Juliet, Naked

“I guess not, no.”

So he was off to London on his own.

* * *

“When will we get there?”

“Ten minutes. But Jackson, you understand that we’re ten minutes from the airport. And then we have to wait for the plane. And then we wait for the plane to take off. And then we fly for seven hours. And then we wait for our bags. And then we wait for a bus. And then it’s maybe another hour from the airport to Lizzie’s apartment. If you don’t think that sounds like much fun, then it’s not too late. I could take you to your mother’s, and…”

“It sounds like fun.”

“All that sitting around waiting sounds like fun.”

“Yep.”

It hadn’t gone well, telling Jackson he was going to see Lizzie without him, and there had been many, many tears, followed by total capitulation. There had been times in his life when he would have paid for tears like these to be shed on his behalf: every single one of his other children had cried unstoppably when a mother had attempted to leave them in his care for a day or an afternoon or even for twenty minutes while she took a bath, and he’d felt wretched and useless every time. His own kids had been afraid of him when they were young. Now he had a child who needed him and loved him and felt anxious when he went out (because “out” was all it had ever been with Jackson, never “away”), and Tucker felt unmanned by it. Fathers weren’t supposed to engender this level of dependency. They’re supposed to miss bedtimes because of business trips and concert tours.

So he’d had to call Natalie and ask her to fork out money for an extra ticket, which made him feel even more inadequate than he had the first time. It was one thing not being able to afford to pay for himself, but fathers were supposed to be providers, as well as bedtime-missers. This father, however, was forced to depend on the largesse of the ex-wife before last and her leech of a husband.

They checked in, bought a small mountain of candy and a couple of dozen comic books. Tucker was feeling awful, anxious and sweaty; when he took Jackson for a pee he looked in a mirror and was alarmed by the complete absence of color from his face. Unless white could be counted as a color, which it probably could be, when it was this intense. He was almost certainly about to be laid low by flu, or pneumonia, or something, and he cursed his timing: in twenty-four hours’ time, he’d be too sick to travel. He could have stayed home without losing face, without being the worst father in the world.

They waited in line to go through security, a process that could have been expressly designed to feed Jackson’s morbidity. Tucker told him that they were looking for guns.

“Guns?”

“Sometimes bad guys take guns on planes because they want to rob rich people. But we’re not rich, so they won’t come near us.”

“How will they know we’re not rich?”

“Rich people wear stupid watches and smell nice. We’re not wearing watches, and we smell bad.”

“But why do we have to take our shoes off?”

“You can fit small guns in shoes. You’d have to walk funny, but you could do it.”

An old English lady waiting in front of them turned around.

“It’s not guns they’re looking for, young man. It’s bombs. I’m surprised Daddy hasn’t heard of the Shoe Bomber. He was English, you know. I mean, Muslim, of course. But English.”

Daddy has heard of the Shoe Bomber, thank you very much, you eavesdropping old crone, Tucker wanted to say. Now turn around and shut the fuck up.

“Shoe Bomber?” said Jackson.

Tucker could see right away that, if they ever got as far as London, they wouldn’t be coming back. Not by plane, anyway. Mark would be coughing up the dough for a couple of tickets on a cruise ship, unless Jackson knew anything about the Titanic. In which case, Mark would be paying for an exclusive English boarding-school education, and Jackson would have to grow up with one of those tony boarding-school accents.

“Yes. He tried to blow up the plane by putting explosives in his shoes. Can you imagine? You wouldn’t need very much, I suppose. Just enough to blow a small hole in the plane. And then fssssssk! We’d all get sucked out and dropped into the middle of the sea.”

Jackson looked up at Tucker. Tucker made a face intended to indicate that the woman was gaga.

“I’m more and more thankful that my life is coming to its end,” said the old lady. “I lived through a world war, but I’ve got a feeling that you’re going to be seeing a lot worse than the Blitz when you grow up.”

They stepped through the scanner and waved a cheery good-bye to the woman. And then Tucker began to tell the ingenious and preposterous lies that would enable them both to board the aircraft. He’d even had to tell Jackson that the old lady was entirely mistaken about the imminence of her own death, let alone all the other deaths she’d alluded to.

Tucker couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a plane. The day he’d quit music, he had flown, drunk and angry and remorseful and self-loathing, from Minneapolis to New York, and he’d hit on a stewardess, and tried to hit a woman who’d tried to stop him from hitting on the stewardess, so that particular flight tended to be the one that stayed in his mind. He’d been pretty sure at the time that the stewardess was going to be the answer to all his problems. His feeling was that they wouldn’t stay together long, but probably there’d be lots of therapeutic fucking. And because she was a stewardess, she’d have to travel a lot, and in her absences he would do some writing, maybe go into a studio near where she lived, rebuild his career. These are all the things she didn’t understand when he made his play. She thought he was just grabbing her ass, but there was more to it than that, as he’d tried to explain, tearfully, and at great volume. He loved her.

Jesus. He was lucky she’d been a reasonable human being. He could have found himself in front of a New Jersey judge. Instead he’d met someone else, and then someone else again, had kids… Maybe his hunch about the stewardess had been right. He wished he’d managed to convince her of their viability as a couple, although he couldn’t wish Jackson away.

He looked down at the seat next to him. The boy was tucked under a blanket with his headphones on and was watching his fifth straight episode of SpongeBob. He was happy. Tucker had warned him that he might not like the movie they were showing on the plane, because that was what happened the last time Tucker flew across the Atlantic: they showed a bad movie you didn’t want to watch. Now they showed every bad movie ever made. Jackson had actually giggled when he realized, long before his father had worked out the sheer abundance of the entertainment system, the amount of junk he could consume; he now felt that the flight was a little on the short side. Tucker had given up on the romantic comedy he’d started watching. As far as he could figure out, the problem between the central couple, the thing that was keeping them from being together, was that she had a cat and he had a dog, and the cat and dog fought like cats and dogs, which made the couple, through some mysterious contagion that the film couldn’t properly explain, fight like cats and dogs, too. Tucker got the feeling that they’d be able to solve their problems before the two hours were up. He wasn’t worried for them. He was now failing to read Barnaby Rudge. Dickens seemed wrong among all these little screens and bleeping lights and miniature cans of soda.

He was still feeling wretched, and he couldn’t shake off a sense of impending catastrophe, which he seemed to recall was a textbook indicator of something-or-other. Jackson had turned him into a hypochondriac—his son’s conviction that just about any cough or unexplained ache was cancer, or old age, anyway, wasn’t good for either of them—but he was pretty sure that the sweating, the arrhythmia and the foreboding were a result of his sudden and unexpected emergence from hiding. He knew the people who cared about him out there in the conjectural world of cyberspace described him as a recluse, but he’d never thought of himself that way. He went to shops and bars and Little League games, so it wasn’t as if he were Salinger. He just didn’t make music or talk to earnest young magazine journalists, and most people didn’t do either of those things. But in the airport he’d noticed himself walking around with his eyes and mouth wide open, so maybe he was a little bit more Kaspar Hauser than he’d thought. And planes were unnervingly different, and they were on their way to a big city, to hang out with an ex- wife and daughter who hated him… It was a miracle that his heart was able to keep any time at all, so 7/4, if that’s what it was, seemed perfectly acceptable. He put his book down and fell into a sickly, clammy doze.