Juliet, Naked

eleven

How can you just lose a baby?” said Jackson. “It hasn’t even been born yet. It can’t even go anywhere.”

His eyebrows were high above his eyes, suggesting stifled mirth; the boy was pretty sure there was going to be a punch line to this joke, Tucker could tell, but he wasn’t going to laugh until he’d been given permission.

“Yeah, well. When people say that someone’s lost a baby…” He hesitated. Was there an easier, gentler way of doing this? Probably, but fuck it. “When people say that someone’s lost a baby, it means the baby died.”

The eyebrows fell.

“Died?”

“Yeah. It happens sometimes. Quite a lot, actually. Lizzie was unlucky, because usually it happens really early on, when the baby isn’t even really a baby. But hers was a little bit older.”

“Is Lizzie going to die, too?”

“No, no. She’ll be okay. At the moment she’s just very sad.”

“So even babies die? Babies that haven’t been born? That really, really sucks.”

“It really, really does.”

“Except,” said Jackson, brightening, “except, you’re not going to be a granddad.”

“Not… Not yet, no.”

“Not for ages. And if you’re not going to be a granddad yet it means you might not die yet.” And with that, Jackson started running up and down, whooping.

“Jackson! Stop being such a jerk!”

Tucker only rarely shouted at him, so whenever he did, the effect was dramatic. Jackson stopped dead, covered his ears with his hands and started to cry.

“That hurt my ears. A lot. I wish you’d died instead of that poor little baby.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“This time I really do.”

Tucker knew why he’d been so angry: it was guilt. The postponement of grandfatherhood hadn’t been the first thing he’d thought of when Lizzie’s mother called to tell him the news, but it had certainly been the second, and the space between the two hadn’t been as respectful as he would have wished. He’d been reprieved. Someone up there had wanted to extend his—not his youth, of course, nor even, let’s face it, his prime, but his pre-grandfatherly state. It wasn’t what he’d wanted. He’d wanted Lizzie to be happy, to have a healthy child. But every cloud, and so on.

Meanwhile Jackson’s sobs had stopped being angry and bitter. They were now pitiful and remorseful.

“I’m really so, so sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean it. I’m glad the baby died and not you.”

Somehow kids could never get it quite right.

“Anyway, I suppose we’ll have to go to London and see Lizzie, right?”

“Oh, no. I don’t think so. That isn’t what she’d want.”

It hadn’t even crossed his mind. Was that bad? Probably. “Probably” was usually the answer to this particular question, in his experience, if the question was self-directed. But Natalie would be around, and Lizzie was close to her stepdad… There was no need for him to sit by her bedside not knowing what to say.

“She’d want to see you, Dad. I’d want to see you if I was sick.”

“Yeah, but… You and me, we’re different. I don’t know Lizzie as well.”

“We’ll see,” Jackson said.

Cat came over to take Jackson out for pizza. She’d offered to take Tucker out, too, but he’d declined—the boy needed some time alone with his mother, and anyway, Tucker wasn’t ready to play happy modern fractured families yet. He was old-fashioned enough (and simple enough) to believe that if a man and his wife could share a pizza, then they could share a bed. He was, however, somewhat disconcerted to realize when he saw her that he could have done it, sat in the restaurant eating and chatting; this particular wound had taken only a short time to heal. A while back, he might have taken this as an indication of increasing psychic health, but in his experience anything to do with getting older rarely indicated good news. Presumably, then, it was doleful proof that he couldn’t bring himself to give much of a shit about anything anymore. She was a good-looking woman, Cat, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what had pulled him toward her. And he could no longer re-create in his mind the circumstances that had led to their marriage, or the production of Jackson, or even the stormy weather of the last year or so.

“I suppose you’ll have to go to London,” Cat said, when he told her the news about Lizzie.

“Oh, no,” he said, although the “Oh” was beginning to sound superfluous and phony, even to him. This time it had crossed his mind. “I don’t think so. That isn’t what she’d want.” Why not stick with a winning formulation?

“You think?” said Cat.

“It’s not as if we’re close,” said Tucker. “She wouldn’t be expecting me to fly across the Atlantic just to be useless.”

“Nearly right,” said Cat. “She’d be expecting you not to.”

“Right,” said Tucker. “Which is what I just said.”

“No. It wasn’t. Your way of putting it suggested that she wouldn’t care one way or the other. My way—her way—is to think the worst of you. You don’t know much about fathers and daughters, do you?”

“Not a lot, no.” Not as much as he should, anyway, seeing as he was the father of a couple of daughters.

“And she flew all the way here to see you when she found out she was pregnant. There’s something going on with her.”

He finished buttoning up Jackson’s coat and kissed him on the top of his head. Of course, the one kid who he hadn’t fucked up was the one kid whose offspring he wasn’t likely to see.

He phoned Natalie as soon as Cat and Jackson had left.

“When do you think you’ll be coming to see her?” said Natalie.

“Oh,” said Tucker, and this time the word was airier. “As soon as I can get things organized here.”

“But you are coming? Lizzie didn’t think you’d make the effort.”

“Yeah, I guessed she’d think that. I know her better than she suspects. And she doesn’t know me at all.”

“She’s very angry with you right now.”

“Well, I guess this sort of thing stirs up all sorts of inner shit.”

“I think you have to get used to it, as your children start to have children. It makes them see how absolutely hopeless you were.”

“Great, I’m looking forward to it.”

It was only much later, after he’d put Jackson to bed, that he realized he didn’t have the money to go to London. He didn’t have the money to go to New York City, was the truth of it; Cat was helping him out for the time being. What would come after that was a mystery, although not one he was particularly anxious to solve. Nobody would let Jackson starve, and that was the only thing that mattered. He called Natalie back and told her he’d been unable to make child-care arrangements.

“His mother won’t look after him? Gosh.”

That “gosh”—so English, so poisonous.

“Of course she would, but…”

“But what?”

“But she’s away. On business.”

“I thought she did things with yogurt.”

“Why can’t yogurt involve travel?”

“Wouldn’t it go off?”

At least he could still feel the open, festering exit wound that Natalie had left, so that was something. That combination of bitchiness and stupidity was as hard to bear now as it had been back then.

“So bring him. I’m sure Lizzie would like to see him. She seemed quite taken with him.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s the school year, and…”

“Lizzie said you and Cat were breaking up.”

“That’s something that… that seems to have happened, yes.”

“So you can’t afford to fly to London.”

“It’s not that.”

“So you can afford to fly to London.”

“If, you know, push came to shove.”

“That’s exactly where push has come.”

“I can’t afford to fly to London, no. There is a little cash-flow problem at the moment.”

“We’ll pay.”

“No, I can’t…”

“Tucker. Please.”

“Fine. Thanks.”

Having no money wasn’t so bad, really, as long as he never did anything other than go for coffee with Fucker once a month or so. Adults, however, especially adults with several children, sometimes found themselves in a position where they needed access to a fund more bountiful than the bedroom change jar that departing ex-spouses had generously left behind. Natalie’s husband did something… Actually, Tucker had no real idea what he did. He could remember that it was something he disapproved of, or had belittled, anyway, so he probably did something that involved going to meetings, possibly while wearing a suit. Was he an agent of some kind? Movies? It was coming back to him now. Simon (?) headed up the London branch of some unspeakable Hollywood agency. Maybe. He was a no-talent leech, anyway, Tucker was sure about that. It was easy to feel superior to these people while you were the talent. But when you stopped being the talent, then they were just grown-up people with a job, and you were the hopeless case who was going to have to accept charity from them.

“Do you know people in London?” said Natalie. “Is there somewhere you can stay?”

“Yeah,” said Tucker. “I mean, she’s not right in the center, but we can come in on the train or whatever.”

“Where is ‘she’?” Tucker was pretty sure there were quote marks around the pronoun. It would be entirely typical of Natalie to put them there.

“It’s a place called Gooleness. On the coast.”

Natalie shrieked into the phone. “Gooleness! How on earth do you know anyone who lives in Gooleness?”

“Long story.”

“It’s hundreds of miles outside London. You can’t possibly stay there. Mark and I will find you somewhere.”

Mark, then, not Simon. And on further reflection, Mark might not, after all, be a no-talent leech. That might well be somebody else’s husband.

“Really? I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

“Lizzie’s flat is empty, for a start. She and Zak are going to stay with us for a little while when she gets out.”

Was Zak her boyfriend? Had he heard that name before? The trouble was, there were too many tangential connections. Too many kids, too many stepfathers, too many half brothers and half sisters. He couldn’t name half the people related to his children, he realized. Natalie had other kids, for example, but who the hell knew their names? Cat did, that’s who.

“And do you still want to bring Jackson with you? Seeing as your child-care problems were completely bogus?”

“I guess not, no.”

So he was off to London on his own.

“When will we get there?”

“Ten minutes. But Jackson, you understand that we’re ten minutes from the airport. And then we have to wait for the plane. And then we wait for the plane to take off. And then we fly for seven hours. And then we wait for our bags. And then we wait for a bus. And then it’s maybe another hour from the airport to Lizzie’s apartment. If you don’t think that sounds like much fun, then it’s not too late. I could take you to your mother’s, and…”

“It sounds like fun.”

“All that sitting around waiting sounds like fun.”

“Yep.”

It hadn’t gone well, telling Jackson he was going to see Lizzie without him, and there had been many, many tears, followed by total capitulation. There had been times in his life when he would have paid for tears like these to be shed on his behalf: every single one of his other children had cried unstoppably when a mother had attempted to leave them in his care for a day or an afternoon or even for twenty minutes while she took a bath, and he’d felt wretched and useless every time. His own kids had been afraid of him when they were young. Now he had a child who needed him and loved him and felt anxious when he went out (because “out” was all it had ever been with Jackson, never “away”), and Tucker felt unmanned by it. Fathers weren’t supposed to engender this level of dependency. They’re supposed to miss bedtimes because of business trips and concert tours.

So he’d had to call Natalie and ask her to fork out money for an extra ticket, which made him feel even more inadequate than he had the first time. It was one thing not being able to afford to pay for himself, but fathers were supposed to be providers, as well as bedtime-missers. This father, however, was forced to depend on the largesse of the ex-wife before last and her leech of a husband.

They checked in, bought a small mountain of candy and a couple of dozen comic books. Tucker was feeling awful, anxious and sweaty; when he took Jackson for a pee he looked in a mirror and was alarmed by the complete absence of color from his face. Unless white could be counted as a color, which it probably could be, when it was this intense. He was almost certainly about to be laid low by flu, or pneumonia, or something, and he cursed his timing: in twenty-four hours’ time, he’d be too sick to travel. He could have stayed home without losing face, without being the worst father in the world.

They waited in line to go through security, a process that could have been expressly designed to feed Jackson’s morbidity. Tucker told him that they were looking for guns.

“Guns?”

“Sometimes bad guys take guns on planes because they want to rob rich people. But we’re not rich, so they won’t come near us.”

“How will they know we’re not rich?”

“Rich people wear stupid watches and smell nice. We’re not wearing watches, and we smell bad.”

“But why do we have to take our shoes off?”

“You can fit small guns in shoes. You’d have to walk funny, but you could do it.”

An old English lady waiting in front of them turned around.

“It’s not guns they’re looking for, young man. It’s bombs. I’m surprised Daddy hasn’t heard of the Shoe Bomber. He was English, you know. I mean, Muslim, of course. But English.”

Daddy has heard of the Shoe Bomber, thank you very much, you eavesdropping old crone, Tucker wanted to say. Now turn around and shut the fuck up.

“Shoe Bomber?” said Jackson.

Tucker could see right away that, if they ever got as far as London, they wouldn’t be coming back. Not by plane, anyway. Mark would be coughing up the dough for a couple of tickets on a cruise ship, unless Jackson knew anything about the Titanic. In which case, Mark would be paying for an exclusive English boarding-school education, and Jackson would have to grow up with one of those tony boarding-school accents.

“Yes. He tried to blow up the plane by putting explosives in his shoes. Can you imagine? You wouldn’t need very much, I suppose. Just enough to blow a small hole in the plane. And then fssssssk! We’d all get sucked out and dropped into the middle of the sea.”

Jackson looked up at Tucker. Tucker made a face intended to indicate that the woman was gaga.

“I’m more and more thankful that my life is coming to its end,” said the old lady. “I lived through a world war, but I’ve got a feeling that you’re going to be seeing a lot worse than the Blitz when you grow up.”

They stepped through the scanner and waved a cheery good-bye to the woman. And then Tucker began to tell the ingenious and preposterous lies that would enable them both to board the aircraft. He’d even had to tell Jackson that the old lady was entirely mistaken about the imminence of her own death, let alone all the other deaths she’d alluded to.

Tucker couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a plane. The day he’d quit music, he had flown, drunk and angry and remorseful and self-loathing, from Minneapolis to New York, and he’d hit on a stewardess, and tried to hit a woman who’d tried to stop him from hitting on the stewardess, so that particular flight tended to be the one that stayed in his mind. He’d been pretty sure at the time that the stewardess was going to be the answer to all his problems. His feeling was that they wouldn’t stay together long, but probably there’d be lots of therapeutic fucking. And because she was a stewardess, she’d have to travel a lot, and in her absences he would do some writing, maybe go into a studio near where she lived, rebuild his career. These are all the things she didn’t understand when he made his play. She thought he was just grabbing her ass, but there was more to it than that, as he’d tried to explain, tearfully, and at great volume. He loved her.

Jesus. He was lucky she’d been a reasonable human being. He could have found himself in front of a New Jersey judge. Instead he’d met someone else, and then someone else again, had kids… Maybe his hunch about the stewardess had been right. He wished he’d managed to convince her of their viability as a couple, although he couldn’t wish Jackson away.

He looked down at the seat next to him. The boy was tucked under a blanket with his headphones on and was watching his fifth straight episode of SpongeBob. He was happy. Tucker had warned him that he might not like the movie they were showing on the plane, because that was what happened the last time Tucker flew across the Atlantic: they showed a bad movie you didn’t want to watch. Now they showed every bad movie ever made. Jackson had actually giggled when he realized, long before his father had worked out the sheer abundance of the entertainment system, the amount of junk he could consume; he now felt that the flight was a little on the short side. Tucker had given up on the romantic comedy he’d started watching. As far as he could figure out, the problem between the central couple, the thing that was keeping them from being together, was that she had a cat and he had a dog, and the cat and dog fought like cats and dogs, which made the couple, through some mysterious contagion that the film couldn’t properly explain, fight like cats and dogs, too. Tucker got the feeling that they’d be able to solve their problems before the two hours were up. He wasn’t worried for them. He was now failing to read Barnaby Rudge. Dickens seemed wrong among all these little screens and bleeping lights and miniature cans of soda.

He was still feeling wretched, and he couldn’t shake off a sense of impending catastrophe, which he seemed to recall was a textbook indicator of something-or-other. Jackson had turned him into a hypochondriac—his son’s conviction that just about any cough or unexplained ache was cancer, or old age, anyway, wasn’t good for either of them—but he was pretty sure that the sweating, the arrhythmia and the foreboding were a result of his sudden and unexpected emergence from hiding. He knew the people who cared about him out there in the conjectural world of cyberspace described him as a recluse, but he’d never thought of himself that way. He went to shops and bars and Little League games, so it wasn’t as if he were Salinger. He just didn’t make music or talk to earnest young magazine journalists, and most people didn’t do either of those things. But in the airport he’d noticed himself walking around with his eyes and mouth wide open, so maybe he was a little bit more Kaspar Hauser than he’d thought. And planes were unnervingly different, and they were on their way to a big city, to hang out with an ex-wife and daughter who hated him… It was a miracle that his heart was able to keep any time at all, so 7/4, if that’s what it was, seemed perfectly acceptable. He put his book down and fell into a sickly, clammy doze.

Natalie had sent a car to pick them up. They were taken to Lizzie’s apartment somewhere in Notting Hill, and the driver waited for them while they dumped their bags and changed into clean underwear. Tucker was feeling dizzy and nauseous by now, as well as spooked, and though he wanted to rest, he definitely didn’t want to puke all over Lizzie’s white rugs. Lizzie had been transferred to a regular hospital—a regular swanky hospital, anyway—because of complications, so if he had to puke, he’d try and wait until he got there.

He remembered what it was that a feeling of impending catastrophe typically foreshadowed just as he was in the middle of pushing open the stupidly heavy glass door of the swanky hospital. Somebody, possibly a robot King Kong, put a pair of giant steel arms around his chest and started squeezing. Savage electric pain shot down his arm and up his neck, and he tried not to look at Jackson’s pale and frightened face. He wanted to apologize—not for feeling sick, but for all the lies he’d told. “I’m sorry, son,” he wanted to say. “That stuff about nobody dying ever… It wasn’t true. People die all the time. Get over it.”

He walked as steadily and as coolly as he could to the reception desk.

“Can I help you?” said the woman. He could see his reflection in her glasses. He tried to look beyond the lenses into her eyes.

“I hope so. I’m pretty sure I’m having a heart attack.”

There are all sorts of causes of ripples of movement across continents: floods and famine, revolution, large international sports events. In this case, however, the trigger was the sudden illness of one middle-aged man. Telephones rang in houses and apartments across the U.S. and Europe, and they were answered by attractive, still-slender women in their thirties and forties and early fifties. Hands were clapped to mouths, more phone calls were made, reassurances were given by careful soft voices. Flights were booked, passports were found, arrangements were canceled. The wives and children of Tucker Crowe were on their way to see him.

It was all Lizzie’s idea. In real life, she was a sentimental young woman, frequently moved to tears by pets and children and romantic comedies; but life with Tucker wasn’t real life, not least because there was so little of it, and the time she had with him always became overwhelmed by the time she had never had. How could it not? It wasn’t a fair fight. Just the sight and sound of him made her shrill and resentful: she hated the way her voice rose by an octave when they talked. But when she went to see him in his hospital room, he was asleep, sedated and helpless, and she didn’t feel angry anymore. She could be a dutiful and loving daughter, as long as he just lay there. When he awoke, she was determined to talk to him in the same voice she used for the people she loved.

She’d been told that he wouldn’t die, but that wasn’t the point: they had to seize the moment. If she felt more goodwill toward Tucker than she had ever managed to muster before, then surely everyone else was feeling it, too? And she couldn’t help believing that some kind of gathering, some attempt to connect a previously incoherent family, is what he would want. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know him at all.

In the early days of his career, Tucker had collected stories of musicians’ bad behavior as if they were baseball cards. They fascinated him not because he wanted to emulate the musicians concerned, but because he was a moralist, and the stories were so unambiguously appalling that they served as a useful piloting guide: in his line of work, it didn’t take much to gain a reputation as a decent human being. As long as you didn’t hurl a girl out of a window when you’d finished with her, people thought you were Gandhi. He’d even got into fights a couple of times, in a pompous attempt to protect somebody’s honor—a girl, a roadie, a motel receptionist. Once, when he’d punched the obnoxious bassist of an indie-rock band that ended up filling stadiums, he was asked who’d died and made him fucking king. The question was rhetorical, of course, but he’d ended up thinking about it. Why couldn’t he let these young men behave like young men? Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented, so what did he think he was going to achieve by pushing a couple around when they’d had a drink? For a while, he blamed the kind of novels he read, and he blamed the decency of his parents, and he blamed his brother, who had managed to kill himself by driving into a wall when he was drunk. Books and parents and a tragic fuckup brother, he felt, had given him a solid ethical grounding. He could see now that he’d always been heading for a fall. It turned out that he was the kind of moralist who abhorred the behavior of others because he was so scared of his own weakness; the more he whipped himself into a frenzy of disapproval, the harder it would be to cave in without losing face. He was certainly right to be afraid. When he met Julie Beatty, he discovered that there wasn’t very much to him aside from weakness.

When he woke up that morning, Tucker Crowe had no idea that he would end the day by walking out on his own life, but, if he’d known, he wouldn’t have minded much, because he was sick of it. If you’d asked him what the problem was… Well, if you had asked him, he wouldn’t have said anything, because he liked to remain laconic, cryptic and gently satirical at all times, because it was cooler that way. Who are you, to be asking Tucker Crowe questions? Some fucking rock journalist? Or, even worse, a fan? But if he’d asked himself—which he did, sometimes, when he wasn’t drunk or asleep—he’d tell himself (exclusively) that what made him unhappiest on a daily basis was this: he had come to the inescapable and unhappy conclusion that Juliet, the album he was currently promoting every night onstage, was utterly inauthentic, completely phony, full of melodrama and bullshit and he hated it.

This wasn’t necessarily a problem. Bands were always promoting product that they didn’t like very much, and presumably actors and writers did the same: something had to be your worst piece of work. But Juliet was different, because it was the only record Tucker had ever made that people seemed to like. It hadn’t sold many copies, but over the last few months credulous college kids who’d never read or heard anything containing real pain, let alone experienced it firsthand, were turning up at shows in the hundreds and singing along to every word of every song. They swallowed Tucker’s portentous, self-righteous, whiny rage whole, as if it meant something to them, and the only way he could deal with them was to close his eyes and aim his voice somewhere just over their heads. (This coping mechanism, inevitably, had led a reviewer to describe him as “still lost in his pain.”) It wasn’t as though he thought the songs were entirely without merit. Musically, they were pretty good, and he and the band had got better at playing them, too; most nights they built up a pretty ferocious head of steam. “You and Your Perfect Life,” which closed the show every night, was a real tour de force now, and in the midsection of the song, right before the guitar solo, Tucker had taken to incorporating fragments of other famous love songs from an earlier time: “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” one night; “I’d Rather Go Blind” the next. Sometimes he dropped down on one knee to sing them, and sometimes audiences rose to their feet, and sometimes he felt as though he were a proper entertainer, someone whose job it was to make extravagant emotional gestures to help people feel. And the lyrics for “You and Your Perfect Life” weren’t too shabby either, even if they were his. He’d dressed up his rejection by Julie Beatty in some pretty fancy clothes, he thought.

No, the trouble was with Julie Beatty herself. She was an idiot, an airhead, a shallow, vain and uninteresting model who happened to be awfully pretty, and Tucker had discovered this shortly after a collection of hymns to her mystery and power had been presented to an apparently awestruck public. When she first heard the album, she was so moved by Tucker’s misery that she promptly left her husband for a second time—the poor guy must have had a crick in his neck by then, from watching his wife running up and down their stairs with a suitcase—and offered herself up to Tucker like a gaudily wrapped present; after three days holed up with her in a hotel room, it became apparent to him that he’d have more in common with a sixteen-year-old Nebraskan cheerleader. She didn’t read, didn’t talk, didn’t think, and she was the vainest human being he’d ever met. What had he been thinking? He’d been drunk when he met her the first time around, and then there’d been the whole sneaking-around drama of it, which in Tucker’s experience always added another level of intensity; but it wasn’t just that. He had wanted to live in her world. He wanted to know the people she knew; it was his right to go over to Faye Dunaway’s house for dinner. He was owed that. He had the talent, but he didn’t have the lifestyle that he felt should accompany that talent. In other words, he’d behaved like an asshole, and Juliet was going to serve as some kind of permanent reminder of his embarrassment and shame.

June the twelfth was a day like most of the others. They’d driven from St. Louis to Minneapolis, and he’d slept in the van, read a little, listened to The Smiths on his Walkman, inhaled the repulsive Cheez Doodles farts of the rhythm section. They’d done the sound check, eaten, and Tucker had nearly finished off the bottle of red wine he’d promised himself he wouldn’t touch until after the show. He’d abused his band—mocked his drummer’s ignorance of current events, questioned his bass player’s personal hygiene—and hit obnoxiously on the promoter’s wife. And then, after the show, someone had suggested checking out some band in some club, and Tucker was drunk by then and didn’t want to stop drinking and he thought he’d heard something good about the band anyway.

He was standing by the bar on his own, squinting at the stage and trying to remember the name of the person who’d told him that these losers were worth walking nine blocks to see. And then he wasn’t on his own anymore. He’d been joined by a big, long-haired guy in a cap-sleeved T-shirt, exposing upper arms that looked like a wrestler’s thighs. I’m not going to get into a fight with this guy, Tucker told himself for no reason at all, although over the last year or so, since he’d become thirstier, no reason at all had often been reason enough for a fight. The guy leaned against the wall next to him, mimicking Tucker’s stance, and Tucker ignored him.

The guy leaned into him and shouted into his ear, above the noise. “Can I talk to you?”

Tucker shrugged.

“I’m a friend of Lisa’s. Jerry. I’m the road manager for the Napoleon Solos.”

Tucker shrugged again, although he felt a tiny surge of panic. Lisa was the girl he’d been seeing when he met Julie. Lisa had been badly treated. He’d go so far as to use the active voice, in fact: he’d treated Lisa badly. He hadn’t even stopped sleeping with her when he was chasing Julie Beatty, mostly because that would have required a conversation that he wasn’t prepared to have. In the end, he’d just… not returned. He didn’t want to speak to any friends of Lisa’s.

“You don’t want to know how she’s doing?”

He shrugged for a third time.

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway, whatever I want.”

“Fuck you,” said the guy.

“Fuck you, too,” said Tucker. He suddenly remembered that it was Lisa who liked the band they were watching, and he felt regretful. He probably wouldn’t have grown old with her, but at least their relationship wasn’t a permanent and public embarrassment to him. (Oh, but it was hard, thinking about this stuff. What would have happened to his music, if he’d never met Julie? He’d never thought he had an album like Juliet in him, and Lisa would never have drawn it out. So if he’d stayed with her, he’d probably like himself more, but he still wouldn’t have gotten any attention. And because he wouldn’t be getting attention, he’d be hating himself. Argh.)

The guy had pushed himself away from the wall and was about to leave.

“I’m sorry,” said Tucker. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s doing okay,” said the guy, which seemed like a somewhat anticlimactic reply. All those “fuck yous” for this?

“Good. Say hi from me.”

The band was building, with great opacity of purpose, a pretty terrifying Berlin Wall of sound, consisting entirely of feedback and cymbal clashes. Jerry said something that Tucker didn’t catch. Tucker shook his head and pointed at his ear. Jerry tried again, and this time Tucker caught the word “mom.” Tucker had met Lisa’s mother. She was a nice lady.

“That’s too bad,” said Tucker.

Jerry looked at him as though he wanted to hit him. Tucker suspected that there might have been a misunderstanding. He shouldn’t get hit for expressing sympathy, surely?

“Her mother died, right?”

“No,” said Jerry. “I said…” He leaned right into Tucker and bellowed in his ear. “Did you know she was a mom? ”

“No,” said Tucker. “I did not know that.”

“I didn’t think so.”

She didn’t waste much time, thought Tucker. They only split a year ago, which meant that she’d had to have…

“How old is the kid?”

“Six months.”

Tucker calculated in his head, and then on his fingers, behind his back and then in his head again.

“Six months. That’s… interesting.”

“I think so,” said Jerry.

“Interesting in two possible ways.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I SAID, THERE ARE TWO WAYS THAT MIGHT BE INTERESTING TO ME.”

Jerry held two fingers up, apparently to confirm the numbers, and mouthed the word “two.” They were, Tucker thought, quite a long way from being able to access the meat of this conversation. They had only just confirmed the exact number of ways it might be interesting.

“Two what?” said Jerry.

Later, Tucker wondered why it had occurred to neither of them to take it outside. Force of habit, he guessed. Both of them were used to conversing in noisy rock clubs, and both of them were long used to the idea that, if you didn’t catch much, or even any, of the conversation, you weren’t missing anything. Now Tucker was being circumlocutory in order to find out something that might be very important to him. It wasn’t working.

“TWO WAYS…” Oh, fuck this. “Are you telling me this kid is mine?”

“Your kid,” said Jerry, nodding vigorously.

“I’m a dad.”

“You,” said Jerry, poking him in the chest. “Grace.”

“Grace?”

“GRACE IS YOUR DAUGHTER.”

“HER NAME’S GRACE?”

“GRACE. YOU. THE. DAD.”

And that was how he found out.

Suddenly, the feedback stopped. It was replaced by a bemused and muted applause. Now that he could talk, though, he didn’t know what to say. He certainly didn’t want to say what he was thinking: he was thinking about his work, his music, about Juliet and the tour. He was thinking that the combination of a child and Juliet would be a permanent and unbearable humiliation. It must already be so for Lisa. (And maybe that last thought redeemed him, he was hoping. It seemed to have an ethical dimension to it. Certainly it was a thought about somebody else. He hoped God caught that one, even though it had been kind of tacked on to the end of a lot of other stuff, all about himself.)

“What are you going to do about it?” said Jerry.

“I’m not sure there’s much I can do, is there? In most states, they don’t allow abortions after the kid has actually been born.”

“Nice,” said Jerry. “Classy. You going to see her?”

“Good to meet you, Jerry.”

Tucker drained his drink and put it down on the bar. He didn’t want to talk to this guy about his responsibilities. He needed to be on his own, outside.

“I wasn’t going to say this part,” said Jerry. “But you seem like kind of a jerk, so what the hell?”

Tucker made a be-my-guest gesture.

“That record. Juliet. It’s really full of shit, isn’t it? I mean, I can see you wanted to fuck her. She’s a good-looking girl, from the pictures I’ve seen. But all that drama? I don’t buy it.”

“Very wise,” said Tucker. He gave Jerry an ironic salute and left. He was intending to walk straight out the door, but he needed to take a piss first. So that was kind of bathetic, because he ended up giving Jerry the same ironic salute on the way back from the restroom.

Years later, little knots of bedraggled fans started meeting together on the Internet, and that visit to the toilet started getting some serious analysis. Tucker was always amazed by their literal-mindedness. If Martin Luther King had needed to take a leak right before the “I Have a Dream” speech, would these people have come to the conclusion that he’d come up with the whole thing midflow? While Tucker was walking out of the restroom, his drummer, Billy, was on the way in; Billy’s mind had been completely fucked by weed, so it was almost certainly Billy who’d decided that a mystical event had taken place in there. Tucker’s conversation with Jerry had remained private, to Jerry’s enormous and eternal credit.

On the way home he puked against a wall somewhere between the club and the motel. He was puking up cold cuts and red wine and Irish whiskey, but it felt like something else was coming out, too. And the next morning he called his manager. It wasn’t such a big deal, really, that night, no matter what the people on the Internet said. He found out he was a father. He canceled a tour. That night, there were probably musicians all over America finding out and canceling—it’s what musicians do. It wasn’t as if the day after was a big deal, or the day after that, either, ad nauseam, six thousand times. It was a cumulative thing.