“Be my guest,” said Tucker. “You got a captive audience.”
“Who’s yours?” Gina asked Duncan.
They were listening to
“Who’s my what?”
“Your… What does he call her? ‘Princess Impossible’?”
“I don’t know. Most of the women I’ve had relationships with were pretty reasonable, really.”
“That’s not what he’s on about, though, is it?”
Duncan stared at her. Nobody had ever attempted to argue with him about Tucker Crowe’s lyrics. Not that Gina was arguing with him, exactly. But she seemed to be on the verge of an interpretation that differed from his own, and it made him feel a little irritable.
“What’s he on about, then, Oh, great Crowologist?”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I’m not setting myself up as an expert.”
“Good,” he said, and laughed. “It takes a while.”
“I’m sure.”
“But isn’t she Princess Impossible because she’s out of reach? Not because she’s an impossible person?”
“Well,” he said generously, “that’s the great thing about great art, isn’t it? It can mean all sorts of things. But by all accounts, she was very difficult.”
“In that first song, though…”
“ ‘And You Are?’ ”
“Yes, that one… There’s that line in there…”
“ ‘They told me that talking to you / Would be chewing barbed wire with a mouth ulcer / But you never once hurt me like that.’ ”
“How does that fit in with her being impossible? If she never once hurt him like that?”
“She became impossible later, I suppose.”
“I thought it was more, you know, her being out of his reach. ‘Your Royal Highness, way up there, and me on the floor below.’ Isn’t it that he thinks he’s out of her league?”
Duncan felt himself panicking a little: a lurch in the stomach, the sort of thing you get when you know you’ve left your keys on the kitchen table just after you’ve shut the front door. He’d invested quite a lot in Juliet’s impossibility. If he hadn’t got it right, then who was he?
“No,” he said, but he offered up nothing more.
“Well, you know more about it than me, as you say. Anyway, if that
“Which he didn’t…”
“No, but forgetting about Tucker and Juliet, because I’m interested anyway: have you had one of those? When you knew you were out of your depth?”
“Oh, I expect so.” He flicked through the index file of his sexual relationships, much of which consisted of blank cards kept at the back. He looked under I for “Impossible” and D for “Depth, Out of,” but there was nothing. He could think of friends who’d had that sort of experience, but the truth was that Duncan had never so much as attempted to form an attachment to someone as glamorous as Juliet, or indeed to anyone who could be described as glamorous. He knew his place, and it was two floors below, not one, thus preventing any kind of contact at all. You couldn’t even see unattainable women from where he usually stood. If you imagined it all as a department store, he was in the basement, with the lamps and the dishes; the Juliets were all in Ladies’ Intimates, a couple of escalator rides away.
“Go on.”
“Oh, you know. The usual thing.”
“How did you meet her?”
It struck Duncan that, as they were already in the kingdom of the self-deprecating, he had to come up with something, otherwise it was all too grim. Nobody was so big a loser that he didn’t even have a story about losing. He tried to conjure up the kind of exoticism Gina would be expecting; he saw dramatic eye makeup, elaborate hairdos, glit tery clothes.
“Do you remember that band the Human League?”
“Yes! Of course! God!”
Duncan smiled enigmatically.
“You went out with one of the girls in the Human League?”
And immediately Duncan lost his nerve. There was probably a website which provided a helpful list of the names of all the men that the girls in the Human League had dated; she’d be able to check.
“Oh, no, no. My… ex wasn’t actually in the Human League. She was in a sort of second-rate version. At college.” This was more like it. “Same deal, synthesizers and funny haircuts. Anyway, we didn’t last very long. She went off with a bass player from, from some other eighties band. What about yours?”
“Oh, an actor. He slept with everyone at drama college. I was silly enough to think I was different.”
He’d negotiated that pretty well, he thought. They were well matched in their failures. He was, however, still feeling uneasy about whether he’d spent two decades misreading the tenor of the relationship between Tucker and Juliet.
“Does it make any difference, do you think? Whether Juliet was impossible as in difficult or impossible as in out of reach?”
“Any difference to what? Or who?”
“I don’t know. I just… I’d feel a bit daft if I’d been wrong all this time.”
“How can you be wrong? You know more about this album than anyone on the planet. Anyway. Like you say. There’s no such thing as wrong.”
Had he ever listened to
“Oh, let’s change the subject,” he said.
“Sorry,” said Gina. “It must be awfully annoying, me chirruping away without knowing the first thing about anything. I can see how this sort of thing gets addictive, though.”
When Annie went to visit Tucker the next morning, he was dressed and ready to go. Jackson was sitting beside him, red-faced and looking swamped in a blue puffy jacket that had clearly not been designed with warm hospitals in mind.
“Okay,” said Tucker. “Here she is. Let’s go.”
The two of them walked past Annie and toward the door. Jackson’s showy determination, all jutting jaw and quick, even steps, led Annie to believe that the move had been rehearsed to within an inch of its life.
“Where are we going?” said Annie.
“Your place,” said Tucker. He was already halfway down the hall, so she could only catch his words by scurrying after him, and even then she nearly dropped them.
“My hotel? Or Gooleness?”
“Yeah. That one. The seaside-y one. Jackson needs some saltwater taffy. Don’t you, Jackson?”
“Yum.”
“Some what? I’ve never heard of it. You won’t be able to find it.”
The elevator had arrived, and she squeezed in just as the doors were shutting.
“What do you have that he’d like, then?”
