Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“Exactly.”

Lucinda felt vertigo watching Carl and Denise’s jesting struggle. She wished to brush away their banter, wave it off like smoke. Was the complainer moving nearer to Lucinda, or farther away? It seemed both at once. She wanted him to want her body, not her band. She wished to be swallowed, laid open with her robe undone across a dirty yellow chair. But his appetite seemed to be drifting. There was confusion here too, since the image of the dirty yellow chair came from a song, though not originally. That was the problem: Carlton’s claim on the band was perversely justified, and impossible to disentangle. The more Denise denied him that claim the further he inched in, an intrusion that would have seemed impossible an hour earlier.

“Nobody takes Matthew seriously,” said Lucinda. “Last week at the supermarket I saw a woman watching him like he was an ocelot on a nature show, like she wanted to go to the pet store and buy one for herself. It’s not so easy being a human bumper sticker.”

“Sad,” said Carl.

“It is sad. The whole band relies on his charisma. We’re exploiting him. I think he senses it.”

“There’s nothing sadder than being a genius of sex,” said the complainer. “Evoking nothing but pleasure in the eyes of others.”

“I never thought of it that way,” said Denise. “It’s sort of an involuntary condition.”

“In another age people like him became priests or nuns,” said Lucinda dreamily.

“Let’s go out and beat up some unattractive people,” said Carl.

Lucinda and Denise stared at him. He raised his hands as if at gunpoint. “Though arguably that would be taking things too far.”

Denise sprang from her chair, fitful. “Matthew’s not the problem,” she said. She seemed to be carrying on some internal dialogue. “Matthew can take care of himself.” She began to pace, stalking the perimeter of their chairs like the zoo’s coyote working its cage’s limits. “I’m thinking of Bedwin now.”

“Bedwin?”

“Yes, he’d have to be treated gently. The band is his whole planet, he doesn’t know anything else.”

Carl shrugged. “So his planet just got a little more—various.”

“You don’t know him,” said Lucinda. “All he does is watch the same black-and-white movie over and over and write songs.”

“He could take the fact that he collaborated unknowingly with someone like you very badly,” said Denise. She hung on the rim of darkness, her features shrouded, as though playing to an unseen crowd. Her words seemed to take it for granted that the three of them all dwelled within some common understanding or intention.

“Who does he think wrote the lyrics?” said Carl.

“If I understand Bedwin, he doesn’t think about it. He might not even remember which ones are his and which Lucinda brought to him.”

“Sounds fine to me,” said Carlton. “Why not just leave it at that?”

“What do you mean?”

“When somebody’s living in a delusory world, it isn’t necessarily your job to pull them out of it. Not unless you’ve got a better one to offer in its place.”

“You mean a better delusion?” said Lucinda.

Carl shrugged, as if to say, What else? “What needs saying? Doesn’t he trust the two of you?”

“Of course.”

“So what do you say we just leave it up to us?”

Denise strolled the shadow boundary, no longer agitated. She glanced at Lucinda, perhaps seeking a sign. Lucinda and the complainer sat in a triangle with Denise’s vacated chair, under lights still wreathed in smoke. Lucinda had abandoned her sneakers on the floor and raised her socked feet to the chair’s lip, hugging her knees to her breasts. Carlton sprawled in the abdicated space between them, his thighs spread wide, one foot upright and the other limply horizontal, between Lucinda’s empty sneakers, his posture grotesquely unashamed and inviting. His shirt was misbuttoned, skewed, riding up to expose a river of hair. Carl was pubic all the way to his neck.

The complainer had plopped himself in the middle of her life and band. Perhaps it was Falmouth’s fault. Carl had found his way to her ear, like a hummingbird pollinating a flower, solely due to Falmouth’s foolish project. The interns had planted stickers and had drawn the attention of an author of stickers, like calling to like, a coyote’s howl across canyons. Perhaps Carlton’s entry into the band should be seen in this light, as Falmouth’s latest art piece, committed unconsciously. Lucinda felt a clandestine devotion to Falmouth, whose imagination embraced more than he knew. But Falmouth was in her past, as was Matthew. Beautiful fallen displaced Matthew.

She could choose who to fuck. Her own words. And she had. She felt her choice in a place in her throat, a hollow pressurized walnut she couldn’t gulp away. She knew it at the juncture where her crossed heels sought the seam of her jeans, where she’d begun to sway and mash against herself, to covertly masturbate, just a little. The room seemed to tilt, to urge her forward in her chair. She stared at Carl. Carlton Complainer. To choose who to fuck is to choose who gets to fuck you. But not how. That was for them to know and you to find out. Lucinda was ready for Denise to leave now. She uncoiled from her chair and moved across to slide into Carl’s lap, made herself small enough to occupy him like a landscape. He grasped her hip and cinched her nearer to him. Kissed her hair, as she squirreled at his neck. A long moment elapsed, one that might have been five or twenty minutes. She sensed dimly Denise waving a silent goodbye, somewhere out of the range where anything much mattered. Then heard a click as the distant gallery door was shut against an instant’s susurrus of wheels tracing Sunset’s blacktop.

“I want a drink,” she said, even as she struggled at the buttons of his fly, trying to free him from his jeans.

“Let’s get you one.”

“I don’t even know your last name,” she said.

“Vogelsong.”

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“I don’t like it. It doesn’t sound like you.” With the native urgency of a child squatting to urinate on a highway shoulder she bunched her pants and underwear at her thighs, then lowered herself like a mouth. He hardened within her. She grunted, shuddering high in her gullet, lengthening her back, arraying herself like a question mark above him, a long doubting curl culminating in one irrefutable point.

“I can’t help it,” he sighed. “It’s my name.”

“Vocalsong, what’s that, it’s like Wetwater or Flavortaste or something—”

“It’s German,” he said. “Vogel means bird.” The complainer’s nostrils widened, the only evidence he was more than a venue for Lucinda’s tremors.

“Birdsong?”

“Song isn’t song. It comes from Vogelfang. It means fowling.”

It was a while before she could produce her question. “Fowling?”

“Catching fowls.”

“You mean hunting,” she said. “Catching their hearts with bullets.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Carlton Birdkiller.” She slid from him now, between his legs, to the floor. She’d orgasmed, he hadn’t.

“Carl,” he corrected.

“Carl Birdkiller.”

He rebuttoned himself. “You want to get a drink?”

“Yes, please.”

the band shed their instruments in their accustomed places, scattered across the vast Persian carpet at the west-facing windows of Carl Vogelsong’s thirtieth-story Olive Street condominium, a loft as high-placed above its surroundings as Jules Harvey’s, though otherwise its opposite. Harvey dwelled in a spartan corner, leaving the rest of his space as a tabula rasa for the enactment of public schemes, whereas the complainer spread his living space to every corner, saturating the cavernous room with antique furniture, lead-glass floor lamps and glass-paneled bookshelves, local arrangements of love seats and divans suggesting rooms without walls. His bed was partitioned from the wider space by a floor-brushing green velvet curtain on a polished wooden rail, and his lavish kitchen was formed of an archipelago of countertops and appliances around a monolithic six-burner range, a kind of theater-in-the-round in the loft’s middle. The complainer had hired a moving van and crew to shift the band’s equipment into the loft, having first cleared the blood-and-rust-colored carpet, itself the size of Denise’s whole living room, as a practice space.