Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

“Where’s your mother?”

“Huh?” said Jesse.

“Yeah, she’s okay,” said Cooper.

“Hey, fellas. You don’t want to turn those things off for a little while?”

“Huh?” said Jesse.

“No thanks,” said Cooper. He said it politely enough, so Tucker understood that he was turning down something else entirely—the offer of a drink, maybe, or an invitation to the ballet. Tucker performed a little mime restating his desire to converse without the hearing impediments. The boys looked at each other, shrugged and stuffed the iPods into their pockets. They had acceded to his request not because he was their father, but because he was older than them, and possibly because he was in a hospital bed; they’d have done the same if he were a paraplegic stranger on a bus. In other words, they were decent enough kids, but they weren’t his kids.

“I was asking where your mother was.”

“Oh. Okay. She’s outside in the hall.” Cooper did most of the talking, but always managed to give the impression that he was channeling his twin brother somehow. Maybe it was the way they stood side by side, staring straight ahead, arms dangling from their sockets.

“She doesn’t want to come in?”

“I guess.”

“You don’t want to get her?”

“No.”

“That was my way of saying ‘Would you get her?’ ”

“Oh. Okay.”

They both walked to the door, peered right and then left, and beckoned their mother toward them.

“He wants you to, though.” And then, after a pause long enough to accommodate dissent, “I don’t know why.”

“She doesn’t really want to come in,” said Cooper.

“But she’s coming in,” said Jesse.

“Okay.”

She didn’t come in.

“So where is she?”

They had readopted their previous positions, standing stiffly side by side, staring straight ahead. Maybe when they’d turned their iPods off they’d somehow turned themselves off, too. They were in standby mode.

“Maybe the restroom?” said Cooper.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Jesse. “The restroom. And maybe there was someone in there already?”

“Oh,” said Tucker. “Sure.”

Tucker suddenly became wearied by the pointlessness of the exercise that Lizzie had planned. These kids had flown thousands of miles to stand in a hospital room and stare at a man they no longer knew very well at all; this debate about whether their mother had gone to the bathroom or not was the most animated conversation the three of them had managed so far. (Tucker would miss it when it was over, but to extend it any further would probably entail scatological detail that he wouldn’t feel comfortable with, although the boys might enjoy it.) And then, in a moment, the ambient room temperature would become further chilled by the arrival of an ex-wife—not one he was particularly afraid of, nor one that bore him a great deal of ill will, as far as he knew, but not a person he’d had any real desire to see again during the time remaining to him on the planet. And then, sometime in the next hour or two, this ex-wife would bump into another one, when Nat came back with Jackson. And these two boys would stare at a half sister they’d never seen before and mumble at her, and… Jesus. There had been a part of him that was half joking when he’d asked English Annie to get him out of here, but that part was gone now. There was nothing funny about this.

The door opened, and Carrie peered around it cautiously.

“This is us,” said Tucker cheerily. “Come on in.”

Carrie took a few steps into the room, stopped and stared at him.

“Jesus,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Tucker.

“Sorry. I just meant…”

“It’s okay,” said Tucker. “I got a lot older, plus the light in here isn’t so flattering, plus I had a heart attack. I accept all of these things with equanimity.”

“No, no,” said Carrie. “I just meant, I guess, Jesus, it’s been a while since I saw you.”

“Okay,” said Tucker. “Let’s leave it at that.”

Carrie, of course, looked good, healthy and sleek. She’d put on weight, but she’d been too skinny when he’d left her anyway, due to the misery he’d inflicted on her, so the few extra pounds indicated only psychic health.

“How’ve you been?” she said.

“Today and yesterday, not so bad. The day before, not great. The last few years, mostly not so bad.”

“I heard you and Cat split.”

“Yeah. I managed to mess up another one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll bet.”

“No, really. I don’t suppose we have a whole lot in common, but we all worry about you. It’s better for us if you’re in a relationship.”

“You’re all in some sort of recovery group together?”

“No, but… You’re the father of our children. We need you to be okay.”

Carrie’s choice of words allowed him to imagine that he was some kind of polygamist in an isolated religious community, that Carrie was here as the elected representative of the wives. It was certainly hard to think of himself as a single man. He tried, for a moment. Hey! I’m single! I have no ties to anyone! I can do what I want! Nope. Wasn’t working, for some reason. Maybe when he was off the drip attached to his arm he’d feel a little more footloose.

“Thank you. How have you been, anyway?”

“I’m fabulous, darling, thank you. Work’s good, Jesse and Cooper are good, as you can see…” Tucker felt obliged to look, although there wasn’t too much to look at, apart from a brief flicker of animation at the sound of their own names.

“My marriage is good.”

“Great.”

“I have a fantastic social life, Doug’s business is solid…”

“Excellent.” He was working on the basis that if he threw enough approving adjectives in her direction she’d stop, but this policy showed no signs of working.

“Last year I ran a half marathon.”

He was reduced to shaking his head in speechless admiration.

“My sex life is better than it’s ever been.”

Finally the boys came out of standby. Jesse’s face creased into a mask of distaste, and Cooper crumpled as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

“Gross,” he said. “Please. Mom. Stop.”

“I’m a healthy woman in her thirties. I’m not gonna hide.”

“Good for you,” said Tucker. “I’ll bet your bowels work better than mine, too.”

“You’d better believe it,” said Carrie.

Tucker was beginning to wonder whether she had actually gone crazy at some point in the last decade. The woman he was talking to bore no resemblance to the one he used to live with: the Carrie he knew was a shy young woman who had wanted to combine her interest in sculpting with her interest in disabled children. She loved Jeff Buckley and REM and the poetry of Billy Collins. The woman in front of him wouldn’t know who Billy Collins was.

“There’s a lot to be said for being a suburban soccer mom,” Carrie said. “No matter what people like you think.”

Oh, okay. Now he got it. They were fighting some kind of culture war. He was the cool rock ’n’ roll singer-songwriter who lived in the Village somewhere and took drugs, and she was the little woman he’d left behind in Nowhere County. The fact was that they lived remarkably similar lives, except Jackson played Little League, not soccer, and Carrie had almost certainly been to NYC more recently than he had. She’d probably even smoked a little pot at some time in the last five years, too. Maybe everyone was going to come in here swinging their insecurities like baseball bats. That would certainly spice things up a little.

They were saved by the return of Jackson, who ran the length of the room in order to punch both Jesse and Cooper in the stomach. They responded with smiles and whoops: finally, somebody was speaking their language. Natalie’s entrance was a little more stately. She waved a greeting to the boys, who ignored her, and introduced herself to Carrie. Or maybe she was reintroducing herself, Tucker couldn’t remember. Who knew who had already met before? They were definitely checking each other out now. He could tell that Natalie had absorbed Carrie completely and then somehow spat her out again, and that Carrie knew she’d been spat out. Tucker accepted completely that women were the fairer and wiser sex, but they were also irredeemably vicious when the occasion demanded.