Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

In the past weeks the band had clocked their rehearsals to the sunset’s glow, as if claiming the power to orchestrate the melting of the continent’s last light into the far-twinkling surf. Then, usually, the complainer would order in Vietnamese or Sushi takeout, lemongrass chicken or Ventura hand rolls. The band would unpack white folded paper boxes across his oak table, a four-leaf large enough to bear piles of books and scatterings of ashtrays full of joint butts and a corral of the previous night’s wine-stained glasses at one end and still invitingly seat five or six at the other. Tonight, however, the table had been cleared, a starched cloth thrown over it, the complainer’s best china and crystal set out. While they practiced, Falmouth had been cooking, boiling down onions and garlic and pork sausages in a tremendous black skillet, brewing what he called his legendary sauce.

Falmouth had become domesticated to the band. Summer break had freed him from his teaching. With no students to impress he’d slacked in both conceptual edge and dress code, though his white T-shirts were uniformly crisp and bright, as if pulled from a dispenser like tissues. Since the disbanding of the complaint center his gallery remained barren. He’d done nothing but scribble in enormous spiral-bound pads with crayon or ballpoint, whatever lay at hand. A fly-on-the-wall at rehearsals, he’d by now produced dozens of sketches of the five working at their music, a pile of pages he shucked from his book as they were done, offering them to the band or letting them fall at his feet. Someone—Bedwin? Denise?—had draped the discarded pages in a stack on the glass top of one of the complainer’s several pinball machines, where they formed a loose dossier of the band’s incorporation of Carl and his small, upright organ into their company.

Carlton stood, as in Lucinda’s vision, between Bedwin, who still played seated, now in a salvaged barber’s chair, and Denise’s drums. He and Lucinda shared a mike stand. The band had slackened, made room, inching to the edges of the Persian. The complainer’s noodly organ riffs and atonal backing vocals found a place too, in a middle of their sound the band might not otherwise have known existed. Like a checker cab with an extra seat, they could carry him. When they played “Monster Eyes,” the song that was their signature, their credential, Carl shouted his backing vocals, and played his wonky organ fills in the manner of free jazz. The band’s response was to play louder and more careeningly, raising their energy to meet and contend with his. Matthew sang with daredevil brilliance, as though shrugging off a challenge he’d never acknowledge. The song grew resolute, intractable, like some enormous watch spring that gained force the more tightly it was wound.

Now, rehearsal concluded, they drifted from the carpet toward the table. Falmouth had set out a monumental steaming bowl of bare cooked spaghetti, a quarter-stick of butter melting at its peak. The complainer hoisted bottles of wine from a rack and clapped them on the table. Matthew set to grating a brick of cheese Falmouth had thrust into his hands. Glistening blobs of tomato spattered the stove in a halo at the burner where the sauce had simmered, its savor investing through the loft. Falmouth’s T-shirt was somehow spotless. Carl jerked the cork from a bottle while Falmouth elbowed past him, hands in oven mitts, to plunk the skillet between the candleholders. Matches were struck and touched to wicks, goblets splashed full, sauce ladled, Parmesan strewn to form a gooey lattice over oil-shiny plates of red-heaped noodles. Talk lulled as eating began, verbal noise replaced by a music of smacking lips, glasses clinked to teeth, the suck of spaghetti stretched by forks from pools of viscosity.

“There’s both sweet and hot sausages,” Falmouth lectured. “Though by now the peppered oil from the hot will have informed the entire base of the sauce. The secret ingredient is heaping spoonfuls of white sugar, more than you’d want to know about. Watch out for bay leaves, they’re as sharp as shark’s teeth. You’ve got one there, Bedwin.”

“Put it here,” said Denise, indicating an empty ashtray. Bedwin plucked the gleaming black leaf from the bird’s nest of his pasta and held it aloft in sauce-shrouded fingers.

“All the best meals require an elephant’s graveyard,” said Falmouth. “Piles of shells or pits or bones. Bay leaves are like a small piece of corruption in our food, like the element of a skull in certain early Renaissance marriage paintings.”

“You’d certainly never find one in a can of Chef Boyardee,” said Denise.

“A bay leaf, or a skull?” said Lucinda.

“Either.”

“Listen, we should have a toast,” said Matthew. “It’s our last rehearsal before we go on the radio. And Falmouth cooked.”

“Stop eating for a minute, you greedy pigs,” said Falmouth. “I propose a toast to ‘Monster Eyes,’ that awful song by that awful band.”

“No, no,” said Matthew. “To you, Falmouth. For this meal. For being our manager and spaghetti cooker.”

“I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not your manager. You need a proper advocate, someone who can tolerate your music.”

“To Falmouth and to ‘Monster Eyes’ and to Bedwin, our secret genius,” said Denise. “He who makes it all happen.”

“Yes, to Bedwin,” said Matthew. “For putting words in my mouth. May you never go solo, god help us.”

“I can’t sing,” said Bedwin, as if he really needed to reassure them.

Lucinda, wineglass lofted, suffered a stirring of resentment. Hadn’t she supplied the words to ‘Monster Eyes’ before their eyes? Had they suppressed all memory of the fateful rehearsal? Theirs was a band whose secret genius had a secret genius, a conspiracy huddled around a confusion. “Another toast,” she blurted. “From Carl, our newest member.”

The complainer was bent to his fork, connected by noodles to both teeth and plate. He ate streamingly, employing circular breathing like a horn player. Gulping, he made his eyes wide to show his willingness to speak once he’d choked down the mouthful. Matthew took up the second bottle and replenished their glasses.

“Okay, a toast,” said the complainer. He stood and licked his thumb. “I like Falmouth’s idea. To the stone in the cherry, the jellyfish in the lagoon, the loser among winners, the figure in the carpet, the crack in the Liberty Bell.” He cleared his throat. They waited, glasses poised, uncertain he was finished. Except for Matthew, who went on eating, pointedly ignoring him. “To the tiny mouse’s skull in the can of Chef Boyardee,” he went on, “the one which results in a settlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“Those aren’t really all the same thing,” said Denise.

“The jellyfish in the lagoon should be a song,” said Bedwin.

“Get to work on that, you genius,” muttered Matthew.

“More,” said Lucinda, raptly.

“To the shark’s tooth, the mouse’s skull, the sour note, the sour mash, the mash note, the sour grapes, the souring of an old friendship,” said the complainer. “To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions. To bad sex.”

“Watch yourself,” said Falmouth. “Some of us haven’t had bad sex in so long we forgot that it was bad.”

“To forgetting it was bad,” said the complainer, gulping back another mouthful of wine. “To telephoning an old lover and pretending to forget it was bad, to falling back into bed when you know you shouldn’t, to sucking the dregs.”

“You mean like a cup of coffee?”

“Exactly. The dregs of a relationship, like the dregs in a cup of coffee. To the greed of a coffee drinker for one last sip, when all that remains is a bitter sludge.”