Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

Bedwin had found a step stool in Jules Harvey’s kitchen. He placed it on the riser in the clear spot behind his monitor. Then Denise led him away, promising snacks, leaving Lucinda and Matthew with the equipment. Matthew offered her a hand up onto the riser. She accepted for the pleasure of the contact of their palms, his cool, hers hot. She was in a fever, her body an engine churning at toxins. Matthew reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. He spoke gently, as if he’d been the one to rouse her from the late-afternoon fugue on her couch.

“You have a wild happy look in your eyes.”

“Denise seemed pissed that I missed the sound check.”

“It mostly involved Falmouth criticizing our clothing.”

“It might be more important than you think. Jules Harvey wants us to play. I mean, with sound coming out.”

“What about Falmouth’s important art?”

“It’s still important in principle. But something more spontaneous decided to happen in actuality.”

She rescued her bass from its fuzzy coffin, then moved to plug in to her amp and begin tuning. She felt Matthew peering at her, unbudged from his seat on the riser. She wondered if he’d made himself pretty for her sake. She wondered if her provocations on the telephone, the kanga dootie song, had somehow shifted him slightly in her direction again, as opposed to that dim specter she’d encountered in the supermarket.

“Lucinda?”

“Yes?”

“I need to talk to you about the, uh, marsupial situation.”

“I owe you an apology.”

“I don’t care about that,” he said, with a warmth and sincerity that instantly absolved her of both break-in and phone call. “I need your help.”

“Yes?” She felt her breath catch, slightly.

His eyes grew shy. “Maybe this isn’t the right time.”

“Anytime,” she said.

“Tomorrow, let’s talk tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

Denise and Bedwin returned, Bedwin with both hands around a sardine sandwich. They’d been consulting with the interns, who now scuttled across the great empty room in the direction of Jules Harvey’s kitchen.

“Jules wants us to start in five minutes,” said Denise. “We need a set list.” She unfolded a sheet of paper and smoothed it against the riser’s plywood, then uncapped a marker and waved the others to kneel beside her.

“Start with ‘Monster Eyes,’” said Lucinda.

“We’d play it to an empty room,” said Denise. “All they’ll hear from the street is the bass line.”

Matthew said, “So let’s pick something that’ll sound good from the street. Something loud that we don’t care about, like ‘Hell Is for Buildings’ or ‘Crayon Fever.’”

“I don’t want to play ‘Crayon Fever’ at all,” said Denise. “We can’t start with something old and depressing. We have to inspire ourselves.”

“‘Dirty Yellow Chair,’” suggested Bedwin.

Denise wrote it in block letters at the top of the page.

“We’re wasting that as the first song, too,” said Lucinda.

“No, she’s right,” said Matthew. “We need to hear ourselves sound good.”

“Then ‘The Houseguest,’” said Bedwin, pointing a finger at the blank space where Denise’s marker circled in the air. They all looked at Bedwin, who only chewed his fish sandwich noisily. This new task of constructing a set list might rightly belong to their auteur.

“What about ‘Temporary Feeling’ next?” said Denise, looking to Bedwin now.

“Mmmm, ‘Astronaut Food,’ then ‘Temporary Feeling,’” said Bedwin. The others nodded, as though hurrying to board a vehicle that might depart without them. The sequence of songs began to feel inevitable in the manner of language or music itself, as though Bedwin were revealing to them a hidden grammar embedded in the band’s motley offerings.

“Right, sure, there’ll be an audience by the time of ‘Astronaut Food,’” said Denise. Lucinda imagined the drummer was anticipating their showpiece, the two women harmonizing on the single microphone.

“Why not ‘Monster Eyes’ after ‘Temporary Feeling’?” asked Matthew.

Bedwin nodded, and Denise jotted it down.

“‘Secret from Yourself,’” said Lucinda, captivated now.

“‘Hell Is for Buildings.’”

“‘Sarah Valentine.’”

“‘Nostalgia.’”

“‘Canary.’”

“Maybe hold ‘Actually Quite Funny’ for a first encore?”

“What about ‘Tree of Death’?”

They called out the names eagerly, unafraid of mistakes. Denise wrote nothing down without Bedwin’s oracular consent. In this manner the set list was hashed out.

the first chords, chunks of noise, rebound in the gulch of buildings. They seem, to those on the sidewalk, an atonal clatter, one unrelated to the tick and throb of drum and bass which had reached them independently, conveyed an instant before through the curb to their calves and knees, perhaps even as high as their genitals. Soon, though, the listeners’ ears wrangle the dissonant sounds into sensible conjunction, a kind of on-the-spot reconstruction of this music’s sense in the first place. Any listener schooled in the form could peel it off echoing architecture as easily as resolve it through a radio’s static. Those staticky growls were, sure, amplified guitars, echoing in the cage of the drumbeat. Vocals, too, though distorted by the street’s reverb effect a general drift was discernible, twice through a verse, building to a chorus: hey, everyone knows how this works, knows it in their bones, even if unable to articulate it exactly: rock ’n’ roll. It’s what makes this band sound alike to any other that makes them intriguing, at this distance: they could be the Beatles, heard from the street. Or, just as easily, the Beards. The crowd buzzes with the general sense that an obscure evening has located its raison d’être. At least you’d have to go upstairs to know. Whoever they were, they were playing live, and you, on the sidewalk with skewered Thai chicken in your hand, are missing the set. Anyway, you were curious to see what this famous party loft was about after all, despite the spontaneous curbside revel’s rude charms.

The band concluded their opener’s last chorus just as Mr. Oo levered open the freight elevator doors and the first clutch of guests spilled onto the floor. Someone—Jules Harvey? the appropriated interns?—had located a master control panel for the loft’s lighting, and fiddled until the stage was encircled with a blobby series of wide purplish spots from a track of lamps mounted behind the band, angled to glare in the eyes of anyone standing near enough to discern the band’s faces, and casting the floor between stage and elevator into dark. Without footlights to provide underlighting, the band appears mysteriously remote, silhouettes draped in indigo as they confer with one another and their set list, nodding, perhaps mumbling a word or two, but inaudible above the low crackle and drone of speakers broadcasting nothing but their own electronic readiness, at top volume. A female voice, the drummer’s, counts “One, two, three, four,” and the second song is launched, with a single rim shot like a firecracker, igniting the guitarist. He’s a feeble figure, hunched atop a tall stool, and apparently unable to play without watching his fingers, but who now lays out an unexpectedly slab-like power chord, stretching a sneakered toe from where it had been curled inside a spoke of his stool to trigger a distortion pedal on the stage floor.

“The Houseguest” is a weirdly grim number, a defiant tirade by a guest wronged by his hosts, over a set of changes that might be the billionth rewrite of some three-chord chestnut, “You Really Got Me,” say, or “Twentieth Century Fox,” but played with conviction and vigor by the band, who associate the song, one of their earliest, with the uncovering of their own capacity to join in birthing ferocious noise. No one’s ever quite dared to query the guitarist, who delivered this lyrical concept to the band whole formed, on its source; no one ever will. The song’s a confidence builder for the singer, who finds that it liberates some element of rageful self-pity his own temperament usually quashes. He loves twisting his body as he bellows the raw quatrain that fits into a gap of feedbacky silence between the rolling changes: