Juliet, Naked

“Right,” said Duncan. “But… Would it matter if I did?”

“Kind of. Because I’d still be breaking the promise.”

“Oh. Well, as I don’t really understand what kind of promise you can make with regard to a public lavatory, I’m not sure I can help you with your ethical dilemma.”

The boy laughed. “I love the way you English talk. ‘Ethical dilemma.’ That’s great.”

Duncan didn’t disabuse him, although he did wonder how many of his students back home would even have been able to repeat the phrase accurately, let alone use it themselves.

“But you don’t think you can help me.”

“Oh. Well. Maybe. How about if I told you how to find it but I didn’t come with you?”

“I wasn’t really expecting you to come with me, to be honest.”

“No. Right. I should explain. The nearest toilet to here is in there.” Elliott pointed down the driveway toward Juliet’s house.

“Yes, well, I suppose it would be,” said Duncan. “But that doesn’t really help me.”

“Except I know where they keep their spare key.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. I’ve been inside like three times? Once to use the shower. A couple times just to see what I could see. I never steal anything big. Just, you know, paperweights and shit. Souvenirs.”

Duncan examined the boy’s face for evidence of an elaborate joke, a satirical dig at Crowologists, and decided that Elliott hadn’t made a joke since he’d turned seventeen.

“You let yourself into their house when they’re out?”

The boy shrugged. “Yeah. I feel bad about it, which is why I wasn’t sure about telling you.”

Duncan suddenly noticed that on the ground there was a chalk drawing of a pair of feet, and an arrowed line pointing toward the house. Tucker’s feet, presumably, and Tucker’s stones. He wished he hadn’t seen the drawing. It gave him less to do.

“Well, I can’t do that.”

“No. Sure. I understand.”

“So there’s nothing else?”

Edith Street was long and leafy, and the next cross street was long and leafy, too. It was the sort of American suburb where residents had to get into their cars to buy a pint of milk.

“Not for a mile or two.”

Duncan puffed out his cheeks, a gesture, he realized even as he was making it, intended to prepare the way for the decision he’d already made. He could have gone behind a hedge; he could have left that second, walked back to the BART station and found a cafe, walked back again if he needed to. Which he didn’t, really, because he’d seen all there was to see. That was the root of the problem. If more had been… laid on for people like him, he wouldn’t have had to create his own excitement. It wouldn’t have killed her to mark the significance of the place in some way, would it? With a discreet plaque or something? He hadn’t been prepared for the mundanity of Juliet’s house, just as he hadn’t really been prepared for the malodorous functionality of the men’s room in Minneapolis.

“A mile or two? I’m not sure I can wait that long.”

“Up to you.”

“Where’s the key?”

“There’s a loose brick in the porch there. Low down.”

“And you’re sure the key’s still there? When did you last look?”

“Honestly? I went in just before you came. I didn’t take a single thing. But I can never believe that I’m standing in Juliet’s house, you know? Fucking Juliet, man!”

Duncan knew that he and Elliott weren’t the same. Elliott had surely never written about Crowe—or, if he had, the work would almost certainly have been unpublishable. Duncan also doubted whether Elliott had the emotional maturity to appreciate the breathtaking accomplishment of Juliet (which, as far as Duncan was concerned, was a darker, deeper, more fully realized collection of songs than the overrated Blood on the Tracks), and nor would he have been able to cite its influences: Dylan and Leonard Cohen, of course, but also Dylan Thomas, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Shelley, the Book of Job, Camus, Pinter, Beckett and early Dolly Parton. But people who didn’t understand all this might look at them and decide, erroneously, that they were similar in some way. Both of them had the same need to stand in fucking Juliet’s house, for example. Duncan followed Elliott down the short driveway to the house and watched as the boy groped for the key and opened the door.

* * *

The house was dark—all the blinds were down—and smelled of incense, or maybe some kind of exotic potpourri. Duncan couldn’t have lived with it, but presumably Julie Beatty and her family weren’t sick with nerves all the time when they were in residence, the way Duncan was feeling now. The smell sharpened his fear and made him wonder whether he might throw up.

He’d made an enormous mistake, but there was no undoing it. He was inside, so even if he didn’t use the toilet, he’d still committed the crime. Idiot. And idiot boy, too, for persuading him that this was a good idea.

“So there’s a small toilet down here, and it’s got some cool stuff on the walls. Cartoons and shit. But the bathroom upstairs, you see her makeup and towels and everything. It’s spooky. I mean, not spooky to her, probably. But spooky if you only kind of half believe she even existed.”

Duncan understood the appeal of seeing Julie Beatty’s makeup absolutely, and his understanding added to his sense of self-loathing.

“Yes, well, I haven’t got time to mess around,” said Duncan, hoping that Elliott wouldn’t point out the obvious holes in the assertion. “Just point me toward the downstairs one.”

They were in a large hallway with several doors leading off it. Elliott nodded at one of them, and Duncan marched toward it briskly, an Englishman with pressing West Coast business appointments who’d troweled some time out of his hectic schedule to stand on a sidewalk, and then break into someone’s house for the hell of it.

He made the pee as splashy as possible, just to prove to Elliott that the need was genuine. He was disappointed by the promised artwork, however. There were a couple of cartoons, one of Julie and one of a middle-aged man who still looked something like the old photos Duncan had seen of her husband, but they looked like they’d been done by one of those artists who hang out at tourist traps, and in any case they were both post- Tucker, which meant that they could have been pictures of any American middle-class couple. He was washing his hands in the tiny sink when Elliott shouted through the door, “Oh, and there’s the drawing. That’s still up in their dining room.”

“What drawing?”

“The drawing that Tucker did of her, back in the day.”

Duncan opened the door and stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“You know Tucker’s an artist, right?”

“No.” And then, because this made him sound like an amateur, “Well, yes. Of course. But I didn’t know…” He didn’t know what he didn’t know, but Elliott didn’t notice.

“Yeah,” said Elliott. “In here.”

The dining room was at the back of the house, with French windows leading out onto a terrace, presumably, or a lawn—there were curtains drawn over them. The drawing was hung over the fireplace, and it was big, maybe four feet by three, a head-and-shoulders portrait of Julie in profile, half squinting through her cigarette smoke at something in the middle distance. She looked, in fact, as if she were studying another work of art. It was a beautiful portrait, reverential and romantic, but not idealized—it was too sad, for a start. It somehow seemed to suggest the impending end of his relationship with the sitter, although of course Duncan might have been imagining that. He might have been imagining the meaning, he might have been imagining the power and charm. Indeed, he could have been imagining the drawing itself.

Duncan moved in closer. There was a signature in the bottom left-hand corner, and that was thrilling enough to require separate examination and contemplation. In a quarter of a century of fandom, he’d never seen Tucker’s handwriting. And while he was staring at the signature, he realized something else: that for the first time since 1986 he hadn’t been able to respond to a piece of work by Crowe. So he stopped looking at the signature and