Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

By evening the carpenters were gone. Falmouth’s interns wandered like cats in the lengthening shadows, cradling their phones. But by seven the calls had begun to trail away. The interns yawned, asked to be excused, delivered a round of hugs, vanished. Falmouth rinsed their chopsticks and he and Lucinda set into the cold ruin of takeout, prawns and snow peas sunk in an aspic of cornstarch and vinegar.

“I guess I need a job,” said Lucinda.

“Or a number-one record.”

“I need to pay the rent in two weeks. I may have to go back to the factory where they assemble cappuccinos.”

“Stay on the payroll. You can write my grant proposals.”

“What are you doing next?”

“Our official line will be nothing.”

A neatly zipped black leather portfolio leaned against Falmouth’s desk. He bore as well a telltale smudge of graphite on the heel of his right hand. Crumbs of pink eraser decorated his lap. He’d been drawing again. She didn’t confront him.

“Why can’t you say you’re doing nothing yourself?” she said.

“It’s better if I pay you to say it.”

They pushed the meal into the garbage. Falmouth moved to the master panel to switch off the overhead lights, but Lucinda said, “I think I’ll stay a bit longer.”

Falmouth raised his eyebrows.

“They’ll start ringing again around nine,” she said. “They always do.”

“I was afraid someone would get sentimental,” he said. “I didn’t realize it would be you. I asked the phone company to cancel the number. It should be cut off shortly after midnight.”

He left her alone there. The institute was an ember flaring on the brink of ash. Falmouth was right. Lucinda stayed for more than just the hope of the complainer’s call. She was a secret curator now. When they rang she answered in the old way. Let them think nothing had changed, until it was too late. She was Florence Nightingale, or a nun among the lepers. A man told her he’d suffered a paper cut on his testicle. Another said his nephew had stolen his collection of vintage lobby cards. A woman or possibly a child made a sound like a rabbit gnawing a carrot.

She thought about dialing the complainer’s number and didn’t.

The sixth or seventh caller was Denise. “There you are,” said the drummer. “Let’s go out.”

“I’m sort of on a vigil. A person might phone me here.”

“The one from the other night?”

“Yes.” They both knew who they were talking about. “Maybe you could come here.”

“You want something to drink?”

“Maybe pick up a six.”

“A six it is.”

“And hey, Denise?”

“Yes?”

“Who cut your hair?”

“I did it myself.”

“A six and scissors.”

he walked into the storefront, an hour after Denise. They’d forgotten to lock the door, and sat deep in the gallery’s rear, ignoring the line’s sporadic ringing. Lucinda sat encircled by her former hair, which lay in a pattern suggesting a controlled explosion. She’d removed her shoes and shirt, wore above her jeans only a pale blue brassiere, its surface furred with a hectic chiaroscuro of hair, as were her neck and shoulders and the knees of her jeans. Denise maypoled around Lucinda in her chair, a bottle in one hand, shears in the other, squinting and burping, making hedging adjustments to her initial ferocious attack. They had no mirror.

The complainer appeared in their ring of light and Lucinda’s hands flew up to feel the spiky new contours of her head. There was an obscure shame in his seeing the haircut sooner than her. A trickling of hair rained from her lifted arms into the hoisted cleft of her breasts, making her feel even more unhidden. Not that there was any privilege he hadn’t already claimed, or she hadn’t offered gladly. He smiled and scratched his jaw and she was struck again by the slightly penisy glamour of his cleft chin and nose, his sculpted lips, his baggy eyes. His hand slid to his stomach, to stuff his flopped shirttails into his belt, as though unconsciously feeling he ought to make some effort, having intruded on a scene of grooming.

“You’re the drummer,” he said.

“Denise.”

“Carl. Nice to meet you.”

“You were at the show.”

“Oh, yes,” he said shyly. “It was sensational.”

“Thank you.”

“Want a beer?” said Lucinda.

“Sure, thanks.”

Lucinda handed a bottle to the complainer from the six beneath her chair, then twisted the cap off a fresh one for herself. Clipped ends floated as she moved, as though she dwelled in a snow globe of hair.

Denise found a push broom and plowed clippings into an ersatz animal behind Lucinda’s chair. Lucinda darted up and brushed herself against the complainer, parted lips raking his collar, then turned, huddling in her goose-pimpled arms, to fetch her shirt.

“Don’t stop on my account,” said the complainer, taking a long pull on his beer. “I’ll just sit and watch.”

“It doesn’t look finished?” Lucinda slid her T-shirt and sweater, still balled together, over her head, scattering more hair.

“I’m no judge. It seems you’re after a hairstyle that complements the band’s sound, something wild and natural, like a flock of hedgehogs. Are you going to confront the singer, though? Because now he’s the only one with girlish hair.”

“Matthew.”

“And the person on the stool is Bedwin, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll play keyboards, I guess.”

Lucinda put her finger to her lips, though she felt a thrill at the image, Carl’s big shoulders hunched over a Farfisa organ, jostling onstage somewhere between Bedwin’s stool and Denise’s kit.

“I feel like you’re Lucinda’s imaginary friend,” said Denise, not seeming to have noticed his remark. “Like I’m not really supposed to be able to see you.”

Lucinda widened her eyes at Carl: I haven’t told our secret, she beamed into his thoughts. He couldn’t reasonably be angry that Denise had noticed their embrace at Jules Harvey’s loft. Lucinda realized she wanted Denise to know.

The complainer seemed not to register Lucinda’s alarm. He drew a chair from the gallery’s darkened corner, into their pool of light, and seated himself. “I’d make some joke about how difficult it is for us imaginary friends,” he said. “The constant struggle to remain visible, etcetera. But the truth is I think it’s you guys, the band, I mean, who are figments of my imagination.”

Lucinda vibrated, hearing his voice, seeing him here again before her, real. Since the night of the gig and their parting she’d binged on drink and crabs, talked on telephones and operated heavy machinery, even sort of kissed someone else, two someone elses. Swimming in her desultory bedsheets Sunday morning she’d masturbated three times, the last humping the ridge of a throw pillow. Yet it all seemed less than a parenthesis now, events not even so vivid as dreams, more like tableaux glimpsed on a television playing in the background somewhere, one no one had thought to switch off.

“How are we figments of your imagination?” said Denise. She inspected him defiantly, wary of sarcasm. She’d pulled up a rolling office chair and plopped down, stretching her legs between Carl and Lucinda as if to assert that she wouldn’t be reduced to third-wheel status.

The complainer emptied his beer with a satisfied gasp, put the bottle aside. “Just a minute,” he said, and drew a matchbox from his shirt pocket. He slid open its drawer to produce a tightly rolled joint, then struck a match to spark its tip. “Here’s the thing,” he said, through his first whalelike indraft and burst of exhaled fume. “I spent the last few days thinking about this. It really knocked me for a loop at first. You singing my songs, I mean.”