Juliet, Naked

affix themselves to another even if they didn’t fit. They didn’t care about jutting off at weird angles, and they didn’t care about phone booths and Mary, Queen of Scots. They were motivated not by seamless and sensible matching, but by eyes, mouths, smiles, minds, breasts and chests and bottoms, wit, kindness, charm, romantic history and all sorts of other things that made straight edges impossible to achieve.

And jigsaw pieces were not known for their passion, really, either. People could be passionate about jigsaws, but the jigsaws themselves were orderly—passionless, even, you could say. And it seemed to Duncan that passion was a part of being human. He valued it in his music and his books and his TV shows: Tucker Crowe was passionate, Tony Soprano, too. But he had never really valued it in his own life, and maybe now he was paying the price, by falling in love at an inopportune time. Later, he wondered whether Juliet, Naked had done something to him—woken him up, shaken some part of him that had gone numb. He’d certainly been more emotional in the days since he first heard it, prone to sudden lurches in the stomach and the occasional, inexplicable prickle of tears.

Gina was a new staff member at the Advanced Performing Arts program, teaching pimply and deluded teenagers that they would never, ever be famous—or, at least, not in their chosen fields, although Duncan harbored the suspicion that some of them were insane enough to stalk and eventually murder somebody they idolized. Gina was a singer, an actor, a dancer, and though she still harbored dreams of doing some of those things professionally, life had worn all of the dreaminess off her. The people who worked in Advanced Performing Arts were freakishly young-looking middle-aged men and women, always waiting for phone calls that never came from touring theater companies and agents; but if Gina still blew on those hopes to keep them glowing gently, she did it outside college hours. And she didn’t talk about herself all the time, either, despite having spiky hennaed hair and a lot of chunky jewelry. She sat next to him on a coffee break on her second day, asked him questions, listened to his answers, proved herself to be knowledgeable about some of the things that were important to him. The day after, when she asked whether she could borrow the first season of The Wire and told him that she’d taken the job to get away from a terminally ill relationship, he knew he was in trouble. Two days after that, he was wondering what happened when a jigsaw piece told his interlocking friend that he wanted to join a different puzzle altogether. And also, less whimsically, he was wondering what sex with Gina would be like, and whether he’d ever find out.

He’d made very few friends on the staff, mostly because he regarded his colleagues as uncultured bores, even the ones who taught arts courses. And they in turn thought he was a weirdo, forever chasing up some obscure tributary of the mainstream to get to the source of whatever he happened to be interested in that week. They thought he was faddish, but in Duncan’s opinion that was because their tastes were set, like concrete, and if the next Dylan came to perform for them in the staff room, they’d roll their eyes and continue to look for new jobs in the Education Guardian. Duncan hated them, and that was partly why he’d fallen so hard for Gina, who seemed to recognize that major works of art were being created every day. She was going to be his soul mate, and in a town like this, with its cold, gray sea and its bingo halls and its shivering senior citizens, soul mates came along every couple of hundred years, probably. How was it possible not to think about sex, in those circumstances?

They went out for a drink on the day he took Season One of The Wire into work with him, hidden inside a newspaper and then placed in his satchel so that Annie wouldn’t see what he was up to. Of course, it was only the secrecy of the act that would have given her any idea, so presumably the smuggling was for his benefit, rather than hers, a way of investing a mundane loan with the faintest scent of adultery. He called Annie to tell her he was going to be late getting home, but she, too, was still at work, and she didn’t seem to be troubled by, or even curious about, his whereabouts. She’d been weird, the last few days. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if she’d met someone, too. Wouldn’t that be perfect? Although he wouldn’t want her to leave until he had worked out whether this thing with Gina had potential, and it was early days, as yet, seeing as they hadn’t actually been on a date.

They cycled, at Duncan’s insistence, to a quiet pub on the other side of town, on the other side of the docks, away from students and staff. She drank cider, a choice Duncan admired, although he was in that frame of mind where anything she ordered—white wine, Baileys and Coke—would have demonstrated her sophistication and exotic singularity. A pint of cider suddenly seemed like the drink he’d been wanting all his life.

“So. Cheers. Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you.”

They took a big pull of their drinks, and made appreciative lip-smacking sounds indicating (a) that they’d earned this drink and (b) they didn’t really know what to say to each other.

“Oh. So.” He delved into his bag and produced the boxed set. “Here it is.”

“Great. What’s it like? I mean, what other programs is it like?”

“Nothing, really. That’s what’s so great about it. It sort of breaks all the rules. It’s a one-off. Unique.”

“Like me.” She laughed, but Duncan saw the opportunity to inject some early sincerity into the occasion.

“I think that’s right,” he said. “I mean, obviously there are loads of ways in which, you know, you’re different from, well, from an American TV series about Baltimore’s underclass. It’s actually about lots of other things, too, but all the other things it’s about doesn’t make it more like you, if you see what I mean, so I won’t go into them.” This wasn’t coming out right, but he was going to plow on anyway. “But in some important ways, you’re the same.”

“Really? Go on. I’m very curious.” She looked amused, rather than appalled. Perhaps he could get away with this.

“Well. I’ve only just met you. But when you were sitting in the staff room earlier today…” He just wanted to pay her a compliment, tell her that he found her attractive, that he was glad she’d come to teach at the college. But now he was stuck with this stupid Wire thing. “Well, you stuck out like a sore thumb. In a good way, not a sore-thumb way. Everyone else there is so staid and bitter, and you lit the place up. You’re cheerful, and energetic, and pretty, and… Okay, The Wire isn’t cheerful. Or pretty. But when you look at all the other programs around. Well, you just have to look at it. And you.”

He thought he’d got away with it, just about.

“Thank you. I hope you won’t end up disappointed.”

“Oh, I won’t.”

The terminally ill relationship that Gina had left behind in Manchester was with a choreographer who idolized his mother and hadn’t touched her in two years, or said anything kind to her in three. He was almost certainly gay, and hated Gina for failing to cure him of his attraction to other men. What she most wanted in the world was a kind, attentive man who clearly found her attractive. Sometimes you can see car crashes from a long way off, if the road is straight and both vehicles are heading toward each other in the same lane.

Gina vaguely remembered Tucker Crowe, but she was happy to be educated. The day after their drink, Duncan played her Naked and Dressed, back to back, on her iPod in her small and heartbreakingly under-furnished one-bedroom apartment up the hill at the back of the town, away from the sea and from Annie, and they went to bed together shortly afterward, when she’d said exactly the right things about the rawness and unadorned simplicity of Naked. To Duncan anyway, it was sex that felt like sex, too, something needy and alarmingly uncontrollable, rather than something that happened on Saturdays after he and Annie had rented a DVD. Forty-eight excruciating hours after that, in the Indian restaurant around the corner, he was telling Annie that he’d met somebody else.

She was calm when he told her.

“Right,” she said. “And by ‘met,’ I presume we’re talking about something more than meeting.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve slept with her.”

“Yes.”

Duncan was sweating, and his heart was racing. He felt sick. Fifteen years! Or more, even! Was it really possible simply to jump from the belly of a fifteen-year relationship into the clear blue sky? Was it allowed? Or would he and Annie be made to attend courses, to see counselors, to go away together for a year or two and explore what had gone wrong? But who would make them? Nobody, that’s who. And there was alarmingly little tying him down. He was one of the first people to complain about the increasing encroachment of the state into personal lives, but, actually, shouldn’t there be a little more encroachment, when it came to things like this? Where