You Don't Love Me Yet

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Okay,” said Lucinda, confused. Harvey, in his Detroit Tigers baseball cap and sneakers, and Falmouth, overdressed at one o’clock in a seersucker suit and yellow tie, had swept in together and nabbed her from her cubicle for the meeting. The two had bored her with small talk before finally announcing their project. Now she waited to understand.

  “Jules is a promoter,” said Falmouth. “We’re collaborating on a happening.”

  “I have a rather large loft,” said Jules Harvey apologetically.

  “It’s going to be a dance party,” said Falmouth. “Only the rule is you can’t bring anyone you know. And you have to wear headphones. You have to listen to whatever you prefer to dance to, your own mix. If people don’t have their own headphones we’ll provide them at the door, like neckties and jackets at a club. What I want is a sea of dancing bodies, each to their own private music. I might call it Party of Strangers. Or maybe Aparty, like apart, y.”

  “I get it.”

  Falmouth held up a cautioning finger. “There’s more. Instead of beginning and ending gradually and spontaneously, like the usual party, I want the start to be perfectly regimented. Everyone has to arrive at exactly such and such o’clock and begin dancing immediately. Latecomers will be turned away. And then at the end, same thing. I may buy a starter’s pistol.”

  “Falmouth had been thinking the backdrop ought to be perfect silence,” said Jules Harvey. “But I suggested it might be even better to have a band playing, very quietly, with nobody paying any attention.”

  “I thought your little consortium might want the gig,” said Falmouth. He spoke grudgingly, as though Jules Harvey had persuaded him against his instincts. Harvey had a talent for insinuating himself, Lucinda suspected. She felt a pang of sympathy for Falmouth, usually so eager to patronize others, here so effortlessly co-opted.

  “Attractive people playing and singing in the classic format: guitar, drums, singer, etcetera,” said Jules Harvey. “Falmouth gave me the impression that you and your friends could answer the call. Only you must be able to play exceedingly quietly. Really, you should be nearly inaudible.” He spoke with the same plodding earnestness with which he’d praised her armpit.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” said Lucinda. She took a long drink of her beer.

  “Between Jules’s efforts and my own, we ought to stir up a certain amount of attention,” said Falmouth. “Who knows? It could be the break you’ve been waiting for.”

  “I’ll have to talk to the others,” she said.

  “Falmouth forgot to tell me the name of your band,” said Harvey.

  “We haven’t—”

  “Maybe there should also be food no one is allowed to eat,” said Falmouth, his attention meandering. In his typical way, Falmouth now took it for granted that the band was enlisted. “Cooks might be preparing something to one side. Delicious smells emanating through the party. And then servers in black tie could load up trays and stand ready at the edges of the dance. Suddenly, just as they take a first step into the room, I fire the pistol a second time, the party’s over, and everyone is whisked out of the room before they can eat anything.”

  She envisioned presenting this chance to the band: their first gig, a thing they’d have expected to come by way of Denise, their beacon of professionalism, or Bedwin or Matthew, who knew musicians—anyone but Lucinda, their self-taught bassist. Matthew, distrusting Falmouth, would take the offer for an insult. She’d need to emphasize Jules Harvey, the famous party promoter, and his rather large loft. They’d be forced to play inaudibly, sure, but to a huge crowd. Most bands debuted to barely anyone at all, to a handful of drunks. Here, they’d be an element in an artwork. Falmouth’s allure, his knack for offhand success, would infect them. And Jules Harvey’s eerie sincerity would ensure nobody mistook the band for merely one of Falmouth’s mean jokes. Harvey would make it clear they were picked for a reason, attractive people in the classic format. After showing how quietly they could play they’d give evidence of what else they were capable of, the quiet, nearly overlooked band, the art band, the band not like any other.

  she was the most beautiful woman I ever slept with. Except in a way I never did. It’s a funny story, actually.”

  “Tell me.” The other cubicles were dark. Falmouth had left early, his interest in complaint already wandering, perhaps overtaken by his Aparty. Lucinda was alone in the gallery when he called, her fabulous complainer. She’d switched off the lamp at her own desk and leaned into the shadow, beyond the spill of ambient light from the storefront’s fluorescents. No one passing on the street would know she was there. No one expected her anywhere. There was no rehearsal. If he hadn’t called her at the gallery she might have dialed his number, which nested in her pocket, inscribed on paper softened to tissue from handling. She might have dialed it or not. She might have again consulted the foot to decide. It didn’t matter. He’d called.

  “She was the kind of beautiful woman who makes other women angry,” he said. “They’d see her and begin accidentally breaking stuff or getting stomachaches and needing to go home. She was a kind of beautiful catastrophe in that way. She’d ruin parties.”

  “I’m not like that,” said Lucinda.

  “Beautiful, or envious?”

  “Envious.”

  “I had that feeling about you.”

  This was what she wanted to hear, his feelings about her. Yet he didn’t know her. Lucinda and the complainer were occult to each other, their mingled voices a conspiracy of imagination. For all she knew he could be only blocks away. Yet for now, his previous existence on earth was fascinating and horrible and she had to know more.

  “What made her so beautiful?” It sickened her slightly to ask, as though she were one of the women with stomachaches, fleeing parties.

  “She was tall and smooth and strange,” he said. “Like an alien, with impossibly long limbs. You couldn’t keep from staring at her, picturing her in certain situations, all tangled in sheets.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “She was the wife of someone I used to know. They got married when she was eighteen or nineteen, I think. He used to stand around guarding her all the time, as if he was shielding her body from a blast. She’d have this look on her face that was sort of bored and panicked at the same time. It was like she was a hostage and they were trying to find a place in the world to hide her. I pitied them in a lot of ways.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was a few years later when I saw her again. At a dinner party. Their marriage had fallen apart, I never knew the details, but she was alone. I think by then she was trying to make up for some of what she’d missed, marrying so young. But it was hard for her. She stood out, she was too immaculate in a way, she had some kind of gawky elegance that made it difficult for her to get properly defiled.”

  “Go on.”

  “We talked. You know, about sex.”

  “And—”

  “I told her I couldn’t explain why but that I only wanted one thing from her, and that was to make her come with my mouth while she was watching television. And ideally while she smoked a cigarette, too, but she wasn’t a smoker.”

  “You can’t have everything.”

  “No.”

  “So that’s why you never slept with her? Because the television was on?”

  “It was just something to talk about the first few times. I’d talk and she’d listen, and laugh at me. She had this deep laugh, you didn’t know where it came from because she had a normal, mild voice, but then this stomach-based laugh would chuckle out of her, like she was laughing at you with her whole soul. The laugh was revealing, but what it revealed was her distance. It let you know how far away she’d gone to hide from her body and from the world and the responses of all the men she’d met.”

  Lucinda didn’t want to joke now, didn’t want to risk interrupting his story. She waited, the only sound the humming of Falmouth’s ionizer as it labored at the room’s dead air. She could hear him listenin
g, too, sensed his satisfaction at this deepening between them, her breath-held anticipation of his words.

  “One night I guess she got tired of laughing and saying no and she took me to her apartment, this huge place she’d lived in during her marriage. Once she’d decided, we didn’t discuss anything. It was a somber ritual, as if we felt answerable to some third party we didn’t want to disappoint. She had a television but no cable, so we put in a video. Her former husband was a film scholar, he’d left all these videos behind. It was in another language, something Scandinavian. The glow was the only light in the room. I guess she was reading the subtitles. I couldn’t.”

  Lucinda released a soft click from the well of her throat.

  “It took a really long time. I think she must have watched half that movie. And when it was over she was still quiet. I could tell she was just waiting for me to leave. I assumed that was the end of it, but she called me about a week later and told me I could visit again if I wanted. This time it didn’t take so long and when she came she started laughing at me, that same fathomless lunatic belly laugh. I was just kneeling there in my clothes between her long legs and I guess I looked sort of stupid. She sashed up her robe and just started laughing.”

  “I’d laugh too,” said Lucinda softly.

  “Of course you would.”

  “Finish the story.”

  “It became a regular thing for a while. I’d visit her apartment and she’d put in a video and sprawl on her chair in front of the television, it was a ratty yellow armchair, and throw her robe open. And she’d laugh afterward. She’d just look at me and laugh madly, and I’d laugh too. It was like I was escorting her on some long passage from where her reserve and her beauty had exiled her, only the voyage could never be finished for her. She’d come and laugh and then it would be time for me to go. Nothing was ever discussed. After a few times I began to push a little. I told her I wanted to tie her up, tie her to the bed or a chair, take away her control. I promised I wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want me to do, wouldn’t do more than I’d done, if that was what she wanted. I only wanted to bind up her limbs and stop her from laughing, maybe, restore the trepidation she’d felt that first time. When I brought it up she’d only laugh and turn on the television. Then we’d drown ourselves in dialogue from foreign films and the little sounds she’d make and the flickers on the wall and the colors projected on her stomach and her filthy yellow chair. She always tried not to make any sounds until she had to. Then she’d explode and start laughing and send me out to my car. It was a perfect relationship, so I had to wreck it.”

  “How?”

  “I kept pushing, trying to get her to allow me to tie her up. And one day she let me. I had no idea what to do, I’d spent all my energy just persuading her, never imagining it would come true. So, I brought over all my neckties and cinched her to the bed. I covered her eyes, too. And turned on the overhead light, which I’d never done. And then it was suddenly over. I had her there, I was able to stare as long as I liked. I could see her breathe and wait, her stomach trembling. But there wasn’t anything left to do. I didn’t say anything. I just went into the kitchen and ate some of her food. She began mewing, this sound that was practically like a kitten or a bat—meanwhile I was raiding the fridge. Then I found a pair of scissors, and I went in and silently cut the tie that held her right wrist to the bedpost, then placed the scissors on the table beside her, where she’d be able to find them. Then I left.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We never spoke again.”

  In the silence Lucinda studied the electronic surf of tone on the line, a sound like distant galaxies collapsing. Falmouth’s gallery might have been a kind of capsule whirling in vast blank space. Then human sounds trickled in from the street—a slammed car door, a bubble of argument—and repainted the world.

  “For a while I was thinking that was kind of a sexy story but it gets really depressing at the end.”

  “I should have warned you.”

  “When you left her there, was that your way of taking revenge? Because she didn’t care about pleasing you?”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “You never wished she’d touched you?”

  “I suggested the arrangement in the first place.”

  “I still think it might have been revenge.”

  “It might be true.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s a secret, I guess.”

  “So you do know.”

  “No. I meant the other kind of secret. It’s possible there’s a reason I left her lying there, but I don’t know it. Even before I left the room, all I could think about was what she might have to eat in the refrigerator. I could make up a reason but then I’d be lying to you. If it exists it’s a secret from myself.”

  “She’d say it was revenge.”

  “I’m open to the suggestion. All I remember is her gawky limbs and that crazy laugh, the flicker of Swedish films across the arms of that filthy yellow chair, the color and texture of her pubic hair when I finally got to examine it in bright light. It’s not some fable about revenge.”

  “I guess the best secrets from yourself are the ones that even if someone else tells them to you, you still don’t know them.”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t decide if your story is funny or depressing.”

  “Maybe it’s both. Haven’t you ever noticed that whenever anybody wants to convince you that you ought to be interested in anything really gloomy, the first thing they tell you is how it’s actually quite funny?”

  “What about the girl in your story? Did she find it depressing, or funny?”

  “I don’t think it counted for that much one way or the other. We were only one another’s astronaut food.”

  “What’s astronaut food?”

  “You know, stuff in little packets that you keep lying on the shelf. Everyone has some lying around. The people you imagine you might be with but you know you never really will be. The people who if you’re in a couple but you’re a little bored or restless you meet them for coffee a lot and the other half of your couple isn’t really thrilled about it. Or if you’re single, they’re the people you’re keeping on a mental list just so you don’t feel like there aren’t any possibilities. Friends who are almost more than friends but really, they’re just friends. Astronaut food, bomb-shelter provisions. If you were ever going to have anything with them it would have happened already. Sometimes you even fall into bed with them, but it doesn’t count for much. It’s always a mistake to try to get any nourishment out of that stuff. But not a big mistake. That’s the beautiful part, how the stakes are so low.”

  “Only if everyone agrees that they’re mutual astronaut food.”

  “Oh, absolutely. You can screw up your astronaut food a million ways. Even just letting them know. Though they sense it at a certain level, nobody wants to be told. The worst is when someone falls in love and then gets all self-righteous about breaking up with their astronaut food, as if there’s anything to break up about.”

  “What about the situation when someone is acting like they’re only astronaut food, but really has hopes of something more.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you say I’m astronaut food for you?” The question tumbled from her lips. He’d never asked her whether there was anyone in her life, never asked her age or name or what she looked like. But then what had she learned about him?

  “I don’t know,” he said tenderly. “It’s possible. Am I astronaut food for you?”

  “I almost called you from my apartment last night,” she said, hearing her breath interfere with the syllables, knowing he heard it too.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “The foot said no.”

  He hesitated. “Is the foot a friend of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then you should listen to him.”

  “The foot’s not a he.”

  “Oh.”

 
“I have to go now,” she said, suddenly abashed.

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t eaten dinner.”

  “Are you going to masturbate?”

  “Not on the telephone.”

  bedwin opened his door with a shocked look on his face. Lucinda stood with a white, grease-spotty bag containing two piping slices fetched from Hard Times, the pizzeria at the base of the hill above which Bedwin’s tiny cottage apartment was perched, hoping to bribe her way into his digs. The nature of his home life had been a subject of keen speculation among the other members of the band.

  “Want something to eat?”

  Bedwin only stared. He was fully dressed in his usual costume: sneakers, plaid shirt buttoned to his Adam’s apple, analog wristwatch, glasses. Lucinda imagined him sleeping in it.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Did I interrupt something?”

  “No, I was just, uh, watching a movie.”

  “What movie?” She followed him through his door, into a low passage lined with book-tumbled shelves, claustrophobically close.

  “It’s called Human Desire. By Fritz Lang.”

  Bedwin lifted the takeout bag from Lucinda’s hands and scuttled into the kitchen, stranding her in a room whose every surface was crazed with media. Records and videotapes and compact discs strained every shelf to its limit, along walls layered with ephemera: concert tickets, 45s thumbtacked through their spindle holes, and Magic Markered set lists retrieved from the floors of concert stages, many with chunks of duct tape still clinging to their edges. His two armchairs were populated by tottering books, piled so high they served as dusty dummy companions. The television, stacked with the videocassette player on a milk crate, faced an empty patch of carpet. Its screen displayed the black-and-white image of a locomotive, trembling in frozen static beneath the word PAUSE in blue.