Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“I want to see you,” she said.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“I need to.”

“I’m free tomorrow night.”

Lucinda issued a sound like a thwarted sneeze.

“You know the Ambit Hotel?” he said. “Downtown, on Sixth.”

“Uh, sure.”

“Meet me at the rooftop bar at nine.”

“Okay, wait, how will I know you?”

“We’ll be the only two people looking for each other.”

“Okay.”

“Nine o’clock, don’t forget.”

“Okay.”

“Get some sleep.”

“Okay.”

“And drink a large glass of water, you’ll feel better.” Lucinda nodded and hung up the phone.

the morning light, when Lucinda cinched open her crumb-gummed lids, was unwelcome. She raised her face from a sleeve smeared with sleep drool, then she turned and saw the polished tops of Falmouth’s shoes. He touched her arm when she stirred.

“You poor pathetic wretch,” he said caressingly.

“Oh, Falmouth.”

“You’re like a child marinating in your own crimes. You smell wrong.”

Falmouth stood before her in his customary suit, a trim figure silhouetted in daylight, a Styrofoam coffee cup braced in his fingertips. One collar point was disarranged, straying upward from its home in his jacket, a poignant breach. His face betrayed tenderness.

“What time is it?” she said.

“Morning.”

“All you do is work, Falmouth.”

“Nothing matters but work. Someday you’ll grow up and then you’ll understand.”

“My head hurts.”

“It should hurt.”

“We had band practice and then Denise and I drank whiskey.”

“You’re unsuited for this world. Your only recourse is to become a rock star. Anything else is beyond you.”

“We’re good, Falmouth.”

“We’ll see about that. Go home and put yourself to bed.”

“Don’t you need me today?”

“You’re fired. My interns can answer the phones. They’re better than you anyway.”

As she roused herself from the cubicle Lucinda felt a sweet nostalgic stirring of affection, almost like green shoots of horniness under the pavement of her hangover. Perhaps the nearer you came to abandoning a romance, evaporating it in friendship, the more piercing and beautiful the trace that remained. Watching Falmouth turn to his lonely desk, place his cup so delicately on its coaster, scowl wholly to himself as he browsed voice mail on his speakerphone, it occurred to Lucinda that one day her well-dressed friend would die. Perhaps then she would stand by Falmouth’s graveside and understand that he was the love of her life.

The sentiment, foolish or not, struck her as worthy of the complainer. At that instant Lucinda recollected the rendezvous, at the gaudy rooftop bar, only hours away, and her throat was scalded by a hiccup laced with the essence of vomit.

the Ambit’s rooftop was like a three-dimensional magazine Lucinda browsed with her whole body. It made her feel irrelevant, unseen, blurred with age. She milled among pink and green cocktails held aloft by peach and mocha teenage limbs. Each, cocktails and limbs, seemed lit by a similar incandescence. The starless night above her shuddered, too close. The complainer was nowhere, lurked behind no potted palm. No man examined her for any purpose whatsoever. No person was alone in that place besides Lucinda. She wandered for what felt to be years, then ordered a scotch, a double, slurped to the bottom, and headed for the elevator.

Another party had formed in the lobby. The valet had abandoned his post, draped his jacket over his abdicated parking stand. Instead he hunched over the handles of a nearby soccer table, madly spinning the posts studded with podlike replica players. He strained heedlessly at the dials, trying to alter the ball’s trajectory with his knees and hips, emitting grunts and shrieks, shaking his head to free his bangs from his eyes. His opponent, a large man, stood calm and stolid with his back to Lucinda, weight equal on his eagled legs, merely twitching his wrists.

It was the valet who noticed her. He straightened to show his readiness, despite dereliction of post and uniform. The large man flipped the dial once more, unfairly plopping the ball into the valet’s unguarded net, where it came to rest like a grape in a sock. Then turned. He was beautiful in a puffy, slightly decrepit way. His features, in the patio’s reddish light, appeared like a painted cameo fringed by his white-streaked mane of hair. His nose and chin were each deep-dimpled, his eyelids baggy above and below, his face resembling in its totality the male organ itself. The man’s clothes were loose, possibly camouflaging flab, his shirt’s top buttons undone to show more white-infested hair rising to mask his clavicle, sleeves sloppily rolled to the elbows, corduroy pants belted uselessly low, not holding anything together. He was unmistakable. The person playing table soccer with the valet was the person she’d come here to discover.

“Complaints?” he said.

“One or two, I suppose.”

“You probably think I’m late,” he said. “Actually, I was on the roof at eight thirty. But I couldn’t bear the noise, so I came downstairs.”

“Why choose it in the first place?” she said, unable to disguise her peevishness. She handed the valet her ticket, wrapped in a pair of dollar bills. It shooed him, at least.

He shrugged. “This place is convenient to my house. And I figured it was a backdrop where you’d stand out.”

Did he refer to her age? He didn’t have any leg to stand on, himself. Beside him the valet was a child. She didn’t mind his seniority, though. It suited her.

“You could have picked a place that was empty,” she said petulantly.

“Would you have agreed to meet me in such an establishment?”

“I wouldn’t have waited an hour, I’m sure of that. But now I see that wasn’t necessary in the first place.”

“Let me make it up to you.”

“I just asked for my car.”

“Perfect,” he said. “I walked here.”

“You live that close?”

He stepped across the patio that housed the table soccer, shrinking the distance between them. “You make that sound like an accusation,” he said softly. “I hope we haven’t gotten off on the wrong foot. I guess you’re ticked you were waiting upstairs while I was down here the whole time. I’d chalk it up to my compulsive need to disappoint.” He took her by the elbow, enfolding her in his billowy body, and opened the passenger door of her car, which now stood running in the driveway. Lucinda felt a giddy paroxysm of relief as her grievance dissolved. The complainer was recognizably himself. That was all she required.

The complainer ushered her into the seat, then stepped around the car and slid in at the wheel, groping for the lever to slide the seat back to make room for his legs and his fantastically large sneakers under her dashboard, loudly crumpling paper refuse behind the seat. He dismissed the valet, his former opponent, with a cheery wave. Then turned her car from the hotel’s driveway onto Sixth Street, into downtown’s empty canyons, his brow consternated as he peered past his knuckles, through the windshield. Hesitant to stare, Lucinda instead tasted with her whole body his significant displacement of the car’s atmosphere, the rustle of his aura. He was clumsy and beautiful and absolutely real.

On a stepped pavilion a smudged man maneuvered a shopping cart to the lip of a vast inhuman fountain, alone amid sentinel buildings. He might have been the first mortal figure to cross that plain, a Thoreau approaching his Walden. In the passenger seat, waiting to know their destination, Lucinda felt encompassed by an oceanic tenderness that bloomed beyond the space of her car to cover the far solitary bum and his cart.