Juliet, Naked

Going to some woman’s house… If you had a day in London, would you spend it outside somebody’s house in, I don’t know, Gospel Oak?”

“But if you’ve actually come to see somebody’s house in Gospel Oak… And it’s not just some woman’s house, you know that. Things happened there. I’m going to stand where he stood.”

No, it wasn’t just any house. Everybody, apart from just about everybody, knew that. Julie Beatty had been living there with her first husband, who taught at Berkeley, when she met Tucker at a party thrown by Francis Ford Cop pola. She left her husband that night. Very shortly afterward, however, she thought better of it all and went home to patch things up. That was the story, anyway. Annie had never really understood how Duncan and his fellow fans could be quite so certain about tiny private tumults that took place decades ago, but they were. “You and Your Perfect Life,” the seven-minute song that ends the album, is supposed to be about the night Tucker stood outside the family home, “Throwing stones at the window / ’Til he came to the door / So where were you, Mrs. Steven Balfour?” The husband wasn’t called Steven Balfour, needless to say, and the choice of a fictitious name had inevitably provoked endless speculation on the message boards. Duncan’s theory was that he had been named after the British prime minister, the man who was accused by Lloyd George of turning the House of Lords into “Mr. Balfour’s poodle”—Juliet, by extension, has become her husband’s poodle. This interpretation is now accepted as definitive by the Tucker community, and if you look up “You and Your Perfect Life” on Wikipedia, apparently, you’ll see Duncan’s name in the footnotes, with a link to his essay. Nobody on the website had ever dared wonder aloud whether the surname had been chosen simply because it rhymed with the word “door.”

Annie loved “You and Your Perfect Life.” She loved its relentless anger, and the way Tucker moved from autobiography to social commentary by turning the song into a rant about how smart women got obliterated by their men. She didn’t usually like howling guitar solos, but she liked the way that the howling guitar solo in “Perfect Life” seemed just as articulate and as angry as the lyrics. And she loved the irony of it all—the way that Tucker, the man wagging his finger at Steven Balfour, had obliterated Julie more completely than her husband had ever managed. She would be the woman who broke Tucker’s heart forever. Annie felt sorry for Julie, who’d had to deal with men like Duncan throwing stones at her windows, metaphorically and probably literally, every now and again, ever since the song was released. But she envied her, too. Who wouldn’t want to make a man that passionate, that unhappy, that inspired? If you couldn’t write songs yourself, then surely what Julie had done was the next best thing?

She still didn’t want to see the house, though. After breakfast she took a cab to the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge and walked back toward the city, the salt wind somehow sharpening her joy in being alone.

Duncan felt slightly odd, going to Juliet’s place without Annie. She tended to arrange their transport to wherever they were going, and she was the one who knew the way back to wherever they had come from. He would rather have devoted his mental energy to Julie, the person, and Juliet, the album; he was intending to listen to it straight through twice, the first time in its released form, the second time with the songs placed in the order that Tucker Crowe originally wanted them, according to the sound engineer in charge of the sessions. But that wasn’t going to work out now, because he was going to need all his concentration for the BART. As far as he could tell, he had to get on at Powell Street and take the red line up to North Berkeley. It looked easy but, of course, it wasn’t, because once he was down on the platform he couldn’t find any way of telling what was a red-line train and what wasn’t, and he couldn’t ask anyone. Asking somebody would make it look as though he wasn’t a native, and though this wouldn’t matter in Rome or Paris or even in London, it mattered here, where so many things that were important to him had happened. And because he couldn’t ask, he ended up on a yellow-line train, only he couldn’t tell it was yellow until he got to Rockridge, which meant that he had to go back to the 19th St. Oakland stop and change. What was wrong with her? He knew she wasn’t as devoted to Tucker Crowe as he was, but he’d thought that in recent years she’d started to get it, properly. A couple of times he’d come home to find her playing “You and Your Perfect Life,” although he’d been unable to interest her in the infamous but superior Bottom Line bootleg version, when Tucker had smashed his guitar to smithereens at the end of the solo. (The sound was a little muddy, admittedly, and an annoying drunk person kept shouting “Rock ’n’ roll!” into the bootlegger’s microphone during the last verse, but if it was anger and pain she was after, then this was the one.) He’d tried to pretend that her decision not to come was perfectly understandable, but the truth was, he was hurt. Hurt and, temporarily at least, lost.

Getting to North Berkeley station felt like an achievement in itself, and he allowed himself the luxury of asking for directions to Edith Street as a reward. It was fine, not knowing the way to a residential street. Even natives couldn’t be expected to know everything. Except of course the moment he opened his mouth, the woman he picked on wanted to tell him that she’d spent a year in Kensing ton, London, after she’d graduated.

He hadn’t expected the streets to be quite so long and hilly, nor the houses quite so far apart, and by the time he found the right house, he was sweaty and thirsty, while at the same time bursting for a pee. There was no doubt he’d have been clearer-headed if he’d stopped somewhere near the BART station for a drink and a visit to the restroom. But he’d been thirsty and in need of a toilet before, and had always resisted the temptation to break into a stranger’s house.

When he got to 1131 Edith Street, there was a kid sitting on the pavement outside, his back against a fence that looked as though it might have been erected simply to stop him from getting any further. He was in his late teens, with long, greasy hair and a wispy goatee, and when he realized that Duncan had come to look at the house, he stood up and dusted himself off.

“Yo,” he said.

Duncan cleared his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to return the greeting, but he offered a “Hi” instead of a “Hello,” just to show that he had an informal register.

“They’re not home,” said the kid. “I think they might have gone to the East Coast. The Hamptons or some shit like that.”

“Oh. Right. Oh well.”

“You know them?”

“No, no. I just… You know, I’m a, well, a Crowologist. I was just in the neighborhood, so I thought, you know…”

“You from England?”

Duncan nodded.

“You came all the way from England to see where Tucker Crowe threw his stones?” The kid laughed, so Duncan laughed, too.

“No, no. God no. Ha! I had some business in the city, and I thought, you know… What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Juliet is my favorite album of all time.”

Duncan nodded. The teacher in him wanted to point out the non sequitur; the fan understood completely. How could he not? He didn’t get the sidewalk-sitting, though. Duncan’s plan had been to look, imagine the trajectory of the stones, maybe take a picture and then leave. The boy, however, seemed to regard the house as if it were a place of spiritual significance, capable of promoting a profound inner peace.

“I’ve been here, like, six or seven times?” the boy said. “Always blows me away.”

“I know what you mean,” said Duncan, although he didn’t. Perhaps it was his age, or his Englishness, but he wasn’t being blown away, and he hadn’t expected to be, either. It was, after all, a pleasant detached house they were standing outside, not the Taj Mahal. In any case, the need to pee was preventing any real appreciation of the moment.

“You wouldn’t happen to know… What’s your name?”

“Elliott.”

“I’m Duncan.”

“Hi, Duncan.”

“Elliott, you wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a Star-bucks near here? Or something? I need a restroom.”

“Ha!” said the kid.

Duncan stared at him. What kind of answer was that?

“See, I do know one right near here. But I kind of promised myself I wouldn’t use it again.”