Nick Hornby: Juliet, Naked

Annie heard the front door open during “Blood Ties,” the second-from-last song. She hadn’t really been tidying up the kitchen while she’d been listening, but now she busied herself, and the stab at multitasking was in itself a form of betrayal: It’s just an album I put on! No big deal!

“How was college?” she asked him when he walked in. “Anything happen while you were away?”

But already he wasn’t listening to her. He was standing still, his head pointed toward the speakers like some kind of hunting dog.

“What’s… Hold on. Don’t tell me. That Tokyo radio-show bootleg? The solo acoustic one?” And then, with rising panic, “He didn’t play ‘Blood Ties’ then.”

“No, it’s…”

“Sssshh.”

They both listened for a few bars. Annie watched his confusion and began to enjoy it.

“But this…” He stopped again. “This is… It’s nothing .”

She burst out laughing. But of course! If Duncan had never heard it before, then all he could do was deny its existence.

“I mean, it’s something, but… I give up.”

“ Juliet, Naked , it’s called.”

“What’s called?” More panic. His world was tilting on its axis, and he was sliding right off.

“This album.”

“What album?”

“The one we’re listening to.”

“This album is called Juliet, Naked .”

“Yes.”

“There is no album called Juliet, Naked .”

“There is now.”

She picked up the note from Paul Hill and handed it to him. He read it, read it again, read it for a third time.

“But this is addressed to me. You opened my post.”

“I always open your post,” she said. “If I don’t open your post, it stays unopened.”

“I open the interesting letters.”

“You left this one because it looked boring.”

“But it isn’t boring.”

“No. But I had to open it to find that out.”

“You had no right,” he said. “And then… To actually play it… I don’t believe this.”

Annie never got a chance to chuck any of her scripted darts at him. He marched over to the CD player, pulled the disk out of the player and marched off.

The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it. It was as if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers: there was no point in looking for the explanation, for the trick, because there wasn’t one—or rather, there wasn’t one that he’d ever understand. Shortly after that, people from the message board started sending him songs attached to e-mails, and that was every bit as mysterious, because it meant that recorded music wasn’t, as he’d previously always understood, a thing at all—a CD, a piece of plastic, a spool of tape. You could reduce it to its essence, and its essence was literally intangible. This made music better, more beautiful, more mysterious, as far as he was concerned. People who knew of his relationship with Tucker expected him to be a vinyl nostalgic, but the new technology had made his passions more romantic, not less.

Over the years, though, he had detected a niggling dissatisfaction with the track-naming part of this new sorcery. He couldn’t help imagining, when he inserted a CD into his laptop, that whoever it was in cyberspace monitoring his musical tastes thought them dull, and a little too mainstream. You could never catch him out. Duncan imagined a twenty-first-century Neil Armstrong wearing a helmet with built-in Bang and Olufsen headphones, floating around somewhere a lot like old-fashioned space (except it was even less comprehensible and clearly contained a lot more pornography), thinking, Oh, not another one of these. Give me something harder. Give me something that stumps me for a moment, something that sends me scurrying off to the cyber reference library. Sometimes, when the computer seemed to whir for longer than usual, Duncan got the feeling that he’d set some kind of a challenge; but then one day, when he was stocking up his iPod with back catalog, it had taken nearly three minutes to obtain the track names for Abbey Road , and it was clear that any delay was due to a bad connection or something, and not because Neil Headphones was stumped. So recently Duncan had been taking pleasure in those rare occasions when Neil couldn’t help him, and he’d had to fill out the titles himself, even though it was boring. It meant that he was off the well-trodden paths and into the musical jungle. Neil Headphones had never heard of Juliet, Naked , which was something of a consolation. Duncan couldn’t have borne it if the information had popped up without any effort on anyone’s part, as if he were the seven-hundredth person to have requested it that day.

He didn’t want to listen to Juliet, Naked straightaway. He was still too angry, both with Annie and, more obscurely, with the album itself, which seemed to belong to her more than him. So he was grateful for the time it took to name the tracks (he took a gamble on the track listing being the same on Naked , as he was already learning to call it, as it was on the original album—the long last song, six minutes even in its demo form, suggested that it would be), and then for his machine to inhale the music into itself. What had she been thinking of? He wanted to find a benign interpretation for her behavior, but there just wasn’t one. It was malevolence, pure and simple. Why did she hate him so much, all of a sudden? What had he done?

He plugged his iPod in, transferred the album with a still-miraculous click of the finger and flick of the wrist, picked his jacket up from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and went out.

He went down to the seashore. He’d grown up in the London suburbs, and still couldn’t get used to the idea that the sea was five minutes’ walk away. It wasn’t much of a sea, of course, if what you wanted was a sea that contained even the faintest hint of blue or green; their sea seemed committed to a resourceful range of charcoal gray blacks, with the occasional suggestion of muddy brown. The weather conditions were perfect for his needs, though. The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull, and the vacationers who still, inexplicably, chose to come here when they could fly to the Mediterranean for thirty quid all looked as though they’d been bereaved that morning. Fallacies really never got more pathetic than this. He got himself a cup of takeout instant coffee from the kebab stand by the pier and sat down on a bench overlooking the ocean. He was ready.

Forty-one minutes later, he was scrabbling around in his pockets for something he could use as a handkerchief when a middle-aged woman came over and touched him on the arm.

“Do you need someone to talk to?” she said gently.

“Oh. Thank you. No, no, I’m fine.”

He touched his face—he’d been crying harder than he’d realized.

“You sure? You don’t look fine.”

“No, really. I’ve just… I’ve just had a very intense emotional experience.” He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. “On here.”

“You’re crying about music?”

The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert.

“Well,” said Duncan, “I’m not crying about it. I’m not sure that’s the right preposition.”

She shook her head and walked off.

He listened from beginning to end twice more while sitting on the bench, and then started to walk home during the third play. One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it. What did it matter that Annie had heard the album before he’d had his chance? Imagine all the people who’d heard the original album before he’d discovered it! Imagine all the people who’d seen Taxi Driver before him, come to that! Did that deaden its impact? Did it make it less his? He wanted to go home, hug her and talk about a morning that he would never forget. He wanted to hear what she had to say, too. He valued her insights into Crowe’s work—she could be surprisingly shrewd, sometimes, given her unwillingness to immerse herself in the subject, and he wanted to hear whether she’d noticed the same things that he’d picked up: the lack of chorus in “The Twentieth Call of the Day,” for example, which gave the song a relentlessness and a self-loathing that you couldn’t really detect in its “finished” form. (He’d play this version to anyone who dared to trot out that tired old line about Crowe being the poor man’s Dylan. “The Twentieth Call of the Day,” in Duncan’s opinion, was “Positively Fourth Street,” but it had more texture and heft. And Tucker could sing.) And who’d have thought that “And You Are?” could sound so ominous? On Juliet , it was a song about two people making a connection straightaway—in other words, it was a simple (but very pretty) love song, a sunny day before the psychic storms started rolling in from the sea. But on Juliet, Naked , it was as if the lovers were standing in a little pool of sunlight that was becoming smaller even while they were talking for the first time. They could see the thunder and the rain already, and it made the album more complete, somehow, more coherent. It was a proper tragedy, with the doom about to befall them implied from the very beginning. The flat restraint of “You and Your Perfect Life,” meanwhile, gave the song a staggering power that was muffled by the histrionics of the rock ’n’ roll version.