Juliet, Naked

Tucker had known for some time that Annie had some sort of crush on him, and he was too old to feel anything other than a childish sense of delight. She was an attractive woman, good company, kind, younger than him. Ten or fifteen years or so ago, he would have felt obliged to enumerate all the individual items on his baggage carousel and point out that their relationship was doomed, that he always made a mess of everything, that they lived on separate continents and so on; but he was almost certain that she’d been paying enough attention to what he’d been saying, so caveat emptor. But then what? He didn’t even know if he was capable of having sex, or whether having sex would kill him if the capability was there. And if sex was going to kill him, then would he be happy to die here, in this town, in Annie’s bed? Jackson wouldn’t be happy, that was for sure. But was Tucker prepared not to have sex until Jackson was capable of looking after himself? He was six now… Twelve years? In twelve years, Tucker would be almost seventy, and that would raise a whole lot of other questions. For example: who’d want to have sex with him when he was seventy? If he was even capable of having sex?

The worst thing about his little medical event was the questions, which had started to come in an apparently unstoppable flood. Not all of them were about whether anyone would want to have sex with him when he was almost seventy; there had been a few really tricky ones related to the empty decades since Juliet, and the decades—he liked to think of a plural—to come. There weren’t going to be any answers to these tricky questions, either, which made them seem tauntingly rhetorical.

If he were a character in a movie, a few days in a strange town with a kind woman would renew his faith in something or other, and he’d go straight home and make a great album, but that wasn’t going to happen: the tank was as empty as it had always been. And then, just as Tucker was about to give in to his gloom, Terry Jackson pressed a button on a boom box, and the room filled with the sound of a soul singer Tucker recognized—Major Lance? Dobie Gray?—and Gav and Barnesy started doing backflips and headspins on the museum carpet.

“I’ll bet you could do that, Dad, couldn’t you?” said Jackson.

“Sure,” said Tucker.

Annie was stuck with the most faithful Friend the museum had ever had, but out of the corner of her eye she saw an elderly lady having her picture taken beside the photograph of the four workmates on their day off. Annie made her excuses and went over to introduce herself.

“Hello, Annie the Museum Director,” said the elderly lady. “I’m Kathleen. Kath.”

“Do you know any of those people?”

“That’s me,” said Kath. “I knew my teeth were bad, but I didn’t know they were that bad. No wonder I lost them.”

Annie looked at the photo, then back at the old woman. As far as Annie could tell, she was seventy-five now, and she’d been sixty in 1964.

“You’ve hardly aged a bit,” Annie said. “Really.”

“I know what you’re saying. I was old then and I’m old now.”

“Not a bit of it,” said Annie. “Do you keep in touch with the others?”

“That’s my sister. She’s passed on. The lads… They’d come up for the day. From Nottingham, I think. I never saw them again.”

“You look like you were having fun.”

“I suppose so. I wish we’d had a bit more though. If you know what I mean.”

Annie made an appropriately scandalized face.

“He wanted to. His hands were everywhere. I fought him off.”

“Well,” said Annie, “you can never go wrong not doing something. It’s only when you do things that you get into trouble.”

“I suppose so,” said Kath. “But now what?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m seventy-seven and I never got into any trouble. So now what? Have you got a medal for me? You’re a museum director. Write to the queen and tell her. Otherwise it was all a bloody waste of time, wasn’t it?”

“No,” said Annie. “Don’t say that.”

“What should I say instead, then?”

Annie smiled blankly.

“Would you excuse me for a moment?” she said.

She went to find Ros, who seemed to be giving an impromptu lecture on the typography of Terry Jackson’s Rolling Stones poster, and told her to take Jackson away from his father and stuff him full of Twiglets. Then Annie pulled Tucker into the corner where they had displayed Terry Jackson’s old bus tickets, which weren’t attracting as much traffic as they’d hoped.

“You okay?” said Tucker. “Seems to be going pretty well.”

“Tucker, I was wondering whether, whether… If you’d be interested.”

“In…”

“Oh. Sorry. Me.”

“I’m already interested in you. The conditional is unnecessary.”

“Thank you. But I suppose I mean sexually.”

The blush, which she had more or less kept in check over the last few days, was returning with a pent-up force; the blood had clearly been pooling, frustrated, somewhere in the region of her ears. She really needed her face to do something different when she asked a man to sleep with her. It seemed to her that the very act of asking made the request irritatingly unlikely.

“What about the party?”

“I meant later.”

“I was kidding.”

“Oh. I see. Anyway, I told myself I’d… I’d broach the subject. I’ve done it now. Thank you for listening.” And she turned to go.

“Pleasure. And, of course, I’m interested, by the way. If the answer to your question isn’t beside the point.”

“Oh. No. It isn’t. Good.”

“I would have jumped on you by now if it hadn’t been for my little scare the other day. And it still worries me.”

“I did actually look that… side of things up on the Internet.”

Tucker laughed.

“This is what constitutes foreplay, when you get older—a woman who’s prepared to look your medical condition up before she sleeps with you. I like it. It’s kind of sexy. What did the Internet have to say?”

Annie could see Ros leading Jackson toward them.

“You don’t get breathless going up stairs?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you should be okay, then. As long as, as I, well, do the work.”

She was, she felt, the color of an eggplant now, a kind of purply black. Maybe he’d like that.

“That’s the way I’ve always done it! We’ll be fine!”

“Right. Well. Good, then. I’ll see you later.”

And she went to give her little welcome speech to the great and the good of Gooleness.

Later, home and drunk, she felt a kind of precoital tristesse. Most of her tristesses were precoital, she thought gloomily. How could they not be, seeing as most of life was precoital? But this one was sharper than most, possibly because the coitus was a more real prospect than most. It began with an attack of nerves, a sudden lack of self-confidence: she’d seen pictures of Julie Beatty, and Julie Beatty had been breathtakingly beautiful. True, she’d been twenty-five or so when Tucker was with her, but Annie hadn’t looked anything like that when she was twenty-five; Natalie was still beautiful, and she was older than Annie. They all must have been, she realized, the ones she knew about and the scores—hundreds?—she didn’t. And