Nick Hornby: Juliet, Naked

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!

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.