Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

lucinda woke in a cocoon of ripe headache, her senses withdrawn against the obnoxious fact of daylight, the planet’s insufferable expedition through widths of light and dark. The man she’d slept beside had gone from the bed but she sensed him operating somewhere, manipulating gaily clanking artifacts outside her range of tolerable awareness. She touched her eyelids, tender wallets of pain, felt her orbs rustle within.

“Coffee?”

She made him out, a mass diffusing the glare.

“What time is it? Is it afternoon yet?”

“It’s pushing afternoon.”

“I have a gig tonight,” she said. “My band, I mean.”

“Here.”

The coffee smelled like an enemy. “I think I need a drink, actually.”

“I’d have to let them in to restock the minibar.”

“I want a drink in my house. Drive me home.”

“I’d have to drive your strange little car.”

“What’s strange about my car?”

“It bumps into things.”

Lucinda pulled him, dressed, to her side of the bed. Hunching free of the binding sheets and robe, she squirmed bare limbs across him, and briefly humped his leg, a leftover animal temblor, then fell back. He was enormous, she saw now. Beneath his clothes he was a hill to climb, pink and hair all over, impossible to encompass. She wasn’t through trying. Let the hellish sunshine make its case, the previous night wasn’t finished. She and the complainer were a secret buried here, at the world’s unreachable core, beyond the encroach of her headache or any other contradictory evidence. She needed to keep him near. Not in the hotel, though. She needed to take him to her apartment, show him the foot sign, her former god. She needed him to hear her play her bass, see her practice her art. And she needed to do something to him that would make him at least once more as gloriously deranged as he’d made her again and again in the hotel bed.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes what?”

“Drive me home in my strange little car.”

the freeway was like a saddle on the splayed city, a means both of mastering it and of shrinking from intimate contact with its surfaces. The complainer handled her Datsun capably, zipping across lanes. Lucinda watched exits blink past, Glendale, Alvarado, Rampart. When the chance came for Silver Lake she bit her tongue.

“Here, take Western.” She pointed him off the freeway, suddenly inspired. “Park on the right. This is my favorite liquor store. The Pink Elephant. It’s beautiful. Look at that Dumbo mural, it’s like cave art. This city is full of primitive geniuses. If they put that in a gallery it would sell for a million dollars. I don’t know why they haven’t been sued by Disney.”

“Maybe they’re owned by Disney.”

“Get us a fifth of something. No more stupid little bottles.”

“Blue label?”

“At this point I’d take yellow or even green label.”

He returned, slid a bottle in a bag down by her feet, then resumed the wheel. She motioned for him to aim the Datsun down Hollywood Boulevard. She halted them in front of the Celebrity Motor Inn, a three-story palace of neon and rotting palms, ironwork skyway suspended between its wings, a majestic relic amid the ruined commercial strip. Skyway lit from beneath, the inn was like a piece of day-for-night footage against the pale sky.

“Nothing against your Ambit room-service burgers but that’s what I call a hotel.”

“I thought we were going to your apartment.”

“I changed my mind. I don’t see your place, you don’t see mine. Fair’s fair.”

“I’ll go sign the register,” he said, pulling into the parking lot. “Mr. and Mrs. Dead Noon.”

at the shop on Sunset the band’s drummer frowned as she packed a shipment for delivery, a mammoth latex implement not modeled on any human part, shaped instead as a squirrel riding a dolphin, each peeping through a separate cellophane window of the product’s glossy cardboard package. She bound it with its invoice in a triple thickness of bubble wrap, feeling irritated still to be at work. She’d swapped shifts with another clerk to earn her freedom this afternoon, and her substitute should have appeared by now. The drummer hoped to nap before the time came to load her kit into the trunk and backseat of her car. The party promoter had made the band promise to arrive for a sound check at five, though how it mattered wasn’t clear, since they were meant to be inaudible. Putting the package aside, the drummer dialed the phone, not for the first time. There was no answer, and she didn’t leave a message.

Above Hyperion Boulevard, the band’s guitarist sat cross-legged on his carpet, bathed in blue light, his mouth open, as his videocassette recorder slow-motioned through a passage in Human Desire , a bar scene, Glenn Ford tussling with a drunken Broderick Crawford over Gloria Grahame. The guitarist seemed uninterested in the performances, instead drew nearer to the screen, trying to decipher the words written on signs pinned to the walls of the bar, which at the level of resolution of his television was impossible. The guitarist picked his nose with a curled forefinger and squinted closer. His other hand absent-mindedly cradled his crotch. The blue figures on-screen swam forward, captives of slow motion.

On Effie Street the band’s singer stood wielding a knife at his kitchen counter. He still wore his T-shirt and underwear, the costume he’d decided to wear to bed since an intrusion into his house the night before last. He’d slept late after lying awake until dawn, having been woken by his phone ringing at some odd hour. The singer chopped a bundle of unrinsed kale into a careless salad. The Los Angeles Times lay across his counter, a copy pilfered from the doormat of the singer’s neighbor across the hall. He’d scoured the City section for an article which he’d hoped to see but which hadn’t appeared. Its absence dismayed him. The remaining sections were unread. Though it wouldn’t have been difficult for the singer to refold the paper and return it to the doormat, it was instead destined to be thrown over his bathroom tile, to absorb certain spillings and stainings. As he switched from the kale to a mass of celery, the singer mused on the voice-mail message he’d listened to at dawn, the baby-talk song with its strangely accurate, if mocking, encapsulation of his dilemma. The singer felt lonely. He decided to take his next chance to entrust the band’s bass player with his secret. After all, she already knew it.

On Hollywood Boulevard, in pale afternoon light bent through tweed curtains, the band’s bass player drew herself, panting, from the still-trembling body of her lover, who lay with his head tipped over the foot of the bed. His hands, which had encircled her, palms nudging her breasts, now fell to his own thighs. His blotched penis draped in an arc to his stomach. There were no robes here. No music. They’d poured from the new bottle into plastic cups, which sat in a spilled pool of whiskey on the side table, beside the telephone. The bottle was half empty, but the bass player didn’t feel drunk anymore. She undoubled her knees and stretched her feet to cradle his ribs. Leaning back, her sweaty shoulders sealed like a decal to the headboard. The motor inn was a perfectly tawdry arena. If possible she’d have her car and apartment destroyed by remote control, and begin again from here. It was as if the hotel rooms they’d inhabited were the telephone line they’d dwelled in earlier, now expanded to contain the whole of Los Angeles.

She felt like a marine creature, a pilot fish, a dipper or darter around the perimeter of some animal greater and slower than herself. Or possibly not an animal but a planet, a distant body. The complainer seemed remote not only in space but in time, the progression of his hair, dark to white, a horizon of years. As though she crawled toward him across some time-lapse vastness, a desert or ocean floor which bloomed and declined before her eyes. Every darting movement she made, her whole lithe, slippery course across his body, the seeking effort of her mouth and hands, was an attempt to close this margin between them. But with no apparent malice or guile he’d shunted away, as though their exact proximity was polar, regulated by magnetic force.