You Don't Love Me Yet

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Wait in there,” Lucinda told Jules Harvey, nodding at another empty cubicle. “You can listen, just don’t pick up the phone.”

  “Sure.” Harvey adjusted his black glasses frames and took the seat, meek as a clam. Lucinda had to remind herself he’d invaded her periphery, robbed her private smells.

  “Complaints,” she said into the phone.

  “Say something so I know it’s you,” said the voice she recognized.

  Lucinda had to catch her breath. “We’d be happy to register any dissatisfaction you’ve experienced, sir.”

  “I had to hang up on that other girl three times,” the caller said.

  “There’s no need for that now, sir.”

  “Yes, I can hear it’s you.”

  “Yes.”

  None of the other complainers interested Lucinda at all. They’d roused her curiosity for the first days, a week at most. After ten days she felt herself turning into a recording instrument. The complainers spoke of their husbands and wives and lovers and children, from cubicles of their own they whispered their despair at being employed, they called to disparage the quality of restaurants and hotels and limousines, they whined of difficulties moving their bowels or persuading anyone to read their screenplays or poetry. They fished for her sympathy. Using Falmouth’s scripted lines she dealt with them crisply, addressing them as ma’am and sir, cutting them off before they’d become familiar. The only one that mattered was the brilliant complainer, who interested her entirely too much. His words were like a pulse detected in a vast dead carcass. They seemed born as he spoke them, blooming in the secret space between his voice and Lucinda’s ears.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it since we hung up. When I was younger I used to love women’s bodies. I’d drive myself crazy picturing them. It was like women themselves were just the keepers of these glorious animals I wanted to pet. I kept trying to push them out of the way so I could get to this agenda I had with their, you know—flesh.”

  Lucinda was grateful now for the gallery’s infestation by the journalists. Falmouth would be kept at bay. If only there hadn’t been an armpit sniffer one cubicle away. She hoped Jules Harvey was listening to the intern’s calls, not her own. Lucinda could hear the intern murmuring assent into her receiver, her pen scribbling noisily, filling the pages of legal pads with accounts of complaint, as Falmouth required.

  “Later,” the complainer went on, “I realized it wasn’t women’s bodies I loved, it was women, actual women. I know that doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment. But women became my actual friends.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a problem,” whispered Lucinda.

  “For a while it wasn’t. For a while I was happy to have sex with the bodies of my friends. But eventually it wore me down. I couldn’t remember what I loved about the bodies because I’d become too fond of the women. It was like a vicious triangle.”

  Jules Harvey’s baseball cap and gleaming lenses rose on the horizon of her carrel. Lucinda turned away, pretended she hadn’t noticed. Thinking of Falmouth’s imperative, she blurted: “What exactly is your complaint, sir?”

  “Same as always,” said the complainer. “Nostalgia, except it’s not just regular nostalgia. More like nostalgia vu. Longing for longing, instead of for the thing in question.”

  Lucinda printed L-O-N-G-I-N-G, shielding the pad from view with her shoulder. When she turned, however, she saw Jules Harvey padding in his high-tops through the doorway, through the gallery front.

  “Women’s bodies don’t interest you anymore?” she asked. She instantly regretted a question which sounded too interested.

  “I can’t even think about women’s bodies clearly now, that’s what I’m trying to explain. All I can think about is particular women. Their faces, their words. The bodies are totally eclipsed. It’s like I can’t see the sun anymore. I used to have a sense of purpose in life.”

  “A guy stuck his face in my armpit a few minutes ago,” she whispered. “A total stranger, at a restaurant.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “I’m in shock, I guess. He crept up while I was sitting with my eyes closed.”

  “See, there’s a person with priorities.”

  “I don’t think he’s much of a person at all.”

  “I bet you he’s a leader in his field. Those types thrive in the modern world.”

  “He’s not as assertive as you’re imagining. He drifts around like a human dandelion. I should have knocked his block off, but he’s too sad-looking.”

  “Now you’re making me jealous. I’m sure I’m twice as sad-looking as your dandelion man—”

  Falmouth and the journalist swept into the maze of cubicles, Falmouth babbling in a continuous stream, alive to his imagined public. The photographer orbited, snapping with a tiny camera in his meaty paws.

  “Can I call you later?” Lucinda whispered.

  “What?”

  “Give me your number. I can’t talk now.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “I’ll explain later. I have to start taking complaints.”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ll call you,” he said, and hung up.

  lucinda strode Sunset Boulevard, past her own parked Datsun, feeling jubilant and deranged. Men in cars slowed to examine her, a rare walker, but Lucinda didn’t turn her head. The sidewalk bowled beneath her like a gerbil’s wheel, the city curling to meet her footfalls. A Jeep trolled past with a bumper sticker she’d never seen before, reading pour love on the broken places. The rippled April heat dispelled the cloistered atmosphere of Falmouth’s gallery.

  The job was worse than her last, making cappuccinos at the Coffee Chairs. It robbed her of a solitude she hadn’t known she’d craved until now, the peace achieved performing some simple purpose adequately, in full view of the public but with her dignity and mystery intact. Operating the blistering, groaning espresso machine—thumping out plugs of steam-soaked coffee and tamping fresh grind in its place, venting the pressured steam through the valves in controlled bursts, flash-toweling grit from the joints and threads before burning your fingers—was like playing bass, an anonymous service full of secret satisfaction at precision, clarity, tempo. And it brought her a version of fame. She watched the café’s customers recognize her everywhere she went, but declined their glances. Falmouth’s callers, by comparison, tugged at her private self, blotted at her with their egos.

  Falmouth would be lucky if some museum purchased his lunatic archive of woe and stored it in its basement, there to rot. Complaint was a tide, a drab surf rinsing up everywhere, and by declaring his project Falmouth had drawn the tide to his door. But the complaints existed before Falmouth, and they’d go on after. No one should be forced to listen to them. She couldn’t be paid enough. Let Falmouth take the calls himself: that’s what Lucinda would have liked to tell the reporter from the Annoyance. That was her complaint. Why hadn’t the brilliant complainer offered her his number? He didn’t sound like anyone’s husband. Lucinda saw how little she’d visualized him at all. He was the murmur in her ear, nothing else. Had she ruined things, become too intimate in asking to call? Shouldn’t that be what he wanted?

  Lucinda’s fugue carried her through the doors of No Shame, past a few studious browsers at long shelves of rubber prosthetics and electronic implements, vials of frictionless liquids, and chic racks of videos, with their florid, meaty artwork, to the counter.

  “Is Denise here?”

  The woman beside the cash register pointed Lucinda to a half-open door. “On break.”

  Lucinda leaned into a storeroom heaped with cartons, through a doorway decorated like a shrine with thumbtacked Polaroids of unhappy male faces. Denise sat in a wooden folding chair with an unwrapped sandwich on a carton in front of her, sneakers planted in a desert of foam peanuts.

  “What’s up?” said Denise.

  “F
almouth’s driving me crazy.” Lucinda didn’t mention the man whose name she didn’t know. The air in the storeroom was heavy, the boxes crammed with erotic supplies too abject to contemplate. Lucinda, perspiring, felt a pleasurable twitching in her calves and realized with what force she’d barreled down Sunset. She ran her fingers down the row of Polaroid mugs. “Who are these?”

  “The shit list. When we catch a shoplifter we take their picture. Or anyone else we don’t want coming back.”

  Lucinda looked for Jules Harvey, but he wasn’t included.

  “It’s dead today,” said Denise. “They don’t need me. Grab a seat.”

  “I’ve been in a dimly lit storefront all morning. Can we go get a beer?”

  “Just let me wolf this sandwich.”

  “I’ve got an even better idea. Let’s go to the zoo.”

  Denise widened her eyes. “You want to see Matthew?”

  “They fired him. That’s why it’s a good time to go. We can look at the animals.”

  “Okay.”

  Lucinda riffled the Polaroids again. “You keep the camera here?”

  Denise pointed to a cabinet.

  “Let’s take it along.”

  the majority of Los Angeles’s kangaroos reclined in a gaggle under tree shade on a tan, scrubby hill. Shelf the Flyer, ostracized instead in a concrete pit, sprawled on her back in desultory glamour, displaying piebald stomach, one leg cocked to the sky in a forlorn show of submission to no one in particular. The pavement of her angled asylum was stained here and there with pissy or vomity streaks, the floor scattered with sun-blanched tatters of uneaten salad. Lucinda, gripping the Polaroid camera, tilted her body as far as she could over the rim of the enclosure and snapped Shelf’s portrait. The camera obediently chugged out its product. Lucinda unsheathed the pregnant black square and wagged it in the dry air.

  “I can’t get that song out of my head,” said Denise.

  “What song?”

  “You know, ‘Monster Eyes.’”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t know, the tune, the riff, the words, whole thing. Bedwin’s more unstable these days, but more of a genius, too.”

  “Yeah,” Lucinda admitted. “It’s really good.”

  The zoo was a maze of circular trails disordered by construction, paths barred by scaffolding, displays shielded with plywood. The visible animals seemed to stand off-kilter on their portion of raw-scraped land, their outcroppings. A ram with an erection tiptoed the sculpted ridge of an artificial mountaintop, pacing a ewe who darted on the flip side of their finite mental kingdom. Monkeys dripped from distant palms, more fruit than creature, refusing to dance. A coyote exasperated the limits of his cage, sniffing distance from hills he might have known. Turtles pedaled in dust. The zoo was an abrasion, Los Angeles’s arid skeleton poking into evidence.

  Lucinda pocketed her snapshot and they walked, searching for the smaller birds and lizards, the depressed little poems veiled in foliage.

  “The band’s horoscope today said ‘a new venture or long-range goal will be given a shot of confidence,’” said Denise. “I think it meant the new song.”

  “The band’s horoscope?”

  “I read it every week. The band was born on February sixteenth.”

  “We’re more fetal, I think,” said Lucinda. “We need to play a gig. And we need a name.”

  “We need more good songs,” said Denise.

  “We have good songs. ‘Hell Is for Buildings’ sounded great last night.”

  “We need more. And ‘Canary in a Coke Machine’ needs a better ending. Also, Bedwin needs to learn to stand up while he plays. He can’t sit when we’re onstage.”

  “Maybe we could get him a really high chair. That might be weird.”

  “Maybe you could write new lyrics to ‘Sarah Valentine,’” mused Denise. “Maybe the problem is the lyrics.”

  “Who is Sarah Valentine anyway? It’s sort of a cursed song.”

  “I think Bedwin went out with a Sarah once for about five minutes.”

  “I didn’t realize Bedwin could shake hands in five minutes. I thought he was more the pining-unspoken-for-years type. I always assumed Sarah was someone who didn’t know there was a song about her.”

  “Matthew looks good, though,” said Denise. “He’s getting more like a real lead singer.”

  “What do you mean, like a real singer?”

  “Just much sexier and more relaxed, the way he stands at the microphone with his toes pointed and slurs the words, like he can barely be bothered to pronounce the consonants. Like how he sang the new song. You know what I’m talking about.”

  Lucinda didn’t speak. Panting from their ascent to the monkey terraces they quit walking, parked in front of a lemur with cartoon-hobo eyes.

  “Do you think Matthew is happy in the band?” said Denise.

  “I think he’s depressed,” said Lucinda irritably. “I think his life is practically falling apart.”

  “Really? He seemed okay to me.”

  “He’s terrible, terrible.”

  “Do you think he’ll leave the band?”

  “Never. We’re all he has.”

  “What about you?”

  “I love the band. The band is fine. It’s even better now that Matthew and I have broken up. A lot of the great rock-and-roll bands are founded in breakups, love triangles, love-hate situations. The band couldn’t be better.”

  Lucinda heard herself parroting Falmouth, and shut up. Turning her back on the dewy moonish lemur, she grabbed Denise’s arm, tugged the smaller woman to her side, so they stood hip to hip. They stepped in tandem, feeling an alliance beyond the grasp of language. They were the girls in the nameless band, the rhythm section.

  “Let’s go back and see that mountain goat with his crazy red penis.”

  “Maybe he’ll catch her and fuck her.”

  “He’ll never catch her. She always stays on the other side of that little fake mountain. The zoo made a mistake, they brought the wrong goats, she doesn’t like him. He’s going slowly insane.”

  “Maybe, but maybe she’ll let him catch her. I think it might be today. I want to see.”

  “I bet they all fuck at night,” said Lucinda. “The whole zoo. All night every night, when we’re not looking.”

  through her kitchen’s rear window on Reservoir Street Lucinda could see, over the rooftop of a tire shop and against a background of shaggy palms, the high rotating sign of the Foot Clinic. It depicted a cartoon foot with features and tiny limbs: one side a happy, cared-for foot, beaming and confident, white-gloved hands jubilantly upraised, the other side a moaning, broken-down foot, neglected and weary, grasping at crutches and with its big toe wreathed in bandages. Lucinda’s view took in a three-quarters slice of the sign as it turned in its vigil over Sunset Boulevard: happy foot and sad foot suspended in dialogue forever. The two images presented not so much a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot-based philosophical system. This was Lucinda’s oracle: one glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she’d delegated to the foot god.

  Beside the candle on her table lay half a Cafe Tropical Cuban sandwich in a nest of foil, a torn scrap of canary paper with a phone number scribbled on it, a Polaroid snapshot of a supine yellowish kangaroo in a band of shaded concrete, and a cordless telephone.

  When Lucinda had parted from Denise and returned to the gallery she’d found the hubbub dissipated, the journalists and Falmouth gone, the fort held down by the interns, the two girls settled into a rhythm, answering the steadily blinking phones and transcribing complaints. Lucinda rejoined them. After the evening surge had peaked one of the interns leaned in at Lucinda’s cubicle and passed her the scrap of paper.

  “He said you’d know who he was,” the intern announced drily.

  Now, fingertips nudging the dangerous scrap of paper, the boundary-smashing digits, Lucinda glanced up. The foot sign
completed a turn, face wheeling into view: sad foot. Lucinda left her phone untouched.

  Instead she took the Polaroid to her desk and located a ballpoint pen, an envelope, and a stamp. Writing left-handed to disguise her script, she lettered I NEED YOU in capitals on the photograph’s fat bottom margin, practically engraving the words in the glossy sandwich of paper. Then, still with her left hand, she wrote MATTHEW PLANGENT on the envelope, and below it, Matthew’s address. Slid the Polaroid into the envelope. Touched her tongue to the flap’s glue and sealed it. Stamped it and put it in her purse.

  three

  the song, “Shaft of Light, Piece of String,” sounded fantastic. They were playing it in a narrow hallway, but the crowd was happy. You couldn’t keep from thinking the stage should have been put at one end or another instead of in the middle of the hallway so we wouldn’t keep having to crane their necks to acknowledge the audience on the other side, but nobody minded. Lucinda said she heard a rat or a squirrel under the stage, it was distracting. “Shaft of Light, Piece of String” had seven choruses. Bedwin really was a genius. The band finally had a name, but nobody could remember whether it was Famous Vomit Ferry or Long-Term Pity Houseguest, and hadn’t the word “houseguest” already been used somewhere? Denise sang something that sounded like a hymn, it was unexpected for the drummer to sing but we tried to act cool about it, they didn’t want to offend her because it was religious. The stage was too tall. The chorus of the new song went “I’m a little doughnut” but Matthew kept saying “I want a little doughnut.” It was too late to correct him. The audience really liked it anyway. Famous Pity Magnet was really popular and they sounded really good.

  The band was dreaming.

  we’re going to have a party,” Jules Harvey explained in his dry, blank voice, as he fingered his heavy black frames and gazed down at the tablecloth. Harvey sounded astonished by his own words, uncertain they’d reach his listeners’ ears before wafting off in the breezeless air. Falmouth sat studying Lucinda for her response, his arms crossed against his suit as though bodily containing impatience. The three sat around a table on the Red Lion’s patio, neglecting steins of afternoon lager that had been plunked down by a waitress in lederhosen. A rap beat blared from a car on the street below, fracturing the boulevard’s gelled soundscape.