stepped back to look at the picture again.
“You should really see it in the daylight,” said Elliott. He drew back the curtains on the French windows, and almost immediately they found themselves staring at a gardener mowing the lawn. He saw them and started shouting and gesticulating, and before Duncan knew it, he was out the front door and halfway up the road, running and sweating, his legs shaking with nerves, his heart pounding so hard he thought he might not make it to the end of the street and possible safety.
It wasn’t until the doors on the BART closed behind him that he felt safe. He’d lost Elliott almost immediately—he’d run out of that house as fast as he could, but the boy was faster, and almost immediately out of sight. And he never wanted to see him again anyway. It had been pretty much all his fault, there was no doubt about that; he’d provided both the temptation and the means to break in. Duncan had been stupid, yes, but his powers of reasoning had been scrambled by his bladder, and… Elliott had corrupted him, was the truth of it. Scholars like him were always going to be vulnerable to the excesses of obsessives, because, yes, they shared a tiny strand of the same DNA. His heart rate began to slow. He was calming himself down with the familiar stories he always told himself when doubt crept in.
When the train stopped at the next station, however, a Latino who looked a little like the gardener in the back garden got into Duncan’s car, and his stomach shot toward his knees while his heart leaped halfway up his windpipe, and no amount of self-justification could help him put his internal organs back where they belonged.
What really frightened him was how spectacularly his transgression had paid off. All these years he’d done nothing more than read and listen and think, and though he’d been stimulated by these activities, what had he uncovered, really? And yet by behaving like a teenage hooligan with a screw loose, he had made a major breakthrough. He was the only Crowologist in the world (Elliott was nobody’s idea of a Crowologist) who knew about that picture, and he could never tell anyone about it, unless he wished to own up to being mentally unbalanced. Every other year spent on his chosen subject had been barren compared to the last couple of hours. But that couldn’t be the way forward, surely? He didn’t want to be the kind of man who plunged his arms into trash cans in the hope of finding a letter, or a piece of bacon rind that Crowe might have chewed. By the time he got back to the hotel, he had convinced himself he was finished with Tucker Crowe.
Various musicians who played on the album have talked about Crowe’s fragile state of mind during the recording of the album. Scotty Phillips has described how Crowe came at him with an oxyacetylene torch before the guitarist’s incendiary solo on “You and Your Perfect Life.”
In one of his last interviews, Crowe expressed surprise at the enthusiasm for the record. “Yeah, people keep telling me they love it. But I don’t really understand them. To me, it’s the sound of someone having his fingernails pulled out. Who wants to listen to that?”
Julie Beatty claimed in a 1992 interview that she no longer owned a copy of
Various musicians, including the late Jeff Buckley, Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of REM, and Chris Martin of Coldplay, have talked about the influence of
1. And You Are?
2. Adultery
3. We’re in Trouble
4. In Too Deep
5. Who Do You Love?
1. Dirty Dishes
2. The Better Man
3. The Twentieth Call of the Day
4. Blood Ties
5. You and Your Perfect Life
Annie scrolled back through the photo library on her computer and started to wonder whether her whole life had been a waste of time. She wasn’t, she liked to think, a nostalgic, or a Luddite. She preferred her iPod to Duncan’s old vinyl, she enjoyed having hundreds of TV channels to choose from, and she loved her digital camera. It’s just that in the old days, when you eventually got your pictures back from the drugstore, you never went backward through time. You shuffled through the twenty-four holiday snapshots, only seven of which were any good, put them in a drawer and forgot about them. You didn’t have to compare them to every other holiday you’d had in the last seven or eight years. But now she couldn’t resist it. When she uploaded or downloaded or whatever it was you did, the new photos took their place alongside all the others, and the seamlessness was beginning to depress her.
Look at them. There’s Duncan. There’s Annie. There’s Duncan and Annie. There’s Annie, Duncan, Duncan, Annie, Duncan standing at a urinal, pretending to have a pee… Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting. On the other hand, being childless meant that you could, if you were in a negative frame of mind, come to the conclusion that your snapshots were a little on the dull side. Nobody grew up or got bigger; no landmark occasions were commemorated, because there were none. Duncan and Annie just got slowly older, and a little fatter. (She was being loyal here. She hadn’t got much fatter at all, she noticed.) Annie had single friends who’d never had kids, but their holiday photos, usually taken in exotic locations, were never boring—or rather, they didn’t feature the same two people over and over again, quite often wearing the same T- shirts and sunglasses, quite often sitting by the same swimming pool in the same hotel on the Amalfi coast.
Her single childless friends seemed to meet new people on their travels, people who then became friends. Duncan and Annie had never made friends on holiday: Duncan was always terrified of speaking to anybody, in case they should “get stuck.” Once, sitting by the pool at the hotel on the Amalfi coast, Duncan had spotted someone reading the same book as him, a relatively obscure biography of some soul or blues musician. Some people—most people, maybe—would have regarded this as a happy and unlikely coincidence worth a smile or a hello, maybe even a drink and an eventual exchange of e-mail addresses; Duncan marched straight to their bedroom, put the book away and got out another one, just in case the other reader wanted to talk to him. Maybe it wasn’t her whole life that had been a waste of time—maybe it was just the fifteen years that she’d spent with Duncan. A chunk of her life, rescued! The chunk that finished in 1993! The photos from the American holiday didn’t do much to lift her gloom. Why had she allowed herself to be snapped outside an old-fashioned ladies’ underwear shop in Queens, New
