You Don't Love Me Yet

by Jonathan Lethem

  She persisted with her question. “Where did it come from? Those particular words.”

  “I made it up.”

  “You couldn’t have.” She spoke tenderly, not wishing to disillusion him.

  “Not just now, I mean. Before.”

  “I read the same words on a bumper sticker.”

  “You did?” He brightened.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s on T-shirts, too. And coffee mugs.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s my work. My latest. I’m the author of a line of slogans. Sometimes I can’t get them out of my head.”

  “So it doesn’t mean anything in particular that you were saying that while we made love?” It gave her a clandestine thrill to say the word aloud, as though releasing pressure in a covert orgasm or sneeze. He’d opened himself to her, despite these ridiculous explanations. She vowed to adore him wordlessly and perfectly. They’d discuss anything but what they really felt, the silently expanding center of the universe.

  “When I’ve coined an itchy phrase it’s all I can think about until I come up with another one.”

  “An itchy phrase?”

  “That’s what it’s called, an itchy or gummy phrase.”

  “Tell me another one.”

  “Let’s see. One of my favorites is ‘All Thinking Is Wishful.’ I had a good run with that a few years ago.”

  “What’s a good run?”

  “To make a good living I only have to come up with something as gummy as that every six months or so.”

  “What do you do the rest of the time?”

  He widened his palms and made an apologetic face.

  Here it was, at last. She’d discovered him, her fat man, her fat life. The complainer was like a house she didn’t have to shrink to enter, a doorway she didn’t have to turn sideways to pass through. To truly love someone was to make them feel ridiculous and free, she felt. The complainer’s hair was white but he was more like a child than anyone she knew. She wondered if he knew what he had shown her: how it was possible to replace disappointment with astonishment.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  In reply he turned his head and gnashed at her foot.

  “There’s a place I want to show you where they serve these great fish tacos.”

  What occurred after they’d checked out of the motel she couldn’t reconstruct, except that he’d had to drive her car again, and that she’d given him her keys and told him the address of her apartment on Elsinore. She wondered, vaguely, whether they’d been seen by anyone she knew, either at the taco stand’s parking lot or as they drove on Sunset, window cranked so she could rest her chin, doglike, on the passenger door’s top and gulp cool air. By the time she gathered that the distant pastoral sound of trickling water was her own kitchen sink, where the complainer stood rinsing her blouse clean of flecks of what had begun rushing out of her in the Siete Mares parking lot, he’d already stripped her clothes, tucked her into bed on her couch, and pulled her shades against the day’s light, which skewed in orange stripes over the couch and her bedspread. It might have been three or five or seven in the afternoon or evening. Lucinda’s eyes ached, as though bruised from behind by the force of her stomach’s expulsion of the food. She tremored within her blankets, impossibly happy.

  “Carl?”

  “You’re awake again,” he whispered, as though there were someone else to overhear.

  “I wasn’t asleep.”

  He drew near to examine her, perhaps less interested in her testimony than in the report of his own eyes.

  “I puked because I’m in love with you,” she said, trashing her vow.

  “Sleep now.”

  “I’m not tired. I have to get up.”

  He placed his fingers to her lips, then tiptoed backward to the doorway, and was gone.

  she was woken by the doorbell what might have been twenty or a thousand minutes later, bolting upright in her nest of blankets on the couch, measuring her disbelief that she was home, that she was alone, that he was gone. Maybe this was him, returned.

  “Come in,” she croaked.

  Denise hustled in and shut the door behind her, her gaze mapping the scene in rapid evaluation.

  “It’s eight, Lucinda.”

  “Why is it eight?”

  “It just is, that’s all.”

  “I fell asleep. I mean, starting at an unusual time, I guess.”

  “I don’t need an account of your movements,” said Denise. “We’re on at nine. I’ll run the shower.”

  Naked and humbled, Lucinda tramped to a place beneath the steam, while the day’s telephone messages—Denise, Falmouth, Matthew, Denise again—unspooled in the background, an epic of beckonings, censures, lengthening silences. Meanwhile, Denise shifted Lucinda’s bass and amplifier through the door, to her car. Lucinda charted Denise’s progress as a series of scraping and rustlings as Denise negotiated the apartment’s slanted concrete walkway, which was shrouded in overgrown jade and aloe. At last came a decisive slam of the car’s trunk.

  “Here.” Denise wrenched off the hot water and offered a towel, hustling Lucinda along. “I laid out clothes.”

  For months Lucinda had auditioned in her closet for a first-gig wardrobe, the perfect art-band garb, precedent for a new public identity. She’d settled on nothing definite. Now she donned the brown corduroys and orange capped-sleeve T-shirt Denise had chosen, incapable of resisting a fate likely as good as any other.

  “I guess I missed the sound check.”

  “It isn’t only the sound check, Lucinda. Loading in and breaking down is part of being in a band. It isn’t just, you know, the drummer’s job.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Denise sighed. “We were worried, that’s all. Anyway, it was sort of anticlimactic, more of a no-sound check, really.”

  Lucinda wanted to explain, but couldn’t begin. In a night and a day her world had parted into halves impossible to reconcile or even mention to each other.

  Bedwin waited in Denise’s passenger seat, so Lucinda clambered into the back, beside her instrument. “Where’s Matthew?”

  “At Jules Harvey’s loft, with our stuff.”

  “Are you okay, Lucinda?” asked Bedwin.

  “I’m fine, Bedwin. I’m just waking up from a really strange sleep and a very sudden shower.”

  “That sounds difficult.”

  “I’m terrific, really.”

  Lucinda leaned her head between Denise’s and Bedwin’s headrests, touched her fingers to their heads from behind, felt them tighten their shoulders to their seats, resisting her. If she couldn’t confess the subject of her happiness she could try to infect them with it nonetheless. The complainer had shown her that her happiness was all one thing, an arrow running, for instance, through her delirious visitation of the two hotel rooms, through drink and talk and sex and food and sleep and even vomit. The arrow of her happiness pierced all those moments and this one as well, the arrival of her friends to whisk her to Falmouth’s Aparty. The big moment that had come at last, come for them all. For Matthew, estranged from the human world and needing to be pulled back. For Denise, so fierce and nervous on the band’s behalf. For Bedwin, their terrified genius, who’d written such excellent songs, though not without secret assistance from Lucinda and Carl. Which proved what she felt: that the source of her happiness was a stream through all their lives, a bass figure under all their music, even if she was its sole hearer. Her instrument, wedged stiffly in the seat beside her, never reproachful or impatient, only waiting for her to plug it in and plumb its wood-and-wire soul: she loved it too.

  Lucinda touched Bedwin’s and Denise’s napes again, put her fingers in their hair, which, she noticed, was cut the same length, and equally amateurishly. Sometime since seeing her last Denise had hacked her red-hennaed bangs into something more Joan of Arcish. Maybe Lucinda should take a child’s scissors to her own hair as well. Haircuts signified change, and she felt changed. Plus i
t would give the band a look.

  “It’s our legendary first gig,” she said. “Robot Head in Mourning or whatever it turns out we’re known as. Some grainy photograph from this night will appear in the booklet of the box-set retrospective of our entire career.”

  Denise and Bedwin said nothing. Denise drove intently out of the side street, onto Sunset.

  “Be excited or something.”

  “I guess I’d be more excited if we were behaving a little more like a band right now,” said Denise. “Also if we were playing aloud. That would probably make a difference in how I felt.”

  “Maybe we will, maybe we’ll shock everyone by suddenly playing aloud—”

  “Won’t they all be wearing headphones?” said Denise.

  “Well, yes.”

  “I think Denise was just trying to say that helping to move the equipment is an important aspect of being—”

  “I told her already, Bedwin,” said Denise.

  lucinda penitently lugged her own amp as the three band members filtered through the horde of the Aparty’s invitees. The April night was clear and warm and smelled of lime and fir, like the desert’s rim, the place you’d reach in a day if you walked east out of the city, which you’d never do. Distant wheeling spotlights grazed the sky west of Koreatown. Here, far-twinkling stars were visible, five or six of them at least. The Aparty’s invitees massed at a rehabbed industrial building on Olympic Boulevard, whose freight elevator served as the undistinguished entrance to Jules Harvey’s loft. They spilled into the street, arriving in bunches, a pedestrian explosion excited by the unlike-liness of itself. Lucinda saw faces she recognized. Mildred Zeno, the painter, Matthew’s previous ex. They had something in common now, Lucinda supposed, like former opponents traded to the same team. Gillian Unger, Lucinda’s old cohort at the Coffee Chairs. Perhaps she still labored there, beneath the espresso steam. Meade Everdark, columnist for the Echo Park Annoyance, leaned his elbow on the roof of a parked Jeep, gesturing with animation as he proved some point to the passengers inside. Clay Howl and Richard Abneg, guitarist and drummer of the Rain Injuries, stood swapping heavy looks with someone who might be Bruce Wagner. John Huck offered a cigarette to Maud Winchester. Denied early entrance by Falmouth’s rigid concept, they inaugurated festivities curbside instead, and gabbling and smoking scanned the crowd for their friends. They swapped earphones to sample one another’s dance mixes, broke out bottles or joints they’d secreted on their persons, having rightly feared a dryish occasion upstairs. The steward from Ixnay produced stem glasses and stood doling red wine to a queue of art-school ingenues.

  Falmouth’s interns sighted the band members and shooed Apartygoers aside to open a path to the elevator’s doors, two paint-blistered steel portals studded with rusty bolts. One intern rapped at the doors and they parted to reveal a wizened Asian man in a porkpie hat and suspenders, manipulating a brass-handled wheel with one hand while gripping a smoldering cigarette and a folded-over Korean newspaper in the other. He arched an eyebrow, grunted, and seized Lucinda’s amp, brandishing his newspaper like a flyswatter to brush the curious throng back from the doors. The band followed him inside.

  “Mr. Oo doesn’t speak English but he knows Korean kung fu,” Jules Harvey explained, bowing to usher them from the elevator at the seventh floor, the top. Harvey wore a forest-green three-piece suit with a zipper in place of its buttons. He still wore his Tigers cap and high-top sneakers, and gaped like a turkey through his frames. “I’m positive he could slay you with that newspaper.” The tiny man had grabbed the amplifier and bass and now soldiered across the vast empty space of the loft toward the distant riser. There, Matthew sat alone in a small grove of their equipment, behind Denise’s kit, tapping his fingers on her snare. The riser was unexpectedly high, and their unoccupied microphones and monitors looked persuasively professional from this angle, rescued from their rehearsal space.

  The floor was a plain of polished wood, scattered with pillars, the ceiling a barren lid pressing low overhead, decorated with track lighting and a dingy, unlit mirror ball. The triangular loft formed a funnel pointing to the riser where the band would play, or mime playing. The prospects of the crowd downstairs fitting itself obediently inside seemed, to Lucinda, poor. Even if they could all squeeze up through the chute of the elevator, what chance they’d fall in line with Falmouth’s commands? The interns scurried off now, presumably to find their leader. Lucinda, with Denise and Bedwin, followed. Crossing the open dance floor Lucinda felt exposed, a cat in a cathedral.

  Jules Harvey scurried beside her, hands joined behind his back. “There isn’t anything to be concerned about,” he mused in his soft voice. “If we begin late it shouldn’t compromise the underlying premise in any important sense.”

  “I wasn’t concerned,” said Lucinda. “We’re ready whenever you like.”

  “I was thinking more of Falmouth.”

  “Is something wrong with Falmouth?”

  “Perhaps after you greet your compatriots you’d be willing to follow me.”

  “Maybe we better go now.”

  Denise and Bedwin continued toward the stage, while Lucinda followed Harvey. Behind the elevator was hidden the loft’s tiny kitchen and bathroom, and above, connected by a short spiral stair, nestled an elevated sleeping platform, with a ceiling so low Lucinda had to stoop. The melancholy living space was a mole’s burrow, suggestive of Harvey’s secret armpit-sniffer’s despondency. “Will you remove your shoes, please?” said Harvey at the top of the stair. Lucinda crushed the backs of her sneakers with her toes, squeezing them off without untying the laces.

  The scene had an air of private ritual. Falmouth knelt on Jules Harvey’s futon, his knees surrounded by a heaped disarray of headphones and portable tape and disk players. Two shopping bags of additional equipment slumped unpromisingly on the floor. A gun nested in the cushions. Lucinda recalled something about a starter’s pistol. She hoped it wasn’t as real as it looked. The small shelf beside Jules Harvey’s bed contained candles and two neat stacks of glossy magazines, possibly pornographic. The two interns sat coolly sharing a joint on a love seat in the corner. Their unspeaking presence seemed almost malevolent now, Falmouth’s fantasy of a world decorated with servile girls gone sour.

  Headphones clung crookedly to Falmouth’s dome. Sweat trickling on his jaw, he stabbed buttons on a scuffed silver Walkman, then rolled his eyes and thrust the rig aside.

  “Where have you been?” he said to Lucinda.

  “I took a shower. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s no good,” he said. “Jules invited too many people and they didn’t bring anything to listen to and when they all come upstairs they’re going to destroy everything. We don’t have enough tape players. Half of these don’t work at all. We can’t let them in, it’s too many. Did you see?”

  “I saw,” said Lucinda. “It’s half of Silver Lake.”

  “This happens,” said Jules Harvey. “An invitation becomes exponential, something gets in the air. Suddenly it’s the party everyone has to be at on a given night, the party of the season. We couldn’t have foreseen how your list and mine would catalyze. People are afraid not to be at an event like this. Many others will eventually lie and claim they were.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be a party,” said Falmouth. “That’s the problem. You threw a party.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jules Harvey. Steel flashed behind his usual gray tone of haplessness. “It’s what I do.” Lucinda understood that Harvey really was indomitable, the human equivalent of a cartoon turtle who appeared to plod ineffectually, yet when you tried to outrun him, turned up seated calmly on a log a few feet ahead of you, smoking a cigar and annotating a racing form with a stub of pencil.

  Falmouth gestured for his interns, who didn’t budge. “We’ll be selective,” he said. “I won’t let them up without headphones.”

  “I’d prefer not to disappoint so many people,” said Jules Harvey.

  “What do you suggest, then?” s
aid Falmouth.

  “Let’s have them up. We can feed and entertain them for a while. Get them on your side, Falmouth, then you can propose something. Here.” Harvey reached across Falmouth’s knees and plucked the pistol from the cushions. “One of you children handle this.”

  One of the interns nodded and stubbed out the joint, took the pistol from Harvey.

  “It makes a very loud noise, so be careful. When you’ve got their attention, try to explain.”

  The intern nodded, and she and her companion moved to the spiral stair. Lucinda saw that some mysterious but unmistakable transfer had occurred. These were Jules Harvey’s interns now.

  When they were gone, Lucinda said, “I ought to go down and, uh, greet my compatriots.”

  Harvey spread his hands. “Maybe we should all go. We can leave this stuff up here for now.”

  Falmouth nodded disconsolately. The sacks of headphones and tape players seemed irrelevant now, the very medium of his great project demoted to “stuff.”

  “Do you want something to drink, Falmouth?” said Harvey.

  “I’d like some water, please.”

  Lucinda led the other two downstairs. Denise and Bedwin hovered at the base of the stair. Jules Harvey led Falmouth into the kitchen and Denise told Bedwin, speaking as if to a child, “Go with them. I’m sure Jules can help you find something.” Bedwin drifted in after Harvey and Falmouth, leaving Denise and Lucinda alone.

  “There’s an aura of doom around here,” said Lucinda.

  “I guess we all get to keep our day jobs,” said Denise.

  “By my count you’re the only one who has one.”

  “Don’t you work for Falmouth?”

  “I don’t see a big future for myself in complaints.”

  “We can all move into my apartment,” said Denise. “We’ll be one of those bands that’s also a utopian collective, an experimental group marriage, and then we can all kill one another.”

  “Don’t forget a certain, ahem, bathtub-dweller.”