Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“I have to go be with the others.”

“The others in the band.”

“Yes.”

“Can I come?”

She stared, not understanding.

“I’ve never been in a band before,” he said.

She capped his mouth with her hand to silence him and to keep herself from kissing him again before the lingering interns. Then, helplessly, mouthed the back of her own hand instead, as though seeking him through prison bars. “Call me tomorrow,” she whispered through her fingers. “Or tonight.” Then escaped.

denise hadn’t lied, Tang’s Donut was a place bands went to celebrate and debrief after shows. The others recognized this at once. Though by the standard of most gigs they’d played the Aparty ludicrously early, at Tang’s it might as easily have been four in the morning. Traffic buzzed past on Sunset and Fountain, isolating Tang’s like a reef in time. Elderly chess opponents in vintage suits nudged pawns across squares at their booths, under clicking, humming fluorescent fixtures, as though installed there by some miraculous hand that had plucked them from a 1930s Vienna kaffeehaus. Trays of cold congealed muffins lay untouched and unloved within the fingerprint-layered lead-glass cases, while the customers invariably queued for the same buttermilk doughnuts, dough flash-fried in irregular clumps with a browned horny crust, which gave way to the peachy-yellow fluff inside, too hot to eat if you badgered the drowsy, indifferent counterman to serve you from the cooling racks in the kitchen behind him.

Crowded at their booth, they juggled steaming buttermilk-dough fragments between fingers and lips, gobbling them when they could stand to. Here, it turned out, was why you wanted to play a triumphant gig: in order to eat Tang’s doughnuts afterward. True, you could come here after merely seeing some other band play. They’d all done that. So, you sought glory then in order not only to sit at Tang’s but to feel you deserved to. Denise slurped peppermint tea, made from Tang’s hot water and a tea bag she’d stashed in her jacket, while Matthew, in vegetarian solidarity with his secret captive, sipped orange juice. Lucinda, heedlessly, drank coffee. Bedwin, hot chocolate.

“I feel like we left some opportunities back there,” said Matthew.

“Those people only dug us because there are women in the band,” said Denise. “They see it as some kind of marketing hook.”

“We don’t know that for a fact,” said Matthew. “Anyway, it’s not like that with Fancher Autumnbreast. He’s got nothing to gain.”

“Anyone who likes us already likes us for the wrong reasons,” said Denise. “We’ve only ever played one set.”

“A lot can happen in one set,” said Lucinda. They fell silent in contemplation of it. The performance fizzed inside them like carbonation, the bubbles destined to unbind, bob to the surface, expire. Perhaps that was even what they’d come here for. Tang’s was a sort of detox ward, a safe zone in which the band could decant, settle back into the safety of their familiar, unfamous lives.

“We sort of got a manager tonight,” said Bedwin. He dunked a chunk of doughnut deep into his hot chocolate, displacing the liquid to the rim and nearly over.

“Maybe a name, too,” said Matthew. He’d crumbled his own doughnut to fragments and spread the fragments around his place mat, wrecking his cake like his bathroom stowaway had wrecked her salad.

“That can’t be our name,” said Lucinda, a little panicked at all she knew and couldn’t say. “It’s a song. It can’t be both a song and a band.”

“Why not?” said Bedwin.

“It’s stupid. Who does that?”

“Hey hey we’re the Monkees,” said Bedwin.

“That only proves my point.”

“Black Sabbath has a song called ‘Black Sabbath.’”

“I don’t want that to be the name.” Lucinda resisted speaking the famous phrase itself, as if to do so were to invoke the band’s occult debt. She wanted the phrase to be smothered in silence, made a footnote. Never mind that it was the title of their hit. They’d write more that were better, leave “Monster Eyes” in the dust. Only Bedwin had any reason to suspect her, but he showed no sign he recalled that the lyrics originated outside himself. Her deception was as safe with him as it would be with a cat or a dog.

Lucinda was the band’s invisible betrayer and its invisible angel at once. Ward of their innocence, she’d inserted the complainer’s language into their art like LSD slipped into a punch bowl. Now she must persuade them that the effects were natural, that though the world had transmuted around them, the hallowed unit of the band remained untouched. Lucinda would take the crime on herself. The others would never know. She only needed to control the whims of the complainer, the least controllable person she’d ever encountered.

“Are We Not Men, We Are Devo,” continued Bedwin. “‘Clash City Rockers.’ ‘Give It to the Soft Boys.’ And the Verlaines have a song whose whole chorus is just the word ‘Verlaine’ over and over again.”

“That’s enough, Bedwin,” said Denise. She placed a quarter of her doughnut onto a napkin and pushed it, like a raft with humanitarian cargo, across to Bedwin, who’d been eyeing hers after gobbling his own.

“Our manager is an armpit sniffer,” said Lucinda despondently. The four again fell silent, unsure how to encompass this remark.

“I do that,” said Bedwin eventually.

“I mean other people’s armpits,” said Lucinda.

the phone rang and Lucinda slugged to the pillow’s edge. She stretched the receiver from its cradle to her head, which was too ponderous to raise from its nest. The receiver, too, was too heavy to hold, so she rested it on her face.

“Hello?”

“You awake?” asked Matthew.

“What time is it?” She’d been fathoms deep, possibly dreaming of the complainer, but the phone’s chime had shattered any dreams, her first eyeful of daylight sweeping the remains off like motes on its beams. But it should have been the complainer calling, she felt.

“Ten,” said Matthew. “Can we talk?”

“Marsupial predicament?”

“Yes.”

“Come in half an hour.”

She allowed her eyes to sag again for what seemed an instant. When she reopened them and padded into her kitchen she found Matthew there, having used his key. Or perhaps she’d left it unlocked. He scrounged in her refrigerator, hip-deep into the appliance. She stretched her T-shirt around her knees and peered over his shoulder. He rattled at back layers of condiments, prying at shrunken fists of tinfoil, artifacts she hadn’t examined in months.

“You won’t find anything in there,” she said. “I fed it all to a fugitive yak who lives in my hamper.”

“I’m broke,” said Matthew. “Will you buy me breakfast?”

“Sure, but I have to go to the gallery. Falmouth owes me a paycheck. I’ll put pants on.”

Matthew didn’t turn to see. “If you feel like it,” he said, sucking a glob of something, peanut butter or chèvre, from his finger. “Uck.”

They took Matthew’s Mazda, with its moonroof open. A tape Lucinda had heard a hundred times before squeaked in the deck, a mix of bands from New Zealand and Australia that Matthew collected on vinyl like holy relics from another realm. Sunset Boulevard blazed, empty, rinsed in sunshine, the stray cars like bugs streaming in the footprint of a vast lifted rock.

“Where is everyone?” said Lucinda, shielding her eyes from the glare. “Is it some kind of holiday?”

“Saturday.”

“Where are all the people?”

“In bed, like you usually are.”

“Don’t you have any other music?”

“The tape’s stuck in the player.”