Duncan is in the US with his girlfriend Annie on a pilgrimage to sites
associated with his hero, the rock legend turned recluse Tucker Crowe. From
his San Francisco hotel he has taken the BART train to Berkeley to get a
glimpse of a house belonging to Julie Beatty, one-time girlfriend of Crowe
and the muse of his seminal album, Juliet. Annie has decided there are
better things to do in the Bay Area.
When he got to 1131 Edith Street, there was a kid sitting on the pavement
outside, his back against a fence that looked as though it might have been
erected simply to stop him from getting any farther. He was in his late
teens, with long, greasy hair and a wispy goatee, and when he realised that
Duncan had come to look at the house, he stood up and dusted himself off.
“Yo,” he said.
Duncan cleared his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to return the greeting,
but he offered a “Hi” instead of a “Hello”, just to show that he had an
informal register.
“They’re not home,” said the kid. “I think they might have gone to the East
Coast. The Hamptons or some shit like that.”
“’Oh. Right. Oh well.”
“You know them?”
“No, no. I just . . . You know, I’m a, well, a Crowologist. I was just in the
neighbourhood, so I thought, you know . . .”
“You from England?”
Duncan nodded.
“You came all the way from England to see where Tucker Crowe threw his
stones?” The kid laughed, so Duncan laughed too.
“No, no. God no. Ha! I had some business in the city, and I thought, you know
. . . What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Juliet is my favourite album of all time.”
Duncan nodded. The teacher in him wanted to point out the non-sequitur; the
fan understood completely. How could he not?
He didn’t get the pavement-sitting, though. Duncan’s plan had been to look,
imagine the trajectory of the stones, maybe take a picture and then leave.
The boy, however, seemed to regard the house as if it were a place of
spiritual significance, capable of promoting a profound inner peace.
“I’ve been here, like, six or seven times?” the boy said. “Always blows me
away.”
“’I know what you mean,” said Duncan, although he didn’t. Perhaps it was his
age, or his Englishness, but he wasn’t being blown away, and he hadn’t
expected to be, either. It was, after all, a pleasant detached house they
were standing outside, not the Taj Mahal. In any case, the need to pee was
preventing any real appreciation of the moment.
“You wouldn’t happen to know . . . What’s your name?”
“Elliott.”
“I’m Duncan.”
“Hi, Duncan.”
“Elliott, you wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a Starbucks near here? Or
something? I need a restroom.”
“’Ha!” said the kid.
Duncan stared at him. What kind of answer was that?
“See, I do know one right near here. But I kind of promised myself I wouldn’t
use it again.”
“’Right,” said Duncan. “But . . . would it matter if I did?”
“Kind of. Because I’d still be breaking the promise.”
“Oh. Well, as I don’t really understand what kind of promise you can make with
regard to a public lavatory, I’m not sure I can help you with your ethical
dilemma.”
The boy laughed. “I love the way you English talk. ‘Ethical dilemma’. That’s
great.”
Duncan didn’t disabuse him, although he did wonder how many of his students
back home would even have been able to repeat the phrase accurately, let
alone use it themselves.
“But you don’t think you can help me.”
“Oh. Well. Maybe. How about if I told you how to find it but I didn’t come
with you?”
“I wasn’t really expecting you to come with me, to be honest.”
“No. Right. I should explain. The nearest toilet to here is in there.” Elliott
pointed down the driveway towards Juliet’s house.
“Yes, well I suppose it would be,” said Duncan. “But that doesn’t really help
me.”
“Except I know where they keep their spare key.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. I’ve been inside like three times? Once to use the shower. A couple times
just to see what I could see. I never steal anything big. Just, you know,
paperweights and shit. Souvenirs.”
Duncan examined the boy’s face for evidence of an elaborate joke, a satirical
dig at Crowologists, and decided that Elliott hadn’t made a joke since he’d
turned seventeen.
“You let yourself into their house when they’re out?”
The boy shrugged. “Yeah. I feel bad about it, which is why I wasn’t sure about
telling you.”
Duncan suddenly noticed that on the ground there was a chalk drawing of a pair
of feet, and an arrowed line pointing towards the house. Tucker’s feet,
presumably, and Tucker’s stones. He wished he hadn’t seen the drawing. It
gave him less to do.
“Well, I can’t do that.”
“No. Sure. I understand.”
“So there’s nothing else?”
Edith Street was long and leafy, and the next cross street was long and leafy
too. It was the sort of American suburb where residents had to get into
their cars to buy a pint of milk.
“Not for a mile or two.” Duncan puffed out his cheeks, a gesture, he realised,
even as he was making it, intended to prepare the way for the decision he’d
already made. He could have gone behind a hedge; he could have left that
second, walked back to the BART station and found a café, walked back again
if he needed to. Which he didn’t, really, because he’d seen all there was to
see. That was the root of the problem. If more had been . . . laid on
for people like him, he wouldn’t have had to create his own excitement. It
wouldn’t have killed her to mark the significance of the place in some way,
would it? With a discreet plaque or something? He hadn’t been prepared for
the mundanity of Juliet’s house, just as he hadn’t really been prepared for
the malodorous functionality of the men’s room in Minneapolis.
“A mile or two? I’m not sure I can wait that long.”
“Up to you.”
“’Where’s the key?”
“There’s a loose brick in the porch there. Low down.”
“And you’re sure the key’s still there? When did you last look?”
“Honestly? I went in just before you came. I didn’t take a single thing. But I
can never believe that I’m standing in Juliet’s house, you know? F***ing Juliet,
man!”
Duncan knew that he and Elliott weren’t the same. Elliott had surely never
written about Crowe — or, if he had, the work would almost certainly have
been unpublishable. Duncan also doubted whether Elliott had the emotional
maturity to appreciate the breathtaking accomplishment of Juliet
(which, as far as Duncan was concerned, was a darker, deeper, more fully
realised collection of songs than the overrated Blood on the Tracks),
and nor would he have been able to cite its influences: Dylan and Leonard
Cohen, of course, but also Dylan Thomas, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Shelley,
the Book of Job, Camus, Pinter, Beckett and early Dolly Parton.
But people who didn’t understand all this might look at them and decide,
erroneously, that they were similar in some way. Both of them had the same
need to stand in f***ing Juliet’s house, for example. Duncan followed
Elliott down the short driveway to the house and watched as the boy groped
for the key and opened the door.
The house was dark — all the blinds were down — and smelled of incense, or
maybe some kind of exotic pot-pourri. Duncan couldn’t have lived with it,
but presumably Julie Beatty and her family weren’t sick with nerves all the
time when they were in residence, the way Duncan was feeling now. The smell
sharpened his fear and made him wonder whether he might throw up.
He’d made an enormous mistake, but there was no undoing it.
He was inside, so even if he didn’t use the toilet, he’d still committed the
crime. Idiot. And idiot boy, too, for persuading him that this was a good
idea.
“So there’s a small toilet down here, and it’s got some cool stuff on the
walls. Cartoons and shit. But the bathroom upstairs, you see her make-up and
towels and everything. It’s spooky. I mean, not spooky to her, probably. But
spooky if you only kind of half-believe she even existed.”
Duncan understood the appeal of seeing Julie Beatty’s make-up absolutely, and
his understanding added to his sense of self-loathing.
“Yes, well I haven’t got time to mess around,” said Duncan, hoping that
Elliott wouldn’t point out the obvious holes in the assertion.
“Just point me towards the downstairs one.”
They were in a large hallway with several doors leading off it. Elliott nodded
at one of them, and Duncan marched towards it briskly, an Englishman with
pressing West Coast business appointments who’d trowelled some time out of
his hectic schedule to stand on a pavement, and then break into someone’s
house for the hell of it.
He made the pee as splashy as possible, just to prove to Elliott that the need
was genuine. He was disappointed by the promised artwork, however. There
were a couple of cartoons, one of Julie and one of a middle-aged man who
still looked something like the old photos Duncan had seen of her husband,
but they looked like they’d been done by one of those artists who hang out
at tourist traps, and in any case they were both post-Tucker, which meant
that they could have been pictures of any American middle-class couple.
He was washing his hands in the tiny sink when Elliott shouted through the
door, “Oh, and there’s the drawing. That’s still up in their dining room.”
“’What drawing?”
“The drawing that Tucker did of her, back in the day.”
Duncan opened the door and stared at him.
“What do you mean?”
“You know Tucker’s an artist, right?”
“No.” And then, because this made him sound like an amateur, “Well, yes. Of
course. But I didn’t know . . .” He didn’t know what he didn’t know, but
Elliott didn’t notice.
“Yeah,” said Elliott. “In here.”
The dining room was at the back of the house, with French windows leading out
on to a terrace, presumably, or a lawn — there were curtains drawn over
them. The drawing was hung over the fireplace, and it was big, maybe four
feet by three, a head-and-shoulders portrait of Julie in profile,
half-squinting through her cigarette smoke at something in the middle
distance. She looked, in fact, as if she were studying another work of art.
It was a beautiful portrait, reverential and romantic, but not idealised —
it was too sad, for a start. It somehow seemed to suggest the impending end
of his relationship with the sitter, although of course Duncan might have
been imagining that. He might have been imagining the meaning, he might have
been imagining the power and charm. Indeed, he could have been imagining the
drawing itself.
Duncan moved in closer. There was a signature in the bottom left-hand corner,
and that was thrilling enough to require separate examination and
contemplation. In a quarter of a century of fandom, he’d never seen Tucker’s
handwriting. And while he was staring at the signature, he realised
something else: that he hadn’t been able to respond for the first time to a
piece of work by Crowe since 1986. So he stopped looking at the signature
and stepped back to look at the picture again.
“You should really see it in the daylight,” said Elliott. He drew back the
curtains on the French windows, and almost immediately they found themselves
staring at a gardener mowing the lawn. He saw them and started shouting and
gesticulating, and before Duncan knew it, he was out the front door and
halfway up the road, running and sweating, his legs shaking with nerves, his
heart pounding so hard he thought he might not make it to the end of the
street and possible safety.
It wasn’t until the doors on the BART closed behind him that he felt safe.
He’d lost Elliott almost immediately — he’d run out of that house as fast as
he could, but the boy was faster, and almost immediately out of sight. And
he never wanted to see him again anyway.
It had been pretty much all his fault, there was no doubt about that; he’d
provided both the temptation and the means to break in.
Duncan had been stupid, yes, but his powers of reasoning had been scrambled by
his bladder, and . . . Elliott had corrupted him, was the truth of it.
Scholars like him were always going to be vulnerable to the excesses of
obsessives, because, yes, they shared a tiny strand of the same DNA. His
heart-rate began to slow. He was calming himself down with the familiar
stories he always told himself when doubt crept in.
When the train stopped at the next station, however, a Latino who looked a
little like the gardener in the back garden got into Duncan’s carriage, and
his stomach shot towards his knees while his heart leapt halfway up his
windpipe, and no amount of self-justification could put his internal organs
back where they belonged.
What really frightened him was how spectacularly his transgression had paid
off. All these years he’d done nothing more than read and listen and think,
and though he’d been stimulated by these activities, what had he uncovered,
really? And yet by behaving like a teenage hooligan with a screw loose, he
had made a major breakthrough.
He was the only Crowologist in the world (Elliott was nobody’s idea of a
Crowologist) who knew about that picture, and he could never tell anyone
about it, unless he wished to own up to being mentally unbalanced. Every
other year spent on his chosen subject had been barren compared to the last
couple of hours.
But that couldn’t be the way forward, surely? He didn’t want to be the kind of
man who plunged his arms into dustbins in the hope of finding a letter, or a
piece of bacon rind that Crowe might have chewed. By the time he got back to
the hotel, he had convinced himself he was finished with Tucker Crowe.
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby is published by Viking tomorrow and is
available from BooksFirst priced £17.09 (RRP £18.99), free p&p,
on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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