Impossible’?”
“I don’t know. Most of the women I’ve had relationships with were pretty reasonable, really.”
“That’s not what he’s on about, though, is it?”
Duncan stared at her. Nobody had ever attempted to argue with him about Tucker Crowe’s lyrics. Not that Gina was arguing with him, exactly. But she seemed to be on the verge of an interpretation that differed from his own, and it made him feel a little irritable.
“What’s he on about, then, Oh, great Crowologist?”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I’m not setting myself up as an expert.”
“Good,” he said, and laughed. “It takes a while.”
“I’m sure.”
“But isn’t she Princess Impossible because she’s out of reach? Not because she’s an impossible person?”
“Well,” he said generously, “that’s the great thing about great art, isn’t it? It can mean all sorts of things. But by all accounts, she was very difficult.”
“In that first song, though . . .”
“ ‘And You Are?’ ”
“Yes, that one . . . There’s that line in there . . .”
“ ‘They told me that talking to you / Would be chewing barbed wire with a mouth ulcer / But you never once hurt me like that.’ ”
“How does that fit in with her being impossible? If she never once hurt him like that?”
“She became impossible later, I suppose.”
“I thought it was more, you know, her being out of his reach. ‘Your Royal Highness, way up there, and me on the floor below.’ Isn’t it that he thinks he’s out of her league?”
Duncan felt himself panicking a little: a lurch in the stomach, the sort of thing you get when you know you’ve left your keys on the kitchen table just after you’ve shut the front door. He’d invested quite a lot in Juliet’s impossibility. If he hadn’t got it right, then who was he?
“No,” he said, but he offered up nothing more.
“Well, you know more about it than me, as you say. Anyway, if that is what he meant . . .”
“Which he didn’t . . .”
“No, but forgetting about Tucker and Juliet, because I’m interested anyway: have you had one of those? When you knew you were out of your depth?”
“Oh, I expect so.” He flicked through the index file of his sexual relationships, much of which consisted of blank cards kept at the back. He looked under I for “Impossible” and D for “Depth, Out of,” but there was nothing. He could think of friends who’d had that sort of experience, but the truth was that Duncan had never so much as attempted to form an attachment to someone as glamorous as Juliet, or indeed to anyone who could be described as glamorous. He knew his place, and it was two floors below, not one, thus preventing any kind of contact at all. You couldn’t even see unattainable women from where he usually stood. If you imagined it all as a department store, he was in the basement, with the lamps and the dishes; the Juliets were all in Ladies’ Intimates, a couple of escalator rides away.
“Go on.”
“Oh, you know. The usual thing.”
“How did you meet her?”
It struck Duncan that, as they were already in the kingdom of the self-deprecating, he had to come up with something, otherwise it was all too grim. Nobody was so big a loser that he didn’t even have a story about losing. He tried to conjure up the kind of exoticism Gina would be expecting; he saw dramatic eye makeup, elaborate hairdos, glit tery clothes.
“Do you remember that band the Human League?”
“Yes! Of course! God!”
Duncan smiled enigmatically.
“You went out with one of the girls in the Human League?”
And immediately Duncan lost his nerve. There was probably a website which provided a helpful list of the names of all the men that the girls in the Human League had dated; she’d be able to check.
“Oh, no, no. My . . . ex wasn’t actually in the Human League. She was in a sort of second-rate version. At college.” This was more like it. “Same deal, synthesizers and funny haircuts. Anyway, we didn’t last very long. She went off with a bass player from, from some other eighties band. What about yours?”
“Oh, an actor. He slept with everyone at drama college. I was silly enough to think I was different.”
He’d negotiated that pretty well, he thought. They were well matched in their failures. He was, however, still feeling uneasy about whether he’d spent two decades misreading the tenor of the relationship between Tucker and Juliet.
“Does it make any difference, do you think? Whether Juliet was impossible as in difficult or impossible as in out of reach?”
“Any difference to what? Or who?”
“I don’t know. I just . . . I’d feel a bit daft if I’d been wrong all this time.”
“How can you be wrong? You know more about this album than anyone on the planet. Anyway. Like you say. There’s no such thing as wrong.”
Had he ever listened to Juliet in the way Gina heard it? He was beginning to wonder. He’d like to think that there wasn’t a single allusion he’d missed, in the lyrics or in the music: the steal from Curtis Mayfield here, the nod to Baudelaire there. But maybe he’d spent so long underneath the surface of the album that he’d never come up for air, never heard what a casual listener might hear. Maybe he’d spent too long translating something that had been written in English all along.
“Oh, let’s change the subject,” he said.
“Sorry,” said Gina. “It must be awfully annoying, me chirruping away without knowing the first thing about anything. I can see how this sort of thing gets addictive, though.”
When Annie went to visit Tucker the next morning, he was dressed and ready to go. Jackson was sitting beside him, red-faced and looking swamped in a blue puffy jacket that had clearly not been designed with warm hospitals in mind.
“Okay,” said Tucker. “Here she is. Let’s go.”
The two of them walked past Annie and toward the door. Jackson’s showy determination, all jutting jaw and quick, even steps, led Annie to believe that the move had been rehearsed to within an inch of its life.