You Don't Love Me Yet

by Jonathan Lethem

  “There’s only one answer for a person in that type of situation,” said Dr. Marian. Lucinda noticed, perhaps too late, a susceptibility in Dr. Marian’s responses for matching her interrogator’s rhythms. Might this have been exploited? More likely it was only a glimpse of Dr. Marian’s ability to absorb and redirect what came within her orbit, particularly anything threatening to the zoo’s priorities.

  “What’s the answer?” said Lucinda.

  “Get sane in a hurry.”

  “I see. And if that person were to want to come in from the cold, so to speak?”

  “As you should understand from what I’ve said, it is and always will be a nonevent.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.” Dr. Marian gestured at the door. Lucinda found herself moving toward it.

  “Dr. Marian?”

  “Yes?”

  “You haven’t ever given any thoughts to lending your gifts to a greater variety of causes, say for instance to managing a very promising rock-and-roll band?”

  “Is that a question you ask at the end of every interview?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I don’t read the Annoyance, and I was wondering whether that was some sort of generic question, like what is your favorite color or are you a morning person or a night person, or if it had something to do with my work at the zoo.”

  “No, it isn’t generic. You’re an extraordinary negotiator and I just wondered if you would ever think of representing a musician or group.”

  “I’d have to hear their music first.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Lucinda. “I won’t take any more of your time.”

  a carpenter pried with his hammer’s claw at the joints of the cubicle, squeaking a bent nail from agonized plywood. Beside him Lucinda sat in the middle of the gallery floor with an un-ringing telephone between her knees. The complaint office was being hurriedly disassembled, subject to Falmouth’s hostility to lazy transitions. Lucinda and the interns had convened to handle a last round of calls, while Falmouth himself tore the black paper from the storefront windows. The phrase “no more complaints,” with which he’d instructed them to answer the phones, had already cued sobbing panic in a few habitual callers.

  The cubicle dividers fell and bands of afternoon light saturated the deeper recesses of the gallery. The interns appeared exhilarated by the destruction. In intervals between murmured farewells to their complainers they refreshed themselves with yoga postures and cigarettes, with takeout Chinese and flirting with the carpenters. Falmouth fretted among them, sidestepping whisk-broomed piles of chips and dust that might accrue to his black cuffs. After the weekend’s dissolution he’d donned a crisp suit, scraped head and chin free of stubble. His firm gaze didn’t confess any memory of a crab-salty kiss. Lucinda sat alone taking sporadic calls, pining for what she hadn’t known she’d miss. The only complainer who mattered hadn’t called. Now the stage set was being struck.

  By evening the carpenters were gone. Falmouth’s interns wandered like cats in the lengthening shadows, cradling their phones. But by seven the calls had begun to trail away. The interns yawned, asked to be excused, delivered a round of hugs, vanished. Falmouth rinsed their chopsticks and he and Lucinda set into the cold ruin of takeout, prawns and snow peas sunk in an aspic of cornstarch and vinegar.

  “I guess I need a job,” said Lucinda.

  “Or a number-one record.”

  “I need to pay the rent in two weeks. I may have to go back to the factory where they assemble cappuccinos.”

  “Stay on the payroll. You can write my grant proposals.”

  “What are you doing next?”

  “Our official line will be nothing.”

  A neatly zipped black leather portfolio leaned against Falmouth’s desk. He bore as well a telltale smudge of graphite on the heel of his right hand. Crumbs of pink eraser decorated his lap. He’d been drawing again. She didn’t confront him.

  “Why can’t you say you’re doing nothing yourself?” she said.

  “It’s better if I pay you to say it.”

  They pushed the meal into the garbage. Falmouth moved to the master panel to switch off the overhead lights, but Lucinda said, “I think I’ll stay a bit longer.”

  Falmouth raised his eyebrows.

  “They’ll start ringing again around nine,” she said. “They always do.”

  “I was afraid someone would get sentimental,” he said. “I didn’t realize it would be you. I asked the phone company to cancel the number. It should be cut off shortly after midnight.”

  He left her alone there. The institute was an ember flaring on the brink of ash. Falmouth was right. Lucinda stayed for more than just the hope of the complainer’s call. She was a secret curator now. When they rang she answered in the old way. Let them think nothing had changed, until it was too late. She was Florence Nightingale, or a nun among the lepers. A man told her he’d suffered a paper cut on his testicle. Another said his nephew had stolen his collection of vintage lobby cards. A woman or possibly a child made a sound like a rabbit gnawing a carrot.

  She thought about dialing the complainer’s number and didn’t.

  The sixth or seventh caller was Denise. “There you are,” said the drummer. “Let’s go out.”

  “I’m sort of on a vigil. A person might phone me here.”

  “The one from the other night?”

  “Yes.” They both knew who they were talking about. “Maybe you could come here.”

  “You want something to drink?”

  “Maybe pick up a six.”

  “A six it is.”

  “And hey, Denise?”

  “Yes?”

  “Who cut your hair?”

  “I did it myself.”

  “A six and scissors.”

  he walked into the storefront, an hour after Denise. They’d forgotten to lock the door, and sat deep in the gallery’s rear, ignoring the line’s sporadic ringing. Lucinda sat encircled by her former hair, which lay in a pattern suggesting a controlled explosion. She’d removed her shoes and shirt, wore above her jeans only a pale blue brassiere, its surface furred with a hectic chiaroscuro of hair, as were her neck and shoulders and the knees of her jeans. Denise maypoled around Lucinda in her chair, a bottle in one hand, shears in the other, squinting and burping, making hedging adjustments to her initial ferocious attack. They had no mirror.

  The complainer appeared in their ring of light and Lucinda’s hands flew up to feel the spiky new contours of her head. There was an obscure shame in his seeing the haircut sooner than her. A trickling of hair rained from her lifted arms into the hoisted cleft of her breasts, making her feel even more unhidden. Not that there was any privilege he hadn’t already claimed, or she hadn’t offered gladly. He smiled and scratched his jaw and she was struck again by the slightly penisy glamour of his cleft chin and nose, his sculpted lips, his baggy eyes. His hand slid to his stomach, to stuff his flopped shirttails into his belt, as though unconsciously feeling he ought to make some effort, having intruded on a scene of grooming.

  “You’re the drummer,” he said.

  “Denise.”

  “Carl. Nice to meet you.”

  “You were at the show.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said shyly. “It was sensational.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Want a beer?” said Lucinda.

  “Sure, thanks.”

  Lucinda handed a bottle to the complainer from the six beneath her chair, then twisted the cap off a fresh one for herself. Clipped ends floated as she moved, as though she dwelled in a snow globe of hair.

  Denise found a push broom and plowed clippings into an ersatz animal behind Lucinda’s chair. Lucinda darted up and brushed herself against the complainer, parted lips raking his collar, then turned, huddling in her goose-pimpled arms, to fetch her shirt.

  “Don’t stop on my account,” said the complainer, taking a long pull on his beer. “I’ll just sit and watch.”

  “It do
esn’t look finished?” Lucinda slid her T-shirt and sweater, still balled together, over her head, scattering more hair.

  “I’m no judge. It seems you’re after a hairstyle that complements the band’s sound, something wild and natural, like a flock of hedgehogs. Are you going to confront the singer, though? Because now he’s the only one with girlish hair.”

  “Matthew.”

  “And the person on the stool is Bedwin, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll play keyboards, I guess.”

  Lucinda put her finger to her lips, though she felt a thrill at the image, Carl’s big shoulders hunched over a Farfisa organ, jostling onstage somewhere between Bedwin’s stool and Denise’s kit.

  “I feel like you’re Lucinda’s imaginary friend,” said Denise, not seeming to have noticed his remark. “Like I’m not really supposed to be able to see you.”

  Lucinda widened her eyes at Carl: I haven’t told our secret, she beamed into his thoughts. He couldn’t reasonably be angry that Denise had noticed their embrace at Jules Harvey’s loft. Lucinda realized she wanted Denise to know.

  The complainer seemed not to register Lucinda’s alarm. He drew a chair from the gallery’s darkened corner, into their pool of light, and seated himself. “I’d make some joke about how difficult it is for us imaginary friends,” he said. “The constant struggle to remain visible, etcetera. But the truth is I think it’s you guys, the band, I mean, who are figments of my imagination.”

  Lucinda vibrated, hearing his voice, seeing him here again before her, real. Since the night of the gig and their parting she’d binged on drink and crabs, talked on telephones and operated heavy machinery, even sort of kissed someone else, two someone elses. Swimming in her desultory bedsheets Sunday morning she’d masturbated three times, the last humping the ridge of a throw pillow. Yet it all seemed less than a parenthesis now, events not even so vivid as dreams, more like tableaux glimpsed on a television playing in the background somewhere, one no one had thought to switch off.

  “How are we figments of your imagination?” said Denise. She inspected him defiantly, wary of sarcasm. She’d pulled up a rolling office chair and plopped down, stretching her legs between Carl and Lucinda as if to assert that she wouldn’t be reduced to third-wheel status.

  The complainer emptied his beer with a satisfied gasp, put the bottle aside. “Just a minute,” he said, and drew a matchbox from his shirt pocket. He slid open its drawer to produce a tightly rolled joint, then struck a match to spark its tip. “Here’s the thing,” he said, through his first whalelike indraft and burst of exhaled fume. “I spent the last few days thinking about this. It really knocked me for a loop at first. You singing my songs, I mean.”

  “Your songs?” said Denise. Lucinda was struck dumb, could only listen.

  “My little scribblings, my first drafts,” he said. He handed the joint to Lucinda. “My complaints, whatever you want to call them. That was you scratching away with a pen on the other end of the line, wasn’t it?”

  Lucinda nodded, hypnotized. Carl was claiming the band. She couldn’t justifiably object. Any ground she stood on was under water, tide lapping at her knees or higher. In truth, she wanted him to have what he liked. That was in the nature of her discovery, her strange new love. More, the aura of her submission widened to enclose Denise as well. Lucinda was only curious about what the complainer might make Denise do.

  Lucinda drew weakly on the joint, crossing her eyes to be certain its lit end flared. She’d never been a cigarette smoker, and when she puffed marijuana she felt like a fraud, contriving at an act natural to others. Clutching at a lungful, she passed the smoldering joint to Denise, as if to transmit some whiff of complicity. Denise accepted it without meeting Lucinda’s eye.

  “The things you said, the things that became lyrics, you were thinking them for the first time when you said them to me, right?” Lucinda heard plaintiveness leak into her voice.

  Carl shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m always worrying away at one motif or another. I was taken with what you did with ‘monster eyes’ and ‘astronaut food.’”

  “Everyone likes ‘Monster Eyes,’” Lucinda gushed, grateful to escape to this point of universal consent.

  “It’s got itchiness, like I was telling you,” said the complainer. “Everyone likes it because everyone thinks it’s about them. Like a decal of the soul. I’d say I wish I’d thought it up myself, if I hadn’t.”

  “You thought up ‘Monster Eyes’?” said Denise. She sucked at the joint, gobbling smoke like a pro, even as she squinted at Carlton in suspicion.

  “The words came out of this mouth.”

  “You didn’t mean them as a song, though,” urged Lucinda.

  “No, I imagined I was seducing you,” he admitted. “Which I seem to have done while writing a song in my spare time. I’m very impressed with myself.”

  Denise’s gaze was fixed on Carlton, as if to meet his challenge with the most essential part of herself, more on the band’s behalf than on Lucinda’s. She kept the marijuana cigarette tucked between her fingers, her cupped hand hovering near her mouth, puffing very slightly. Lucinda had seen before how the drummer would enter a state of fierce intoxication, crafting a thick foggy lens of drug or drink through which to peer out at the world, a transparent shield. “So you tricked Lucinda into using your shitty lyrics,” she said. Her tone wasn’t wholly unfriendly. “And now you want to take credit for songs that were basically written by Bedwin, someone you’ve never met.”

  “I’d like very much to meet him.”

  “Do you want to destroy the band?”

  “How could I want to do that?” he said. “I basically am the band.”

  “What do you want out of this? What exactly do you think is going to happen?”

  “I want what we all want,” said Carl. “To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the external world, to see if they can be embraced. What’s incredible is that it happened without my knowledge. Like putting on clothes somebody laid out on a bed for you and finding the pockets are full of money and car keys and an address book full of new friends.”

  “Now you’re getting to the point,” said Denise. “You see us as a fund of young new friends.” She handed the joint back to him, reduced to a mushy nub. “One of whom you get to fuck.”

  “Isn’t there a tradition of liaisons within musical groups?” he said. “I’m surprised you don’t have any already.”

  “I can choose who I fuck, Denise,” said Lucinda.

  “I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t your choice. Though if I were in the mood for white hair I’d be more inclined to go for that Fancher Autumnbreast, myself. At least he’s sort of a hipster. No offense, Carl, but you don’t really look like a member of a rock-and-roll band.”

  “None taken. Maybe I should ask you for a haircut.”

  “I wouldn’t fool with that,” said Denise. “Your long hair is all you’ve got going for you. We could dye it black or orange, maybe. But then we’d have to do your eyebrows, too. It’s probably hopeless.”

  “I can dress up like this Autumnbreast, if you tell me how. I’ve never seen him, just heard his voice on the radio.”

  “It’s not the clothes but how you wear them.”

  “I’m sure that’s true. Like our singer, Matthew. Is that who you’re drawn to, personally?”

  “You don’t know me well enough to ask me that, Carl,” said Denise. She might have turned a little red.

  “You’re right, it’s better for band members to leave these things unspoken,” said Carl.

  “I didn’t say anything like that.”

  “Maybe I misread the onstage vibes.”

  “Being in a band isn’t about hair or clothes,” said Lucinda, wanting to blunt the hostilities. “The point is the music.” The assertion, which she’d only uttered as a diversion, seemed instantly both profound and obvious. She waited for Carl’s and Denise’s acclaim, not so much to confirm her point as to
test their grasp of essential realities.

  “That may be true,” said Carl. He siphoned the soggy nubbin of joint, then tossed it sideways into the shadows of the gallery. “Only, as a good friend of mine used to say, you can’t be deep without a surface.”

  They stared at him, the bass player and drummer, trying to digest the phrase, which conveyed itself into their minds like a drug itself: toxic, gnarled, ineradicable.

  “Deep without a surface,” repeated Denise.

  “Yes,” said Carlton. “You can’t be, that’s the point.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Lucinda understood that Denise only meant it as a brave show of resistance to the phrase’s colonizing effects.

  “Did a good friend of yours really used to say that?” said Lucinda. She felt obscurely jealous.

  “No, I made it up just now.”

  “That could be the name of an album,” said Denise. “Deep Without a Surface.”

  “The kind of guys who name an album that would have songs that each took up a whole side,” said Lucinda.

  “They could be called the Deep Surfaces,” said Denise.

  “Or Deep and the Surfaces,” said Lucinda. “There wouldn’t be any pictures of them on the record sleeve.”

  “Just their instruments,” said Denise. “Because all that matters is the music.”

  “Whereas for our band the opposite is true,” said the complainer.

  Again they stared at him as if his words had opened up some pit in the floor.

  “I just realized,” said Denise. “‘You can’t be deep without a surface’ describes the situation perfectly. The lyrics you wrote, they wouldn’t amount to anything at all if we hadn’t played them onstage. They wouldn’t be worth ten cents if they weren’t coming out of Matthew’s mouth.”

  “Matthew makes a very nice human bumper sticker or coffee mug,” said Carl.

  “If you tried to take his place it wouldn’t work,” said Denise.

  “I’m not taking his place, I’m assuming my own.”

  “You act like you’re some skinny backup singer, some inconspicuous element. We’re not an orchestra, Carl. We can’t just give you a tambourine and hide you behind an amp or something.”