BetterthanBob 4 страница

He looked down at the seat next to him. The boy was tucked under a blanket with his headphones on and was watching his fifth straight episode of SpongeBob. He was happy. Tucker had warned him that he might not like the movie they were showing on the plane, because that was what happened the last time Tucker flew across the Atlantic: they showed a bad movie you didn’t want to watch. Now they showed every bad movie ever made. Jackson had actually giggled when he realized, long before his father had worked out the sheer abundance of the entertainment system, the amount of junk he could consume; he now felt that the flight was a little on the short side. Tucker had given up on the romantic comedy he’d started watching. As far as he could figure out, the problem between the central couple, the thing that was keeping them from being together, was that she had a cat and he had a dog, and the cat and dog fought like cats and dogs, which made the couple, through some mysterious contagion that the film couldn’t properly explain, fight like cats and dogs, too. Tucker got the feeling that they’d be able to solve their problems before the two hours were up. He wasn’t worried for them. He was now failing to read Barnaby Rudge. Dickens seemed wrong among all these little screens and bleeping lights and miniature cans of soda.

He was still feeling wretched, and he couldn’t shake off a sense of impending catastrophe, which he seemed to recall was a textbook indicator of something-or-other. Jackson had turned him into a hypochondriac—his son’s conviction that just about any cough or unexplained ache was cancer, or old age, anyway, wasn’t good for either of them—but he was pretty sure that the sweating, the arrhythmia and the foreboding were a result of his sudden and unexpected emergence from hiding. He knew the people who cared about him out there in the conjectural world of cyberspace described him as a recluse, but he’d never thought of himself that way. He went to shops and bars and Little League games, so it wasn’t as if he were Salinger. He just didn’t make music or talk to earnest young magazine journalists, and most people didn’t do either of those things. But in the airport he’d noticed himself walking around with his eyes and mouth wide open, so maybe he was a little bit more Kaspar Hauser than he’d thought. And planes were unnervingly different, and they were on their way to a big city, to hang out with an ex-wife and daughter who hated him… It was a miracle that his heart was able to keep any time at all, so 7/4, if that’s what it was, seemed perfectly acceptable. He put his book down and fell into a sickly, clammy doze.

Natalie had sent a car to pick them up. They were taken to Lizzie’s apartment somewhere in Notting Hill, and the driver waited for them while they dumped their bags and changed into clean underwear. Tucker was feeling dizzy and nauseous by now, as well as spooked, and though he wanted to rest, he definitely didn’t want to puke all over Lizzie’s white rugs. Lizzie had been transferred to a regular hospital—a regular swanky hospital, anyway—because of complications, so if he had to puke, he’d try and wait until he got there.

He remembered what it was that a feeling of impending catastrophe typically foreshadowed just as he was in the middle of pushing open the stupidly heavy glass door of the swanky hospital. Somebody, possibly a robot King Kong, put a pair of giant steel arms around his chest and started squeezing. Savage electric pain shot down his arm and up his neck, and he tried not to look at Jackson’s pale and frightened face. He wanted to apologize—not for feeling sick, but for all the lies he’d told. “I’m sorry, son, ” he wanted to say. “That stuff about nobody dying ever… It wasn’t true. People die all the time. Get over it. ”

He walked as steadily and as coolly as he could to the reception desk.

“Can I help you? ” said the woman. He could see his reflection in her glasses. He tried to look beyond the lenses into her eyes.

“I hope so. I’m pretty sure I’m having a heart attack. ”

There are all sorts of causes of ripples of movement across continents: floods and famine, revolution, large international sports events. In this case, however, the trigger was the sudden illness of one middle-aged man. Telephones rang in houses and apartments across the U. S. and Europe, and they were answered by attractive, still-slender women in their thirties and forties and early fifties. Hands were clapped to mouths, more phone calls were made, reassurances were given by careful soft voices. Flights were booked, passports were found, arrangements were canceled. The wives and children of Tucker Crowe were on their way to see him.

It was all Lizzie’s idea. In real life, she was a sentimental young woman, frequently moved to tears by pets and children and romantic comedies; but life with Tucker wasn’t real life, not least because there was so little of it, and the time she had with him always became overwhelmed by the time she had never had. How could it not? It wasn’t a fair fight. Just the sight and sound of him made her shrill and resentful: she hated the way her voice rose by an octave when they talked. But when she went to see him in his hospital room, he was asleep, sedated and helpless, and she didn’t feel angry anymore. She could be a dutiful and loving daughter, as long as he just lay there. When he awoke, she was determined to talk to him in the same voice she used for the people she loved.

She’d been told that he wouldn’t die, but that wasn’t the point: they had to seize the moment. If she felt more goodwill toward Tucker than she had ever managed to muster before, then surely everyone else was feeling it, too? And she couldn’t help believing that some kind of gathering, some attempt to connect a previously incoherent family, is what he would want. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know him at all.

June 12, 1986, Minneapolis

In the early days of his career, Tucker had collected stories of musicians’ bad behavior as if they were baseball cards. They fascinated him not because he wanted to emulate the musicians concerned, but because he was a moralist, and the stories were so unambiguously appalling that they served as a useful piloting guide: in his line of work, it didn’t take much to gain a reputation as a decent human being. As long as you didn’t hurl a girl out of a window when you’d finished with her, people thought you were Gandhi. He’d even got into fights a couple of times, in a pompous attempt to protect somebody’s honor—a girl, a roadie, a motel receptionist. Once, when he’d punched the obnoxious bassist of an indie-rock band that ended up filling stadiums, he was asked who’d died and made him fucking king. The question was rhetorical, of course, but he’d ended up thinking about it. Why couldn’t he let these young men behave like young men? Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented, so what did he think he was going to achieve by pushing a couple around when they’d had a drink? For a while, he blamed the kind of novels he read, and he blamed the decency of his parents, and he blamed his brother, who had managed to kill himself by driving into a wall when he was drunk. Books and parents and a tragic fuckup brother, he felt, had given him a solid ethical grounding. He could see now that he’d always been heading for a fall. It turned out that he was the kind of moralist who abhorred the behavior of others because he was so scared of his own weakness; the more he whipped himself into a frenzy of disapproval, the harder it would be to cave in without losing face. He was certainly right to be afraid. When he met Julie Beatty, he discovered that there wasn’t very much to him aside from weakness.

When he woke up that morning, Tucker Crowe had no idea that he would end the day by walking out on his own life, but, if he’d known, he wouldn’t have minded much, because he was sick of it. If you’d asked him what the problem was… Well, if you had asked him, he wouldn’t have said anything, because he liked to remain laconic, cryptic and gently satirical at all times, because it was cooler that way. Who are you, to be asking Tucker Crowe questions? Some fucking rock journalist? Or, even worse, a fan? But if he’d asked himself—which he did, sometimes, when he wasn’t drunk or asleep—he’d tell himself (exclusively) that what made him unhappiest on a daily basis was this: he had come to the inescapable and unhappy conclusion that Juliet, the album he was currently promoting every night onstage, was utterly inauthentic, completely phony, full of melodrama and bullshit and he hated it.

This wasn’t necessarily a problem. Bands were always promoting product that they didn’t like very much, and presumably actors and writers did the same: something had to be your worst piece of work. But Juliet was different, because it was the only record Tucker had ever made that people seemed to like. It hadn’t sold many copies, but over the last few months credulous college kids who’d never read or heard anything containing real pain, let alone experienced it firsthand, were turning up at shows in the hundreds and singing along to every word of every song. They swallowed Tucker’s portentous, self-righteous, whiny rage whole, as if it meant something to them, and the only way he could deal with them was to close his eyes and aim his voice somewhere just over their heads. (This coping mechanism, inevitably, had led a reviewer to describe him as “still lost in his pain. ”) It wasn’t as though he thought the songs were entirely without merit. Musically, they were pretty good, and he and the band had got better at playing them, too; most nights they built up a pretty ferocious head of steam. “You and Your Perfect Life, ” which closed the show every night, was a real tour de force now, and in the midsection of the song, right before the guitar solo, Tucker had taken to incorporating fragments of other famous love songs from an earlier time: “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” one night; “I’d Rather Go Blind” the next. Sometimes he dropped down on one knee to sing them, and sometimes audiences rose to their feet, and sometimes he felt as though he were a proper entertainer, someone whose job it was to make extravagant emotional gestures to help people feel. And the lyrics for “You and Your Perfect Life” weren’t too shabby either, even if they were his. He’d dressed up his rejection by Julie Beatty in some pretty fancy clothes, he thought.

No, the trouble was with Julie Beatty herself. She was an idiot, an airhead, a shallow, vain and uninteresting model who happened to be awfully pretty, and Tucker had discovered this shortly after a collection of hymns to her mystery and power had been presented to an apparently awestruck public. When she first heard the album, she was so moved by Tucker’s misery that she promptly left her husband for a second time—the poor guy must have had a crick in his neck by then, from watching his wife running up and down their stairs with a suitcase—and offered herself up to Tucker like a gaudily wrapped present; after three days holed up with her in a hotel room, it became apparent to him that he’d have more in common with a sixteen-year-old Nebraskan cheerleader. She didn’t read, didn’t talk, didn’t think, and she was the vainest human being he’d ever met. What had he been thinking? He’d been drunk when he met her the first time around, and then there’d been the whole sneaking-around drama of it, which in Tucker’s experience always added another level of intensity; but it wasn’t just that. He had wanted to live in her world. He wanted to know the people she knew; it was his right to go over to Faye Dunaway’s house for dinner. He was owed that. He had the talent, but he didn’t have the lifestyle that he felt should accompany that talent. In other words, he’d behaved like an asshole, and Juliet was going to serve as some kind of permanent reminder of his embarrassment and shame.

June the twelfth was a day like most of the others. They’d driven from St. Louis to Minneapolis, and he’d slept in the van, read a little, listened to The Smiths on his Walkman, inhaled the repulsive Cheez Doodles farts of the rhythm section. They’d done the sound check, eaten, and Tucker had nearly finished off the bottle of red wine he’d promised himself he wouldn’t touch until after the show. He’d abused his band—mocked his drummer’s ignorance of current events, questioned his bass player’s personal hygiene—and hit obnoxiously on the promoter’s wife. And then, after the show, someone had suggested checking out some band in some club, and Tucker was drunk by then and didn’t want to stop drinking and he thought he’d heard something good about the band anyway.

He was standing by the bar on his own, squinting at the stage and trying to remember the name of the person who’d told him that these losers were worth walking nine blocks to see. And then he wasn’t on his own anymore. He’d been joined by a big, long-haired guy in a cap-sleeved T-shirt, exposing upper arms that looked like a wrestler’s thighs. I’m not going to get into a fight with this guy, Tucker told himself for no reason at all, although over the last year or so, since he’d become thirstier, no reason at all had often been reason enough for a fight. The guy leaned against the wall next to him, mimicking Tucker’s stance, and Tucker ignored him.

The guy leaned into him and shouted into his ear, above the noise. “Can I talk to you? ”

Tucker shrugged.

“I’m a friend of Lisa’s. Jerry. I’m the road manager for the Napoleon Solos. ”

Tucker shrugged again, although he felt a tiny surge of panic. Lisa was the girl he’d been seeing when he met Julie. Lisa had been badly treated. He’d go so far as to use the active voice, in fact: he’d treated Lisa badly. He hadn’t even stopped sleeping with her when he was chasing Julie Beatty, mostly because that would have required a conversation that he wasn’t prepared to have. In the end, he’d just… not returned. He didn’t want to speak to any friends of Lisa’s.

“You don’t want to know how she’s doing? ”

He shrugged for a third time.

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway, whatever I want. ”

“Fuck you, ” said the guy.

“Fuck you, too, ” said Tucker. He suddenly remembered that it was Lisa who liked the band they were watching, and he felt regretful. He probably wouldn’t have grown old with her, but at least their relationship wasn’t a permanent and public embarrassment to him. (Oh, but it was hard, thinking about this stuff. What would have happened to his music, if he’d never met Julie? He’d never thought he had an album like Juliet in him, and Lisa would never have drawn it out. So if he’d stayed with her, he’d probably like himself more, but he still wouldn’t have gotten any attention. And because he wouldn’t be getting attention, he’d be hating himself. Argh. )

The guy had pushed himself away from the wall and was about to leave.

“I’m sorry, ” said Tucker. “How’s she doing? ”

“She’s doing okay, ” said the guy, which seemed like a somewhat anticlimactic reply. All those “fuck yous” for this?

“Good. Say hi from me. ”

The band was building, with great opacity of purpose, a pretty terrifying Berlin Wall of sound, consisting entirely of feedback and cymbal clashes. Jerry said something that Tucker didn’t catch. Tucker shook his head and pointed at his ear. Jerry tried again, and this time Tucker caught the word “mom. ” Tucker had met Lisa’s mother. She was a nice lady.

“That’s too bad, ” said Tucker.

Jerry looked at him as though he wanted to hit him. Tucker suspected that there might have been a misunderstanding. He shouldn’t get hit for expressing sympathy, surely?

“Her mother died, right? ”

“No, ” said Jerry. “I said…” He leaned right into Tucker and bellowed in his ear. “Did you know she was a mom? ”

“No, ” said Tucker. “I did not know that. ”

“I didn’t think so. ”

She didn’t waste much time, thought Tucker. They only split a year ago, which meant that she’d had to have…

“How old is the kid? ”

“Six months. ”

Tucker calculated in his head, and then on his fingers, behind his back and then in his head again.

“Six months. That’s… interesting. ”

“I think so, ” said Jerry.

“Interesting in two possible ways. ”

“I’m sorry? ”

“I SAID, THERE ARE TWO WAYS THAT MIGHT BE INTERESTING TO ME. ”

Jerry held two fingers up, apparently to confirm the numbers, and mouthed the word “two. ” They were, Tucker thought, quite a long way from being able to access the meat of this conversation. They had only just confirmed the exact number of ways it might be interesting.

“Two what? ” said Jerry.

Later, Tucker wondered why it had occurred to neither of them to take it outside. Force of habit, he guessed. Both of them were used to conversing in noisy rock clubs, and both of them were long used to the idea that, if you didn’t catch much, or even any, of the conversation, you weren’t missing anything. Now Tucker was being circumlocutory in order to find out something that might be very important to him. It wasn’t working.

“TWO WAYS…” Oh, fuck this. “Are you telling me this kid is mine? ”

“Your kid, ” said Jerry, nodding vigorously.

“I’m a dad. ”

“You, ” said Jerry, poking him in the chest. “Grace. ”

“Grace? ”

“GRACE IS YOUR DAUGHTER. ”

“HER NAME’S GRACE? ”

“GRACE. YOU. THE. DAD. ”

And that was how he found out.

Suddenly, the feedback stopped. It was replaced by a bemused and muted applause. Now that he could talk, though, he didn’t know what to say. He certainly didn’t want to say what he was thinking: he was thinking about his work, his music, about Juliet and the tour. He was thinking that the combination of a child and Juliet would be a permanent and unbearable humiliation. It must already be so for Lisa. (And maybe that last thought redeemed him, he was hoping. It seemed to have an ethical dimension to it. Certainly it was a thought about somebody else. He hoped God caught that one, even though it had been kind of tacked on to the end of a lot of other stuff, all about himself. )

“What are you going to do about it? ” said Jerry.

“I’m not sure there’s much I can do, is there? In most states, they don’t allow abortions after the kid has actually been born. ”

“Nice, ” said Jerry. “Classy. You going to see her? ”

“Good to meet you, Jerry. ”

Tucker drained his drink and put it down on the bar. He didn’t want to talk to this guy about his responsibilities. He needed to be on his own, outside.

“I wasn’t going to say this part, ” said Jerry. “But you seem like kind of a jerk, so what the hell? ”

Tucker made a be-my-guest gesture.

“That record. Juliet. It’s really full of shit, isn’t it? I mean, I can see you wanted to fuck her. She’s a good-looking girl, from the pictures I’ve seen. But all that drama? I don’t buy it. ”

“Very wise, ” said Tucker. He gave Jerry an ironic salute and left. He was intending to walk straight out the door, but he needed to take a piss first. So that was kind of bathetic, because he ended up giving Jerry the same ironic salute on the way back from the restroom.

Years later, little knots of bedraggled fans started meeting together on the Internet, and that visit to the toilet started getting some serious analysis. Tucker was always amazed by their literal-mindedness. If Martin Luther King had needed to take a leak right before the “I Have a Dream” speech, would these people have come to the conclusion that he’d come up with the whole thing midflow? While Tucker was walking out of the restroom, his drummer, Billy, was on the way in; Billy’s mind had been completely fucked by weed, so it was almost certainly Billy who’d decided that a mystical event had taken place in there. Tucker’s conversation with Jerry had remained private, to Jerry’s enormous and eternal credit.

On the way home he puked against a wall somewhere between the club and the motel. He was puking up cold cuts and red wine and Irish whiskey, but it felt like something else was coming out, too. And the next morning he called his manager. It wasn’t such a big deal, really, that night, no matter what the people on the Internet said. He found out he was a father. He canceled a tour. That night, there were probably musicians all over America finding out and canceling—it’s what musicians do. It wasn’t as if the day after was a big deal, or the day after that, either, ad nauseam, six thousand times. It was a cumulative thing.

twelve

A t first, Annie was glad Tucker and Jackson were late. It gave her time to compose herself, think about the version of herself she wanted to present. Yes, there was some kind of connection between her and Tucker, maybe, but it was a gossamer cyberthread: blow on it and it would break. And yet, if he’d arrived right on the dot of three, she would probably have been unable to resist running up to him and throwing her arms around his neck, which was presuming a reciprocal depth of feeling for which she had no evidence whatsoever. By ten past, she had resolved to give him a friendly peck on the cheek, and ten minutes after that she was wondering whether the peck shouldn’t be downgraded to a handshake, although she’d do that two-handed-clasp thing to convey warmth. By quarter to four, she didn’t really like him very much anyway.

And, of course, if she’d known there was any chance of outrageous rudeness on this scale, she’d have suggested meeting somewhere other than Dickens’s house in Doughty Street. There weren’t any shops or caf& #233; s around, nowhere she could sit inside and watch the entrance to the museum while sipping on a cappuccino that would cost roughly the same as a terraced house back in Gooleness. She just had to stand there in the street, feeling stupid. And though she had known, somewhere inside her, that a feeling of foolishness would be an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of this silly flirtation (could a flirtation be as one-sided as this one, without becoming merely a crush? ), she’d rather hoped that it would come later on, when he didn’t reply to her e-mails afterward. It hadn’t occurred to her that he simply wouldn’t show up. But what did she expect? He was a reclusive recovering alcoholic former rock star. None of that suggested a person who’d trot up to a museum at three o’clock on the dot on a Thursday afternoon. What to do? After an hour, and after considering and then rejecting a tour of the house on her own (because she suddenly didn’t love Dickens as much as she’d made out), she walked toward Russell Square. She’d given him her cell number, but he’d offered nothing in return—cunningly, she could see now. All she knew was that he was staying in his daughter’s apartment, but even if she were detective enough to obtain the relevant details, she wouldn’t call, and she certainly wouldn’t knock on the door. She had some pride.

Somewhere in her she hadn’t given up on him, otherwise she’d have gone back to her cheap and musty hotel room near the British Museum, collected her overnight bag and gone back to Gooleness on the train. She didn’t want to, though. When she got to Russell Square, she saw a poster outside an arts theater advertising a French movie, and she sat on her own in the dark for a couple of hours, squinting at the subtitles. She set the phone to vibrate, and checked it every few minutes just in case she’d somehow failed to feel the vibrations, but there was no message, no missed call, no evidence that she’d ever arranged to meet anyone.

She only knew a couple of people who still lived in London, Linda in Stoke Newington and Anthony in Ealing; one by one her friends had paired off and moved out. Many of them were teachers that she’d met at college, and they’d decided that they might as well earn their measly salaries in towns that were cheaper to live in than London, at schools where the pupils were exposed to knife crime only through rap songs.

Annie tried Linda first, on the grounds that she worked at home and therefore might be in to answer the phone, and that, as far as she could tell, Stoke Newington was closer than Ealing. As luck would have it, Linda was in, and bored, and offered to drop what she was doing and come and take her out for cheap Indian food in Bloomsbury. Less fortunately, however, Linda was almost unbearably annoying, a quality Annie had completely forgotten until halfway through the three-minute phone call.

“Oh, my God! What are you doing down here? ”

“I came down… Well, it was an Internet date, actually. ”

“There is so much in that last sentence which needs unpacking. First, what happened to the dreaded Duncan? ”

To her surprise, Annie found herself stinging a little.

“He wasn’t so dreaded. Not by me, anyway. ”

She had to defend him in order to defend herself. That was why people were so prickly about their partners, even their ex-partners. To admit that Duncan wasn’t up to much was to own up publicly to the terrible waste of time, and terrible lapses in judgment and taste. She had stuck up for Spandau Ballet in just the same way at school, even after she had stopped liking them.

“And second—what? It’s over already? At six o’clock? Was it a speed date? ” And she laughed maniacally at her own witticism.

“Oh, well. You win some and you lose some. ”

“And this one was a loser? ”

Yes, Annie wanted to say. That’s what the expression means, you dimwit. Nobody comes down from the Olympic rostrum with a gold medal around their neck and says “You win some, you lose some. ”

“I’m afraid so. ”

“Hold that thought. I’m comin’ to getcha. See you in half an hour or so. ”

Annie squeezed her eyes shut and swore.

After Linda had crawled under the fence surrounding her north London high school, she’d set about making a living as a freelance journalist, writing about liposuction and cellulite and leather boots and cats and sex aids and cakes and just about anything else the more down-market women’s magazines thought their readers might want to know about. Last time Annie had talked to her, she was just about getting by, although she gave the impression that the work was disappearing quickly down the Internet drain. Linda had hennaed hair and a loud voice, and whenever she and Annie met up, she always wanted Annie’s “take” on something or other, Barack Obama, or a reality TV show she never watched, or a band she’d never heard of. Annie didn’t really have a “take” on very much, really, unless a “take” was the same thing as an opinion, but she always had the feeling that it wasn’t, that it was something altogether more aggressive, definitive and unusual. Even if Annie had any of these qualities, she wouldn’t waste them on a “take. ” Linda lived with a man who was every bit as hopeless as Duncan, although for some reason everyone had to pretend that he wasn’t, that his novel would get finished, and published, and recognized as a work of rare genius, and he could stop teaching English to Japanese businessmen.

“So? ” said Linda, as they sat down in the restaurant, even before Annie had taken her coat off. “Pray tell all. ”

Maybe Linda and Duncan should get together, Annie thought. Then they could “pray tell” and “aghast” each other to death.

“I left Mike at home so we could have a proper girly chat. ”

“Oh, goody, ” said Annie. Were there two words in the English language that combined more dispiritingly than “girly” and “chat”?

“What did you do? Where did you go? What did you talk about? ”

Annie wondered for a moment whether Linda was par odying interest. Nobody could be as fascinated by a damp Internet date as the width of her eyes suggested.

“Well. ” What would they have done? “We went for a cup of coffee, and then we went to see a French film at the cinema in Russell Square, and then… That was it, really. ”

“What happened at the end? ”

“The woman found out her husband had been sleeping with a poet and she moved out. ”

“No, at the end of the date, stupid. ”

Typical Linda: she’d missed the admittedly mild witticism, but she made Annie seem like the idiot.

“Yes, I…”

Oh, what did it matter? It was all ridiculous. She had invented an Internet date, and the Internet date had been invented to replace another date that she was beginning to feel might have been half fantasy anyway. Why not continue on the same path and give Linda something to goggle at?

“We just said good-bye. It was… It was all slightly awkward, actually. He brought his girlfriend with him, and I think he was hoping…”

“Oh, my God! ”

“I know. ”

If the story she was telling were ever to be published, she’d have to thank Ros in the acknowledgments, maybe even offer her coauthorship. According to Ros, that sort of thing would almost certainly have happened, if she had really met somebody over the Internet.

“It happens more than you think, ” said Annie. “The stories I could tell. ”

She was beginning to feel like a real novelist, suddenly. Her first fiction was semiautobiographical, but now that she had some confidence she was pushing off into deeper imaginative territory.

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