TUCKER CROWE 4 страница

He spent the weekend almost entirely in Gina’s company. They ate good food, watched two movies, went for a walk along the beach, had sex twice, on Saturday night and Sunday night. And everything felt wrong, off, peculiar. Duncan couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living somebody else’s life, a life that was much more enjoyable than his own had been recently, but which didn’t suit him, or fit him, or something. And then, on Monday morning, they cycled into work together, and when it was time for the first classes of the day, Gina kissed him good-bye, on the lips, and squeezed his bottom playfully while colleagues watched, stupefied with excitement. By lunchtime, everybody in the college knew that they were a couple.

eight

W hat to say? Tucker couldn’t think of anything. Or rather, he couldn’t think of anything that would help in any way. “Let’s give it one more try”? “I’m pretty sure I can change”? “Would you like to go to counseling”? His previous and extensive history of messing up relationships was useful only up to a point: effectively, all it did was make him give in to the inevitable much more quickly. He was like a mechanic who could take one look at an old car and tell its owner, “Well, yes, I could try. But the truth of it is, you’ll be back here again in two months, and you’ll have spent an awful lot of money in the meantime. ” He’d attempted to change before; he’d been to marriage counseling, he’d given it another try, and all of this had merely served to attenuate the agony. Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.

It was news to him that Cat had been “kind of seeing somebody, ” if only in a “pretty much semi-platonic” way. (He was tempted, in a spirit of devilment, to press for a definition of “semi-platonic, ” but he was afraid that Cat might actually try to provide one, and neither of them could cope with the ensuing embarrassment. ) Try as he might, however, he couldn’t see it as front-page news, or even a headline in the sports section. She was a young woman and as a consequence didn’t subscribe to the idea that monogamous sexual relationships between men and women were doomed, pointless, miserable, hopeless; she’d get there, he felt, but not for a while yet. Of course she was seeing somebody. Tucker wondered whether he knew the man who was being kind of seen and then wondered whether to ask if he knew him. In the end, he decided against it. He could see what would happen: Cat would tell him that, yes, Tucker had met him before, and Tucker would have to confess that he couldn’t bring him to mind. Unless Cat was kind of seeing a friend of his, the name she provided was unlikely to mean much.

Cat was staring at him. He was stirring his coffee and had been for the last few minutes. Had she asked him a question? He rewound until he heard her voice.

“I think we’ve reached the end of the road, ” is what she’d said, which wasn’t actually a question, although it clearly required an acknowledgment of receipt, at least.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. But I think you’re probably right. ”

“And that’s all you have to say? ”

“I think so. ”

Jackson walked into the room, saw Tucker and Cat sitting there expectantly and ran out again.

“I told you, ” said Tucker. He tried to keep it to that, but he was actually really angry. Jackson was a smart kid, and it had taken him three seconds to sense the danger in that room: the silence, his parents’ obvious nervousness.

“Go get him, ” said Cat.

“You go get him. This was all your idea. ” And then, when he could see Cat was going to react, “Telling him was your idea, I mean. Telling him like this. Formally. ”

Tucker wasn’t sure how they should have done it, but he knew they’d got it wrong. Why had Cat decided that the den was the right place? None of them ever used it. It was dark and smelled musty. They might just as well have woken him up in the middle of the night and yelled, “Something weird and upsetting is going to happen! ” at him through a megaphone. And the formation, Cat and Tucker side by side on a sofa, never happened much in real life, either. They were a head-on couple.

“You know I can’t, ” Cat said. “He won’t come unless you do it. ”

And this, of course, was a neat illustration of the trouble she faced. Shortly—not today, not here and now, but sometime soon—Jackson would be forced to choose which parent he was going to live with, and really that was no choice at all. Cat, like your average American dad, hadn’t seen much of Jackson since the first six months of his life. She’d been too busy keeping food on the table. Cat knew she wouldn’t be eating breakfast with her son much in the near future, which made her determination to end the relationship even more impressive, Tucker thought. And his security, the reassuring knowledge that the apparently unavoidable split couldn’t come between him and his son, probably sucked a great deal of the desperation out of his efforts to smooth things over. He and Jackson were the couple, and they didn’t need a lawyer.

Jackson was in his room, bashing the hell out of the buttons on a cheap computer game. He didn’t look up when Tucker opened the door.

“You want to come back downstairs? ”

“No. ”

“It’ll be easier if the three of us talk. ”

“I know what you want to talk about. ”

“What? ”

“ ‘Mommy and Daddy are having problems, so we’re going to split up from each other. But it doesn’t mean we don’t love you, blah, blah, blah. ’ There. Now I don’t have to go. ”

Jesus, thought Tucker. Six years old and already these kids can parody the language of marital failure.

“Where did you get all that from? ”

“Like, five hundred TV shows, plus five hundred kids at school. So that’s a thousand, right? ”

“Right. Five hundred plus five hundred makes a thousand. ”

Jackson couldn’t prevent a tiny flicker of triumph from crossing his face.

“Okay. You don’t have to come down. But please be kind to your mother. ”

“She knows I want to live with you, right? ”

“Yeah, she knows, and she’s upset about it. ”

“Dad? Do we have to move to another house? ”

“I don’t know. Not if you don’t want to. ”

“Really? ”

“Sure. ”

“So it doesn’t matter that you don’t have any money? ”

“No. Not at all. ”

Tucker was pleased with the dismissive tone. It suggested that only a kid with no knowledge of the way the world worked would even have brought the subject up.

“Cool. ”

Tucker went back downstairs to explain to his wife that she’d have to give up both her child and her house.

Tucker now accepted, without question, that he couldn’t make a marriage, or anything resembling a marriage, work. (He had never been absolutely sure whether he was married to Cat or not. Cat referred to him as her husband, and it always sounded a little off to him, but he’d never been able to ask her directly whether there was any legal basis for her description of his status. She’d be hurt that he couldn’t remember. Certainly there’d been no ceremony since sobriety, but anything could have happened before that. ) He was one of those people whose flaws remained consistent whoever he was with. He’d had friends who’d had good second marriages, and they always talked about the relief they’d felt when they realized that the first had gone wrong because of the dynamic, rather than any inherent failing in themselves. But as several women, women who didn’t really resemble one another in any way, had all complained of the same things, he had to accept that dynamics had nothing to do with anything. It was all him. At the beginning, something—infatuation, hope, whatever—helped disguise his real shape. But then the tide went out, and all was revealed, and it was ugly, dark and jagged and unpleasant.

One of the chief complaints was that he never did anything, which Tucker couldn’t help but feel was unfair; not because the complaint was groundless, because it obviously wasn’t, but because, in certain circles, Tucker was one of the most famous do-nothings in the United States. All of these women had known that he hadn’t done anything since 1986; that, it seemed to him, was his unique selling point, and it was a never-ending source of fascination. But when he’d continued to do nothing, there was outrage. Where was the justice in that? He could see that several of these women, Cat included, had presumed, without ever articulating it or possibly even acknowledging it to themselves, that they’d be able to redeem him, bring him back to life. They’d appointed themselves muses, and he would respond to their love, inspiration and care by making the most beautiful and passionate music of his career. And then, when nothing happened, they were left with an ex-musician who sat around the house drinking, watching game shows and reading Victorian novels in his sweatpants, and they didn’t like it much. Who could blame them? There wasn’t much to like. With Cat it had been different, because he’d sobered up and taken care of Jackson. But he was still a disappointment to her. He was a disappointment to himself, but that didn’t help anyone much.

It wasn’t as if he was a happy slacker, either. He’d never been able to shrug away the loss of his talent, for want of a better word to describe whatever the hell it was he once had. Sure, he’d got used to the idea that there wouldn’t be a new album, or even a new song, anytime soon, but he’d never learned to look on his inability to write as anything other than a temporary state, which meant that he was permanently unsettled, as if he were in an airport lounge waiting for a plane. In the old days, when he flew a lot, he’d never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he’d spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that’s what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he’d known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he’d have made different travel arrangements, but instead he’d sat there, sighing and fidgeting and, more often than was ever really acceptable, snapping at his traveling companions.

“What are you going to do? ” they asked, all the Cats and Nats and other wives and lovers and mothers of his children whose names sometimes blurred regrettably together. And he always told them what he thought they should want to hear. “I’m gonna look for a job, ” he said, or, “I’m retraining as an accountant. ” And they’d sigh and roll their eyes, which for him merely underlined the impossibility of his situation: how else to answer, other than to say he was going to look for a job, do something else, stop being a former something? A few months back, he’d called Cat on the eye-rolling, asked her for some suggestions. After some deliberation, she announced that she thought he should be a singer-songwriter, but one who actually sang and wrote songs. She hadn’t articulated the idea exactly in those terms, of course, but that was pretty much what it amounted to. He’d laughed a lot. She’d gotten angry. One more finger had been prised off the rope they were clinging to.

Up until a couple of years ago, Tucker’s best and only friend in the neighborhood had been known as Farmer John, after the old Premiers song, because his name was John and he lived on a farm. Then something strange happened, and one of the eventual consequences was that Farmer John became known affectionately to his nearest and dearest as Fucker. (This select group included, to Cat’s mortification and Tucker’s childish delight, Jackson. ) The strange thing that happened was this: sometime in 2003, one of the half-crazed fans who refer to themselves as Crowologists drove up the dirt track that led to Farmer John’s farm, apparently in the belief that Tucker lived there. While John was walking down to the stranger’s car to talk to him, the driver’s door opened, the fan emerged and he started frantically taking pictures of John with a fancy-looking camera. Tucker had never really learned how John earned a living; he was no farmer, that was for sure. And every time anyone asked him, he was impressively and sometimes even aggressively evasive. The general presumption was that there was some harmless, low-level illegal activity involved somewhere, which was probably why John went for the photographer, who kept snapping pictures even as he got into the car to make his escape. Within days, the scariest of these photos (and John, a grizzled man with long, matted gray hair, never looked anything less than intimidating anyway) was being passed from website to website. Neil Ritchie, the photographer, became almost famous, the man who’d stolen the first shot of Tucker Crowe in over fifteen years. It was still, even now, the first image you saw if you went to find a picture of Tucker on the Internet.

At first, Tucker was baffled by the easy passage the photo had through cyberspace. Nobody ever asked how a man who looked like that in 1986 could look like this in 2003. Hair can grow long and get dirty and go gray, sure. But could noses change shape that easily? Could eyes start creeping closer together? Could mouths get wider, lips thinner? But then, the photo was never used anywhere that it was likely to get fact-checked; Tucker had long since drifted away from the mainstream media and into the backwaters where all the screwballs and conspiracy theorists did their fishing. And anyway, to talk about plausibility was to miss the point. The few people who hadn’t forgotten him, people who had turned his songs into hymns that contained profoundly helpful guidance on just about everything, wanted him to look like Farmer John. Tucker was a genius, according to these people, and he’d gone mad, and that’s what mad geniuses looked like. And John’s anger was perfect, too. Neil Ritchie almost certainly had other shots of John ambling toward his car, but they just didn’t fit with the idea of someone who was clearly so obsessive about his privacy. The moment John went nuts was the moment he turned into Tucker Crowe, damaged recluse. Tucker, meanwhile, the real one, the one who drove Jackson to Little League games, kept his silver hair neatly trimmed, wore moderately fashionable rimless spectacles and shaved every day. He felt like Fucker on the inside, which was why he’d always made sure he looked like somebody you’d be happy to buy insurance from.

Anyway, Farmer John became known to Tucker and Cat (and Jackson) and a few other friends and neighbors as Fake Tucker, and Fake Tucker became, inevitably, Fucker. And when Tucker needed to get out of the house and out into the world, it was Fucker he took with him—not because the confusion was helpful in any way, but because he didn’t really know any other men anymore. It was always slightly complicated, though, a night out with The Fuck. Tucker couldn’t drink, and Fucker couldn’t not drink, and though Tucker could watch someone sipping liquor slowly and in moderation, it didn’t do him much good to watch somebody get slammed. So the deal was this: Fucker had to be given an hour’s notice, and in that hour he’d work his way through several fingers of Bushmills and get a glow on. By the time Tucker came to pick him up he’d only need a small top-up, and occasionally he’d be ready for a mug of coffee.

Fucker wanted to listen to a band that was playing in a local bar.

“Why? ”

“Because it might be fun. ”

“Oh, man, ” said Tucker. “Do we have to? ”

“You don’t drink, you don’t listen to music… Why do you even ask me to go out at night? How about this? You want to see me, we’ll meet for breakfast. Except you probably disapprove of eggs. Or you used to snort them, back in the eighties, so you can’t be in the same room as them now. ”

“I need to talk, I think. ”

“Why? You screwed it all up with Cat? ”

“Yep. ”

“Wow. Who could have seen that coming? ”

Tucker actually valued John’s blunt sarcasm. It felt bracing, like one of those sponges Cat liked that were supposed to remove dead skin.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should go see a band. That way I don’t have to listen to you. ”

“I’ve said all I have to say. Apart from you’re an idiot. How’s Jackson? ”

“He’s okay. He’s not amazed, either, really. He just wanted to make sure that he could be with me and stay in the house. ”

“And is that possible? ”

“Apparently. Cat’s going to look for an apartment in town, somewhere Jackson can sleep when he wants to. ”

“So you stole Cat’s house from her? ”

“For now. ”

“What’s going to change? ”

“Either I start earning some money, or Jackson turns eighteen and goes to college. ”

“You taking bets on what happens first? ”

“Maybe Juliet, Naked will make me some money. ”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot you had a new album out. There must be a million people who want to hear crappy versions of songs they forgot about years ago. ”

Tucker laughed. John had never heard his work before he moved into the neighborhood, but one night, drunk, he’d told Tucker that he’d played Juliet incessantly when he’d split with his wife. He’d been dismissive of Naked, for pretty much the same reasons as that English girl, although he was less eloquent in his expression of them.

It had been a long time since Tucker had been anywhere to hear a band, and he couldn’t quite believe how familiar it all felt. Shouldn’t something have moved on by now? Did you really still have to lug all your equipment in by yourself, sell your records and T-shirts at the back of the room, talk to the crazy guy with no friends who’d been to see you three times this week already? There wasn’t much anyone could do with the live music experience, though. It was what it was. Bars and the bands that played in them didn’t have much use for the shiny white Apple world out there; there’d be processed cheese slices for dinner and blocked toilets until the world melted away.

Tucker went to the bar and got their drinks, a Coke for himself and a glass of Jameson for Fucker, and they sat down at a table at the side of the room, away from the tiny, low stage and the lights.

“But you’re doing okay, ” said Fucker.

“Yeah. ”

“Wondering whether you’ll ever have sex again? ”

“Not yet. ”

“You should. ”

“If you can find someone to sleep with, anyone can. ” Fucker was seeing a divorced English teacher from the local high school.

“You don’t have my charm, though. ”

“Lisette probably thought you were me anyway. ”

“You know what? That picture has never done me the smallest bit of good with a woman. Think about that, my friend. ”

“I have. And the conclusion I’ve drawn is, it’s a picture of you, not me, and it makes you look like a bug-eyed psycho. ”

The houselights went down, and the band ambled out onto the stage, to the general indifference of the drinkers in the room. They weren’t young men, the musicians, and Tucker wondered how often they’d been tempted to quit, and why they hadn’t done so. Maybe it was because they hadn’t been able to think of anything better to do; maybe it was even because they thought this was fun. They were okay. Their own songs weren’t anything special, but they knew that, because they played “Hickory Wind” and “Highway 61” and “Sweet Home Alabama. ” They knew their audience, anyway. Tucker and John were surrounded by gray ponytails and bald heads. Tucker looked around to see if he could spot anybody under forty and saw a young man who immediately looked away when Tucker caught his eye.

“Uh-oh, ” said Tucker.

“What’s up? ”

“That kid over there, by the men’s room. I think he’s recognized you. ”

“Cool. That never happens anymore. Shall we have some fun? ”

“What do you call fun? ”

“I’ll think of something. ”

But then it got too loud to talk much, and Tucker started to get gloomy. He had feared the onset of gloom. It was the real reason he hadn’t wanted to come out in the first place. He’d spent a lot of time doing nothing, but the trick to doing nothing, as far as he was concerned, anyway, was not to think while you were doing it. The trouble with going to see bands is that there wasn’t much else to do but think, if you weren’t being swept away on a wave of visceral or intellectual excitement; and Tucker could tell that The Chris Jones Band would never be able to make people forget who they were and how they’d ended up that way, despite their sweaty endeavors. Mediocre loud music penned you into yourself, made you pace up and down your own mind until you were pretty sure you could see how you might end up going out of it. In the seventy-five minutes that he spent with himself, he managed to revisit pretty much every single place he’d have been happy never to see again. He worked back from Cat and Jackson to all the other screwed-up marriages and kids; the professional wasteland of the last twenty years ran alongside them, like a rusted-over railroad running alongside a traffic jam. People underestimated the speed of thought. It was possible to cover just about every major incident of a lifetime during the average bar band’s set.

When the band waved to the handful of people applauding them and walked offstage, John disappeared through the door at the side of the stage to find them. A couple of minutes later, he was leading the musicians back for their encore.

“As some of you know, it’s a long time since I’ve done this, ” said John into the microphone. A couple of people in the bar laughed, either because they knew the story, or because they’d heard him sing before. Tucker watched the kid who’d been staring at them earlier. He was already on his feet and making his way to the foot of the stage. He looked as though he might faint with excitement. John grabbed the mike stand, nodded at the band, and they did their best Crazy Horse impersonation for a ragged but recognizable “Farmer John. ” Fucker sounded terrible: too loud, off-key and insane, but it clearly didn’t matter to his one fan, who was leaping up and down with excitement, while taking as many shots as he could with the camera on his cell phone. John finished with an ungainly leap into the air several seconds after the musicians’ last chord and grinned happily at Tucker.

The kid stopped John while he was making his way back to the seat, and John spoke to him for a couple of minutes.

“What did you say? ”

“Oh, just a bunch of made-up crap. But it doesn’t matter. Tucker Crowe spoke. ”

When Tucker got home that night, everyone was asleep, so he sat down and wrote to English Annie. She was English Annie because she wasn’t the Annie with whom he’d been conducting a chaste but nonetheless morale-boosting flirtation for a while now. American Annie was the mother of Jackson’s school friend Toby. She was in her mid-thirties, recently divorced, lonely and pretty. He’d started to think about her within hours—okay, minutes—of Cat telling him that they’d reached the end of the road. Tellingly, however, the thought of Toby’s Annie hadn’t cheered him much. He’d only been able to see a whole lot of grim consequential inevitabilities: ill-advised sex, his inability to follow through, hurt and the destruction of one of Jackson’s most important relationships.

Well, fuck that. Maybe he should concentrate on flirting with someone who lived on another continent, a woman who only lived in cyberspace and didn’t have a son on Jackson’s Little League team, or indeed any kind of son, which was one of the reasons she’d been so attractively expansive in the first place. Anyway, English Annie had been on his mind in the bar. A couple of the questions she’d asked in her last e-mail were similar to the questions he’d ended up asking himself during his sonic incarceration earlier in the evening, and it seemed like it might be more helpful to think about them as part of a conversation with someone.

Dear Annie,

Here’s another way of proving I am who I claim to be. Have you ever seen that picture someone took of a scared crazy person a few years back? You say you know people who still like my music—well, they’re the kind of people who are familiar with the photo, because they are under the impression that it’s me. They think it’s a revealing, if unflattering, portrait of a creative genius having some kind of breakdown, but it’s not. It’s a fair likeness of my neighbor John, who is a nice guy but not a creative genius, as far as I know. And he wasn’t having a breakdown. He was just flipping out. John went nuts because, not unreasonably, he didn’t like this guy snapping away at him, possibly because he’s got a whole field of cannabis plants in his backyard. (I have no idea whether he has or hasn’t. I just know he’s touchy about trespassers. )

Tucker stopped, and opened the photo library. He’d attached a picture to an e-mail a couple of times and he was pretty sure he could do it again. He found one of him and Jackson outside Citizens Bank Park earlier on in the summer and clicked the paper clip icon hopefully. It seemed to work. But would she think he was hitting on her? Could sending a photo of himself with his cute son, no woman in sight, be construed as some kind of come-on? He removed the attachment, just in case.

Anyway, it’s a good story, right? Around here, John has been christened Fucker (= Fake Tucker), if you’ll pardon my language. And forgive the yoking together a word alluding to Our Lord with an obscenity. And tonight, Fucker sang with a local bar band, thus overexciting a kid in the audience who clearly thought he was witnessing my resurrection. If anyone tells you I’m making a comeback, you can tell them it was Farmer John (which is what he sang. You know that song? “I’m in love with your daughter, whoa, whoa”? )

No, the photo made sense of the e-mail. How else could he prove that he didn’t look like John? And he wasn’t trying to prove that he was better-looking than John. He was trying to show that he and John didn’t resemble each other, and the whole Wild Man of the Woods thing was a hilarious Internet myth. He reattached the attachment.

This is me, outside a baseball stadium with my youngest son, Jackson. I have always kept my hair short since I gave up music, probably because I was afraid people might think I’d turned into someone like John. Plus, I wear glasses, which I didn’t use to. I have spent a lot of time reading the small print of big novels, and

“Big novels? ” Why did he feel the need to tell English Annie why he needed to wear glasses? So she didn’t think it was because he did too much jerking off? He deleted the last line. It was none of her business. Plus, that “pardon my language” thing sounded prissy. If she couldn’t cope with bad language, then fuck her… And that phrase begged a few questions. What did he want English Annie to look like? If he knew for sure that she weighed two hundred pounds, would he be pursuing this correspondence? Maybe he should ask her for a reciprocal photo, except then he would really look like some kind of creepy stalker. And anyway, what was he supposed to do with this girl? Invite her to come over? But actually, now that he thought about it…

I’ll probably be coming to England sometime in the next few months to see my grandchild. How far is your museum from London, where my daughter lives? I’d like to see your dead shark pictures. Or do you ever go down south? I don’t really know anybody in England, so…

So what? He scrapped the last half sentence, and then the one before it, too. It was okay to tell someone you wanted to see their dead shark pictures, wasn’t it? Or did that have a sleazy ring to it, too? And, hold on… “Do you ever go down south? ” Jesus Christ. There was a reason he’d given up talking to people he didn’t know.

nine

T he extraordinary news that Tucker had made some kind of bizarre public appearance passed Duncan by for a couple of days. There was so much going on in his personal life that he hadn’t had time to check the website, an oversight which, he later realized, neatly proved one of Annie’s cruel theories about Crowologists.

“I know ‘Get a life’ is a clich& #233;, ” she used to say. “But really, if these people actually had anything to do all day, they wouldn’t have time to write his lyrics out backward to see if there were any hidden messages in them. ”

Only one person on the message boards had ever done that, and he did nothing all day because, it was eventually discovered, he was writing from the psychiatric ward of a hospital, but Duncan could see her point. The moment Duncan had found something to do—namely, try to grab the steering wheel back from the maniac who seemed to be driving his life—then Tucker had been forgotten. One evening, when Gina had gone to bed early, Duncan sat down at her computer and rejoined his little community, mostly because he wanted to feel normal for a few minutes, to do something that he used to do. Looking at a picture of Tucker taken a few nights before, onstage with a band Duncan had never heard of, really didn’t help with his attempted reorientation. It actually made him feel rather giddy.

It seemed to be genuine. There was no mistaking the man from the infamous Neil Ritchie photo—the same long gray dreadlocks, the same discolored teeth, although this time the teeth were visible because Tucker was smiling, rather than because they were being bared in anger.

It was incredible that anyone who’d ever heard of Tucker was in the crowd to see it: the band were, as far as it was possible to tell, a distinctly ordinary bunch of pub-rockers who played bars all over Pennsylvania but not much farther than that. It turned out that the young man who got the scoop was in the middle of the same sort of Crowe pilgrimage that Duncan and Annie had embarked on in the summer. He, however, had set out to try and find Tucker, and it looked as though he’d struck it astonish ingly lucky. But why “Farmer John”? Duncan would have to think about that. A man as deliberate and as thoughtful as Crowe would be trying to say something with the song that broke a twenty-year silence, but what? Duncan certainly had the Neil Young version; he would try to find the original before he went to bed.

There was more, however. The witness, who identified himself only by his initials, ET, had managed to speak to Crowe when he came offstage, and Crowe had spoken back.

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