Juliet, Naked

you.”

“Do you mean… romantically?”

He was tempted to qualify Gina’s adverb, and explain that he wasn’t really involved with Annie romantically, that it was more a question of jigsaw pieces. But he could see that might not have been terribly helpful.

“I suppose so, yes.”

“A long-term thing?”

Duncan paused. He knew the answer to this question, really. Fifteen years was a long-term thing, unambiguously, so it would be disingenuous to say something like “What do you mean?” or “Define your terms.”

“What counts as a long-term thing, for you?”

“A year?”

“Ummm…” He made a face that suggested mute calculation. He was more or less counting on his fingers, in his head. “Yes.”

“Oh. Oh dear. And was it bloody?”

“It was a bit, yes.”

“Is that why you raised the subject of the sofa?”

“I suppose it might have been, yes.”

“And are you with her now?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

And that was all there was to say about his previous relationship, as far as Gina was concerned. Duncan felt homesick the entire night and slept poorly. Gina, however, seemed inappropriately cheerful about everything. Duncan was forced to conclude that she just didn’t get the magnitude of his breakup with Annie, possibly because she was shallow and lacking in empathy. Only later did he realize that she was unlikely to get the magnitude of it, because he’d willfully and possibly even deceitfully shrunk it. He’d knocked fourteen years off it and then asked her to acknowledge that she was a home-wrecker. He’d told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn’t offered morphine.

Returning home didn’t help with his homesickness, inevitably. It simply made it worse. He wanted to linger, maybe even watch a DVD and pretend that it was a normal Saturday morning, but he doubted whether that would help him much. He finished packing his bag—enough for a week or so, no more—and left. Duncan didn’t know too much about the vicissitudes of Tucker Crowe’s love life—nobody did, really, although there had been much speculation on the web—but he imagined it to have been tumultuous. How did he stand it? How many times had Tucker had to pack his bag like this, say good-bye to a home? Not for the first time, Duncan wished that he knew Tucker personally. He would very much like to ask him what he took with him when he moved out of one life and into another. Was underwear the key? For some reason he imagined Tucker would have a tip for him, something like, “Don’t worry about T-shirts,” or “Never leave your favorite picture behind.” Duncan’s favorite picture was an original Dr. No poster that he and Annie had found, incredibly, in a junk shop in Gooleness. He was pretty sure he was the one who’d paid for it, so he’d be entitled to remove it. On the other hand, it was quite big, and covered a large damp patch on the bedroom wall. If he left the damp patch exposed, there’d be trouble. He settled for his second-favorite, an eighteen-by-twelve shot of Tucker he’d bought on eBay. It was taken in the late seventies, perhaps at the Bottom Line in New York, and Crowe looked good, young and confident and happy. He’d had it framed, but Annie never wanted it up in the sitting room or the bedroom, so it was propped up against the wall in the office. She wouldn’t mind that he’d taken it—indeed, she’d probably mind if he didn’t—and it seemed appropriate, seeing as it was Tucker’s advice in the first place. Imaginary advice, anyway. It was somewhat embarrassing, perhaps, walking into Gina’s flat with a small duffel bag and a large picture, but Gina loved it, or said she did. Gina was enthusiastic about a lot of things.

He spent the weekend almost entirely in Gina’s company. They ate good food, watched two movies, went for a walk along the beach, had sex twice, on Saturday night and Sunday night. And everything felt wrong, off, peculiar. Duncan couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living somebody else’s life, a life that was much more enjoyable than his own had been recently, but which didn’t suit him, or fit him, or something. And then, on Monday morning, they cycled into work together, and when it was time for the first classes of the day, Gina kissed him good-bye, on the lips, and squeezed his bottom playfully while colleagues watched, stupefied with excitement. By lunchtime, everybody in the college knew that they were a couple.

eight

What to say? Tucker couldn’t think of anything. Or rather, he couldn’t think of anything that would help in any way. “Let’s give it one more try”? “I’m pretty sure I can change”? “Would you like to go to counseling”? His previous and extensive history of messing up relationships was useful only up to a point: effectively, all it did was make him give in to the inevitable much more quickly. He was like a mechanic who could take one look at an old car and tell its owner, “Well, yes, I could try. But the truth of it is, you’ll be back here again in two months, and you’ll have spent an awful lot of money in the meantime.” He’d attempted to change before; he’d been to marriage counseling, he’d given it another try, and all of this had merely served to attenuate the agony. Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.

It was news to him that Cat had been “kind of seeing somebody,” if only in a “pretty much semi-platonic” way. (He was tempted, in a spirit of devilment, to press for a definition of “semi-platonic,” but he was afraid that Cat might actually try to provide one, and neither of them could cope with the ensuing embarrassment.) Try as he might, however, he couldn’t see it as front-page news, or even a headline in the sports section. She was a young woman and as a consequence didn’t subscribe to the idea that monogamous sexual relationships between men and women were doomed, pointless, miserable, hopeless; she’d get there, he felt, but not for a while yet. Of course she was seeing somebody. Tucker wondered whether he knew the man who was being kind of seen and then wondered whether to ask if he knew him. In the end, he decided against it. He could see what would happen: Cat would tell him that, yes, Tucker had met him before, and Tucker would have to confess that he couldn’t bring him to mind. Unless Cat was kind of seeing a friend of his, the name she provided was unlikely to mean much.

Cat was staring at him. He was stirring his coffee and had been for the last few minutes. Had she asked him a question? He rewound until he heard her voice.

“I think we’ve reached the end of the road,” is what she’d said, which wasn’t actually a question, although it clearly required an acknowledgment of receipt, at least.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. But I think you’re probably right.”

“And that’s all you have to say?”

“I think so.”

Jackson walked into the room, saw Tucker and Cat sitting there expectantly and ran out again.

“I told you,” said Tucker. He tried to keep it to that, but he was actually really angry. Jackson was a smart kid, and it had taken him three seconds to sense the danger in that room: the silence, his parents’ obvious nervousness.

“Go get him,” said Cat.

“You go get him. This was all your idea.” And then, when he could see Cat was going to react, “Telling him was your idea, I mean. Telling him like this. Formally.”

Tucker wasn’t sure how they should have done it, but he knew they’d got it wrong. Why had Cat decided that the den was the right place? None of them ever used it. It was dark and smelled musty. They might just as well have woken him up in the middle of the night and yelled, “Something weird and upsetting is going to happen!” at him through a megaphone. And the formation, Cat and Tucker side by side on a sofa, never happened much in real life, either. They were a head-on couple.

“You know I can’t,” Cat said. “He won’t come unless you do it.”

And this, of course, was a neat illustration of the trouble she faced. Shortly—not today, not here and now,