then she tried to console herself with the knowledge that Tucker must have lowered the bar by now, and, of course, that was no consolation at all. She didn’t want to be the dying embers of his sex life, and she certainly didn’t want to be a low bar. While Tucker was putting Jackson to bed she made tea and looked for something else to drink; when he came downstairs she was pouring some very old banana liqueur into a tumbler and trying not to cry. She really hadn’t thought the museum thing through, when she first took the job. She hadn’t worked out that it would make absolutely everything, even a one-night stand, feel as though it were already over, behind glass, a poignant relic of an earlier, happier time.
“Listen,” said Tucker, “I’ve been thinking,” and Annie was convinced that he had come to the same conclusion himself, that he was about to tell her that, yes, though his bar was no longer at Olympic height, it hadn’t dropped that far just yet, and he’d come back to her in a decade or so. “I should look at this stuff myself.”
“Which stuff?”
“The stuff on the Internet that told you whether sex will kill me.”
“Oh. Of course. No problem.”
“It’s just… If I did drop dead, you’d probably feel bad.”
“Almost certainly.”
“You’d feel responsible. And I’d rather it was me who had the post-death guilt.”
“Why would you feel guilt?”
“Ah, you’re not a parent, are you? Guilt is pretty much all I feel.”
Annie found the website she’d been looking at and showed him the section titled “Recovery.”
“Can I trust this one?” said Tucker.
“It’s the National Health Service. They usually want to keep you out of the hospital. The government can’t afford you, and anyway the hospitals kill you.”
“Okay. Hey, there’s a whole sex section. ‘Having sex will not put you at further risk of another heart attack.’ We’re good to go.”
“It also says that most people will feel comfortable about resuming sexual activity about four weeks after a heart attack.”
“I’m not most people. I feel comfortable now.”
“And then there’s that bit.”
She pointed at the screen, and Tucker read from it.
“A thirty-percent chance of erectile dysfunction. That’s good.”
“Why?”
“Because if there’s nothing going on, you needn’t blame yourself. Even though it would probably be your fault.”
“There won’t be any erectile dysfunction,” said Annie, mock confidently.
She was blushing, of course, but they were looking at a screen in the dark of the office, and Tucker didn’t notice, so for a moment she wanted to undercut the moment out loud—clap a hand over her mouth, or make a joke at her own expense—but she resisted the urge, and… well, there was an atmosphere, she thought. She wasn’t sure she’d ever created an atmosphere before, and she would never have thought it could be achieved by talking to a man with health problems about erectile dysfunction. It was just as well, really. For the best part of forty years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true. Her youth was over, but there might be some life left in life yet.
They kissed for the first time then, while the NHS website glared at them; they kissed for so long that the computer went to sleep. Annie wasn’t blushing anymore, but she was feeling embarrassingly emotional and she was worried that she’d start to cry, and he’d think she had too much invested in him, and he’d change his mind about the sex. If he asked her what the problem was, she’d tell him she always got weepy after exhibition openings.
They went upstairs, took their clothes off with their backs to each other, got into her cold bed and started to touch.
“You were right,” said Tucker.
“So far, anyway,” said Annie. “But there was that bit about maintenance.”
“And I’ll tell you,” said Tucker, “you’re not making maintenance much easier.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Have you… I didn’t come prepared. For understandable reasons. You don’t keep anything lying around, do you?”
“Oh,” said Annie. “Yes. Of course. But I don’t have any condoms. You’ll have to excuse me for a moment.”
She’d already thought about this moment; she’d been thinking about it since her conversation with Kath. She went to the bathroom, stayed in there for a couple of minutes and then went back to make love to him. She didn’t kill him, even though it felt like parts of her had been asleep for as long as Tucker’s career.
The following day, Jackson talked to his mother on the phone and became upset, and Tucker booked their flights home. On the last night, Tucker and Annie shared a bed, but they didn’t have sex again.
“I’ll come back,” said Tucker. “I like it here.”
“Nobody comes back.”
Annie didn’t know whether she meant the town or the bed, but either way there was some bitterness in there, and she didn’t want that.
“Or you could come over.”
“I’ve used up a lot of my holidays.”
“There are other jobs.”
“I’m not taking lectures on alternative careers from you.”
“Okay. So. I’m never coming back here, you’re never going over there… It’s difficult to find the place where we can at least pretend that there’s some sort of future.”
“Is that what you normally do after a one-night stand?” said Annie. “Pretend there’s a future?” She couldn’t seem to change the tone in her voice, no matter what she did. She didn’t want to scoff and taunt; she wanted to find a way to hope, but she only seemed to be able to speak one language. Typical bloody British, she thought.
“I’m just going to ignore you,” said Tucker.
She put her arms around him. “I’ll miss you. And Jackson.”
There. It wasn’t much, and it was entirely unrepresentative of the grief and panic that were already probing for promising-looking ways of escape, but she hoped at least he heard uncomplicated affection.
“You’ll e-mail, right? A lot?”
“Oh, I’ve got nothing to say.”
“I’ll tell you when I’m bored.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Now I’ll be scared to write anything.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Tucker. “You don’t make it easy.”
“No,” said Annie. “That’s because it isn’t. That’s why mostly it goes wrong. That’s why you’ve been divorced a thousand times. Because it isn’t easy.”
She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn’t have been much, and it wouldn’t have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.
Tucker sat up in bed and looked at her.
“You should make up with Duncan,” he said. “He’d take you back. Especially now. You’ve got about nine years’ worth of material for him.”
“Why? What good would that do me?”
“None at all,” said Tucker. “That would be the point.”
She tried one last time.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. I know that… that love is supposed to be transformative.” Now that she’d used the word she felt her tongue loosen. “And that’s how I’m trying to look at it. There. Bang. I’ve been
