Juliet, Naked

creeping closer together? Could mouths get wider, lips thinner? But then, the photo was never used anywhere that it was likely to get fact-checked; Tucker had long since drifted away from the mainstream media and into the backwaters where all the screwballs and conspiracy theorists did their fishing. And anyway, to talk about plausibility was to miss the point. The few people who hadn’t forgotten him, people who had turned his songs into hymns that contained profoundly helpful guidance on just about everything, wanted him to look like Farmer John. Tucker was a genius, according to these people, and he’d gone mad, and that’s what mad geniuses looked like. And John’s anger was perfect, too. Neil Ritchie almost certainly had other shots of John ambling toward his car, but they just didn’t fit with the idea of someone who was clearly so obsessive about his privacy. The moment John went nuts was the moment he turned into Tucker Crowe, damaged recluse. Tucker, meanwhile, the real one, the one who drove Jackson to Little League games, kept his silver hair neatly trimmed, wore moderately fashionable rimless spectacles and shaved every day. He felt like Fucker on the inside, which was why he’d always made sure he looked like somebody you’d be happy to buy insurance from.

Anyway, Farmer John became known to Tucker and Cat (and Jackson) and a few other friends and neighbors as Fake Tucker, and Fake Tucker became, inevitably, Fucker. And when Tucker needed to get out of the house and out into the world, it was Fucker he took with him—not because the confusion was helpful in any way, but because he didn’t really know any other men anymore. It was always slightly complicated, though, a night out with The Fuck. Tucker couldn’t drink, and Fucker couldn’t not drink, and though Tucker could watch someone sipping liquor slowly and in moderation, it didn’t do him much good to watch somebody get slammed. So the deal was this: Fucker had to be given an hour’s notice, and in that hour he’d work his way through several fingers of Bushmills and get a glow on. By the time Tucker came to pick him up he’d only need a small top-up, and occasionally he’d be ready for a mug of coffee.

Fucker wanted to listen to a band that was playing in a local bar.

“Why?”

“Because it might be fun.”

“Oh, man,” said Tucker. “Do we have to?”

“You don’t drink, you don’t listen to music… Why do you even ask me to go out at night? How about this? You want to see me, we’ll meet for breakfast. Except you probably disapprove of eggs. Or you used to snort them, back in the eighties, so you can’t be in the same room as them now.”

“I need to talk, I think.”

“Why? You screwed it all up with Cat?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. Who could have seen that coming?”

Tucker actually valued John’s blunt sarcasm. It felt bracing, like one of those sponges Cat liked that were supposed to remove dead skin.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should go see a band. That way I don’t have to listen to you.”

“I’ve said all I have to say. Apart from you’re an idiot. How’s Jackson?”

“He’s okay. He’s not amazed, either, really. He just wanted to make sure that he could be with me and stay in the house.”

“And is that possible?”

“Apparently. Cat’s going to look for an apartment in town, somewhere Jackson can sleep when he wants to.”

“So you stole Cat’s house from her?”

“For now.”

“What’s going to change?”

“Either I start earning some money, or Jackson turns eighteen and goes to college.”

“You taking bets on what happens first?”

“Maybe Juliet, Naked will make me some money.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot you had a new album out. There must be a million people who want to hear crappy versions of songs they forgot about years ago.”

Tucker laughed. John had never heard his work before he moved into the neighborhood, but one night, drunk, he’d told Tucker that he’d played Juliet incessantly when he’d split with his wife. He’d been dismissive of Naked, for pretty much the same reasons as that English girl, although he was less eloquent in his expression of them.

It had been a long time since Tucker had been anywhere to hear a band, and he couldn’t quite believe how familiar it all felt. Shouldn’t something have moved on by now? Did you really still have to lug all your equipment in by yourself, sell your records and T-shirts at the back of the room, talk to the crazy guy with no friends who’d been to see you three times this week already? There wasn’t much anyone could do with the live music experience, though. It was what it was. Bars and the bands that played in them didn’t have much use for the shiny white Apple world out there; there’d be processed cheese slices for dinner and blocked toilets until the world melted away.

Tucker went to the bar and got their drinks, a Coke for himself and a glass of Jameson for Fucker, and they sat down at a table at the side of the room, away from the tiny, low stage and the lights.

“But you’re doing okay,” said Fucker.

“Yeah.”

“Wondering whether you’ll ever have sex again?”

“Not yet.”

“You should.”

“If you can find someone to sleep with, anyone can.” Fucker was seeing a divorced English teacher from the local high school.

“You don’t have my charm, though.”

“Lisette probably thought you were me anyway.”

“You know what? That picture has never done me the smallest bit of good with a woman. Think about that, my friend.”

“I have. And the conclusion I’ve drawn is, it’s a picture of you, not me, and it makes you look like a bug-eyed psycho.”

The houselights went down, and the band ambled out onto the stage, to the general indifference of the drinkers in the room. They weren’t young men, the musicians, and Tucker wondered how often they’d been tempted to quit, and why they hadn’t done so. Maybe it was because they hadn’t been able to think of anything better to do; maybe it was even because they thought this was fun. They were okay. Their own songs weren’t anything special, but they knew that, because they played “Hickory Wind” and “Highway 61” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” They knew their audience, anyway. Tucker and John were surrounded by gray ponytails and bald heads. Tucker looked around to see if he could spot anybody under forty and saw a young man who immediately looked away when Tucker caught his eye.

“Uh-oh,” said Tucker.

“What’s up?”

“That kid over there, by the men’s room. I think he’s recognized you.”

“Cool. That never happens anymore. Shall we have some fun?”

“What do you call fun?”

“I’ll think of something.”

But then it got too loud to talk much, and Tucker started to get gloomy. He had feared the onset of gloom. It was the real reason he hadn’t wanted to come out in the first place. He’d spent a lot of time doing nothing, but the trick to doing nothing, as far as he was concerned, anyway, was not to think while you were doing it. The trouble with going to see bands is that there wasn’t much else to do but think, if you weren’t being swept away on a wave of visceral or intellectual excitement; and Tucker could tell that The Chris Jones Band would never be able to make people forget who they were and how they’d ended up that way, despite their sweaty endeavors. Mediocre loud music penned you into yourself, made you pace up and down your own mind until you were pretty sure you could see how you might end up going out of it. In the seventy-five minutes that he spent with himself, he managed to revisit pretty much every single place he’d have been happy never to see again. He worked back from Cat and Jackson to all the other screwed-up marriages and kids; the professional wasteland of the last twenty years ran alongside them, like a rusted-over railroad running alongside a traffic jam. People underestimated