but sometime soon—Jackson would be forced to choose which parent he was going to live with, and really that was no choice at all. Cat, like your average American dad, hadn’t seen much of Jackson since the first six months of his life. She’d been too busy keeping food on the table. Cat knew she wouldn’t be eating breakfast with her son much in the near future, which made her determination to end the relationship even more impressive, Tucker thought. And his security, the reassuring knowledge that the apparently unavoidable split couldn’t come between him and his son, probably sucked a great deal of the desperation out of his efforts to smooth things over. He and Jackson were the couple, and they didn’t need a lawyer.
Jackson was in his room, bashing the hell out of the buttons on a cheap computer game. He didn’t look up when Tucker opened the door.
“You want to come back downstairs?”
“No.”
“It’ll be easier if the three of us talk.”
“I know what you want to talk about.”
“What?”
“ ‘Mommy and Daddy are having problems, so we’re going to split up from each other. But it doesn’t mean we don’t love you, blah, blah, blah.’ There. Now I don’t have to go.”
Jesus, thought Tucker. Six years old and already these kids can parody the language of marital failure.
“Where did you get all that from?”
“Like, five hundred TV shows, plus five hundred kids at school. So that’s a thousand, right?”
“Right. Five hundred plus five hundred makes a thousand.”
Jackson couldn’t prevent a tiny flicker of triumph from crossing his face.
“Okay. You don’t have to come down. But please be kind to your mother.”
“She knows I want to live with you, right?”
“Yeah, she knows, and she’s upset about it.”
“Dad? Do we have to move to another house?”
“I don’t know. Not if you don’t want to.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“So it doesn’t matter that you don’t have any money?”
“No. Not at all.”
Tucker was pleased with the dismissive tone. It suggested that only a kid with no knowledge of the way the world worked would even have brought the subject up.
“Cool.”
Tucker went back downstairs to explain to his wife that she’d have to give up both her child and her house.
Tucker now accepted, without question, that he couldn’t make a marriage, or anything resembling a marriage, work. (He had never been absolutely sure whether he was married to Cat or not. Cat referred to him as her husband, and it always sounded a little off to him, but he’d never been able to ask her directly whether there was any legal basis for her description of his status. She’d be hurt that he couldn’t remember. Certainly there’d been no ceremony since sobriety, but anything could have happened before that.) He was one of those people whose flaws remained consistent whoever he was with. He’d had friends who’d had good second marriages, and they always talked about the relief they’d felt when they realized that the first had gone wrong because of the dynamic, rather than any inherent failing in themselves. But as several women, women who didn’t really resemble one another in any way, had all complained of the same things, he had to accept that dynamics had nothing to do with anything. It was all him. At the beginning, something—infatuation, hope, whatever—helped disguise his real shape. But then the tide went out, and all was revealed, and it was ugly, dark and jagged and unpleasant.
One of the chief complaints was that he never did anything, which Tucker couldn’t help but feel was unfair; not because the complaint was groundless, because it obviously wasn’t, but because, in certain circles, Tucker was one of the most famous do-nothings in the United States. All of these women had known that he hadn’t done anything since 1986; that, it seemed to him, was his unique selling point, and it was a never-ending source of fascination. But when he’d continued to do nothing, there was outrage. Where was the justice in that? He could see that several of these women, Cat included, had presumed, without ever articulating it or possibly even acknowledging it to themselves, that they’d be able to redeem him, bring him back to life. They’d appointed themselves muses, and he would respond to their love, inspiration and care by making the most beautiful and passionate music of his career. And then, when nothing happened, they were left with an ex-musician who sat around the house drinking, watching game shows and reading Victorian novels in his sweatpants, and they didn’t like it much. Who could blame them? There wasn’t much to like. With Cat it had been different, because he’d sobered up and taken care of Jackson. But he was still a disappointment to her. He was a disappointment to himself, but that didn’t help anyone much.
It wasn’t as if he was a happy slacker, either. He’d never been able to shrug away the loss of his talent, for want of a better word to describe whatever the hell it was he once had. Sure, he’d got used to the idea that there wouldn’t be a new album, or even a new song, anytime soon, but he’d never learned to look on his inability to write as anything other than a temporary state, which meant that he was permanently unsettled, as if he were in an airport lounge waiting for a plane. In the old days, when he flew a lot, he’d never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he’d spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that’s what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he’d known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he’d have made different travel arrangements, but instead he’d sat there, sighing and fidgeting and, more often than was ever really acceptable, snapping at his traveling companions.
“What are you going to
Up until a couple of years ago, Tucker’s best and only friend in the neighborhood had been known as Farmer John, after the old Premiers song, because his name was John and he lived on a farm. Then something strange happened, and one of the eventual consequences was that Farmer John became known affectionately to his nearest and dearest as Fucker. (This select group included, to Cat’s mortification and Tucker’s childish delight, Jackson.) The strange thing that happened was this: sometime in 2003, one of the half-crazed fans who refer to themselves as Crowologists drove up the dirt track that led to Farmer John’s farm, apparently in the belief that Tucker lived there. While John was walking down to the stranger’s car to talk to him, the driver’s door opened, the fan emerged and he started frantically taking pictures of John with a fancy-looking camera. Tucker had never really learned how John earned a living; he was no farmer, that was for sure. And every time anyone asked him, he was impressively and sometimes even aggressively evasive. The general presumption was that there was some harmless, low-level illegal activity involved somewhere, which was probably why John went for the photographer, who kept snapping pictures even as he got into the car to make his escape. Within days, the scariest of these photos (and John, a grizzled man with long, matted gray hair, never looked anything less than intimidating anyway) was being passed from website to website. Neil Ritchie, the photographer, became almost famous, the man who’d stolen the first shot of Tucker Crowe in over fifteen years. It was still, even now, the first image you saw if you went to find a picture of Tucker on the Internet.
At first, Tucker was baffled by the easy passage the photo had through cyberspace. Nobody ever asked how a man who looked like
