Juliet, Naked

four

While Annie was waiting hopefully in her office for Tucker Crowe’s reply, Tucker Crowe was wandering around his local supermarket with his six-year-old son, Jackson, trying to buy comfort food for somebody neither of them knew very well.

“Hot dogs?”

“Yeah.”

“I know you like ’em. I was asking you whether you think Lizzie might.”

“I dunno.”

There was no reason why he would.

“I’ve forgotten who she is again,” said Jackson. “I’m sorry.”

“She’s your sister.”

“Yeah, I know that,” said the boy. “But… Why is she?”

“You know what a sister is,” said Tucker.

“Not this kind.”

“She’s the same as every other kind.”

But of course she wasn’t. Tucker was being disingenuous. As far as a six-year-old boy was concerned, a sister was someone you saw at the breakfast table, someone who argued with you about what TV shows to watch, someone whose birthday party you tried to avoid because it was so pink, someone whose friends laughed at you a fraction of a second before you left a room. The girl who was coming to stay with them was twenty and had never come to stay with them before. Jackson had never even seen a photograph of her, so he could hardly be expected to know whether or not she was a vegetarian. It wasn’t as if this were the first time Jackson had had a mystery sibling thrust upon him, either. A couple of years ago, Tucker had introduced him to twin brothers he’d previously been unaware of, neither of whom had remained a consistent presence in his life.

“I’m sorry, Jackson. She must seem like a different kind of sister to you. She’s your sister because you’ve got the same dad.”

“Who’s her dad?”

“Who? Who do you think? Who’s your dad?”

“So you’re her dad, too?”

“That’s it.”

“Like you’re Cooper’s dad?”

“Yep.”

“And Jesse’s?” Cooper and Jesse, the recent twin fraternal inductees.

“You’re getting it.”

“So who’s her mom this time?”

Jackson asked the question with such a pained world-weariness that Tucker couldn’t help but laugh.

“This time it’s Natalie.”

“Natalie from my preschool?”

“Ha! No. Not Natalie from your preschool.”

Tucker had a sudden and not unwelcome flash of the Natalie from Jackson’s preschool. She was a nineteen-year-old assistant, blonde and sunny. There was a time, as James Brown once sang.

“Who, then?”

“You don’t know her. She lives in England now. She lived in New York when I knew her.”

“And what about my sister?”

“She’s been living in England with her mom. But now she’s going to college in the U.S. She’s real smart.”

All of his children were smart, and their intelligence was a source of pride—possibly misplaced, seeing as he’d only really been around for Jackson’s education. Maybe he could at least take credit for choosing to impregnate only smart women? Probably not. God knew he’d slept with some dumb ones.

“Will she read to me? Cooper and Jesse read to me. And Gracie.”

Grace was another daughter, his eldest: Tucker couldn’t even hear her name without wincing. He had been an inadequate father to Lizzie and Jesse and Cooper, but his inadequacies seemed forgivable, somehow; he could forgive them, anyway, even if the children and mothers concerned were less indulgent. Grace, though… Grace was another story. Jackson had met her once, and Tucker had spent the entire visit in a cold sweat, even though his eldest daughter had been as sweet-natured as her mother. That just made it all worse, somehow.

“Why don’t you read to her? She’ll be impressed.”

He put the hot dogs in the shopping cart and then took them out again. What percentage of smart girls were vegetarian? It couldn’t be as high as fifty, right? So the chances were that she ate meat. He put them back into the cart. The trouble was that even young female carnivores wouldn’t eat red meat. Well, hot dogs were pinky orange. Did pinky orange count as red? He was pretty sure the strange hue was chemical rather than sanguine. Vegetarians could eat chemicals, right? He picked them up again. He wished he’d sired a hard-drinking thirty-year-old mechanic from somewhere in Texas. Then he could just buy steaks and beer and a carton of Marlboros and be done with it. That particular scenario, however, would probably have involved him impregnating some sexy thirty-year-old Texan waitress, and Tucker had misspent his youth on deathly pale English models with cheekbones instead of breasts, and he was now paying the price. Now that he thought about it, he had paid the price then, too. What had he been thinking of?

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“I don’t know whether she eats meat or not.”

“Why wouldn’t she eat meat?”

“Because some people believe that eating meat is wrong. And other people believe it’s bad for you. And some people believe both.”

“What do we believe?”

“I guess we believe both, but we don’t care enough to do anything about it.”

“Why do some people believe it’s bad for you?”

“They think it’s bad for your heart.” There was no point in talking to Jackson about the colon.

“So your heart could just stop beating? If you ate meat? But you eat meat, Dad.”

There was a tremulous note of panic in Jackson’s voice, and Tucker cursed under his breath. He’d walked right into this one, like a sucker. Jackson had recently discovered that his father was going to die at some point in the first half of the twenty-first century, and his premature grief could be unleashed at any time, by anything, including the main tenets of vegetarianism. What made it worse was that Jackson’s existential despair had both coincided with and bolstered Tucker’s own. His fifty-fifth birthday seemed to have sparked a particularly acute bout of melancholy that he couldn’t see being lifted too much by any of the birthdays to come.

“I don’t eat so much meat.”

“That’s a lie, Dad. You eat tons. You had bacon this morning. And you cooked burgers last night.”

“I said it’s what some people believe, Jack. I didn’t say it was true.”

“So why do we believe it? If it’s not true?”

“We believe that the Phillies are going to win the World Series every year, but that’s not true either.”

“I never believe that. You just tell me to believe that.”

He put the hot dogs back on the shelf one last time and ushered Jackson over to the chicken. Chicken was neither pink nor orange, and he was able to tell Jackson of its health-giving properties without feeling like too much of a liar.

They went home, dumped the shopping and then drove straight over to Newark to pick up Lizzie. Tucker was hoping he’d like her, but the signs weren’t promising: they’d e-mailed back and forth for a while, and she seemed angry and difficult. He had to concede, though, that this needn’t necessarily mean she was an angry and difficult person: his daughters had found it hard to forgive the parental style he’d adopted for his early kids, which had ended up revolving around his complete absence from their lives. And he was beginning to learn that some of his children always reintroduced themselves to him at some big watershed moment, either in their own lives or in the lives of their mothers, and that tended to weigh the visits down somewhat. He was trying to cut down on introspection, so he really didn’t need to import it.

On the way to the airport, Jackson chatted about school, baseball and death until he fell asleep, and Tucker listened to an old R&B mixed tape that he’d found in the trunk. He only had a handful of cassettes left now, and when they were gone, he’d have to find the money for a new truck. He couldn’t contemplate a driving life without music. He sung along to the Chi-Lites softly, so as not to wake Jackson, and found himself thinking about the question that woman had asked him in her e-mail: “It isn’t you really, is it?” Well, it was him, he was almost positive, but for some reason he’d started fretting about how he could prove it to her: as far as he could see, there was no good way of doing it. There was no detail in his music too trivial to have remained unnoticed by those people, so telling her who had contributed uncredited backing vocals to a couple of the songs wouldn’t help. And just about every single scrap of the biographical trivia about him that floated around the Internet like so much space junk was all untrue, as far as he could tell. Not a single one of those creeps was aware that he had five kids, by four different women, for example; but they all knew that he’d had a secret child with Julie Beatty, pretty much the only woman he’d avoided knocking up. And when would they stop going on and on about something that happened in a restroom in Minneapolis?

He tried very hard not to overinflate his importance in the cosmos. Most people had forgotten him; very occasionally, he supposed, they’d come across his name in a music review—some of the older journalists still used him as a point of reference sometimes—or there’d be an album in somebody’s old vinyl collection, and they’d think, “Oh, yeah. My college roommate used to listen to him.” But the Internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore. He could Google his name and come up with thousands of hits, and as a consequence he’d started to think about his career as something that was still current, somehow, rather than something that had died a long time ago. If you looked at the right websites, he was Tucker Crowe, mysterious reclusive genius, rather than Tucker Crowe, former musician, ex-person. He was flattered, at first, by the people who devoted themselves to online discussions of his music; it helped restore some of the things that had been worn away by everything that had happened to him since he quit. But after a while these people just made him feel ill, especially when they turned their cranky attention to Juliet. Still. If he’d kept making albums he’d probably be a tired old joke by now, or at best a cult hero carving out a subsistence living in clubs, or occasionally as the grace-and-favor opening act for a band that he’d apparently helped kick-start, although he could never hear his influence in their music. So stopping had been a very smart career move—provided, that is, you ignored the lack of a career that was the inevitable consequence.

Tucker and Jackson were late, and they found Lizzie wandering up and down the line of limo drivers waving signs, in the vain hope that Tucker might have sent a car for her. He tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned around, scared.

“Hey.”

“Oh. Hi. Tucker?”

He nodded, and tried to convey without words that anything she wanted to do was fine by him. She could throw her arms around his neck and cry, she could peck him on the cheek, shake his hand, ignore him altogether and walk to the truck in silence. He was becoming an expert in what he was beginning to think of as Paternal Reintroduction. He could run classes, probably. There were enough people nowadays who could use them.

If Tucker didn’t disapprove of national stereotyping, then he’d describe Lizzie’s greeting as English. She smiled politely, kissed him on the cheek and still somehow managed to suggest that he was representing all the pond life who’d been unable to get to the airport due to other commitments.

“And I am Jackson,” said the boy with an impressive moral gravity. “I am your brother. I am very pleased to meet you.” For some reason, Jackson took the view that verb contractions were inappropriate at occasions of this magnitude.

“Half brother,” said Lizzie, unnecessarily.

“Correct,” said Jackson, and Lizzie laughed. Tucker was glad he’d brought him along.

The conversation during the first part of the drive home was easy enough. They talked about her flight, the movies she’d seen and the couple who’d been reprimanded by a steward for inappropriate behavior (“canoodling,” Lizzie called it, after detailed questioning from Jackson); he asked after her mother, and she talked about her studies. In other words, they did as well as they could, seeing as they were two complete strangers sharing a motor vehicle. Sometimes Tucker was mystified by society’s obsession with the natural father. All his kids had been raised by competent mothers and loving stepfathers, so why did they need him? They (or their mothers) always talked about wanting to know where they came from and who they were, but the more he heard that, the less he understood it. His impression was that they always knew who they were. He couldn’t ever tell them that, otherwise they’d just think he was some kind of brutal asshole.

The tenor of the conversation changed on the last stretch before home, when they’d come off the freeway.

“My boyfriend’s a musician,” said Lizzie, suddenly.

“Good for him,” Tucker said.

“When I told him you were my dad, he couldn’t believe it.”

“How old is he? Forty-five?”

“No.”

“I was just kidding. Most young people don’t know my work.”

“Oh, I see. No. He knew it. I think he wants to meet you. Maybe next time I come I can bring him.”

“Sure.” Next time? Surely this visit was some kind of probationary period, if not a job interview.

“Maybe at Christmas?”

“Yes,” said Jackson. “Jesse and Cooper are coming at Christmas. So it would be fun if you came, too.”

“Who are Jesse and Cooper?”

Oh, shit, Tucker thought. How had that happened? He was almost certain he’d told Natalie about the twins, and he’d kind of assumed that Natalie would pass the news on to Lizzie. Obviously not. This was another example of something he should have done himself, if he were any kind of father. The examples never stopped coming. They were inexhaustible. He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. “Always tell your kids they have siblings…” He couldn’t imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.

“They’re my brothers,” said Jackson. “Half brothers. Like you. Me.”

“Cat had kids from another relationship?” said Lizzie. Even this piece of tangential information was clearly irritating, something she apparently had a right to know. And if she was irritated about Cat having kids she didn’t know about, Tucker was guessing that she’d be even more ticked off when she found out they were his. Or was he doing her a disservice? Maybe she’d just be really happy that she had more siblings than she’d suspected. More siblings = more fun, right?

“No,” said Tucker.

“So…”

Tucker didn’t want her to work it out for herself. He wanted to be able to say that he’d told her, even if he’d ended up breaking the news twelve years after the event.

“Jesse and Cooper are mine.”

“Yours?”

“Yep. Twin boys.”

“When?”

“Oh, a few years ago now. They’re twelve.”

Lizzie shook her head bitterly.

“I thought you knew,” said Tucker.

“No,” said Lizzie. “If I knew, I promise you I wouldn’t pretend not to know. What would be the point of that?”

“You’d like them,” said Jackson, confidently. “I did. But don’t play them at any DS game. They will destroy you.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Lizzie.

“I know, right?” said Jackson.

“And they’ve been out to stay?”

“Just one time so far,” said Tucker.

“So I’m just another one on the conveyor belt?”

“Yeah. You have to be out by tomorrow, otherwise the next one bumps into you and you cause a pileup. I’ve lost kids like that before.”

“You think it’s something to joke about?”

“No. I’m sorry, Lizzie.”

“I should hope so. You really are unbelievable, Tucker.”

Lizzie’s mother had somehow been reduced in Tucker’s memory to the beautiful picture that Richard Ave don took of her in ’82 for some cosmetic ad, a picture that Tucker still had somewhere. He’d somehow mislaid Natalie’s obtuseness, her haughtiness, her fragility and her extraordinary humorlessness. How had he forgotten any of that, seeing as those four qualities went half of the way toward explaining why they had split before Lizzie was even born? (“Half” was generous, he thought, but seeing as he’d split with many, many women who possessed none of these faults, logic suggested that he should take some of the blame.) And why hadn’t he ever had a thing for warm Texan waitresses? Why had a chilly English girl seemed so compelling? Natalie was supposed to be his Julie Beatty replacement; he’d met her at a time in his life when he was a drunk, drifting from one party to the next simply because he was still being invited to parties. He was beginning to suspect that the invitations would be withdrawn one day, and the models, too, so Natalie had been his last hurrah. Not, of course, that she’d ever have made a noise as coarsely enthusiastic as that.

“Guys, let’s not argue. Hey, Lizzie,” said Jackson, brightly, “do you eat meat?”

“No,” said Lizzie. “I haven’t touched it since I was your age. It makes me feel sick, and I find the whole industry morally repugnant.”

“But you eat chicken, right?”

Tucker laughed. Lizzie didn’t.

When Cat heard the truck pull into the driveway, she opened the screen door and stood on the porch, restraining Pomus so he didn’t jump all over their guest. Tucker looked at her, trying to gauge her mood. She hadn’t been a whole lot of use during the twins’ visit, but that was mostly to do with their mother: Tucker had told Cat, soon after they’d got together, that his breakup with Carrie had been difficult for him, and he had a vague recollection of implying that the difficulty derived from missing the excellence of the sex. He was surprised that this news pained her. He’d have thought she might be consoled to hear that some relationships were hard to shrug off, that he didn’t just plow through them all unharmed.

Tucker carried Lizzie’s bag into the house and introduced the girls to each other. For a moment they all stood there, frozen and smiling, although Lizzie’s smile was a thin-lipped, functional thing that didn’t indicate too much warmth or pleasure. Cat wasn’t a girl anymore, Tucker realized now that there was an actual girl in the house: life had got at her around the eyes and the mouth and maybe even the middle. He was no longer an old pervert! Cat was a woman! But on the other hand: he and Jackson had ruined her! She’d misspent her youth on them, and they’d repaid her by making her look worried and old! He suddenly wanted to hold her, and say sorry, but right now, moments after a guest daughter had arrived, probably wasn’t the time.

“Go sit in the backyard,” said Cat. “I’ll bring out drinks.”

They walked through the house, Jackson pointing out places of historical and cultural interest—spots where he’d hurt himself, drawings he’d done—along the way. Lizzie appeared underwhelmed.

“I thought you lived on a farm,” she said, when they were settled on chairs and benches.

“Why did you think that?” said Tucker.

“I read it on Wikipedia.”

“And did you read about yourself there? Or Jackson?”

“No. It said you were rumored to have one child, with Julie Beatty.”

“So why would you believe them when they tell you I live on a farm? Anyway, you have my phone number and my e-mail address. Why didn’t you just ask me where I lived?”

“It seemed like too weird a question to ask my own father. Maybe you should write your own Wikipedia page. So your children know something about you.”

“We have animals,” said Jackson defensively. “Chickens. Pomus. One rabbit that died.”

The rabbit had been recommended to them as a way to assuage Jackson’s fears about the imminent death of his father. Tucker couldn’t remember precisely how the idea was supposed to work—maybe that the kid would learn about the natural order of things by looking after a pet over its natural life span, was that it? It made sense at the time, but the rabbit died after two days, and now Jackson talked about his dead rabbit all the time. It was true, however, that he seemed slightly more phlegmatic about the end of Tucker’s life, expected any day now.

“The rabbit’s buried just over there,” Jackson told Lizzie, pointing at the wooden cross on the edge of the lawn. “Dad’s going next to him, aren’t you, Dad?”

“Yep,” said Tucker. “But not yet.”

“Soon, though,” said Jackson. “Maybe when I’m seven?”

“After that,” said Tucker.

“Well. Maybe,” said Jackson, doubtfully, as if the point of the conversation was to console Tucker. “Is your mom dead yet, Lizzie?”

“No,” said Lizzie.

“Is she well?” Tucker asked.

“She’s very well, thank you for asking,” said Lizzie. Was there acid in there? Probably. “She was the one who thought I should come to see you.”

“Okay,” said Tucker.

“It’s that thing,” said Lizzie.

“Uh-huh.” This thing, that thing… They all turned out to be the same thing, more or less, so why insist on a definition?

“When you find out you’re going to have a kid of your own, you want to understand more about everything else.”

“Sure.”

“You guessed, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“What I just said.”

He got the feeling that there had been some information given to him that he hadn’t processed properly yet. Maybe he shouldn’t treat these getting-to-know-you conversations as a genre.

“Hold on,” said Jackson. “That means… You’re my sister, right?”

“Half sister.”

“So… I’m going to be… What does that mean?”

“You’re going to be an uncle.”

“Cool.”

“And he’s going to be a granddad.”

Tucker finally understood what he was being told when Jackson burst into tears and went running to find his mother.

Finally, Lizzie thawed a little—at least on the side nearest Jackson, when Tucker led him back a couple of minutes later.

“It doesn’t mean your dad’s old,” she said. “He’s not.”

“Okay, so how many other kids at my school have dads who are granddads?”

“I’m sure not many.”

“None,” said Jackson. “Not one.”

“Jack, we’ve been through this,” said Tucker. “I’m fifty-five. You’re six. I’m gonna live a long time. You’ll be a big man before I’m ready to go. Forty, maybe. You’ll be sick of me.”

Tucker wouldn’t want to bet on the life span he was predicting for himself. Thirty years of smoking, ten years of alcohol dependence… He’d be amazed if he even got his threescore years and ten.

“You don’t know I’ll be forty,” said Jackson. “You might die tomorrow.”

“I’m not going to.”

“You might.”

Tucker always got sidetracked by the logic in these conversations. Yes, I might die tomorrow, he wanted to say. But that was true even before you found out I was going to be a grandfather. Instead of embarking on paths like these, however, he just had to talk rubbish. Rubbish always worked.

“I can’t.”

Jackson looked at him, hope renewed.

“Really?”

“Nope. If there’s nothing wrong with me today, I can’t die tomorrow. There’s just not enough time.”

“What about a car crash?”

Which anyone of any age could have at any time, you moron.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not going anywhere in the car tomorrow.”

“The day after.”

“Or the day after.”

“How will we get food?”

“We have a ton of food.”

Tucker didn’t want to be thinking about whether they’d be starved out if they couldn’t drive anywhere. He wanted to think about how old he was, and how he was going to die soon, and how his whole life seemed to have slipped away without him noticing.

A while back, Tucker had promised himself that he’d sit down with a piece of paper and try to account for the last couple of decades. He’d write the years down in sequence on the left-hand side, and write down one or two words next to each, words that would at least give some sense of what might have occupied him in those twelve months. The word “booze” and a few ditto marks would do for the end of the eighties; occasionally he’d picked up a guitar or a ballpoint, but mostly he’d just watched TV and poured scotch down his throat until he blacked out. There were other, healthier words he could use later on—“painting,” “Cooper and Jesse,” “Cat,” “Jackson,” but actually, even they didn’t explain away as many months as he’d be asking them to. How long had he really spent in that tiny apartment he’d rented and used as a studio in the painting years? Six months? And his sons, in the years they were born… He’d taken them for walks, sure, but a lot of the time they’d been nursing, or sleeping, and he’d watched them do both. But then, watching was an activity, right? You couldn’t do much else, if you were watching.

Occasionally he thought about what his father would have written if faced with a sheet of paper containing a list of all his adult years. He’d had a long, productive life: three kids, a good, strong marriage, his own dry-cleaning business. So what would he write next to, say, ’61-’68? “Work”? That one short word would cover seven years of his life perfectly adequately. And Tucker knew for sure what he’d have chosen for 1980: “Europe.” Or probably, “EUROPE!” He’d waited a long time to go back, and he’d loved every second of it, and the holiday of a lifetime lasted a month. Four weeks out of the fifty-two! Tucker wasn’t trying to flatten out the differences—he knew his dad was the better man. But anyone trying to account for their days in this way was going to wonder where they had all gone, what had been missed.

Jackson was tearful for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. He cried about losing to Lizzie at tic-tac-toe, he cried about having his hair washed, he cried about Tucker dying, he cried about not being allowed to smother his ice cream in chocolate sauce. Tucker and Cat had presumed that he’d stay up and eat with them, but he was so exhausted by his emotional exertion that he ended up going to bed early. Seconds after the boy fell asleep, Tucker realized he’d been using him as a small but effective hostage: nobody could get a clear shot in while Jackson was around. When he went downstairs and rejoined Cat and Lizzie in the garden, he was just in time to hear Cat saying, wryly, “Well, he’ll do that to you.”

“Who’ll do what to who?” he said, cheerfully.

“Lizzie was just telling me about her mom being hospitalized after you dumped her.”

“Oh.”

“You never told me about that.”

“It just never came up when we started dating.”

“Funny, huh?”

“Not really,” said Lizzie.

And they took on from there. Cat decided that she already felt comfortable enough around her new stepdaughter to give her a candid assessment of the state of her marriage; Lizzie reciprocated with a candid assessment of the damage Tucker had caused through his absence. (She held her stomach protectively all the way through her complaint, Tucker noticed, as if he were about to attack her unborn child with a knife at any moment.) Tucker nodded sagely at various points, and occasionally shook his head sympathetically. Every now and again, when both women simply stared at him, he’d shrug and stare at the ground. There didn’t seem an awful lot of point in attempting to defend himself, and anyway he wasn’t absolutely sure what line of defense he would have taken. There were a couple of errors of fact embedded in the stories they told each other, but nothing worth correcting. Who really cared that, in her bitterness and rage, Natalie had told Lizzie that he’d slept with another woman in her apartment, for example? It was only the location she had wrong, not the act of infidelity itself. The only word that would have explained anything, most of the time, was “drunk.” He could have said that, at regular intervals, possibly even after every sentence, but it almost certainly wouldn’t have helped.

At the end of the evening, he showed Lizzie to her room and wished her good night.

“Was that all okay?” she said, and she made a face, as if he’d spent the evening dealing with acute heartburn.

“Oh, yeah, fine. You were owed.”

“I hope you sort things out with Cat. She’s lovely.”

“Yeah. Thanks. Good night. Sleep well.”

Tucker went back downstairs, but Cat had gone. She had used his absence as an excuse to go to bed without him, and without explanations. They mostly slept in separate rooms now, but they were at a peculiar stage in their relationship where this wasn’t accepted as a given: they talked about it every night. Or it got mentioned, at least. “Are you okay in the spare room?” Cat would say, and Tucker would shrug and nod. A couple of times, after a really savage argument that seemed to push them to the point of no return, he’d followed her into their bedroom, and eventually they’d swung things around. There was no talking about it tonight, though. She’d just vanished.

Tucker went to bed, read a little, turned the light out. But he couldn’t sleep. It isn’t you really, is it? that woman had asked, and he started to phrase answers to the question in his head. Eventually he got up and went downstairs to the computer. Annie was going to get more than she’d bargained for.