Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

The complainer, exempt, jabbered. “Do you know why people fall out of love in small apartments?” he said, apropos of nothing. “Because they can’t gaze at each other over a large enough distance. You need to be able to watch the other person as if you weren’t there to be seen yourself, like sighting a creature in the forest.”

“Who did you fall out of love with in a small apartment?” Lucinda asked. She felt as though Carl spooled from her, an astronaut outside the space station, drifting on his tether.

“Nobody. I mean, lots of people. When I was married I lived in a basement apartment in San Francisco.”

“You were married?” said Denise.

“About a million years ago. Another era, like prehistory. The Susan Ming Dynasty.”

Matthew and Bedwin went on plinking at their instruments, testing microphone levels for the engineer on the far side of the glass, a blasé goth girl with lank black hair and a nocturnally pale complexion, a silver ring piercing one eyebrow. Her own mike channel bled into their booth, ceaseless incomprehensible staticky asides directed to unseen others.

“Was your wife’s name Susan Ming?” Lucinda whispered to the complainer. Before he could answer they were overwhelmed by Fancher Autumnbreast’s looming passage into the booth. Autumnbreast squinted his mournful brow as if across some great distance, though the tiny booth barely contained him and the band. Despite the tracksuit he gave off traces of patchouli and clove, redolent smoke. Shaking his leonine head and showing the slightest of smiles he embraced Matthew. Then he reached for Lucinda, kissing each cheek and tipping her elegantly, fingertips at the small of her back, like a Flamenco dancer. Bedwin he chucked under the chin. Bedwin blushed. Autumnbreast then blew a kiss to Denise, his gesture fulsome. The four quivered slightly, puppyish under his hand.

“Oh, you dizzy kids.” He squinted one eye, a wink stilled to a sardonic frieze. The band waited, enspelled. Finally Autumnbreast lifted his chin at the complainer, who stood grinning at his keyboard. “Who he?” he asked Matthew.

“New band member,” said the complainer, sticking out his hand. “Carl’s the name.”

Autumnbreast squinted more deeply, suggesting the complainer was difficult to make out, a form vanishing in wavering heat lines on far asphalt. “Hmmm,” he said.

“Yes?” said the complainer.

“Fifth Beatle,” said Autumnbreast.

“Ten minutes,” warned the buzzing voice of the engineer. Lucinda looked up to discover Jules Harvey standing at the glass, slightly behind the goth girl at her board, peering in at them pleasantly from beneath his baseball cap. Who’d notified him of their appointment here? Not Denise, surely. Perhaps Matthew or Bedwin had fallen under his bland spell. Or Fancher Autumnbreast might have been plugging their appearance in advance, so Harvey might have heard it on the radio.

Autumnbreast widened his hands. “Everybody beautiful?”

They gawped, perplexed.

“You’re miked?”

“They’re miked,” the engineer cut in.

“Then you’re beautiful,” said Autumnbreast, as though knighting them with the scepter of his esteem. “Except you, Beatle. What do you do?”

“Play this keyboard, sir.”

“Sing?”

“I do, sir.”

Autumnbreast shook his head, sighed, furrowed, pursed. “Goof.”

“Sorry?”

“You heard me, Beatle.” Autumnbreast repeated the word silently, as in a game of charades, pointing from himself to the complainer.

“I think I understand,” said Carl.

“Doctor, heal thyself,” said Autumnbreast.

“Seven minutes,” said the engineer.

“Are we being interviewed?” interrupted Denise, speaking in her confusion for the whole band. “Or just playing the song?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, yes what?”

“This gig’s easy, pumpkin. I tickle you, and you laugh.”

“Excuse me?”

“Be organic,” said Autumnbreast, pained to explain.

“Just speak into your mikes,” explained the engineer. “Try not to pop your plosives or say fuck or shit. I probably ought to get a quick sound check to balance the instruments, Mr. Autumnbreast.” Other figures now joined the engineer behind the glass, fitting themselves along the wall on either side of Jules Harvey: Rhodes Bramlett of Considerable Records, and Mick Felsh in his cowboy shirt. Bramlett and Felsh offered small gesticulations and nods of encouragement to the band once they were spotted, as if to say, Don’t mind us .

The complainer raised his hand. “Sir?”

“Yes, Beatle?”

“Our guitarist needs a chair.”

“Chair.”

Bedwin nodded shamefully.

“And,” the complainer went on, “I think I’d prefer to lie on the floor.”

“Are you sick?” asked Denise.

“No, it’s for the song. Can we put the microphone on the floor?”

“You want to sing on the floor?” said Matthew.

“I need to sing on the floor, yes.”

“You won’t be able to play the keyboard,” said Denise.

“You don’t need me on keyboard.”

No one could argue that point.

“I need to be on the floor to get the right emotion. I’ve just had a realization, that I wasn’t giving the band my all. Art requires sacrifice, even of one’s dignity.”

Lucinda loved most of all his careening integrity to his impulses, even if he might seem to be careening away from her. She would have played her bass on the floor if only to be beside him. But even if it was possible, there wasn’t room.

“Six minutes,” said the engineer. “I better get a sound check.”

Everyone waited for Autumnbreast, who said at last, “Mike Beatle on the floor, Morsel.”

“Thank you,” said Carl. “And a chair for Bedwin.”

“And a chair.”

The engineer Autumnbreast had called Morsel tramped from behind her instrument panel, through the rubber-sealed doors, which opened with a sound like a sneeze, and into the sound booth. She rearranged the complainer’s mike stand, loosening the hinge and capsizing the microphone so it hovered a few inches from the carpet. She was pure efficiency, a human clock ticking toward their on-air deadline. The band could only watch, reduced to an autistic helplessness. Fancher Autumnbreast sat cross-legged against the lip of the booth’s window, his back to Harvey, Bramlett, and Felsh, bridging his forehead with his fingers, radiating philosophical detachment from all present events.

“Try this,” said Morsel.

The complainer threaded his sneakered feet through Denise’s kit, laid his right arm under Lucinda’s mike stand, and settled his bulk across the cables that ribboned the carpet. Jules Harvey tapped on the window of the glass booth and mouthed inaudible suggestions. Rhodes Bramlett came through the door with a folding chair, which Matthew passed to Bedwin, who settled on it like a dog for a nap, tucking one foot under his thigh, curling the other into the chair’s struts and himself around his guitar. Bramlett didn’t depart, but instead squatted low against the wall, hiding behind Matthew. He raised a finger to his lips, pleading with the band not to finger him to Autumnbreast, who hadn’t seemed to register the A&R man’s intrusion. Mick Felsh, on the other side, looked perturbed that Bramlett had achieved this coup. He leaned in to whisper to Harvey, who remained serene.

Morsel scurried past Autumnbreast, through the sound-sealed door, and reseated at her control panel. Autumnbreast, like a human buttress, revealed no trace of urgency. His wide hand now fully masked his face, thumb and fingertips over his eyes, Hamlet with a headache.

“Three minutes,” said Morsel on the PA. “Everybody want to give me a little something? First, uh, the person on the floor.”