Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet

Lucinda recognized Falmouth’s jabber as a symptom. “You’re nervous about this interview.”

“Be dispassionate,” he said, dismissing her sympathy. “This piece needs to have a certain gloss.”

“Some men find it erotic to talk to a woman on the telephone, Falmouth. You underestimated the titillation effect. I get breathers.”

“You’re mistaken. I had titillation in mind. When you take a complaint you ought to sound like a beautiful nurse. Patient but slightly bored. As if you’re wearing a uniform that you’ll remove only after the conversation, not during. As if your real life is elsewhere.” Falmouth turned and bugged his eyes at an old woman laden with shopping bags who paused on the sidewalk, overhearing him. The woman shook her head and resumed plodding. Falmouth motioned with cupped hands, as if scooting the woman along the sidewalk by the buttocks.

“Maybe then you should have hired someone who had a real life elsewhere,” said Lucinda.

“Has it never been explained to you that self-pity undermines sarcasm? Pick one or the other, then stick with it.”

Lucinda daubed at her stained plate, scooping fallen shreds of fish and cabbage, slurping from her fingers. Falmouth sighed, radiating disappointment that Lucinda wouldn’t tangle with him.

“Falmouth, when you and I were together, were you in love with me?”

He winced. “I suppose I was. It appeared so at the time, didn’t it? Do you want a cigarette?”

“Maybe you only seemed to be in love. Suppose, appear, seem, I hate those words.”

“Why are we discussing this now?”

“Nothing, it’s just someday I want to be in love without supposing or appearing or seeming.”

“You want to be in love? Or you want somebody to be in love with you? It can’t be both, that’s like mingling self-pity and sarcasm. What’s the latest development with Matthew?”

Sunset gloom had overtaken the boulevard. Falmouth looked tired. He was anxious about the complaint piece. And older. They were all getting older.

“We’ve broken up,” Lucinda said. “I’ll see him tonight, at practice.”

“So you’re friends.”

“Matthew’s too mild to be anybody’s enemy. And we refuse to wreck the band. So instead we’re miserable.”

“Voilà. It’s love.”

“I want real true clear passion, not murk and misery.”

“You underestimate the value of your inertia and dismay.” Falmouth had been slumbering, coasting through the talk. Now his attention gelled. “Misery’s much better than happiness. It’s auspicious that you’re in a band together.”

“Just because we’re as unhappy as a great rock band doesn’t mean we don’t suck.”

“You’re being too hard on yourselves. Most great rock bands are not only unhappy, they also suck, if you listen closely enough.”

“You never knew anything about music, Falmouth.”

“No, I never did. Don’t you want a cigarette?”

the band barely fit into its rehearsal space, formerly the living room of drummer Denise Urban, now with its floor triply carpeted and bay windows draped with a bedspread to insulate the band’s sounds from irritated neighbors. Denise, muscular and nearly breastless in a scant white T-shirt, blue eyes half covered by her high hennaed bangs, balanced on a stool crammed between her kit and the French doors to her bedroom. On a couch of threadbare gingham, beneath bookshelves drooping on their brackets, sat Bedwin Greenish, the band’s lead guitarist, lyricist, and arranger. Bedwin wore plaid shirts buttoned to his throat, and cut his hair himself, with children’s scissors. He sat coiled around his black electric guitar, corduroyed legs tangled in themselves, one sneakered foot bobbing, head dipped so that his glasses neared his fingers, which spidered on the guitar’s fret-work noiselessly.

Matthew stood at the room’s center, leaning on his microphone stand with his back to the drums, acoustic guitar strapped across his shoulder but dangling untouched. Matthew knew only rudimentary chords, his strumming inessential to the band’s sound. He turned and stared unhelpfully while Lucinda, arriving last, wrestled her enormous hard case through the kitchen doorway. The room was silent enough to hear Bedwin throat-humming the notes of an imaginary solo.

“Hey,” said Lucinda.

“Hey,” said Denise.

“Um?” said Bedwin.

Matthew nodded as Lucinda fitted herself into her accustomed spot at his left elbow. A bass player’s stance, pivot between drummer and singer, the only player to absorb everyone’s reactions. She’d face Bedwin too, if he ever looked up. But it was Matthew’s presence to which she attuned now, his delicate eyes so firmly unglanced in her direction. She felt a kind of heat impression of his contour glow along the side of her body that was turned toward his.

The sensation, pleasant or unpleasant, was familiar enough to ignore. She plugged in and tuned her strings. “Somebody give me a G.”

Bedwin plucked a note, unamplified, then turned himself up and plucked it again. Denise rattled her snare warningly. Matthew coughed.

Lucinda boinged her ill-tuned string, but her ear failed her. “Sorry, another G?” Matthew and Bedwin each replied with their guitars. This time she nailed it.

“So, Bedwin’s got something new he wants to try,” said Matthew, still not looking at anyone in particular.

“Great,” said Lucinda. Bedwin himself didn’t seem to register the discussion, his glasses still magnetized to the guitar’s neck.

“Sure, but let’s do a run-through first,” said Denise. The heartbeat of their music, she was also the conscience of the band’s claim to professionalism. They hadn’t practiced in ten days. So, the four shrugged halfway through their set list: “Shitty Citizen,” “Temporary Feeling,” “The Houseguest,” and “Hell Is for Buildings.” Then worked a few times over the ending to “Canary in a Coke Machine,” struggling with the elusive full-stop timing. The band possessed these five songs, and five more. It was enough to make a set which, crisply played, lasted thirty-five minutes. A credible duration, if you relied on between-song patter and false starts, plus a break after “Sarah Valentine” and, you’d have to hope, a round of applause calling them back to the stage to finish with “Secondhand Apologies.” Credible, except the band was sick of “Crayon Fever” and “Temporary Feeling.” The oldest songs in their set, both felt embarrassing and slight. They all rooted for Bedwin to write more songs. He hadn’t in a while. Not that anyone meant to start panicking about it.

Lucinda adored thumping the fat strings of her instrument, constructing with the stretched notes a physical bridge between Denise’s peppery beat and Bedwin’s chords, a bridge across which Matthew’s voice could scurry or shamble or cavort. She felt she ought to hide her secret passion for rehearsal, the uncommon extent of pleasure she felt in simply generating the same figures over and over, those low, mumbling bass lines Bedwin had scripted with her capacities in mind. She wasn’t the fastest, but she’d been assured by better players that she possessed all anyone needed: She swung. She had feel. Lucinda took solace in these notions without comprehending them fully. Bass players were a secret guild, each abiding with the ungainly, disrespected instrument for the thankless benefit of music itself. Lucinda had read somewhere of the argument as to who derived the most pleasure from the sexual act, the male or the female. She felt certain the musical reply would be: the bass player.

Halfway through teaching the band his new song—he’d stepped to the drums and quickly set a rhythm figure for Denise to play, shown Lucinda a bass line by playing it on the upper two strings of his guitar, then strummed chords for Matthew to follow—Bedwin seemed to lapse into glazed discouragement at his spot on the gingham cushions. The song was sprightly and appealing, its changes easy to remember and play, and the band cycled through several choruses hopefully, waiting for Bedwin to further enlighten them. But rather than suppling lead lines on his guitar or offering Matthew a lyric, he fell to silence, then issued a faint moan. The players ground to an incongruent halt.