Juliet, Naked Read online

  “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.

  JULIET

  FROM WIKIPEDIA, THE FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA

  Juliet, released in April 1986, is singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe’s sixth and (at the time of writing) last studio album. Crowe went into retirement later that year and has made no music of any kind since. At the time it received ecstatic reviews, although like the rest of Crowe’s work it sold only moderately, reaching number 29 on the Billboard charts. Since then, however, it has been widely recognized by critics as a classic breakup album to rank with Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love. Juliet tells the story of Crowe’s relationship with Julie Beatty, a noted beauty and L.A. scenester of the early eighties, from its beginnings (“And You Are?”) to its bitter conclusion (“You and Your Perfect Life”), when Beatty returned to her husband, Michael Posey. The second side of the album is regarded as one of the most tortured sequences of songs in popular music.

  NOTES

  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 Juliet. “I don’t need that in my life. If I want someone yelling at me for forty-five minutes, I’ll call my mother.”

  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 Juliet on their careers. Buck’s side project The Minus Five and Coldplay both recorded songs for the tribute album released in 2002, Wherefore Art Thou?.

  TRACK LISTING

  SIDE 1: 1. And You Are?

  2. Adultery

  3. We’re in Trouble

  4. In Too Deep

  5. Who Do You Love?

  SIDE 2: 1. Dirty Dishes

  2. The Better Man

  3. The Twentieth Call of the Day

  4. Blood Ties

  5. You and Your Perfect Life

  two

  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 York, adopting exactly the same pose that Tucker had struck for the album cover of You and Me Both?

  Duncan’s sudden rejection of all things Tucker made it all even more pointless. She kept asking him what had happened at Juliet’s house, but he simply claimed that he’d been losing interest for a while, and the morning in Berkeley had underlined the ridiculousness of it all. Annie didn’t buy it. He’d been blabbing on about Juliet all through breakfast that morning and he was clearly upset about something that afternoon when
she saw him back at the hotel; the evidence suggested a Minneapolis toilet-style incident, destined to provoke wild Internet speculation among Crowologists forever.

  She closed her photo library and went down to the hall to pick up all the mail that had been lying on the floor since they got home that morning. Duncan had already picked out all his Amazon parcels, and he wasn’t interested in anything else he got, so once she’d finished opening her mail, she started to tear open his, just in case there was anything that shouldn’t go straight into the recycling bin. There was an invitation to a symposium for English teachers, two invitations to apply for a credit card and a brown envelope containing a letter and a CD in one of those see-through plastic sleeves.

  Dear Duncan (she read),

  Haven’t spoken to you in a while, but then, there hasn’t really been much to talk about, has there? We’re releasing this in a couple of months, and I thought you should be one of the first to hear it. Who knew? Not me, and I suspect not even you. Anyway, Tucker has decided that the time is right. These are solo acoustic demos of all the songs on the album. We’re calling it Juliet, Naked.

  Lemme know what you think, and enjoy!

  Best wishes,

  Paul Hill,

  Press Officer,

  PTO Music

  Annie had in her hands a new Tucker Crowe release, and her excitement wasn’t even vicarious, just as it wouldn’t be vicarious if Duncan were elected prime minister. In the entire fifteen years of their relationship, this had never happened before, and as a consequence she didn’t know how to react. She would have called Duncan on his cell, but his cell was right in front of her, plugged into the spare socket by the kettle to recharge; she would have loaded it straight onto his iPod, but he’d taken that with him to work. (Both gadgets had come back from their holiday with drained batteries. One had been taken care of straightaway, the other forgotten about until just before Duncan left the house.) So how was she supposed to mark the occasion?

  She took the CD out of its plastic sleeve and put it into the portable player they kept in the kitchen. But instead of pressing the “play” button, her finger hovered above it for a second. Could she really listen to it before he did? It felt like one of those moments in a relationship—and there were enough of them in theirs, God knows—that would look completely innocuous to an outsider, but which were packed with meaning and aggression. Annie could imagine telling Ros at work that Duncan had gone absolutely nuts because she played a new CD when he wasn’t at home, and Ros would be suitably appalled and disgusted. But she wouldn’t be telling the whole story. She’d be telling a self-serving version, omitting the context. And, of course, it would be legitimate to feel bafflement and outrage if Ros didn’t understand, but Annie knew Duncan too well. She understood. She knew that playing the CD was an act of naked hostility, even if anyone peering through the windows wouldn’t be able to see the nakedness.

  She put the CD back in its sleeve and made herself a cup of coffee. Duncan had only gone to pick up a timetable for the new semester, so he’d be back in less than an hour. Oh, this is ridiculous, she thought. Told herself, anyway, telling oneself being a more self-conscious mode of self-communication, and thus a more efficient way of lying, than thinking. Why couldn’t she put on some music she’d almost certainly like while she was pottering around in the kitchen? Why not pretend that Duncan was a normal person, with a healthy relationship to the things that pleased him? She put the disk back in the machine, and this time she pressed “play.” And already she was preparing the opening lines of the skirmish to come.

  To begin with, she was so stirred up by the act of playing the CD, the drama and the treachery of it, that she forgot to listen to the music—she was too busy composing her retorts. “It’s just a CD, Duncan!” “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but I quite like Juliet too.” (That “quite”—so innocent and casual, and yet so wounding. She hoped.) “It never occurred to me for a moment that I wasn’t allowed to listen!” “Oh, don’t be such a baby!” Where had this ill feeling sprung from? It wasn’t as if their relationship was any more precarious than it ever had been. But she could see now that a lot of resentment had been locked into her somewhere, and it was busy, restless stuff, roaming around looking for the tiniest open window. The last time she’d felt like this was during a house-share at university, when she’d found herself setting ridiculously complicated and time-consuming traps to catch a housemate whom she suspected of stealing her cookies. It took her a while to understand that the cookies weren’t really the point, and that somehow, without her noticing, she’d come to loathe this other girl—her greed, her smugness, her face and voice and bathrobe. Was that happening here? Juliet, Naked was both as blameless and as incendiary as a chocolate chip cookie.

  Eventually she managed to stop wondering whether she hated her life partner and to start listening. And what she heard was exactly what she might have guessed she’d hear if she’d read about Juliet, Naked in a newspaper: it was Juliet, but without all the good bits. That probably wasn’t fair. Those lovely melodies were all there, intact, and Crowe had clearly written most of the lyrics, although a couple of the songs were missing choruses. But it was so tentative, so unadorned—it was like listening to one of those people you’ve never heard of who comes onstage at lunchtime in a folk festival. There wasn’t really any music to it yet, no violins, no electric guitars, no rhythm, none of the texture or the detail that still contained surprises, even after all this time. And there was no anger that she could hear, either, no pain. If she were still a teacher, she’d have played the two albums back-to-back to her sixth-formers, so that they could understand that art was pretending. Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made Juliet, but he couldn’t just march into a recording studio and start howling. He’d have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself. Juliet, Naked proved how clever Tucker Crowe was, Annie thought, how artful; but only because of all the things that were missing, not because of anything that you could actually hear.

  Annie heard the front door open during “Blood Ties,” the second-from-last song. She hadn’t really been tidying up the kitchen while she’d been listening, but now she busied herself, and the stab at multitasking was in itself a form of betrayal: It’s just an album I put on! No big deal!

  “How was college?” she asked him when he walked in. “Anything happen while you were away?”

  But already he wasn’t listening to her. He was standing still, his head pointed toward the speakers like some kind of hunting dog.

  “What’s . . . Hold on. Don’t tell me. That Tokyo radio-show bootleg? The solo acoustic one?” And then, with rising panic, “He didn’t play ‘Blood Ties’ then.”

  “No, it’s . . .”

  “Sssshh.”

  They both listened for a few bars. Annie watched his confusion and began to enjoy it.

  “But this . . .” He stopped again. “This is . . . It’s nothing.”

  She burst out laughing. But of course! If Duncan had never heard it before, then all he could do was deny its existence.

  “I mean, it’s something, but . . . I give up.”

  “Juliet, Naked, it’s called.”

  “What’s called?” More panic. His world was tilting on its axis, and he was sliding right off.

  “This album.”

  “What album?”

  “The one we’re listening to.”

  “This album is called Juliet, Naked.”

  “Yes.”

  “There is no album called Juliet, Naked.”

  “There is now.”

  She picked up the note from Paul Hill and handed it to him. He read it, read it again, read it for a third time.

  “But this is addressed to me. You opened my post.”

  “I always open your post,” she said. “If I don’t open your post, it stays unopened.”

&n
bsp; “I open the interesting letters.”

  “You left this one because it looked boring.”

  “But it isn’t boring.”

  “No. But I had to open it to find that out.”

  “You had no right,” he said. “And then . . . To actually play it . . . I don’t believe this.”

  Annie never got a chance to chuck any of her scripted darts at him. He marched over to the CD player, pulled the disk out of the player and marched off.

  The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it. It was as if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers: there was no point in looking for the explanation, for the trick, because there wasn’t one—or rather, there wasn’t one that he’d ever understand. Shortly after that, people from the message board started sending him songs attached to e-mails, and that was every bit as mysterious, because it meant that recorded music wasn’t, as he’d previously always understood, a thing at all—a CD, a piece of plastic, a spool of tape. You could reduce it to its essence, and its essence was literally intangible. This made music better, more beautiful, more mysterious, as far as he was concerned. People who knew of his relationship with Tucker expected him to be a vinyl nostalgic, but the new technology had made his passions more romantic, not less.

  Over the years, though, he had detected a niggling dissatisfaction with the track-naming part of this new sorcery. He couldn’t help imagining, when he inserted a CD into his laptop, that whoever it was in cyberspace monitoring his musical tastes thought them dull, and a little too mainstream. You could never catch him out. Duncan imagined a twenty-first-century Neil Armstrong wearing a helmet with built-in Bang and Olufsen headphones, floating around somewhere a lot like old-fashioned space (except it was even less comprehensible and clearly contained a lot more pornography), thinking, Oh, not another one of these. Give me something harder. Give me something that stumps me for a moment, something that sends me scurrying off to the cyber reference library. Sometimes, when the computer seemed to whir for longer than usual, Duncan got the feeling that he’d set some kind of a challenge; but then one day, when he was stocking up his iPod with back catalog, it had taken nearly three minutes to obtain the track names for Abbey Road, and it was clear that any delay was due to a bad connection or something, and not because Neil Headphones was stumped. So recently Duncan had been taking pleasure in those rare occasions when Neil couldn’t help him, and he’d had to fill out the titles himself, even though it was boring. It meant that he was off the well-trodden paths and into the musical jungle. Neil Headphones had never heard of Juliet, Naked, which was something of a consolation. Duncan couldn’t have borne it if the information had popped up without any effort on anyone’s part, as if he were the seven-hundredth person to have requested it that day.