Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

Lucinda touched Bedwin’s and Denise’s napes again, put her fingers in their hair, which, she noticed, was cut the same length, and equally amateurishly. Sometime since seeing her last Denise had hacked her red-hennaed bangs into something more Joan of Arcish. Maybe Lucinda should take a child’s scissors to her own hair as well. Haircuts signified change, and she felt changed. Plus it would give the band a look.

“It’s our legendary first gig,” she said. “Robot Head in Mourning or whatever it turns out we’re known as. Some grainy photograph from this night will appear in the booklet of the box-set retrospective of our entire career.”

Denise and Bedwin said nothing. Denise drove intently out of the side street, onto Sunset.

“Be excited or something.”

“I guess I’d be more excited if we were behaving a little more like a band right now,” said Denise. “Also if we were playing aloud. That would probably make a difference in how I felt.”

“Maybe we will, maybe we’ll shock everyone by suddenly playing aloud—”

“Won’t they all be wearing headphones?” said Denise.

“Well, yes.”

“I think Denise was just trying to say that helping to move the equipment is an important aspect of being—”

“I told her already, Bedwin,” said Denise.

lucinda penitently lugged her own amp as the three band members filtered through the horde of the Aparty’s invitees. The April night was clear and warm and smelled of lime and fir, like the desert’s rim, the place you’d reach in a day if you walked east out of the city, which you’d never do. Distant wheeling spotlights grazed the sky west of Koreatown. Here, far-twinkling stars were visible, five or six of them at least. The Aparty’s invitees massed at a rehabbed industrial building on Olympic Boulevard, whose freight elevator served as the undistinguished entrance to Jules Harvey’s loft. They spilled into the street, arriving in bunches, a pedestrian explosion excited by the unlike-liness of itself. Lucinda saw faces she recognized. Mildred Zeno, the painter, Matthew’s previous ex. They had something in common now, Lucinda supposed, like former opponents traded to the same team. Gillian Unger, Lucinda’s old cohort at the Coffee Chairs. Perhaps she still labored there, beneath the espresso steam. Meade Everdark, columnist for the Echo Park Annoyance , leaned his elbow on the roof of a parked Jeep, gesturing with animation as he proved some point to the passengers inside. Clay Howl and Richard Abneg, guitarist and drummer of the Rain Injuries, stood swapping heavy looks with someone who might be Bruce Wagner. John Huck offered a cigarette to Maud Winchester. Denied early entrance by Falmouth’s rigid concept, they inaugurated festivities curbside instead, and gabbling and smoking scanned the crowd for their friends. They swapped earphones to sample one another’s dance mixes, broke out bottles or joints they’d secreted on their persons, having rightly feared a dryish occasion upstairs. The steward from Ixnay produced stem glasses and stood doling red wine to a queue of art-school ingenues.

Falmouth’s interns sighted the band members and shooed Apartygoers aside to open a path to the elevator’s doors, two paint-blistered steel portals studded with rusty bolts. One intern rapped at the doors and they parted to reveal a wizened Asian man in a porkpie hat and suspenders, manipulating a brass-handled wheel with one hand while gripping a smoldering cigarette and a folded-over Korean newspaper in the other. He arched an eyebrow, grunted, and seized Lucinda’s amp, brandishing his newspaper like a flyswatter to brush the curious throng back from the doors. The band followed him inside.

“Mr. Oo doesn’t speak English but he knows Korean kung fu,” Jules Harvey explained, bowing to usher them from the elevator at the seventh floor, the top. Harvey wore a forest-green three-piece suit with a zipper in place of its buttons. He still wore his Tigers cap and high-top sneakers, and gaped like a turkey through his frames. “I’m positive he could slay you with that newspaper.” The tiny man had grabbed the amplifier and bass and now soldiered across the vast empty space of the loft toward the distant riser. There, Matthew sat alone in a small grove of their equipment, behind Denise’s kit, tapping his fingers on her snare. The riser was unexpectedly high, and their unoccupied microphones and monitors looked persuasively professional from this angle, rescued from their rehearsal space.

The floor was a plain of polished wood, scattered with pillars, the ceiling a barren lid pressing low overhead, decorated with track lighting and a dingy, unlit mirror ball. The triangular loft formed a funnel pointing to the riser where the band would play, or mime playing. The prospects of the crowd downstairs fitting itself obediently inside seemed, to Lucinda, poor. Even if they could all squeeze up through the chute of the elevator, what chance they’d fall in line with Falmouth’s commands? The interns scurried off now, presumably to find their leader. Lucinda, with Denise and Bedwin, followed. Crossing the open dance floor Lucinda felt exposed, a cat in a cathedral.

Jules Harvey scurried beside her, hands joined behind his back. “There isn’t anything to be concerned about,” he mused in his soft voice. “If we begin late it shouldn’t compromise the underlying premise in any important sense.”

“I wasn’t concerned,” said Lucinda. “We’re ready whenever you like.”

“I was thinking more of Falmouth.”

“Is something wrong with Falmouth?”

“Perhaps after you greet your compatriots you’d be willing to follow me.”

“Maybe we better go now.”

Denise and Bedwin continued toward the stage, while Lucinda followed Harvey. Behind the elevator was hidden the loft’s tiny kitchen and bathroom, and above, connected by a short spiral stair, nestled an elevated sleeping platform, with a ceiling so low Lucinda had to stoop. The melancholy living space was a mole’s burrow, suggestive of Harvey’s secret armpit-sniffer’s despondency. “Will you remove your shoes, please?” said Harvey at the top of the stair. Lucinda crushed the backs of her sneakers with her toes, squeezing them off without untying the laces.

The scene had an air of private ritual. Falmouth knelt on Jules Harvey’s futon, his knees surrounded by a heaped disarray of headphones and portable tape and disk players. Two shopping bags of additional equipment slumped unpromisingly on the floor. A gun nested in the cushions. Lucinda recalled something about a starter’s pistol. She hoped it wasn’t as real as it looked. The small shelf beside Jules Harvey’s bed contained candles and two neat stacks of glossy magazines, possibly pornographic. The two interns sat coolly sharing a joint on a love seat in the corner. Their unspeaking presence seemed almost malevolent now, Falmouth’s fantasy of a world decorated with servile girls gone sour.

Headphones clung crookedly to Falmouth’s dome. Sweat trickling on his jaw, he stabbed buttons on a scuffed silver Walkman, then rolled his eyes and thrust the rig aside.

“Where have you been?” he said to Lucinda.

“I took a shower. What’s wrong?”

“It’s no good,” he said. “Jules invited too many people and they didn’t bring anything to listen to and when they all come upstairs they’re going to destroy everything. We don’t have enough tape players. Half of these don’t work at all. We can’t let them in, it’s too many. Did you see?”

“I saw,” said Lucinda. “It’s half of Silver Lake.”

“This happens,” said Jules Harvey. “An invitation becomes exponential, something gets in the air. Suddenly it’s the party everyone has to be at on a given night, the party of the season. We couldn’t have foreseen how your list and mine would catalyze. People are afraid not to be at an event like this. Many others will eventually lie and claim they were.”