“A lot of groups have five members, don’t they?”
“Have you looked in the mirror? Remember when they tried to put Frankenstein in a tuxedo? What was that movie?”
“Last Tango in Paris?”
“Exactly.”
Lucinda felt vertigo watching Carl and Denise’s jesting struggle. She wished to brush away their banter, wave it off like smoke. Was the complainer moving nearer to Lucinda, or farther away? It seemed both at once. She wanted him to want her body, not her band. She wished to be swallowed, laid open with her robe undone across a dirty yellow chair. But his appetite seemed to be drifting. There was confusion here too, since the image of the dirty yellow chair came from a song, though not originally. That was the problem: Carlton’s claim on the band was perversely justified, and impossible to disentangle. The more Denise denied him that claim the further he inched in, an intrusion that would have seemed impossible an hour earlier.
“Nobody takes Matthew seriously,” said Lucinda. “Last week at the supermarket I saw a woman watching him like he was an ocelot on a nature show, like she wanted to go to the pet store and buy one for herself. It’s not so easy being a human bumper sticker.”
“Sad,” said Carl.
“It is sad. The whole band relies on his charisma. We’re exploiting him. I think he senses it.”
“There’s nothing sadder than being a genius of sex,” said the complainer. “Evoking nothing but pleasure in the eyes of others.”
“I never thought of it that way,” said Denise. “It’s sort of an involuntary condition.”
“In another age people like him became priests or nuns,” said Lucinda dreamily.
“Let’s go out and beat up some unattractive people,” said Carl.
Lucinda and Denise stared at him. He raised his hands as if at gunpoint. “Though arguably that would be taking things too far.”
Denise sprang from her chair, fitful. “Matthew’s not the problem,” she said. She seemed to be carrying on some internal dialogue. “Matthew can take care of himself.” She began to pace, stalking the perimeter of their chairs like the zoo’s coyote working its cage’s limits. “I’m thinking of Bedwin now.”
“Bedwin?”
“Yes, he’d have to be treated gently. The band is his whole planet, he doesn’t know anything else.”
Carl shrugged. “So his planet just got a little more—various.”
“You don’t know him,” said Lucinda. “All he does is watch the same black-and-white movie over and over and write songs.”
“He could take the fact that he collaborated unknowingly with someone like you very badly,” said Denise. She hung on the rim of darkness, her features shrouded, as though playing to an unseen crowd. Her words seemed to take it for granted that the three of them all dwelled within some common understanding or intention.
“Who does he think wrote the lyrics?” said Carl.
“If I understand Bedwin, he doesn’t think about it. He might not even remember which ones are his and which Lucinda brought to him.”
“Sounds fine to me,” said Carlton. “Why not just leave it at that?”
“What do you mean?”
“When somebody’s living in a delusory world, it isn’t necessarily your job to pull them out of it. Not unless you’ve got a better one to offer in its place.”
“You mean a better delusion?” said Lucinda.
Carl shrugged, as if to say, What else? “What needs saying? Doesn’t he trust the two of you?”
“Of course.”
“So what do you say we just leave it up to us?”
Denise strolled the shadow boundary, no longer agitated. She glanced at Lucinda, perhaps seeking a sign. Lucinda and the complainer sat in a triangle with Denise’s vacated chair, under lights still wreathed in smoke. Lucinda had abandoned her sneakers on the floor and raised her socked feet to the chair’s lip, hugging her knees to her breasts. Carlton sprawled in the abdicated space between them, his thighs spread wide, one foot upright and the other limply horizontal, between Lucinda’s empty sneakers, his posture grotesquely unashamed and inviting. His shirt was misbuttoned, skewed, riding up to expose a river of hair. Carl was pubic all the way to his neck.
The complainer had plopped himself in the middle of her life and band. Perhaps it was Falmouth’s fault. Carl had found his way to her ear, like a hummingbird pollinating a flower, solely due to Falmouth’s foolish project. The interns had planted stickers and had drawn the attention of an author of stickers, like calling to like, a coyote’s howl across canyons. Perhaps Carlton’s entry into the band should be seen in this light, as Falmouth’s latest art piece, committed unconsciously. Lucinda felt a clandestine devotion to Falmouth, whose imagination embraced more than he knew. But Falmouth was in her past, as was Matthew. Beautiful fallen displaced Matthew.
She could choose who to fuck. Her own words. And she had. She felt her choice in a place in her throat, a hollow pressurized walnut she couldn’t gulp away. She knew it at the juncture where her crossed heels sought the seam of her jeans, where she’d begun to sway and mash against herself, to covertly masturbate, just a little. The room seemed to tilt, to urge her forward in her chair. She stared at Carl. Carlton Complainer. To choose who to fuck is to choose who gets to fuck you. But not how. That was for them to know and you to find out. Lucinda was ready for Denise to leave now. She uncoiled from her chair and moved across to slide into Carl’s lap, made herself small enough to occupy him like a landscape. He grasped her hip and cinched her nearer to him. Kissed her hair, as she squirreled at his neck. A long moment elapsed, one that might have been five or twenty minutes. She sensed dimly Denise waving a silent goodbye, somewhere out of the range where anything much mattered. Then heard a click as the distant gallery door was shut against an instant’s susurrus of wheels tracing Sunset’s blacktop.
“I want a drink,” she said, even as she struggled at the buttons of his fly, trying to free him from his jeans.
“Let’s get you one.”
“I don’t even know your last name,” she said.
“Vogelsong.”
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“I don’t like it. It doesn’t sound like you.” With the native urgency of a child squatting to urinate on a highway shoulder she bunched her pants and underwear at her thighs, then lowered herself like a mouth. He hardened within her. She grunted, shuddering high in her gullet, lengthening her back, arraying herself like a question mark above him, a long doubting curl culminating in one irrefutable point.
“I can’t help it,” he sighed. “It’s my name.”
“Vocalsong, what’s that, it’s like Wetwater or Flavortaste or something—”
“It’s German,” he said. “Vogel means bird.” The complainer’s nostrils widened, the only evidence he was more than a venue for Lucinda’s tremors.
“Birdsong?”
“Song isn’t song. It comes from Vogelfang. It means fowling.”
It was a while before she could produce her question. “Fowling?”
“Catching fowls.”
“You mean hunting,” she said. “Catching their hearts with bullets.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“Carlton Birdkiller.” She slid from him now, between his legs, to the floor. She’d orgasmed, he hadn’t.
“Carl,” he corrected.
“Carl Birdkiller.”
He rebuttoned himself. “You want to get a drink?”
“Yes, please.”
five
the band shed their instruments in their accustomed places, scattered across the vast Persian carpet at the west-facing windows of Carl Vogelsong’s thirtieth-story Olive Street condominium, a loft as high-placed above its surroundings as Jules Harvey’s, though otherwise its opposite. Harvey dwelled in a spartan corner, leaving the rest of his space as a tabula rasa for the enactment of public schemes, whereas the complainer spread his living space to every corner, saturating the cavernous room w
ith antique furniture, lead-glass floor lamps and glass-paneled bookshelves, local arrangements of love seats and divans suggesting rooms without walls. His bed was partitioned from the wider space by a floor-brushing green velvet curtain on a polished wooden rail, and his lavish kitchen was formed of an archipelago of countertops and appliances around a monolithic six-burner range, a kind of theater-in-the-round in the loft’s middle. The complainer had hired a moving van and crew to shift the band’s equipment into the loft, having first cleared the blood-and-rust-colored carpet, itself the size of Denise’s whole living room, as a practice space.
In the past weeks the band had clocked their rehearsals to the sunset’s glow, as if claiming the power to orchestrate the melting of the continent’s last light into the far-twinkling surf. Then, usually, the complainer would order in Vietnamese or Sushi takeout, lemongrass chicken or Ventura hand rolls. The band would unpack white folded paper boxes across his oak table, a four-leaf large enough to bear piles of books and scatterings of ashtrays full of joint butts and a corral of the previous night’s wine-stained glasses at one end and still invitingly seat five or six at the other. Tonight, however, the table had been cleared, a starched cloth thrown over it, the complainer’s best china and crystal set out. While they practiced, Falmouth had been cooking, boiling down onions and garlic and pork sausages in a tremendous black skillet, brewing what he called his legendary sauce.
Falmouth had become domesticated to the band. Summer break had freed him from his teaching. With no students to impress he’d slacked in both conceptual edge and dress code, though his white T-shirts were uniformly crisp and bright, as if pulled from a dispenser like tissues. Since the disbanding of the complaint center his gallery remained barren. He’d done nothing but scribble in enormous spiral-bound pads with crayon or ballpoint, whatever lay at hand. A fly-on-the-wall at rehearsals, he’d by now produced dozens of sketches of the five working at their music, a pile of pages he shucked from his book as they were done, offering them to the band or letting them fall at his feet. Someone—Bedwin? Denise?—had draped the discarded pages in a stack on the glass top of one of the complainer’s several pinball machines, where they formed a loose dossier of the band’s incorporation of Carl and his small, upright organ into their company.
Carlton stood, as in Lucinda’s vision, between Bedwin, who still played seated, now in a salvaged barber’s chair, and Denise’s drums. He and Lucinda shared a mike stand. The band had slackened, made room, inching to the edges of the Persian. The complainer’s noodly organ riffs and atonal backing vocals found a place too, in a middle of their sound the band might not otherwise have known existed. Like a checker cab with an extra seat, they could carry him. When they played “Monster Eyes,” the song that was their signature, their credential, Carl shouted his backing vocals, and played his wonky organ fills in the manner of free jazz. The band’s response was to play louder and more careeningly, raising their energy to meet and contend with his. Matthew sang with daredevil brilliance, as though shrugging off a challenge he’d never acknowledge. The song grew resolute, intractable, like some enormous watch spring that gained force the more tightly it was wound.
Now, rehearsal concluded, they drifted from the carpet toward the table. Falmouth had set out a monumental steaming bowl of bare cooked spaghetti, a quarter-stick of butter melting at its peak. The complainer hoisted bottles of wine from a rack and clapped them on the table. Matthew set to grating a brick of cheese Falmouth had thrust into his hands. Glistening blobs of tomato spattered the stove in a halo at the burner where the sauce had simmered, its savor investing through the loft. Falmouth’s T-shirt was somehow spotless. Carl jerked the cork from a bottle while Falmouth elbowed past him, hands in oven mitts, to plunk the skillet between the candleholders. Matches were struck and touched to wicks, goblets splashed full, sauce ladled, Parmesan strewn to form a gooey lattice over oil-shiny plates of red-heaped noodles. Talk lulled as eating began, verbal noise replaced by a music of smacking lips, glasses clinked to teeth, the suck of spaghetti stretched by forks from pools of viscosity.
“There’s both sweet and hot sausages,” Falmouth lectured. “Though by now the peppered oil from the hot will have informed the entire base of the sauce. The secret ingredient is heaping spoonfuls of white sugar, more than you’d want to know about. Watch out for bay leaves, they’re as sharp as shark’s teeth. You’ve got one there, Bedwin.”
“Put it here,” said Denise, indicating an empty ashtray. Bedwin plucked the gleaming black leaf from the bird’s nest of his pasta and held it aloft in sauce-shrouded fingers.
“All the best meals require an elephant’s graveyard,” said Falmouth. “Piles of shells or pits or bones. Bay leaves are like a small piece of corruption in our food, like the element of a skull in certain early Renaissance marriage paintings.”
“You’d certainly never find one in a can of Chef Boyardee,” said Denise.
“A bay leaf, or a skull?” said Lucinda.
“Either.”
“Listen, we should have a toast,” said Matthew. “It’s our last rehearsal before we go on the radio. And Falmouth cooked.”
“Stop eating for a minute, you greedy pigs,” said Falmouth. “I propose a toast to ‘Monster Eyes,’ that awful song by that awful band.”
“No, no,” said Matthew. “To you, Falmouth. For this meal. For being our manager and spaghetti cooker.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not your manager. You need a proper advocate, someone who can tolerate your music.”
“To Falmouth and to ‘Monster Eyes’ and to Bedwin, our secret genius,” said Denise. “He who makes it all happen.”
“Yes, to Bedwin,” said Matthew. “For putting words in my mouth. May you never go solo, god help us.”
“I can’t sing,” said Bedwin, as if he really needed to reassure them.
Lucinda, wineglass lofted, suffered a stirring of resentment. Hadn’t she supplied the words to ‘Monster Eyes’ before their eyes? Had they suppressed all memory of the fateful rehearsal? Theirs was a band whose secret genius had a secret genius, a conspiracy huddled around a confusion. “Another toast,” she blurted. “From Carl, our newest member.”
The complainer was bent to his fork, connected by noodles to both teeth and plate. He ate streamingly, employing circular breathing like a horn player. Gulping, he made his eyes wide to show his willingness to speak once he’d choked down the mouthful. Matthew took up the second bottle and replenished their glasses.
“Okay, a toast,” said the complainer. He stood and licked his thumb. “I like Falmouth’s idea. To the stone in the cherry, the jellyfish in the lagoon, the loser among winners, the figure in the carpet, the crack in the Liberty Bell.” He cleared his throat. They waited, glasses poised, uncertain he was finished. Except for Matthew, who went on eating, pointedly ignoring him. “To the tiny mouse’s skull in the can of Chef Boyardee,” he went on, “the one which results in a settlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“Those aren’t really all the same thing,” said Denise.
“The jellyfish in the lagoon should be a song,” said Bedwin.
“Get to work on that, you genius,” muttered Matthew.
“More,” said Lucinda, raptly.
“To the shark’s tooth, the mouse’s skull, the sour note, the sour mash, the mash note, the sour grapes, the souring of an old friendship,” said the complainer. “To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions. To bad sex.”
“Watch yourself,” said Falmouth. “Some of us haven’t had bad sex in so long we forgot that it was bad.”
“To forgetting it was bad,” said the complainer, gulping back another mouthful of wine. “To telephoning an old lover and pretending to forget it was bad, to falling back into bed when you know you shouldn’t, to sucking the dregs.”
“You mean like a cup of coffee?”
“Exactly. The dregs of a relationship, like the dregs in a cup of coffe
e. To the greed of a coffee drinker for one last sip, when all that remains is a bitter sludge.”
Lucinda felt gripped by an irrational jealousy. Had an old lover called him on the telephone? The instrument in question was banished to a far corner of the loft, a single ancient black enamel model with a rotary dial. It rang seldom and was answered, in Lucinda’s sight, never. She’d stayed at the complainer’s loft around the clock lately, up with him past dawn after rehearsals, then sleeping late into the next day, when she’d wake to find Carl preparing breakfast at two or three in the afternoon. Hardly worth returning to her apartment before the band convened again. Besides, once she’d ferried in some spare underwear and socks there was nothing to return for. After rehearsal and dinner she’d help the others pack their instruments, then escort them into the corridor and elevator. She had no wish to rub in anyone’s face that she enjoyed special privileges yet no interest in hiding it, either. She felt a certain munificence in having ushered the band through so much, lyrics, gig, new member, new rehearsal space. Any trace of resentment in the others Lucinda chalked to confusion, perhaps even fear at what had overtaken them: the possibility of success. She now adopted Falmouth’s attitude: most artists were their own worst enemies. As for her, she’d left hesitation behind with her apartment, her hamper full of dirty clothes, her phone blinking with who-knew-what messages. She was no longer curious what the foot sign thought. The answer to any remaining question was yes: yes to staying beside the complainer, yes to what she felt when she was beside him. The answer to any other question, questions to do with the band’s feelings, or Matthew’s, anything outside the loft and the music they made there, was: yes, quit asking. Don’t imagine a broader ratification was due, from the foot sign or anywhere else. Embrace the bay leaf of the moment, which, unlike the foot sign, wasn’t divided into happy and sad but was instead sweet and fearful on both of its faces.
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