Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet

“Hey, Bedwin,” said Matthew. “You okay?”

“Sure…sorry…”

“Bedwin,” said Denise, more sharply. “Did you eat anything today?”

“Um, sure, yeah.”

“Tell me what you ate.”

“I, uh, definitely had some raisin bran.”

“I mean any dinner or anything, Bedwin. Before coming to rehearsal.”

“I can’t tell you exactly when it was,” he mumbled defiantly.

Sighing, Denise slid from behind her drums. “I bought some groceries today, all the stuff you like. How about some ginger ale and a baloney sandwich? I got some beer, too, if anyone wants one.”

Bedwin shifted his guitar to one side, expending minimum effort in freeing himself from its weight, then ambled behind Denise into the kitchen. Lucinda and Matthew were left alone. Matthew ducked his head under his guitar strap and parked his instrument against an amp. Lucinda unloaded her bass. Accompanied by the faint music of Denise’s refrigerator, which began chortling and whining the moment its door was opened, and the tinkering of a blade in jars of mustard and mayonnaise, the two moved to the empty cushions. The ramshackle couch saddled obligingly, dipping their bodies into contact at elbow and shoulder.

“I’m in trouble,” said Matthew.

“What trouble?”

“I quit on Tuesday. Dr. Marian was so pissed she won’t even let me into my locker. Shelf is dying of ennui and nobody will admit it.”

“Who’s Shelf?”

“The kangaroo. You remember.”

Lucinda and Matthew had sworn not to speak on the telephone. The ten days since their breakup had passed without those chance encounters for which, heart tripping, she’d braced at the entry to each of his regular haunts, the Back Door Bakery, Hard Times Pizza, Netty’s. Their abandoned intimacy dwelled like a rumor between them, independent and charged.

Lucinda put her hand into Matthew’s hair. He leaned his skull into her hand. Lucinda spotted a tiny nesting of dandruff grains in the blazing red cup of his ear, as usual.

“You’ll be back in a week,” she said.

“I don’t know this time.”

“Did you leave something important in your locker?”

“More I’m worried about Shelf.”

“Shelf’s probably just a little depressed.”

“Shelf’s fucking inconsolable.”

“You see aspects of yourself in the kangaroo,” Lucinda said gently. “But you’re not dying.”

“I might be suffocating slowly, who knows, it’s hard to tell. Like all of us. We’re turning thirty and we haven’t done anything. Look at Bedwin. He can’t even feed himself, and he’s our genius.”

“The song’s good.”

“It’s not a song yet,” said Matthew. “He hasn’t got any lyrics, he told me.”

Inside the kitchen, Bedwin choked, wolfing his food. A kettle rattled on its burner. Denise went on puttering at the stove and refrigerator, allowing them privacy.

“Anyone can write lyrics,” suggested Lucinda.

“Anyone can be in a lame band, anyone can scoop up the hair shed by a depressed molting kangaroo, anyone can wipe the tears from the infected eyes of a bandicoot, anyone can put a monkey in handcuffs,” said Matthew savagely. “For that matter, anyone can answer telephones in fucking Falmouth’s stupid pretend gallery, or work in a porn store—”

“Denise doesn’t work in a porn store,” whispered Lucinda. “Keep your voice down.”

“Masturbation boutique, whatever it is.”

Lucinda saw she’d roiled Matthew by touching his hair, by breaching the distance. If he’d been the one to speak consolingly she’d surely now be in his role. Abjection and solace switched between them as lightly and easily as electric current.

“Bedwin’s the only one of us who actually lives for his art,” said Matthew, more evenly. “And see where it gets him.”

“Maybe you really should quit the zoo.”

“I can’t abandon Shelf.”

“Is Shelf a male or a female kangaroo?”

“A flyer.”

“What’s a flyer?” Lucinda, suddenly in the grip of an absurd jealousy, felt certain she knew the answer.

“That’s the word for a female. A lady kangaroo.”

“Of course,” she said bitterly.

Denise and Bedwin emerged from the kitchen. Matthew and Lucinda fumbled apart on the couch.

“What about one of those beers?” said Lucinda.

“Sure.” Denise grabbed one from the fridge. Lucinda twisted off the beer’s cap and pulled a long sip from its neck. Matthew frowned, turned his back to the band. They reclaimed their instruments and, at Denise’s prompting, encored “Tree of Death,” probably their favorite among their songs if they were honest with themselves. Bedwin, restored by the sandwich, managed a plinking, gnarled solo. Matthew lowered his voice to a whisper during the bridge, seducing an audience that wasn’t there.

Outside, a moonless night had fallen on the terraced apartments of Landa Street and Kenilworth Avenue, shadow swarming the concrete steps, bushed with jade plants, that wended up from the silence of parked cars, so distant from the blacktop heat and scurry of wheels on Silver Lake and Hyperion. Beyond the band’s windows something four-footed crashed in the under leaves, daring itself to raid Denise’s garbage bin. Inside, the quartet was complete for one instant, rollicking in the embrace of the sound they produced themselves, free from time and hesitation. If only it could go on forever. Bedwin wrote short songs.

The band didn’t have a name yet, though they’d discussed it hundreds of times.

The whatever-it-was got into the garbage, whining as it ravaged a foil-lined takeaway bag.

“Let’s play the new one,” said Lucinda, after the band stuttered to silence. “I can’t get it out of my head.” She slugged the last of her beer, went to the fridge and found another.

“I already told Matthew and Denise,” said Bedwin. “I really don’t have any lyrics.”

“No problem,” said Lucinda, wiping her mouth. “You’ll write some.” She set the new bottle at the base of her amp and retook her place, expectantly.

“I’ve been trying. I’m having a sort of problem with language.”

“What do you mean?”

“With sentences…words.”

“We know what language is, Bedwin,” said Denise, not unkindly.

The three had turned to Bedwin now, half consciously, as though reaching out to support someone freshly released from a hospital, a man tapping down a ramp on crutches.

“My problem is I don’t believe in the place where the sentences come from anymore.”

“Lucinda says anyone can write lyrics,” said Matthew.

“Go to hell,” said Lucinda. “Let’s just play it. I’ll make up some words, sure.”

“I didn’t mean—” began Matthew.

“No, you’re absolutely right,” said Lucinda. “Pick up your guitar.”

Lucinda plumped at her bass strings, jump-starting the song, and planted her thighs in a new stance, facing Denise, demanding the drums’ reply. Denise met the call, ticked the beat double-time. The sound was sprung, uncanny, preverbal, the bass and drum the rudiment of life itself, argument and taunt, and each turn of the figure a kiss-off until the cluster of notes began again. Who needed words? Who even needed guitars, those preening whiners? Lucinda felt violently unapologetic. And when the guitars wended in she wasn’t any sorrier. Meeting Lucinda’s challenge had stirred even Bedwin, who now confessed with his lead line that the wordless song had a melodic hook.

Denise sped up and no one cared.

The thing that rooted in garbage heard them. It dropped the chicken carcass it had plucked from the foil bag and bayed its own song into the tops of the trees.

“Monster eyes,” Lucinda called out at the peak of the chorus. The others turned and gaped.