Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

She’d heard herself laughing and producing other noises which had no simple name, but hadn’t spoken sentences in hours. Language had come out of the complainer, though. As before, when he’d muttered in his sleep. The same words, she was certain of it now.

“Carl?” Her own voice shocked her, restored her modesty slightly.

“Yes?”

“When you were coming did you say ‘pour love on the broken places,’ or was I just imagining it?”

“I said that, yes.” He propped on his elbows.

“Over and over again under your breath.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I guess I just needed something to say.”

She began to see that all of what she felt, the strange abject yearning that had grown inside her through this journey to nowhere conducted across the two hotel beds, across this night turned to afternoon, might have a name. If he could say the word, why couldn’t she? He’d asked her to keep it a secret, though, and she would. Her tenderness and awe, the risk of love, would be kept secret between her and herself.

She persisted with her question. “Where did it come from? Those particular words.”

“I made it up.”

“You couldn’t have.” She spoke tenderly, not wishing to disillusion him.

“Not just now, I mean. Before.”

“I read the same words on a bumper sticker.”

“You did?” He brightened.

“Yes.”

“It’s on T-shirts, too. And coffee mugs.”

“Why?”

“That’s my work. My latest. I’m the author of a line of slogans. Sometimes I can’t get them out of my head.”

“So it doesn’t mean anything in particular that you were saying that while we made love?” It gave her a clandestine thrill to say the word aloud, as though releasing pressure in a covert orgasm or sneeze. He’d opened himself to her, despite these ridiculous explanations. She vowed to adore him wordlessly and perfectly. They’d discuss anything but what they really felt, the silently expanding center of the universe.

“When I’ve coined an itchy phrase it’s all I can think about until I come up with another one.”

“An itchy phrase?”

“That’s what it’s called, an itchy or gummy phrase.”

“Tell me another one.”

“Let’s see. One of my favorites is ‘All Thinking Is Wishful.’ I had a good run with that a few years ago.”

“What’s a good run?”

“To make a good living I only have to come up with something as gummy as that every six months or so.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?”

He widened his palms and made an apologetic face.

Here it was, at last. She’d discovered him, her fat man, her fat life. The complainer was like a house she didn’t have to shrink to enter, a doorway she didn’t have to turn sideways to pass through. To truly love someone was to make them feel ridiculous and free, she felt. The complainer’s hair was white but he was more like a child than anyone she knew. She wondered if he knew what he had shown her: how it was possible to replace disappointment with astonishment.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

In reply he turned his head and gnashed at her foot.

“There’s a place I want to show you where they serve these great fish tacos.”

What occurred after they’d checked out of the motel she couldn’t reconstruct, except that he’d had to drive her car again, and that she’d given him her keys and told him the address of her apartment on Elsinore. She wondered, vaguely, whether they’d been seen by anyone she knew, either at the taco stand’s parking lot or as they drove on Sunset, window cranked so she could rest her chin, doglike, on the passenger door’s top and gulp cool air. By the time she gathered that the distant pastoral sound of trickling water was her own kitchen sink, where the complainer stood rinsing her blouse clean of flecks of what had begun rushing out of her in the Siete Mares parking lot, he’d already stripped her clothes, tucked her into bed on her couch, and pulled her shades against the day’s light, which skewed in orange stripes over the couch and her bedspread. It might have been three or five or seven in the afternoon or evening. Lucinda’s eyes ached, as though bruised from behind by the force of her stomach’s expulsion of the food. She tremored within her blankets, impossibly happy.

“Carl?”

“You’re awake again,” he whispered, as though there were someone else to overhear.

“I wasn’t asleep.”

He drew near to examine her, perhaps less interested in her testimony than in the report of his own eyes.

“I puked because I’m in love with you,” she said, trashing her vow.

“Sleep now.”

“I’m not tired. I have to get up.”

He placed his fingers to her lips, then tiptoed backward to the doorway, and was gone.

she was woken by the doorbell what might have been twenty or a thousand minutes later, bolting upright in her nest of blankets on the couch, measuring her disbelief that she was home, that she was alone, that he was gone. Maybe this was him, returned.

“Come in,” she croaked.

Denise hustled in and shut the door behind her, her gaze mapping the scene in rapid evaluation.

“It’s eight, Lucinda.”

“Why is it eight?”

“It just is, that’s all.”

“I fell asleep. I mean, starting at an unusual time, I guess.”

“I don’t need an account of your movements,” said Denise. “We’re on at nine. I’ll run the shower.”

Naked and humbled, Lucinda tramped to a place beneath the steam, while the day’s telephone messages—Denise, Falmouth, Matthew, Denise again—unspooled in the background, an epic of beckonings, censures, lengthening silences. Meanwhile, Denise shifted Lucinda’s bass and amplifier through the door, to her car. Lucinda charted Denise’s progress as a series of scraping and rustlings as Denise negotiated the apartment’s slanted concrete walkway, which was shrouded in overgrown jade and aloe. At last came a decisive slam of the car’s trunk.

“Here.” Denise wrenched off the hot water and offered a towel, hustling Lucinda along. “I laid out clothes.”

For months Lucinda had auditioned in her closet for a first-gig wardrobe, the perfect art-band garb, precedent for a new public identity. She’d settled on nothing definite. Now she donned the brown corduroys and orange capped-sleeve T-shirt Denise had chosen, incapable of resisting a fate likely as good as any other.

“I guess I missed the sound check.”

“It isn’t only the sound check, Lucinda. Loading in and breaking down is part of being in a band. It isn’t just, you know, the drummer’s job.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Denise sighed. “We were worried, that’s all. Anyway, it was sort of anticlimactic, more of a no-sound check, really.”

Lucinda wanted to explain, but couldn’t begin. In a night and a day her world had parted into halves impossible to reconcile or even mention to each other.

Bedwin waited in Denise’s passenger seat, so Lucinda clambered into the back, beside her instrument. “Where’s Matthew?”

“At Jules Harvey’s loft, with our stuff.”

“Are you okay, Lucinda?” asked Bedwin.

“I’m fine, Bedwin. I’m just waking up from a really strange sleep and a very sudden shower.”

“That sounds difficult.”

“I’m terrific, really.”

Lucinda leaned her head between Denise’s and Bedwin’s headrests, touched her fingers to their heads from behind, felt them tighten their shoulders to their seats, resisting her. If she couldn’t confess the subject of her happiness she could try to infect them with it nonetheless. The complainer had shown her that her happiness was all one thing, an arrow running, for instance, through her delirious visitation of the two hotel rooms, through drink and talk and sex and food and sleep and even vomit. The arrow of her happiness pierced all those moments and this one as well, the arrival of her friends to whisk her to Falmouth’s Aparty. The big moment that had come at last, come for them all. For Matthew, estranged from the human world and needing to be pulled back. For Denise, so fierce and nervous on the band’s behalf. For Bedwin, their terrified genius, who’d written such excellent songs, though not without secret assistance from Lucinda and Carl. Which proved what she felt: that the source of her happiness was a stream through all their lives, a bass figure under all their music, even if she was its sole hearer. Her instrument, wedged stiffly in the seat beside her, never reproachful or impatient, only waiting for her to plug it in and plumb its wood-and-wire soul: she loved it too.