Juliet, Naked

the River-front District a couple of blocks away. Minneapolis, it turned out, was on the Mississippi—who knew, apart from Americans, and just about anyone else who’d paid attention in geography lessons?—so Annie ended up ticking off something else she’d never expected to see, although here at the less romantic end it looked disappointingly like the Thames. Duncan was animated and chatty, still unable quite to believe that he’d been inside a place that had occupied so much of his imaginative energy over the years.

“Do you think it’s possible to teach a whole course on the toilet?”

“With you just sitting on it, you mean? You wouldn’t get it past Health and Safety.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Sometimes Annie wished that Duncan had a keener sense of humor—a keener sense that something might be meant humorously, anyway. She knew it was too late to hope for actual jokes.

“I meant, teach a whole course on the toilet in the Pits.”

“No.”

Duncan looked at her.

“Are you teasing me?”

“No. I’m saying that a whole course about Tucker Crowe’s twenty-year-old visit to the toilet wouldn’t be very interesting.”

“I’d include other things.”

“Other toilet visits in history?”

“No. Other career-defining moments.”

“Elvis had a good toilet moment. Pretty career-defining, too.”

“Dying’s different. Too unwilled. John Smithers wrote an essay for the website about that. Creative death versus actual death. It was actually pretty interesting.”

Annie nodded enthusiastically, while at the same time hoping that Duncan wouldn’t print it off and put it in front of her when they got home.

“I promise that after this holiday I won’t be so Tucker-centric,” he said.

“That’s okay. I don’t mind.”

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”

“I know.”

“I’ll have got him out of my system.”

“I hope not.”

“Really?”

“What would there be left of you, if you did?”

She hadn’t meant it cruelly. She’d been with Duncan for nearly fifteen years, and Tucker Crowe had always been part of the package, like a disability. To begin with, the condition hadn’t prevented him from living a normal life: yes, he’d written a book, as yet unpublished, about Tucker, lectured on him, contributed to a radio documentary for the BBC and organized conventions, but somehow these activities had always seemed to Annie like isolated episodes, sporadic attacks.

And then the Internet came along and changed everything. When, a little later than everyone else, Duncan discovered how it all worked, he set up a website called “Can Anybody Hear Me?”—the title of a track from an obscure EP recorded after the wounding failure of Crowe’s first album. Until then, the nearest fellow fan had lived in Manchester, sixty or seventy miles away, and Tucker met up with him once or twice a year; now the nearest fans lived in Duncan’s laptop, and there were hundreds of them, from all around the world, and Duncan spoke to them all the time. There seemed to be a surprising amount to talk about. The website had a “Latest News” section, which never failed to amuse Annie, Tucker no longer being a man who did an awful lot. (“As far as we know,” Duncan always said.) There was always something that passed for news among the faithful, though—a Crowe night on an Internet radio station, a new article, a new album from a former band member, an interview with an engineer. The bulk of the content, though, consisted of essays analyzing lyrics, or discussing influences, or conjecturing, apparently inexhaustibly, about the silence. It wasn’t as if Duncan didn’t have other interests. He had a specialist knowledge of 1970s American independent cinema and the novels of Nathanael West and he was developing a nice new line in HBO television series—he thought he might be ready to teach The Wire in the not-too-distant future. But these were all flirtations, by comparison. Tucker Crowe was his life partner. If Crowe were to die—to die in real life, as it were, rather than creatively—Duncan would lead the mourning. (He’d already written the obituary. Every now and again he’d worry out loud about whether he should show it to a reputable newspaper now, or wait until it was needed.)

If Tucker was the husband, then Annie should somehow have become the mistress, but of course that wasn’t right—the word was much too exotic and implied a level of sexual activity that would horrify them both nowadays. It would have daunted them even in the early days of their relationship. Sometimes Annie felt less like a girlfriend than a school chum who’d come to visit in the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years. They had both moved to the same English seaside town at around the same time, Duncan to finish his thesis and Annie to teach, and they had been introduced by mutual friends who could see that, if nothing else, they could talk about books and music, go to films, travel to London occasionally to see exhibitions and gigs. Gooleness wasn’t a sophisticated town. There was no arts cinema, there was no gay community, there wasn’t even a Waterstone’s (the nearest one was up the road in Hull), and they fell upon each other with relief. They started drinking together in the evenings and sleeping over at weekends, until eventually the sleepovers turned into something indistinguishable from cohabitation. And they had stayed like that forever, stuck in a perpetual postgraduate world where gigs and books and films mattered more to them than they did to other people of their age.

The decision not to have children had never been made, and nor had there been any discussion resulting in a postponement of the decision. It wasn’t that kind of a sleepover. Annie could imagine herself as a mother, but Duncan was nobody’s idea of a father, and anyway, neither of them would have felt comfortable applying cement to the relationship in that way. That wasn’t what they were for. And now, with an irritating predictability, she was going through what everyone had told her she would go through: she was aching for a child. Her aches were brought on by all the usual mournful-happy life events: Christmas, the pregnancy of a friend, the pregnancy of a complete stranger she saw in the street. And she wanted a child for all the usual reasons, as far as she could tell. She wanted to feel unconditional love, rather than the faint conditional affection she could scrape together for Duncan every now and again; she wanted to be held by someone who would never question the embrace, the why or the who or the how long. There was another reason, too: she needed to know that she could have one, that there was life in her. Duncan had put her to sleep, and in her sleep she’d been desexed.

She’d get over all this, presumably; or at least one day it would become a wistful regret, rather than a sharp hunger. But this holiday hadn’t been designed to comfort her. There was an argument that you might as well change nappies as hang out in men’s lavatories taking pictures. The amount of time they had for themselves was beginning to feel sort of… decadent.

At breakfast in their cheap and nasty hotel in downtown San Francisco, Annie read the Chronicle and decided she didn’t want to see the hedge obscuring the front lawn of Julie Beatty’s house in Berkeley. There were plenty of other things to do in the Bay Area. She wanted to see Haight- Ashbury, she wanted to buy a book at City Lights, she wanted to visit Alcatraz, she wanted to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. There was an exhibition of postwar West Coast art on at the Museum of Modern Art just down the street. She was happy that Tucker had lured them out to California, but she didn’t want to spend a morning watching Julie’s neighbors decide whether they constituted a security risk.

“You’re joking,” said Duncan.

She laughed.

“No,” she said. “I really can think of better things to do.”

“When we’ve come all this way? Why have you gone like this all of a sudden? Aren’t you interested? I mean, supposing she drives out of her garage while we’re outside?”

“Then I’d feel even more stupid,” she said. “She’d look at me and think, ‘I wouldn’t expect any different from him. He’s one of the creepy guys. But what’s a woman doing there?’ ”

“You’re having me on.”

“I’m really not, Duncan. We’re in San Francisco for twenty-four hours and I don’t know when I’ll be back.