Juliet, Naked

A while back, Tucker had promised himself that he’d sit down with a piece of paper and try to account for the last couple of decades. He’d write the years down in sequence on the left-hand side, and write down one or two words next to each, words that would at least give some sense of what might have occupied him in those twelve months. The word “booze” and a few ditto marks would do for the end of the eighties; occasionally he’d picked up a guitar or a ballpoint, but mostly he’d just watched TV and poured scotch down his throat until he blacked out. There were other, healthier words he could use later on—“painting,” “Cooper and Jesse,” “Cat,” “Jackson,” but actually, even they didn’t explain away as many months as he’d be asking them to. How long had he really spent in that tiny apartment he’d rented and used as a studio in the painting years? Six months? And his sons, in the years they were born… He’d taken them for walks, sure, but a lot of the time they’d been nursing, or sleeping, and he’d watched them do both. But then, watching was an activity, right? You couldn’t do much else, if you were watching.

Occasionally he thought about what his father would have written if faced with a sheet of paper containing a list of all his adult years. He’d had a long, productive life: three kids, a good, strong marriage, his own dry-cleaning business. So what would he write next to, say, ’61-’68? “Work”? That one short word would cover seven years of his life perfectly adequately. And Tucker knew for sure what he’d have chosen for 1980: “Europe.” Or probably, “EUROPE!” He’d waited a long time to go back, and he’d loved every second of it, and the holiday of a lifetime lasted a month. Four weeks out of the fifty-two! Tucker wasn’t trying to flatten out the differences—he knew his dad was the better man. But anyone trying to account for their days in this way was going to wonder where they had all gone, what had been missed.

Jackson was tearful for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. He cried about losing to Lizzie at tic-tac- toe, he cried about having his hair washed, he cried about Tucker dying, he cried about not being allowed to smother his ice cream in chocolate sauce. Tucker and Cat had presumed that he’d stay up and eat with them, but he was so exhausted by his emotional exertion that he ended up going to bed early. Seconds after the boy fell asleep, Tucker realized he’d been using him as a small but effective hostage: nobody could get a clear shot in while Jackson was around. When he went downstairs and rejoined Cat and Lizzie in the garden, he was just in time to hear Cat saying, wryly, “Well, he’ll do that to you.”

“Who’ll do what to who?” he said, cheerfully.

“Lizzie was just telling me about her mom being hospitalized after you dumped her.”

“Oh.”

“You never told me about that.”

“It just never came up when we started dating.”

“Funny, huh?”

“Not really,” said Lizzie.

And they took on from there. Cat decided that she already felt comfortable enough around her new stepdaughter to give her a candid assessment of the state of her marriage; Lizzie reciprocated with a candid assessment of the damage Tucker had caused through his absence. (She held her stomach protectively all the way through her complaint, Tucker noticed, as if he were about to attack her unborn child with a knife at any moment.) Tucker nodded sagely at various points, and occasionally shook his head sympathetically. Every now and again, when both women simply stared at him, he’d shrug and stare at the ground. There didn’t seem an awful lot of point in attempting to defend himself, and anyway he wasn’t absolutely sure what line of defense he would have taken. There were a couple of errors of fact embedded in the stories they told each other, but nothing worth correcting. Who really cared that, in her bitterness and rage, Natalie had told Lizzie that he’d slept with another woman in her apartment, for example? It was only the location she had wrong, not the act of infidelity itself. The only word that would have explained anything, most of the time, was “drunk.” He could have said that, at regular intervals, possibly even after every sentence, but it almost certainly wouldn’t have helped.

At the end of the evening, he showed Lizzie to her room and wished her good night.

“Was that all okay?” she said, and she made a face, as if he’d spent the evening dealing with acute heartburn.

“Oh, yeah, fine. You were owed.”

“I hope you sort things out with Cat. She’s lovely.”

“Yeah. Thanks. Good night. Sleep well.”

Tucker went back downstairs, but Cat had gone. She had used his absence as an excuse to go to bed without him, and without explanations. They mostly slept in separate rooms now, but they were at a peculiar stage in their relationship where this wasn’t accepted as a given: they talked about it every night. Or it got mentioned, at least. “Are you okay in the spare room?” Cat would say, and Tucker would shrug and nod. A couple of times, after a really savage argument that seemed to push them to the point of no return, he’d followed her into their bedroom, and eventually they’d swung things around. There was no talking about it tonight, though. She’d just vanished.

Tucker went to bed, read a little, turned the light out. But he couldn’t sleep. It isn’t you really, is it? that woman had asked, and he started to phrase answers to the question in his head. Eventually he got up and went downstairs to the computer. Annie was going to get more than she’d bargained for.

five

From: Tucker

<[email protected]

Subject: Re: Re: Your Review

Dear Annie,

It really is me, although I can’t think of a good way of proving it to you. How about this: nothing happened to me in a restroom in Minneapolis. Or this: I don’t have a secret love child with Julie Beatty. Or this: I stopped recording altogether after I made the album Juliet, so I don’t have two hundred albums’ worth of material locked away in a shed, nor do I regularly release material under an assumed name. Does that help? Probably not, unless you are sane enough to believe that the truth about anyone is disappointing, the truth about me especially so. This is due to an unfortunate turn of events: the longer I spent doing nothing at all, aside from watching TV and drinking, the more a small but impressively imaginative number of people seemed to be convinced that I was doing a whole procession of outlandish things—making hip-hop albums with Lauryn Hill in Colorado, for example, or making a movie with Steve Ditko in Los Angeles. I wish I knew Lauryn Hill and/or Steve Ditko, because I admire both of them greatly (and because I’d make myself some money somehow), but I don’t. The fact is, some of these myths are so colorful that they have deterred me from re-entering the world; it seems to me that people were having more fun with me gone than they could ever have if I was around. Can you imagine, if I were to give an interview, for example, to the kind of music magazine still interested in someone like me? “No, I didn’t. No, I haven’t. No, we weren’t…” It would be so dull as to be unconvincing. Anyone can say they haven’t done anything.

Today I learned that I am going to be a grandfather. As I don’t really know the pregnant daughter in question—I don’t really know four of my five children, by the way—I was not able to feel joyful. For me, the only real emotional content of the news was the symbolism, what it said about me. I don’t feel bad about that, particularly. There’s no point in pretending to feel joy when someone you don’t know very well tells you she’s pregnant, although I suppose I do feel bad that various decisions I’ve made and avoided have reduced my daughter to the status of a stranger.

Anyway, the symbolism… Learning that I was about to become a grandfather felt like reading my own obituary, and what I read made me feel really sad. I haven’t done much with whatever talents I was given, whatever your friends on the website think, nor have I been very successful in other areas of my life. The children I never see are products of relationships I messed up, through my indolence and my drinking; the child I do see, my beloved six-year-old son, Jackson, is the product of a relationship that I’m in the process of messing up. His mother has been supporting me for a few years now, so I owe her a lot, but understandably I have begun to irritate her,