Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked

Jackson was happy enough on the train, mostly because he was taking a crash course in English sweets; he was allowed to go to the café car whenever he felt like it. He came back with “pastilles” and “biscuits” and “crisps,” and he rolled the exotic words around his mouth as if they were Italian wines. Tucker, meanwhile, was sipping litigiously hot tea from a Styrofoam cup and watching the little town houses roll out in front of him. It was all very flat out there, and the sky was full of ill-tempered dark gray swirls.

“So what is there to do in your town?”

“Do?” And then she laughed. “Sorry. The combination of Gooleness and an active verb took me by surprise.”

“We won’t be staying long, anyway.”

“Just until your children have given up on you and started traveling the thousands of miles back home.”

“Ouch.”

“I’m sorry.” And she was. Where was this disapproval coming from, all of a sudden? Wasn’t his checkered past half the attraction? What was the point of becoming attracted to a rock musician, if she wanted him to behave like a librarian?

“How was Grace, anyway?”

Jackson flashed his father a look, and Annie caught it, before examining it and lobbing it along to its intended recipient.

“Yeah, Gracie’s doing good. Living in Paris with some guy. Studying to, to be something.”

“I know you didn’t see her.” Shut up . God.

“I did. Didn’t I, Jacko?”

“You did, Dad, yeah. I saw you.”

“You saw him seeing her?”

“Yeah. I was watching all the time he was looking at her and talking to her.”

“You’re a little fibber, and you’re a big fibber.”

Neither of them said anything. Maybe they had no idea what a fibber was.

“Why that one?”

“Which one?”

“Why Grace?”

“Why Grace what?”

“How come you don’t mind seeing the others, but she scares you?”

“She doesn’t scare me. Why would she scare me?”

Maybe Duncan should be sitting on the train listening to this stuff. She knew already that Duncan would give an eye and several internal organs to be sitting on the train listening to this stuff; she meant that it would do him good to be here, that his obsession with this man would dwindle away, perhaps to nothing. Any relationship, it seemed to her, was reduced by proximity; you couldn’t be awestruck by someone sipping British Rail tea while he lied shamelessly about his relationship with his own daughter. In her case, it had taken about three minutes for passionate admiration and dreamy speculation to be replaced by a nervous, naggingly maternal disapproval. And that, it seemed to her, was a pretty good description of how some of her married female friends felt, some of the time. She had married Tucker somewhere between the hospital room and the taxi.

“I don’t know why she would scare you,” said Annie. “But she does.”

There was something about the journey to Gooleness that reminded Tucker uncomfortably of The Old Curiosity Shop . He didn’t think he was crawling through the English countryside to die, although English trains surely didn’t move much faster than Little Nell and her dad, and they’d had to walk to wherever the hell they were going. (The train had stopped three times already, and a man kept apologizing to them all through the loudspeaker, in a blank, unapologetic voice.) But he definitely wasn’t at his best, and he was heading north, and he was leaving a whole lot of shit behind. He certainly felt more like a sick young girl from the nineteenth century than he’d ever felt before. Maybe he was coming down with something—a sickness of the soul, or one of those other existential bugs that was going around.

Tucker liked to think that he was reasonably honest with himself; it was only other people he lied to. And he’d ended up lying to people about Grace her whole life, pretty much. He’d lied to her quite a lot, too. The good news was that these lies were not constant, that there were long periods of time when he didn’t have to bullshit anybody; the bad news was that this was because Grace was way off his radar most of the time. He’d seen her two or three times since she was born (one of these times was when she made a disastrous trip out to stay with him and Cat and Jackson back in Pennsylvania, a visit that Jackson remembered with unfathomable fondness), and thought about her as little as possible, although this turned out to be much more than he was comfortable with. And here he was, on a train a long way from home with someone he hardly knew, lying about Grace again.

The lies weren’t so surprising, really. He couldn’t have a third-person existence—“Tucker Crowe, semilegendary recluse, creator of the greatest, most romantic breakup album ever recorded”—and tell the truth about his eldest daughter. And as he didn’t really have a first-person existence anymore, hadn’t had since that night in Minneapolis, it had been necessary to get rid of her. He’d gone into therapy when he’d given up drinking, but he’d lied to his therapist, too; or rather, he’d never helped guide his therapist toward Grace’s importance, and the therapist had never done the math. (Nobody ever did the math. Not Cat, not Natalie, not Lizzie… ) It had always seemed to Tucker that talking about Grace meant giving up Juliet , and he wasn’t prepared to do that. When he turned fifty, he began to think about what he’d done, like people do at that age, and Juliet was pretty much it. He didn’t like it, but other people did, and that was just about enough: surely a man could sacrifice a kid or two to preserve his artistic reputation, especially when there wasn’t much else to him? And it wasn’t like Grace had suffered, really. Oh, sure, she was probably fucked up about fathers, and men generally. And somebody, her mother or her stepfather, had had to shell out for her therapy sessions, just as Cat had paid for his. But she was a beautiful, smart girl, as far as he could tell, and she’d live, and she already had a boyfriend and a career path, although he couldn’t recall what the hell it was. It didn’t seem like she was paying such a big price for her old man’s vanity. That wouldn’t be how they saw it on Maury Povich’s show, if Grace ever forced him to go on the show to confront his inadequacies. But the world was more complicated than that. It wasn’t just good guys and bad guys, great dads and evil dads. And thank God for that.

Annie was frowning.

“What’s up?”

“I was just trying to work something out.”

“Can I help?”

“I would hope so. When was Grace born?”

Fuck, Tucker thought. Someone is doing the math. He felt nauseous and relieved, all at the same time.

“Later,” said Tucker.

“Later than who or what?”

“I think I might be ahead of you.”

“Really? I’d be surprised. Seeing as I don’t know why I want you to tell me how old Grace is.”

“You’re a smart woman, Annie. You’ll get there. And I don’t want to talk about it until later.”

He cocked his head toward Jackson, whose head was deep in a comic book.

“Ah.”

And when she looked at him, he could see that she was halfway there already.

When they arrived in Gooleness, it was already dark. They dragged their bags out to the taxi stand at the front of the station, where one malodorous taxi was waiting. The driver was leaning against his car, smoking, and when Annie told him her address he threw his cigarette down on the ground and swore. Annie shrugged at Tucker helplessly. They had to put their own luggage in the trunk, or rather, Annie and Jackson had to do it. They wouldn’t let Tucker lift anything.

They passed overlit kebab shops, and Indian restaurants offering all-you-can-eat specials for three pounds, and bars with one-word names—“Lucky’s,” “Blondie’s,” even one called “Boozers.”