Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet

“Just friends now, Matthew—”

“Yes—”

there’s a certain kind of talk I have with women,” the voice complained. “I say whatever I’m thinking about love and sex and blah, blah, blah, I’ve heard myself a thousand times. But as normal as it is for me—this kind of frank talk, I mean—for women it seems like it’s always the first time in their lives they’ve ever spoken that way.”

“There’s nothing so strange in that,” Lucinda suggested. “You’re accustomed to yourself, but you surprise others.”

“Surprise would be one thing,” said the complainer. “But I change others. I affect people. Women. Something happens to them, but nothing happens to me. The sameness of my life is confirmed by the effect I have on women. They’re always changed. Maybe if I met somebody who wasn’t surprised by me something new would happen.”

“You mean falling in love?” Perhaps the caller was only some dreary seducer, impressed with his own unresponsiveness.

“Oh, I’ve fallen in love.”

Lucinda adjusted the telephone on her shoulder and craned sideways to peer beyond the edge of the cubicle. Falmouth wasn’t at the storefront gallery’s reception desk. She caught scent of his coffee pot, dregs charring to a shrill odor. Vehicles coursed outside. At four in the afternoon the sun on Sunset Boulevard was as pale and flinty as morning light. Cubicles at either side of Lucinda sat empty. The office was little more than library carrels that Falmouth’s carpenters had slapped together, then painted gray.

The yellow legal pad before Lucinda lay bare. She raised her pen and mimed script in the air. “Tell me,” she said.

“Look,” he said, “I fall in love every five minutes. I might be half in love with you now.”

“You’re not the first caller to this line to say that,” she said.

“Love is everywhere.”

“I’m supposed to be writing down your complaints,” she reminded him.

“Okay, right,” he said. “Well, today’s complaint can be about what happens when I fall in love. Though I try not to, anymore. It makes me bad at being where I am.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If I really fell in love with you, then when we hung up the phone I’d be stuck halfway. I’d be all disjointed in time and space, half there and half here. And I don’t even know where there is . Whereas now, we get off the phone, no trouble. I’m where I am, like the Buddhists prefer.”

“We all want to keep the Buddhists happy.”

“The little Buddhists inside of ourselves, those are the ones I worry about.”

“But you still haven’t really told me what happens when you really fall in love,” she said. “Only that you want to avoid it.”

“My eyes destroy you.”

“What?”

“I have this condition called monster eyes. I find something not to like and it becomes enormous, it becomes the whole world. Once it was a woman’s fingernails. I started to think they were too weird and short and stubby, and then it was all I could think about. I tried encouraging her to work on her cuticles, to push them up—am I disgusting you?”

“No.”

“I told myself that if she’d just work on her hands I’d go back to adoring her. But really there were other things about her voice and personality and the way she fucked that were waiting to take the place of the fingernails. I’d begun to erode and degrade her in my mind. With my monster eyes.”

Cradling the pen at the point like chalk, Lucinda wrote, in block letters, M-O-N-S-T-E-R E-Y-E-S.

“So,” he continued, “sometimes I think the kindest thing I can do for a person is keep them out of range of those eyes. Like keeping a wolf out of moonlight.”

“You mean a wolfman,” Lucinda corrected.

“Well if he isn’t exposed to the moon it doesn’t have to get to that point.”

“But isn’t a wolfman a man before he sees the moon? Rather than a wolf? But anyway, the danger in a wolfman seeing the moon isn’t to the wolfman—”

“Or the moon.”

Stymied, Lucinda drew a rudimentary wolfman on the pad: a smiley face fringed with snaky hairs. What seemed hippieish sideburns gained a fiercer cast as she scribbled them nearly to the eyes.

“The thing about a wolfman is that something repulsive emerges from hiding,” said Lucinda. “But that isn’t the fault of the person who sees it. Maybe she just had ugly hands—”

Turning, Lucinda found Falmouth scowling over her shoulder at the block letters and pie-faced wolfman on the canary pad. Where had he been lurking? Falmouth turned his wrist to show Lucinda his watch, then pointed to the phone, where a square red button of translucent plastic blinked. Another complaint, waiting to be recorded. She shrugged guiltily.

“I’m sorry, sir, our time is up,” she told the caller.

“Tell me your name,” said the complainer.

“You know I can’t do that, sir.”

“Okay, I’ll call again tomorrow.”

“That’s your prerogative,” she said into the phone. It was one of the generic replies Falmouth had originally scripted for her and the other complaint receptionists. She hung up before he could reply, and took the next call.

who were you talking to when I came in?”

“Who do you think? A complainer.”

“It sounded like you knew him.”

“He had a lot to say.” It wasn’t a lie. He’d had a lot to say the day before, too. That he’d called each day of the past week Lucinda left unmentioned.

Lucinda and Falmouth sat in white plastic chairs at the edge of Sunset Boulevard’s sidewalk, under the shade of the Siete Mares patio. Falmouth faced west, squinting in the declining April sun. They’d departed the Strand Gallery for an early dinner, after the arrival of Falmouth’s two interns to man the complaint lines. Falmouth had culled the spookily young and confident interns from his students at CalArts, where he taught a class on installation art. At his gallery, a showcase solely for his own spectacles, Falmouth employed only women. Soon Falmouth would need more than three of them. The frequency of calls had mushroomed as word spread through Los Angeles, by means of bright orange stickers reading “Complaints? Call 213 291 7778,” mounted on public telephones, also by the interns, in restaurants, cocktail bars, and hotel lobbies.

Two ruined plates of fish tacos lay before them, the table covered with shreds of spilled cabbage and dots of red sauce and sour cream. Falmouth, though, sat unstained and impeccable in his trim brown sharkskin suit and vintage tie. He’d begun wearing tailored suits, polished shoes, and silk ties during his and Lucinda’s last year of college. The rest of their friends wore T-shirts and jeans, then and now. The suits debuted at the same time Falmouth had begun to lose his hair. Lucinda recalled poignantly the wisps that had wreathed Falmouth’s ears and neck, overlapping his collars, even as the bareness on top expanded, naked, undeniable, silly. Lucinda and Falmouth’s affair had been finished just before he began shaving his dome clean. Falmouth’s first and most successful piece of art was himself, installed in the larger gallery of the world.

“Don’t lose control of the dialogues, Lucinda,” Falmouth said. “You can’t begin thinking the complaint line is somehow a real service. The Echo Park Annoyance is coming tomorrow for an interview. We ought to seem institutional. As though we’re recording these complaints for some scientific or altruistic purpose, yet couldn’t care less about the yearnings of any given caller. It’s not a hipster chat line.”