Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

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.