You Don't Love Me Yet

by Jonathan Lethem

  Morsel tiptoed out when no one was looking, so when they finished they were entirely alone. Autumnbreast didn’t speak if he was listening. It was hard to believe he’d heard. No one congratulated them, no one was on the line, no one had broadcast or bootlegged their small, enraptured song. They waited in the booth in dumb embarrassment until Morsel reappeared. She offered them release forms, which they signed without reading.

  “We weren’t on the radio, were we?”

  “Just the first part of the interview,” said Morsel. “After that the station went to a cart, a prerecorded feature on Mr. Autumnbreast’s charitable work with rescued greyhounds who worked at racetracks, including his own companion animal, Verve.”

  “Not the song.”

  “Not the song.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Good luck.”

  Matthew walked Lucinda out. Denise and Bedwin were already gone. Lucinda’s car was where she’d left it, but Carl had her key. They abandoned it, rode in an elevator to the top of a parking garage to Matthew’s Mazda and loaded Lucinda’s bass into the backseat. He turned the key in the ignition, then stopped, staring across the roof at a tall figure folding his legs into a small sports car.

  They walked over. Fancher Autumnbreast seemed to wait for them. There was no companion animal in the car, a canvas-topped convertible Porsche with a leather brassiere cupping its headlamps.

  “Pretty,” said Autumnbreast, once Lucinda and Matthew stood at his driver’s window. His expression was fond and wounded, resigned as if to inevitable historical forces, famine, genocide, tyranny.

  “Sorry?”

  “You’re pretty.”

  “We wanted to apologize.”

  Autumnbreast lifted his hands from the wheel, shut his eyes.

  “Will you have us back on the show?”

  Autumnbreast blinked, tried to find words. “Who?”

  “Us. Monster Eyes.”

  Autumnbreast smiled forgivingly.

  “What you saw in us before, it can’t be completely gone,” said Matthew.

  Autumnbreast raised a fist as though in solidarity, curled it to his own lips, and kissed each of his four knuckles, his eyes again gently lidded.

  “Are you saying it’s gone?” demanded Lucinda.

  Autumnbreast sighed, seeming to wish they could interpret his gnomic gesture and spare themselves the squalor of mere language. Seeing their wide waiting eyes, he spoke.

  “It’s so gone, buttermilk, it’s like it was never there.”

  she only understood that she’d fallen asleep and where when his telephone rang, a whirr or chortle you’d produce by great effort with a hand-cranked eggbeater. She opened her eyes. Orange zones of lamplight glowed throughout the loft, the kitchen counters lit like a derrick at sea. The bed too glowed within its green curtain, another outpost she must have lit during her initial circuit, an attempt to lure him back by bringing his apartment to life. The turntable’s needle crackled, endlessly rein-scribing the loose spiral between an LP’s final song and its label, a subliminal noise mimicking a cricket’s call. Matthew had dropped Lucinda here hours ago. Her car was still in Culver City unless the complainer had returned there with her key to drive it.

  In an ALL THINKING IS WISHFUL T-shirt and holey underwear she sprawled in a large paisley chair, her bare knees cradling a two-thirds empty bottle of scotch. Her mouth tasted of drink. She scratched her calf where it had wrinkled hotly against the chair’s arm. Two of her fingers were stuck together.

  She’d meant to masturbate, was pretty certain she’d failed.

  The black laminate telephone gargled a second time, reposing its problem.

  Lucinda gaped at it stupidly. Really, the holes were so small she doubted the complainer’s clubby fingers could fit in them. But she was being confused: you could answer a telephone you never dialed. Not that she’d ever seen him do either. But it might be him calling. He might know she’d come here and be cuddling this bottle with her thighs in a chair, curled beside the telephone as if she was seeking its warmth.

  The phone seemed to take months between rings, allowing agonies of indecision, and now she was sure it had stopped. But no, it rang again. She worked to remoisten a snoring tongue dried to clay against back molars.

  “Hello?” The receiver was a carpenter’s C-clamp she pressed to one side of her face. She gripped her right wrist with her left hand for support.

  “Uh, hello,” said a young woman’s voice. “Is Carl there?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “He’ll be right back. I can take a message.”

  “Oh, thanks, I’ll call another time.”

  “Do you have a yellow chair?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Is your name Susan Ming?”

  The caller hung up.

  she woke desperate to pee at six when the uncovered window flooded the complainer’s loft with sky, the lamps still lit, Lucinda still in her chair, the bottle drained. She showered and left her damp towels where they fell, dressed in the previous day’s clothes, then burned herself trying to operate his espresso machine, her sole former art now eluding her. She settled instead for a remedial beer, the chill bottle relief for her scorched thumb. In shame she called no one for a lift, paid a cab instead to take her to Culver City to rendezvous with a locksmith at her parked car. It was barely eight in the morning, the streets brightly vacant.

  “What happened to your car?” asked the locksmith, nodding at the crinkled bumper, still fresh enough to raise notice, the metal raw where the paint had crackled.

  “It bumped into something,” said Lucinda.

  Her Datsun recaptured, she piloted home. The car limped, as though it had accommodated to the complainer’s mass, his breakneck lefts full of body English and swearing. She parked and slugged to the door of her scorned apartment, exhausted in nine a.m. sunlight. Unlike the car, Lucinda’s rooms weren’t marked by the complainer’s use, his cavalier hands, but instead by her own neglect, a habitat she’d molted like a shell. She crept in, averting her gaze from the slaw of mail beneath the door slot and the answering machine’s blinking message counter. She avoided any glimpse of the foot sign, too, uninterested in its smug fateful knowledge. What she wanted was to hear the complainer coming again, overspilling himself against her breasts, mumbling his gratitude, moving southward to finish her. She slid between her old bed’s stale crumby layers and dozed in melancholy.

  she kept herself from returning to Olive Street until after dark, just, though she dialed his number a half-dozen times waiting. The foot sign, when she at last glanced, was out of order, its fuse blown or gears jammed. Her view was of its stilled edge bisecting the pale wash of dusk above Sunset, no foot to be seen, sick or healthy. She called the clinic to complain, but the foot doctors weren’t picking up the phone either. Los Angeles was the largest inhabited abandoned city on earth.

  She drove back under a spell of apprehension. It was as if she and the band had fallen into a void, dead air, somewhere between the last digits of Morsel’s countdown and the zero of their own thwarted possibilities. As for Carl, Lucinda only wanted him back, wanted once more to be tickled and fooled and swallowed, be made undisappointed and whole. Nothing more. She examined the bumpers of neighboring cars for his slogans, the words he’d moaned in her ear and hidden in plain view throughout the world, but couldn’t find any.

  She discovered him there behind the green curtain, packing a black leather case that sat open on his bed. Toothbrush and underwear, nothing else, gear for an astronaut’s departure, or a child’s sleepover. He rolled his shaggy head at the sound of her entrance. The lamps she’d lit still blazed. Her damp towels still lay crumpled like tribute at his feet. Yet nothing in the loft belonged to her, unless it was the pile of Falmouth’s drawings of the band, drooping ignored over the hood of the pinball machine in the distant corner. The drawings spoke of her life before this disaster, far from this place.

  “Where are you going?”r />
  “I’d like to avoid feeling guilty if that’s at all possible.”

  “You don’t need to feel guilty, just explain.”

  “There’s someone else.”

  “I saw.” The truth fell on her like injurious rain: she already knew.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “You were there when it happened.”

  “Did you and Dr. Marian know each other from before?”

  “No. I’ve never met anyone like her.”

  “That’s beautiful,” said Lucinda, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice.

  “You can stay here if you want,” he said. He struggled to zipper the tiny case with his mittenlike hands. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but in the meantime I’d be thrilled if you and the band made use of the place.”

  “You don’t want to be in the band anymore?”

  “Marian thinks I should simplify. Anyway, I really wasn’t helping things, was I?”

  “I thought you were proud of the songs.” Lucinda knew she’d begun sulking.

  “The songs are great. But it’s just not really my kind of thing, trying to be liked. For instance, I really screwed up the radio show.”

  Lucinda astonished herself by saying, “I thought it went okay.”

  “You’re being kind.”

  “I was here before,” she said. “I answered the telephone, I hope that’s okay. I have a message for you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Susan Ming called.”

  “Who’s Susan Ming?”

  Lucinda felt in a panic that she’d had nothing to drink, was hopelessly sober. The world, unenlivened by alcohol or music or sex, was tinny, pallid, unwound. She felt starved for the complainer’s talk, his language that once seemed capable of saying anything and now appeared capable of saying nothing. No language could tell what she knew at this moment: that she’d loved the complainer more than she’d ever managed to say.

  “I must have gotten the name wrong,” she said at last.

  “Or it was a wrong number,” he said helpfully.

  “There’s something you said before,” she began, wanting to break through to him, to remind him of their language. “That a genius of sex was a terrible thing to be—”

  “To only be,” he corrected. “Anyway, I think I called it sad, not terrible, although that would probably make a better lyric in a song.”

  “Please be serious with me,” she cried.

  He opened his palms. “This part of my life isn’t serious.”

  “Which part is?”

  “There is no other part.”

  She fled.

  matthew wasn’t home. It was too late for the zoo, but without the kangaroo pinning him to his apartment he was freed to his nightclub crawling, his life full of bands he was shocked Lucinda had never heard of. She drove to Denise’s apartment, knocked. Nothing. The windows were dark. She tried No Shame, feeling sordid and guilty among the evening clientele, the couples browsing videos. Denise wasn’t at the counter. Lucinda asked the clerk, who said Denise wasn’t on again until tomorrow. Then mentioned he’d seen the show at Jules Harvey’s loft. How he’d loved it, especially that one song.

  Were Matthew and Denise together? Possibly the whole band was together, apart from her. She’d let the universe slide into ruin while she frolicked with the complainer, and now anything was possible, even likely. She drove to Falmouth’s gallery, but the doors were locked, the window dark. Cars whistled past on Sunset, Saturday night under way.

  Lucinda hadn’t visited Falmouth at home for years. She barely recalled where he lived. She couldn’t ambush him there now in desperation. He might mock her distress. Or worse, be sincere, and sketch her. It was the band she needed. Monster Eyes, the dreamers, the fools, her only friends.

  she appeared at Bedwin’s cottage door without offering this time, no pizza, no yellow pages of cribbed lyrics, only a bottle of scotch as good as that she’d drained at the complainer’s, acquired at the Pink Elephant in defiant nostalgia. She cracked the seal on the bottle at the curb in front of Bedwin’s steps and slugged a shot straight from its lip. Bedwin was home, of course. He opened the door to his converted garage, his secret grotto, in a T-shirt, blue-piped at neck and biceps, with the words BIG STAR emblazoned on his sweet puny chest.

  “What are you doing?” Lucinda demanded, before he could ask it of her.

  “Just watching a movie,” Bedwin said helplessly, as though he knew it was an indefensible reply.

  “That’s funny because it’s the same thing you were doing the last time I visited you, remember? When I came with the lyrics?”

  “Sure, Lucinda, I remember.”

  “You’re not watching the same movie, are you?” She peered past Bedwin’s shoulder at the screen, winking like an electric eye from his cavern of stuff. On it, a jocular engineer beckoned from the narrow window of a massive locomotive. “Something about choo-choos?”

  “Human Desire, by Fritz Lang.”

  “The one you’ve watched, like, a hundred times.”

  “Not a hundred, but yes, that’s right.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Do you have more lyrics?” His tone was flat, eerie, as accusingly innocent as a child’s.

  “No, it’s just Saturday night and I figured I’d drop in.”

  “Yeah, sure, okay.”

  She carved a space beside him on his musty floor amid the propped-open paperbacks and video clamshells and they watched his movie, as though repairing what Lucinda had neglected on her last visit, a full and earnest entry into Bedwin’s universe. Lucinda drank straight from the bottle, while Bedwin fetched himself a beer from the refrigerator. Bedwin dimmed the lights, so the screen was the sole glow, blue patterns playing across their faces and curling around the bottle of scotch. The film’s characters, confusingly, both worked on trains and rode as passengers on trains frequently in their spare time. It had a strange lulling rhythm, alternating between urgency and languor. The many looming shots of trains, tracks, and tunnels had a documentary authority that tended to dwarf the actors, one of whom was not Spencer Tracy, another not Marilyn Monroe. Lucinda detected Bedwin murmuring along very softly with the dialogue. Bedwin had allowed her inside a moment as pure and private as if she were watching him in sleep, digits jerking and eyelids trembling with a dream.

  “Explain to me what you see in this,” she said. “I really want to know.”

  “It’s too much to explain.”

  “Just in this scene, then. Right now. What are you seeing?”

  Bedwin turned his moonish face to her, surprisingly near. The blue screen stretched in miniature reflection in each of his lenses, the sun in a tiny solar system that also contained Lucinda’s reflection and the space-capsule enclosure of Bedwin’s book-lined room. Behind these teaspoon realms, she glimpsed his eyes: moist, large, feeble, and utterly unfamiliar.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, lately I’ve been focused on text fragments more than anything else,” he said.

  “Text fragments?”

  “For instance, in the train yard, did you notice how they kept passing that sign that said ‘Safety First—Think,’ but the word ‘Safety’ was cut off so all you could see was ‘fety’?”

  “I think I did,” she lied.

  “It’s as if the word itself had been wounded, the way a limb might get severed on a train track.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “‘Fety First—Think.’ It’s like an uncanny message from the unconscious of the film to the audience of 1954, telling them they live in a fundamentally unsafe reality.”

  “Wow.”

  “You can help me find more, if you want,” he said hopefully.

  “I’d love to.”

  “Watch this, this is an incredible one. On the wall of the bar, look. It says ‘If You Don’t See What You Want, Ask,’ but the way the sign is formatted all you can read is ‘You Don’t See You Want,’ which if you repunctuate
d it could be read as, ‘You don’t see, you want.’ It’s this total rebuke to the viewer’s objectivity, the presumption that the audience can watch the behavior of the characters without becoming complicit in some way.”

  “My god, Bedwin, that’s brilliant.”

  “I know, I know.” He seemed not to be taking credit. Rather, the film’s profundities had exfoliated themselves under his watch. And now hers as well.

  “What about this one?” Lucinda said. “Look, it says ‘Perfect Beer.’”

  “Uh, you’re right, it does.”

  “What do you think that’s about?”

  “I don’t know, Lucinda, I guess that was just a brand of beer at the time that they were advertising in the bar.”

  “I know, but ‘Perfect’? Doesn’t that seem like they’re at least slightly overstating the case?”

  “Overstating which case?”

  “What beer is perfect, right?”

  “But it’s not a fragment,” said Bedwin. “The words are whole.” His tone failed to mask disappointment.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, the scotch causing her to slur now.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered back, ever suggestible.

  “I’m just getting the feel.”

  “It’s your first time,” he said generously.

  “You’ve opened my eyes.”

  Bedwin goggled behind his frames, flattered beyond speech. She lifted the glasses from his face and placed her forefinger alongside his nose, to smooth the ruddy gutter where the glasses had pressed his tender flesh, soothing him like a lobster for the slaughter. His lips parted. She kissed him. She hadn’t lied. He’d opened her eyes, not to the insane excavation of text fragments from the movie about murderous train engineers but to Bedwin himself, his nobility and beauty. She ached to feel his precarious attention shifted entirely to the subject of her.