Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“Doesn’t matter, since we’re not ready,” said Denise. “Lucinda, help Bedwin pack up his stuff.” Bedwin was ground to a halt, sat dope-eyed on his stool in the midst of their mike stands and cable. Lucinda tried to rouse herself but fell slack. She’d succumbed to a tidal exhaustion, the accumulated physical insult of too much joy, too many fish tacos and bass notes and orgasms flying in and out of her boundaries.

“We could all go sit upstairs,” said Jules Harvey. “Just take a few minutes to talk. These moments don’t come so often.”

“Nah, we’re in a hurry,” said Denise.

“Where are we in a hurry to?” asked Matthew.

“Yes, where are you going?” said Harvey. “This party’s hardly over.”

“To a place where bands go after gigs,” said Denise. “A secret destination, known only to bands.”

Now the tall man with the headband full of white hair and the mournful craggy face loomed into view, nudging Mick Felsh aside effortlessly, without seeming to notice the smaller man. He was dressed in a long, battered peacoat, missing buttons. He stood with his hands deep in its pockets as though braced against some arctic wind. He placed himself before the band and smiled and shook his head, mouth parted as if to speak, none of the sorrow banished from his eyes.

“Okay,” he said finally. His voice rumbled, thrummed.

“Hey, I know you,” said Matthew. “You’re Fancher Autumnbreast.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been listening to you since I was a kid,” said Matthew.

Fancher Autumnbreast closed his eyes, shook his head again, sighed. “Sure, sweetheart.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Denise, nudging Matthew again. “Let’s go.”

“No, you don’t understand,” said Matthew. “Fancher Autumnbreast, from KPKD. The Dreaming Jaw .”

“What’s The Dreaming Jaw ?”

“His midnight radio show, for like the last thousand years.” Matthew didn’t disguise his impatience. “He’s fairly important, if you care anything about the history of music in this town.”

“Let alone if you want to make some,” added Jules Harvey.

“When I was a child I pretty much just wanted to be you,” said Bedwin to Autumnbreast, so softly he was barely heard.

“Look.” Autumnbreast ignored Bedwin, Denise, Harvey, anyone else, removed one gnarled, elegant hand from the peacoat’s pocket and pushed a single finger against Matthew’s chest. “Find me. You’ll play your song. On the Jaw . Live in studio.”

“Which song?”

“You know, babykins.”

Fancher Autumnbreast turned and threaded through the chaotic, musicless dance floor. Jules Harvey and Mick Felsh and Rhodes Bramlett all stared and watched him go, as did the band. Autumnbreast left in his place a conspicuous vacancy, an authority gap.

Denise spoke first. “Let’s just take the guitars. Jules, if you’re supposed to be our manager now, you can make sure nobody screws with our equipment. Bedwin, guitar to the elevator, now. Matthew too. We’ll break down when the party’s out of the way, tomorrow maybe.”

“Your equipment is safe,” said Harvey, bowing. Felsh and Bramlett bowed too, not wishing to seem ungracious. Denise had won this round, it appeared. But she’d named Harvey as their manager, in front of the others. Perhaps he’d act as if authorized to speak for them. Word might even spread, by the same osmosis that had launched the evening in the first place.

Obeying Denise, Matthew seized up Lucinda’s bass as well as his own guitar and started for the elevator. Bedwin too. Perhaps they hoped for another passing encounter with their hero, Fancher Autumnbreast. Denise pushed the cymbals and kicks she’d already partially broken down into some rough order. Lucinda slid off the stage.

At that moment he moved within the perimeter of lights and revealed himself. The complainer. Carl, Carlton. He stood in his same loose pants and untucked shirt covering the blunt hairy fact of his body, and gazing at her with his droll handsome disheveled look, his gone-to-seed glamour. He’d been there, surely, throughout the show. Had seen them play.

The band had discovered itself onstage like Helen Keller, connecting at last the idea or name for a thing to the thing itself, a blundering into a new world they’d never dared to name. At the same time another world had uncovered itself to Lucinda when she made herself drunk and naked for the complainer. Now they weren’t two worlds, but one. It was all too much, he was too much for her, standing so patiently at the stage.

“The way you play that instrument makes me think of the way you fuck, if you don’t mind my saying that.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “It’s a bass.”

“I mean to say very beautifully and forcefully.”

“Thank you.”

“With great sincerity and even with what I’d be tempted to call originality, if I didn’t think originality was a word people throw around a lot without knowing what they’re talking about.”

“Uh, thank you.”

“Because to really judge the originality of something you’d have to be familiar with all the possible precedents and sources, which very few people are ever likely to be.”

“I’m not completely sure I understand.”

“I couldn’t help feeling I was listening to myself.”

Lucinda examined him for signs of anger, found none. His words had been delivered with perfect cheer, as eloquent and seductive as if he’d been pouring them into her ear on the telephone in that time so long past, that telephonic life which felt now like a distant journey, recollected in postcards.

“How did you know to come here?”

He shrugged. “Someone on the complaint line suggested I come to this unusual dance party they were planning. One of the other receptionists, you weren’t there that day. Then I saw a notice in the paper that the famous complaint guy was putting on a performance piece at this loft. It wasn’t that hard to guess you’d be here, though the show was a surprise.”

“Falmouth is my friend.” She wanted him to know her life completely now. If he’d recognized the song lyrics and wasn’t angry there might be nothing to hide. She’d let her new worlds be joined. She wanted him to know Falmouth and the others, was impatient that it all even needed explaining. That Falmouth and Matthew were, technically, her exes was a minor note. The complainer, of all people, would understand.

“I felt like if I squinted I could practically see myself onstage.”

There might be something mildly autistic in the complainer’s reactions, a flatness to the face with which he addressed the world. His stance toward hotels and automobiles and women’s bodies, his cataloging of her orgasms, his deafness to social pretense, all had a strangely equable quality. It made Lucinda love him more, not less. He crossed the grain of ordinary life, deliriously indifferent.

“I used your words as lyrics,” she blurted.

“I noticed.”

“Bedwin wrote the music. The guitarist.”

“Does he know?”

She shook her head, wide-eyed. “Nobody knows.”

She pushed away from the stage, nearer to him.

“I usually collect hundreds, if not thousands, per verb or noun.”

“I don’t have my checkbook.”

“I’ll take a hostage.”

The complainer reached his hand into her hair, cradling her skull. She kissed him, on tiptoe, felt the grit of his unshaved cheek. She found herself folded into his encyclopedia of clothes and hair and limbs. His free paw bridged her buttocks and drew her higher into the embrace. In the kiss Lucinda tasted traces of their night and afternoon, hints of herself or the Ambit’s mustard and ketchup unrinsed from his face.

Someone tapped her shoulder. She turned and found the two appropriated interns standing unexpectedly close. They didn’t speak, but like spectral sentinels nodded to indicate Denise, who waited a few yards from the stage, her rack toms tucked beneath one arm. Lucinda nodded and Denise lowered her head and moved through the dancers, for the elevator.