Juliet, Naked Page 6

  She wondered why someone would bother to write that; but then, “Why bother” was never a question you could ask about more or less anything on the Internet, otherwise the whole bunch of them shriveled to a cotton-candy nothing. Why had she bothered? Why does anybody? She was for bothering, on the whole; in which case thank you, MrMozza7, for your contribution, and thank you, everybody else, on every other website.

  Just before she shut down her computer for the day, she checked her e-mails again. She’d suspected that Duncan had told her she had to provide an address in an attempt to frighten her off; clearly the comments section was the preferred method of providing feedback. Duncan had implied that there would be a host of homicidal cyber stalkers, spewing bile and promising vengeance, but so far, nothing.

  This time, however, there were two e-mails, from someone called Alfred Mantalini. The first was titled “Your Review.” It was very short. It said, simply, “Thank you for your kind and perceptive words. I really appreciated them. Best wishes, Tucker Crowe.” The title on the second was “P.S.,” and the message said, “I don’t know if you hang out with anyone on that website, but they seem like pretty weird people, and I’d be really grateful if you didn’t pass on this address.”

  Was it possible? Even asking the question felt stupid, and the sudden breathlessness was simply pathetic. Of course it wasn’t possible. It was obviously a joke, even though it was a joke removed of all discernible humor. Why bother? Don’t ask. She draped her jacket over the back of her chair and put her bag on the floor. What would be an amusing response? “Fuck off, Duncan”? Or should she just ignore it? But supposing . . . ?

  She tried mocking herself again, but the self-mockery only worked, she realized, if she thought with Duncan’s head—if she really believed that Tucker Crowe was the most famous man in the world, and that there was more chance of being contacted out of the blue by Russell Crowe. Tucker Crowe, however, was an obscure musician from the 1980s, who probably didn’t have much to do at nights except look at websites dedicated to his memory and shake his head in disbelief. And she could certainly understand why he wouldn’t want to contact Duncan and the rest of them: the torch they were holding burned way too bright. Why Alfred Mantalini? She Googled the name. Alfred Mantalini was a character in Nicholas Nickleby, apparently, an idler and philanderer who ends up bank rupting his wife. Well, that could fit, couldn’t it? Especially if Tucker Crowe had a sense of self-irony. Quickly, before she could think twice, she clicked on “Reply” and typed, “It isn’t you really, is it?”

  This man had been both a presence and an absence in her life for fifteen years, and the idea that she had just sent him a message that might somehow appear somewhere in his house, if he had one, seemed preposterous. She waited at work for an hour or two in the hope that he’d reply, and then she went home.

  TUCKER CROWE

  FROM WIKIPEDIA, THE FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA

  Tucker Jerome Crowe (b. 1953-09-06) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. Crowe came to prominence in the mid- to late seventies, first as the lead singer in the band The Politics of Joy, and then as a solo artist. Influenced both by other North American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen, and by the guitarist Tom Verlaine, he achieved increasing critical success after a difficult start, culminating in what is regarded as his masterwork, Juliet, in 1986, an album about his breakup with Julie Beatty that frequently features in “Best of All Time” lists. During the tour to support that album, however, Crowe abruptly withdrew from public life, apparently after some kind of life-changing incident in the men’s toilet of a Minneapolis club, and has neither made music, nor spoken in the media about his disappearance, since.

  BIOGRAPHY

  EARLY LIFE

  Crowe was born and raised in Bozeman, Montana. His father, Jerome, owned a dry-cleaning business, and his mother, Cynthia, was a music teacher. Several of the songs on his earlier albums are about his relationship with his parents, for example, “Perc and Tickets” (from Tucker Crowe, “perc” being the abbreviation for “perchloroethylene,” the chemical used in the dry-cleaning process) and “Her Piano” (from Infidelity and Other Domestic Investigations), a tribute to his mother written after her death from breast cancer in 1983. Crowe’s older brother, Ed, died in 1972, aged twenty-one, in a car accident. The inquest found that he had “significant” levels of alcohol in his bloodstream.

  EARLY CAREER

  Crowe formed The Politics of Joy at Montana State and dropped out of school to tour with the band. They split up before they were offered a recording contract, although most of the members of the band played with Crowe on his albums and tours, and his third album was titled Tucker Crowe and The Politics of Joy. Crowe’s self-titled first album, released in 1977, was a famous music-industry disaster: the record company’s confidence in the artist led them to place a series of advertisements in trade magazines and on billboards bearing the hubristic tagline BRUCE PLUS BOB PLUS LEONARD EQUALS TUCKER underneath a photograph of a pouting Crowe wearing eyeliner and a Stetson. A drunken Crowe was arrested for attempting to tear a gigantic poster down on Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California, in October 1977. The rock critics were merciless—Greil Marcus in Creem ended his review with the line “Drivel plus feyness plus John Denver equals not much to go on?” Stung, Crowe recorded a savage four-track EP, Can Anybody Hear Me? (now the name of a website given over to earnest, sometimes pompous, discussion of his music), which helped to turn his fortunes, and the critical reception, around.

  CONCERT TOURS

  Crowe toured extensively between 1977 and his retirement, although his live shows are generally regarded as being variable in quality, mostly because of Crowe’s alcoholism. Some shows could be as short as forty-five minutes, with long breaks between songs broken only by Crowe’s abuse of, and evident scorn for, his audience; other nights, as the justly celebrated “At Ole Miss” bootleg demonstrates, he played for two and a half hours to ecstatic, devoted crowds. Too often, though, a Crowe concert would degenerate into name-calling and violence: in Cologne, Germany, he leaped into the crowd to punch a fan who had repeatedly requested a song he didn’t want to play. Most members of The Politics of Joy had quit before the end of Crowe’s career, most of them citing abuse from the singer as the reason for departure.

  PERSONAL LIFE

  Tucker Crowe is presumed to be the father of Julie Beatty’s daughter, Ophelia (b. 1987), although her mother has always denied this. He is believed to have achieved sobriety.

  RETIREMENT

  Crowe is believed to be living on a farm in Pennsylvania, although little is known about how he has spent the last two decades. Rumors of a comeback are frequent, but so far unfounded. Some fans detect his involvement in recent albums by the Conniptions and the Genuine Articles; the album Yes, Again (2005) by the re-formed The Politics of Joy is regarded—wrongly, according to the band—to feature two songs by Crowe. Juliet, Naked, an album of demo versions of the songs on Juliet, was released in 2008.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  Tucker Crowe—1977

  Infidelity and Other Domestic Investigations—1979

  Tucker Crowe and The Politics of Joy—1981

  You and Me Both—1983

  Juliet—1986

  Juliet, Naked—2008

  AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS

  Crowe received an honorary degree from the University of Montana in 1985. Juliet was nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Album” category in 1986. Crowe was nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Male Rock Performance” category, for “You and Your Perfect Life,” in the same year.

  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.”r />
  “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.