Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“Did you and Dr. Marian know each other from before?”

“No. I’ve never met anyone like her.”

“That’s beautiful,” said Lucinda, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice.

“You can stay here if you want,” he said. He struggled to zipper the tiny case with his mittenlike hands. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but in the meantime I’d be thrilled if you and the band made use of the place.”

“You don’t want to be in the band anymore?”

“Marian thinks I should simplify. Anyway, I really wasn’t helping things, was I?”

“I thought you were proud of the songs.” Lucinda knew she’d begun sulking.

“The songs are great. But it’s just not really my kind of thing, trying to be liked. For instance, I really screwed up the radio show.”

Lucinda astonished herself by saying, “I thought it went okay.”

“You’re being kind.”

“I was here before,” she said. “I answered the telephone, I hope that’s okay. I have a message for you.”

“Yes?”

“Susan Ming called.”

“Who’s Susan Ming?”

Lucinda felt in a panic that she’d had nothing to drink, was hopelessly sober. The world, unenlivened by alcohol or music or sex, was tinny, pallid, unwound. She felt starved for the complainer’s talk, his language that once seemed capable of saying anything and now appeared capable of saying nothing. No language could tell what she knew at this moment: that she’d loved the complainer more than she’d ever managed to say.

“I must have gotten the name wrong,” she said at last.

“Or it was a wrong number,” he said helpfully.

“There’s something you said before,” she began, wanting to break through to him, to remind him of their language. “That a genius of sex was a terrible thing to be—”

“To only be,” he corrected. “Anyway, I think I called it sad, not terrible, although that would probably make a better lyric in a song.”

“Please be serious with me,” she cried.

He opened his palms. “This part of my life isn’t serious.”

“Which part is?”

“There is no other part.”

She fled.

matthew wasn’t home. It was too late for the zoo, but without the kangaroo pinning him to his apartment he was freed to his nightclub crawling, his life full of bands he was shocked Lucinda had never heard of. She drove to Denise’s apartment, knocked. Nothing. The windows were dark. She tried No Shame, feeling sordid and guilty among the evening clientele, the couples browsing videos. Denise wasn’t at the counter. Lucinda asked the clerk, who said Denise wasn’t on again until tomorrow. Then mentioned he’d seen the show at Jules Harvey’s loft. How he’d loved it, especially that one song.

Were Matthew and Denise together? Possibly the whole band was together, apart from her. She’d let the universe slide into ruin while she frolicked with the complainer, and now anything was possible, even likely. She drove to Falmouth’s gallery, but the doors were locked, the window dark. Cars whistled past on Sunset, Saturday night under way.

Lucinda hadn’t visited Falmouth at home for years. She barely recalled where he lived. She couldn’t ambush him there now in desperation. He might mock her distress. Or worse, be sincere, and sketch her. It was the band she needed. Monster Eyes, the dreamers, the fools, her only friends.

she appeared at Bedwin’s cottage door without offering this time, no pizza, no yellow pages of cribbed lyrics, only a bottle of scotch as good as that she’d drained at the complainer’s, acquired at the Pink Elephant in defiant nostalgia. She cracked the seal on the bottle at the curb in front of Bedwin’s steps and slugged a shot straight from its lip. Bedwin was home, of course. He opened the door to his converted garage, his secret grotto, in a T-shirt, blue-piped at neck and biceps, with the words BIG STAR emblazoned on his sweet puny chest.

“What are you doing?” Lucinda demanded, before he could ask it of her.

“Just watching a movie,” Bedwin said helplessly, as though he knew it was an indefensible reply.

“That’s funny because it’s the same thing you were doing the last time I visited you, remember? When I came with the lyrics?”

“Sure, Lucinda, I remember.”

“You’re not watching the same movie, are you?” She peered past Bedwin’s shoulder at the screen, winking like an electric eye from his cavern of stuff. On it, a jocular engineer beckoned from the narrow window of a massive locomotive. “Something about choo-choos?”

“ Human Desire , by Fritz Lang.”

“The one you’ve watched, like, a hundred times.”

“Not a hundred, but yes, that’s right.”

“Can I come in?”

“Do you have more lyrics?” His tone was flat, eerie, as accusingly innocent as a child’s.

“No, it’s just Saturday night and I figured I’d drop in.”

“Yeah, sure, okay.”

She carved a space beside him on his musty floor amid the propped-open paperbacks and video clamshells and they watched his movie, as though repairing what Lucinda had neglected on her last visit, a full and earnest entry into Bedwin’s universe. Lucinda drank straight from the bottle, while Bedwin fetched himself a beer from the refrigerator. Bedwin dimmed the lights, so the screen was the sole glow, blue patterns playing across their faces and curling around the bottle of scotch. The film’s characters, confusingly, both worked on trains and rode as passengers on trains frequently in their spare time. It had a strange lulling rhythm, alternating between urgency and languor. The many looming shots of trains, tracks, and tunnels had a documentary authority that tended to dwarf the actors, one of whom was not Spencer Tracy, another not Marilyn Monroe. Lucinda detected Bedwin murmuring along very softly with the dialogue. Bedwin had allowed her inside a moment as pure and private as if she were watching him in sleep, digits jerking and eyelids trembling with a dream.

“Explain to me what you see in this,” she said. “I really want to know.”

“It’s too much to explain.”

“Just in this scene, then. Right now. What are you seeing?”

Bedwin turned his moonish face to her, surprisingly near. The blue screen stretched in miniature reflection in each of his lenses, the sun in a tiny solar system that also contained Lucinda’s reflection and the space-capsule enclosure of Bedwin’s book-lined room. Behind these teaspoon realms, she glimpsed his eyes: moist, large, feeble, and utterly unfamiliar.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well, lately I’ve been focused on text fragments more than anything else,” he said.

“Text fragments?”

“For instance, in the train yard, did you notice how they kept passing that sign that said ‘Safety First—Think,’ but the word ‘Safety’ was cut off so all you could see was ‘fety’?”

“I think I did,” she lied.

“It’s as if the word itself had been wounded, the way a limb might get severed on a train track.”

“I don’t understand.”

“‘Fety First—Think.’ It’s like an uncanny message from the unconscious of the film to the audience of 1954, telling them they live in a fundamentally unsafe reality.”

“Wow.”

“You can help me find more, if you want,” he said hopefully.

“I’d love to.”

“Watch this, this is an incredible one. On the wall of the bar, look. It says ‘If You Don’t See What You Want, Ask,’ but the way the sign is formatted all you can read is ‘You Don’t See You Want,’ which if you repunctuated it could be read as, ‘You don’t see, you want .’ It’s this total rebuke to the viewer’s objectivity, the presumption that the audience can watch the behavior of the characters without becoming complicit in some way.”