Juliet, Naked

“I’ll leave you to it.”

She went upstairs, lay down on the bed and tried to read her book, but she couldn’t concentrate. She could hear the sound of his shaking head all the way through the floorboards.

Duncan read the essay twice, just to buy himself some time; the truth was that he knew he was in trouble after the first reading, because it was both very well written and very wrong. Annie had made no factual errors that he could find (although someone on the boards would always point out some glaring and utterly inconsequential mistake, he found, when he wrote something), but her inability to recognize the brilliance of the album was indicative of a failure in taste that appalled him. How had she ever managed to read or see or listen to anything and come to the right conclusion about its merits? Was it all just luck? Or was it just the boring good taste of the Sunday newspaper supplements? So she liked The Sopranos—well, who didn’t? He’d had a chance this time to watch her have to come to her own conclusions, and she’d messed it up.

He couldn’t refuse to put the piece up, though. That wouldn’t be fair, and he didn’t want to be put in the position of turning her down. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t get the greatness of Tucker Crowe: this was, after all, a long hymn of praise to the perfection of Dressed. No, he’d post it on the site and let the others tell her what they thought of her.

He read it through once more, just to make sure, and this time it depressed him: she was better than him in everything but judgment—the only thing that mattered in the end, but still. She wrote well, with fluency and humor, and she was persuasive, if you hadn’t actually heard the music, and she was likable. He tended to be strident and bullying and smart-alecky, even he could see that. This wasn’t what she was supposed to be good at. Where did that leave him? And supposing they didn’t shoot her down in flames? Supposing, instead, that they used her as a stick to beat him with? Naked, which just about everyone had heard by now, was getting a very mixed reaction, and the negative stuff, he feared, had been provoked by his original, overenthusiastic review. He was just beginning to change his mind about accepting her into the community when she appeared in front of him.

“Well?” she said. She was nervous.

“Well,” he said.

“I feel as though I’m waiting for my exam results.”

“I’m sorry. I was just thinking about what you wrote.”

“And?”

“You know I don’t agree with it. But it’s really not bad.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“And I’m happy to put it up, if that’s what you really want.”

“I think so.”

“You have to include your e-mail address, you know that.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. And you’ll get a few nutters contacting you. But you can just delete them, if you don’t want to get involved in a debate.”

“Can I use a fake name?”

“Why? Nobody knows who you are.”

“You’ve never mentioned me to any of your friends?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Oh.”

Annie looked rather taken aback. But was that so weird? None of the other Crowologists lived in the town, and he only ever talked to them about Tucker, or occasionally about related artists.

“Have you ever had a contribution from a woman?”

He pretended to think about it. He’d often wondered why they only ever heard from middle-aged men, but it had never worried him unduly. Now he felt defensive.

“Yes,” he said. “But not for a while. And even then they just wanted to talk about how, you know, attractive they found him.”

The only women he could invent, it seemed, were cliched airheads, unable to contribute to serious debate. He’d only had a couple of seconds to imagine them, but even so, he could and should have done better. If he ever did write his novel, he’d have to watch that.

“Do women find him attractive?”

“God, yes.”

Now he was beginning to sound weird. Well, not weird, because homosexual attraction wasn’t weird, of course it wasn’t. But he was certainly sounding more vehement about Tucker’s good looks than he had meant to.

“Anyway. Send me the piece as an attachment and I’ll put it up tonight.”

And, after only a couple of arguments with himself, he did what he’d promised.

At work the next morning, Annie found herself logging on to the website a couple of times an hour. At first, it seemed obvious to her that she’d want some feedback on what she’d written—she’d never done this before, so she was bound to be curious about the process. Later in the day, however, she realized that she wanted to win, to beat Duncan hollow. He’d had his say, and for the most part his say had been greeted by hostility, sarcasm, disbelief and envy; she wanted people to be nicer to her than they had been to him, more appreciative of her eloquence and acuity, and, to her great delight, they were. By five o’clock that afternoon, seven people had posted in the “comments” section, and six of them were friendly—inarticulate, and disappointingly brief, but friendly nonetheless. “Nice work, Annie!” “Welcome to our little online ‘community’—good job!” “I completely agree with you. Duncan’s so far off-base he’s disappeared off of the radar.” The only person who wanted to make it clear that he hadn’t enjoyed her contribution didn’t seem very happy about anything. “Tucker Crowe is FINISHED get over it you people are pathetic just going on and on about a singer who hasn’t made an album for twenty years. He was overrated then and he’s overrated now and Morrissey is so much better its embarrassing.”

She wondered why someone would bother to write that; but then, “Why bother” was never a question you could ask about more or less anything on the Internet, otherwise the whole bunch of them shriveled to a cotton- candy nothing. Why had she bothered? Why does anybody? She was for bothering, on the whole; in which case thank you, MrMozza7, for your contribution, and thank you, everybody else, on every other website.

Just before she shut down her computer for the day, she checked her e-mails again. She’d suspected that Duncan had told her she had to provide an address in an attempt to frighten her off; clearly the comments section was the preferred method of providing feedback. Duncan had implied that there would be a host of homicidal cyber stalkers, spewing bile and promising vengeance, but so far, nothing.

This time, however, there were two e-mails, from someone called Alfred Mantalini. The first was titled “Your Review.” It was very short. It said, simply, “Thank you for your kind and perceptive words. I really appreciated them. Best wishes, Tucker Crowe.” The title on the second was “P.S.,” and the message said, “I don’t know if you hang out with anyone on that website, but they seem like pretty weird people, and I’d be really grateful if you didn’t pass on this address.”

Was it possible? Even asking the question felt stupid, and the sudden breathlessness was simply pathetic. Of course it wasn’t possible. It was obviously a joke, even though it was a joke removed of all discernible humor. Why bother? Don’t ask. She draped her jacket over the back of her chair and put her bag on the floor. What would be an amusing response? “Fuck off, Duncan”? Or should she just ignore it? But supposing… ?

She tried mocking herself again, but the self-mockery only worked, she realized, if she thought with Duncan’s head—if she really believed that Tucker Crowe was the most famous man in the world, and that there was more chance of being contacted out of the blue by Russell Crowe. Tucker Crowe, however, was an obscure musician from the 1980s, who probably didn’t have much to do at nights except look at websites dedicated to his memory and shake his head in disbelief. And she could certainly understand why he wouldn’t want to contact Duncan and the rest of them: the torch they were holding burned way too bright. Why Alfred Mantalini? She Googled the name. Alfred Mantalini was a character in Nicholas Nickleby, apparently, an idler and philanderer who ends up bank rupting his wife. Well, that could fit, couldn’t it? Especially if Tucker Crowe had a sense of self-