Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

In the early-evening presence of so many moodily lit vegetable shapes it wasn’t remarkable to notice a slight pheremonal hubbub as shoppers ogled one another, or postured over their selections, waiting to be noticed. Tonight Lucinda felt a personal flutter, a disturbance in her field. A young redhead in a leather coat lingered pensively near a man in torn jeans. Her pursuit brought her edging through Lucinda’s orbit. The man loaded a rolling cart with heads of cabbage and lettuce and bundles of beets and celery, a flaunt of healthfulness, Lucinda thought with irritation, even as she realized the man in jeans was Matthew.

He appeared oblivious to both women. His cast was grim, lip bitten in ponderous consideration of kale and bok choy. Lucinda poked him in the waist with a carrot.

“Ow.”

“Ever feel you’re being watched?” she asked. Behind them the red-haired girl’s posture tightened in disappointment. She melted off to another aisle.

“I didn’t see you there.”

“I didn’t mean me. Several eyeballs were stuck to your pants. You ever notice that this produce section is a real meat market? Ha ha.”

“Sorry?”

“When I haven’t seen you for a while I forget how handsome you are,” she said. “Like a model on a billboard advertisement for vegetarian cigarettes.”

He blinked at her and fumbled at the cabbages in his cart. The robot sprayer arm finished its cycle. Lucinda heard the trickling of new moisture in the leaves. A scent of dampened mulch rose through the conditioned air.

“You’re not too much fun. At least say something, like ‘All cigarettes are vegetarian.’”

Matthew only stared. Lucinda felt the dawning of a new and original awkwardness between them. She’d relied on the band to enmesh them in something still near enough to a liaison, the tension of a bass player half turned to a singer, plumbing notes, jerking the song from his body. The voltage of the band’s aspirations, fierce as lust. Here they were nothing but two shoppers, bearing bald homely groceries in opposite directions.

“It’s good to see you,” Matthew said. He patted her clumsily on the elbow, then withdrew.

Now she spotted the glitch of panic in his raccooned eyes, his extra day’s stubble. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a really gargantuan salad you’re making,” she said.

“It’s a lot,” he confessed blankly.

She counted the green and purple heads in his cart, calculating volumes of leafy material. “Some sort of coleslaw sauna treatment, or are you throwing a dinner party?”

“I have a visitor.”

“Someone I know?”

He regarded her evenly, with a still, small defiance.

“A sick friend?” she asked.

“I guess you could say that. Someone who needs my help.”

Lucinda was silenced now.

“I think I should be getting back,” said Matthew. He pivoted his cart toward the registers.

“I’ll see you at rehearsals,” she called to his departing back. She felt like the redhead now, a thirsting stranger. “Don’t forget.”

At home Lucinda boiled the cauliflower whole, suffused it with butter and pepper, then devoured it with knife and fork as if it were a soufflé. The dish was either lame and lonely, or grand, she couldn’t decide, but consoled herself imagining translated French names—“white brain,” possibly, or “virgin moon.” She poured a scotch, just a small one, sat breathing its mellow fumes, barely drinking. Then wrecked the evening irretrievably by glancing in the hallway mirror for the foot’s command: it smiled encouragement and she dialed the complainer’s number. No answer. He had no machine. Each echoing chime of the unanswered line cast another band of shadow across her heart’s floor. After twelve rings she gulped the scotch and retreated to bed.

the set list grew. Bedwin had written four new songs: “Dirty Yellow Chair,” “Nostalgia Vu,” “Astronaut Food,” and “Secret from Yourself.” He presented them to the band at the same afternoon rehearsal where Lucinda unveiled the news of the Aparty gig, the chance to play quietly in front of several hundred of Falmouth’s well-dressed art friends. It was easy to picture them as tastemakers, rumormongers, a milieu capable of making a new band its pet overnight. Together, songs and gig, it presented an orgy of possibilities. Nobody knew what to say. The songs were so fine that Bedwin himself seemed astonished. The band’s only outlet for its bewildered gratitude was to commence rehearsing diligently. So they shirked paying jobs and sleep, gathering four of the next five nights to burnish the treasury of new material. Talk grew respectfully minimal. Denise regularly fixed sandwiches for Bedwin at the breaks, assuming this caretaking duty without resentment. Matthew arrived on time and expressed no exasperation at the intervals of tuning among the instrumentalists, gazing fixedly at middle distances while waiting for the players to resume behind him, then carving deep into the material, despite seeming otherwise somewhat wasted, skinnier than ever. At each set’s conclusion distraction overtook him, and he left before the others.

Lucinda held her secrets close. She felt a proprietary elation at having brought the others to this place. Yet hid inside the music, fingers throbbing on the neck of her instrument with a grace beyond her knowledge, agent of some higher purpose. The songs told her how to feel. She’d waited a week for a phone call which refused to come, then succumbed two nights in a row to the temptation to dial the complainer’s number. For reward, only listened to his line howl in vacancy. She felt no impatience. Her complainer would reemerge and find her, the songs said so. In the meantime she dwelled in his words, now made plastic and catchy by Bedwin and the band. Bedwin had written a backup harmony vocal for “Astronaut Food.” Since they only owned two microphones, Lucinda curled down to meet Denise at the mike stand mounted close on her snare drum to sing, “Am I just astronaut food for you? Are you gonna take me along to the moon?” The sentiment might have seemed plaintive or piteous, but she and Denise always felt beaming joy as their voices braided.

The fifth night in their siege of rehearsal, the last night before the Aparty, Bedwin said, with an air of pre-defeat: “What about ‘Robot Head in Mourning’?” Everyone understood: the phrase was a possible band name. The band still didn’t have a name and they’d grown embarrassed even to try. Proposals weren’t so much shot down as left to perish in the air. They’d even resorted once to sticking pins in a dictionary, with no success.

“Sounds more like an album title than a band name,” said Denise.

“Mourning like dead or morning like morning has broken?” asked Lucinda.

“I was thinking like dead but it doesn’t matter,” said Bedwin. “We could spell it different ways at different times.”

“I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said pour love on the broken places,” said Denise.

“I’ve been seeing that thing everywhere!” said Lucinda. “I saw it on a T-shirt the other day. What does it mean?”

“We could call ourselves ‘The Broken Places.’”

“Don’t you think that’s pathetic?” said Matthew.

“Pathetic is good,” said Bedwin. “Maybe we should use the word ‘pathetic’ in the name.”

“The Pathetic Fallacies,” suggested Lucinda.

“The Pathetic Chickens,” said Bedwin.

“Why chickens?” said Denise.

“Okay, hens,” said Bedwin. “The Pathetic Hens.”

“That’s terrible,” said Denise.

“Okay, the Fallacy Hens,” said Bedwin.

“We really need a name before the gig,” said Lucinda.

Matthew was nearly out the door, his mike cord bundled and shoved underneath Denise’s couch, his guitar case in hand.