Juliet, Naked

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning, and he’d managed to do that with just about everybody he’d ever met or married or fathered. The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

“Can I trust this one?” said Tucker.
“It’s the National Health Service. They usually want to keep you out of the hospital. The government can’t afford you, and anyway the hospitals kill you.”

She really hadn’t thought the museum thing through, when she first took the job. She hadn’t worked out that it would make absolutely everything, even a one-night stand, feel as though it were already over, behind glass, a poignant relic of an earlier, happier time.

“You look like you were having fun.”
“I suppose so. I wish we’d had a bit more though. If you know what I mean.”
Annie made an appropriately scandalized face.
“He wanted to. His hands were everywhere. I fought him off.”
“Well,” said Annie, “you can never go wrong not doing something. It’s only when you do things that you get into trouble.”
“I suppose so,” said Kath. “But now what?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m seventy-seven and I never got into any trouble. So now what? Have you got a medal for me? You’re a museum director. Write to the queen and tell her. Otherwise it was all a bloody waste of time, wasn’t it?”

“And some towns do that? What do they pretend to be?”
“Paris. Giraffes. Whatever.”
“I’d like to go somewhere that pretends to be somewhere else. That sounds fun.”
He was right: it sounded fun. Who wanted to be in a place that prided itself on its lack of ambition, its pig-headed delight in its own plainness?

“Tucker, please put him down,” said Annie. “You’re frightening Jackson.”
“He’s not,” said Jackson. “It’s cool. I don’t like that guy anyway. Punch him, Dad.”

And there was Gina, too, of course, which was another narrative strand in the same story. Gina was, metaphorically, Naked, and her literal nakedness, or the offer of it, had only served to underline the aptness of the metaphor. He’d jumped too quickly there, too.)

“Not in this case, no. See… It’s like I’m a chef, and you’re eating in my restaurant, and you’re telling me how great my food is. But I know I pissed all over it before I served it up. So, you know, your opinion is valid, but…”

the cheap nighttime neon it just looked tired, like a middle-aged hooker wearing no makeup.

“Have you got a computer at home?”
“Yes.”
“Can I write you an e-mail?”