Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“Not the song.”

“Not the song.”

“Thank you.”

“Good luck.”

Matthew walked Lucinda out. Denise and Bedwin were already gone. Lucinda’s car was where she’d left it, but Carl had her key. They abandoned it, rode in an elevator to the top of a parking garage to Matthew’s Mazda and loaded Lucinda’s bass into the backseat. He turned the key in the ignition, then stopped, staring across the roof at a tall figure folding his legs into a small sports car.

They walked over. Fancher Autumnbreast seemed to wait for them. There was no companion animal in the car, a canvas-topped convertible Porsche with a leather brassiere cupping its headlamps.

“Pretty,” said Autumnbreast, once Lucinda and Matthew stood at his driver’s window. His expression was fond and wounded, resigned as if to inevitable historical forces, famine, genocide, tyranny.

“Sorry?”

“You’re pretty.”

“We wanted to apologize.”

Autumnbreast lifted his hands from the wheel, shut his eyes.

“Will you have us back on the show?”

Autumnbreast blinked, tried to find words. “Who?”

“Us. Monster Eyes.”

Autumnbreast smiled forgivingly.

“What you saw in us before, it can’t be completely gone,” said Matthew.

Autumnbreast raised a fist as though in solidarity, curled it to his own lips, and kissed each of his four knuckles, his eyes again gently lidded.

“Are you saying it’s gone?” demanded Lucinda.

Autumnbreast sighed, seeming to wish they could interpret his gnomic gesture and spare themselves the squalor of mere language. Seeing their wide waiting eyes, he spoke.

“It’s so gone, buttermilk, it’s like it was never there.”

she only understood that she’d fallen asleep and where when his telephone rang, a whirr or chortle you’d produce by great effort with a hand-cranked eggbeater. She opened her eyes. Orange zones of lamplight glowed throughout the loft, the kitchen counters lit like a derrick at sea. The bed too glowed within its green curtain, another outpost she must have lit during her initial circuit, an attempt to lure him back by bringing his apartment to life. The turntable’s needle crackled, endlessly rein-scribing the loose spiral between an LP’s final song and its label, a subliminal noise mimicking a cricket’s call. Matthew had dropped Lucinda here hours ago. Her car was still in Culver City unless the complainer had returned there with her key to drive it.

In an ALL THINKING IS WISHFUL T-shirt and holey underwear she sprawled in a large paisley chair, her bare knees cradling a two-thirds empty bottle of scotch. Her mouth tasted of drink. She scratched her calf where it had wrinkled hotly against the chair’s arm. Two of her fingers were stuck together.

She’d meant to masturbate, was pretty certain she’d failed.

The black laminate telephone gargled a second time, reposing its problem.

Lucinda gaped at it stupidly. Really, the holes were so small she doubted the complainer’s clubby fingers could fit in them. But she was being confused: you could answer a telephone you never dialed. Not that she’d ever seen him do either. But it might be him calling. He might know she’d come here and be cuddling this bottle with her thighs in a chair, curled beside the telephone as if she was seeking its warmth.

The phone seemed to take months between rings, allowing agonies of indecision, and now she was sure it had stopped. But no, it rang again. She worked to remoisten a snoring tongue dried to clay against back molars.

“Hello?” The receiver was a carpenter’s C-clamp she pressed to one side of her face. She gripped her right wrist with her left hand for support.

“Uh, hello,” said a young woman’s voice. “Is Carl there?”

“No.”

“Oh, okay.”

“He’ll be right back. I can take a message.”

“Oh, thanks, I’ll call another time.”

“Do you have a yellow chair?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is your name Susan Ming?”

The caller hung up.

she woke desperate to pee at six when the uncovered window flooded the complainer’s loft with sky, the lamps still lit, Lucinda still in her chair, the bottle drained. She showered and left her damp towels where they fell, dressed in the previous day’s clothes, then burned herself trying to operate his espresso machine, her sole former art now eluding her. She settled instead for a remedial beer, the chill bottle relief for her scorched thumb. In shame she called no one for a lift, paid a cab instead to take her to Culver City to rendezvous with a locksmith at her parked car. It was barely eight in the morning, the streets brightly vacant.

“What happened to your car?” asked the locksmith, nodding at the crinkled bumper, still fresh enough to raise notice, the metal raw where the paint had crackled.

“It bumped into something,” said Lucinda.

Her Datsun recaptured, she piloted home. The car limped, as though it had accommodated to the complainer’s mass, his breakneck lefts full of body English and swearing. She parked and slugged to the door of her scorned apartment, exhausted in nine a.m. sunlight. Unlike the car, Lucinda’s rooms weren’t marked by the complainer’s use, his cavalier hands, but instead by her own neglect, a habitat she’d molted like a shell. She crept in, averting her gaze from the slaw of mail beneath the door slot and the answering machine’s blinking message counter. She avoided any glimpse of the foot sign, too, uninterested in its smug fateful knowledge. What she wanted was to hear the complainer coming again, overspilling himself against her breasts, mumbling his gratitude, moving southward to finish her. She slid between her old bed’s stale crumby layers and dozed in melancholy.

she kept herself from returning to Olive Street until after dark, just, though she dialed his number a half-dozen times waiting. The foot sign, when she at last glanced, was out of order, its fuse blown or gears jammed. Her view was of its stilled edge bisecting the pale wash of dusk above Sunset, no foot to be seen, sick or healthy. She called the clinic to complain, but the foot doctors weren’t picking up the phone either. Los Angeles was the largest inhabited abandoned city on earth.

She drove back under a spell of apprehension. It was as if she and the band had fallen into a void, dead air, somewhere between the last digits of Morsel’s countdown and the zero of their own thwarted possibilities. As for Carl, Lucinda only wanted him back, wanted once more to be tickled and fooled and swallowed, be made undisappointed and whole. Nothing more. She examined the bumpers of neighboring cars for his slogans, the words he’d moaned in her ear and hidden in plain view throughout the world, but couldn’t find any.

She discovered him there behind the green curtain, packing a black leather case that sat open on his bed. Toothbrush and underwear, nothing else, gear for an astronaut’s departure, or a child’s sleepover. He rolled his shaggy head at the sound of her entrance. The lamps she’d lit still blazed. Her damp towels still lay crumpled like tribute at his feet. Yet nothing in the loft belonged to her, unless it was the pile of Falmouth’s drawings of the band, drooping ignored over the hood of the pinball machine in the distant corner. The drawings spoke of her life before this disaster, far from this place.

“Where are you going?”

“I’d like to avoid feeling guilty if that’s at all possible.”

“You don’t need to feel guilty, just explain.”

“There’s someone else.”

“I saw.” The truth fell on her like injurious rain: she already knew.

“Yes,” he agreed. “You were there when it happened.”