Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“You don’t pull any punches, do you? Here, hand me that pitcher.”

“It’s full of crushed limes.”

“Maybe give it a quick rinse.”

“I didn’t mean to sound hostile.” Water ran, dishes clanked, the toaster’s coils clicked: the two were making breakfast together. “You have to excuse me, I’m no good at this kind of thing. I just can’t help wondering what value the songs have to you.”

“That’s the point I was trying to make.”

“Sorry?”

“You should help yourself. Take them outright, no charge.”

“Really?”

“Sure. If they mean that much to you. Truth is, I was never so into music in the first place. You know, I’ve got some bacon and eggs in here, it really wouldn’t be hard to put together a little fry-up.”

“That sounds good, actually.”

“Nobody doesn’t like a fry-up.”

Now the dream had become richly olfactory, and following on the scent of coffee and toast came fumes of sizzling bacon grease and butter.

“So if you were to, say, hear the song ‘Monster Eyes’ on the radio, even if it became, say, hugely popular and a sort of contemporary classic, you’d have no problem with that, we could expect nothing in the way of regrets or recriminations from you at any point in the future?”

“Nope.”

“There’s nothing you want in return?”

“Well, I was wondering if you and Denise already had a singer in mind.” There was an interval of silence before he spoke again. “Just kidding.”

“Oh.”

“But I’m curious—who’s handling the vocals?”

“Denise says I have a very expressive voice, I just have to trust it.”

“That’s great. Here, pass me that pepper. Actually, if you would, just keep this from sticking. That’s the way, move it gently from the edges of the pan.”

“I’m not much of a cook.”

“It’s coming along nicely. I like my eggs wet, in fact.”

Their talk was punctuated by the clank of silverware now, and by the sighs and smacks of hearty chewing. Lucinda idled, naked and unseen behind the green curtain, still in reverie. So long as she remained silent and selfless the two players were essentially as she preferred them: benign, enchanted, fond.

“I just realized I recognize those clothes on the floor.”

“I do apologize for the mess.”

“No, but I mean specifically those are Lucinda’s clothes.”

“She left a lot of stuff lying around here. She pretty much moved in for a while. But you knew that.”

“But what I’m trying to say is those are specifically exactly the clothes Lucinda wore last night, quite late last night in fact. I happen to be absolutely certain.”

“You could be right.”

“She’s awful.”

“She’s just a mixed-up person, Bedwin.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion, but I think Lucinda is a genuinely reprehensible person.”

“That’s why it’s no go with the band, huh?”

“I never want to see her again. I can’t even stand to look at those clothes.”

“We’ll just throw them in the garbage, then. Have to get this whole place swept out, but it’s a start.”

“There’s more, over there. Her underwear.”

“Holy smoke, it’s everywhere, you’re right.”

“Should we light it on fire?”

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“I suppose.”

“Just push it down in there with the eggshells.”

“Ugh, okay, there.”

No dream. Lucinda’s sick eyes opened to the blaze of day to which she lay bare, her lips and nipples and the microscopic hairs of her stomach and thighs alive to tiny breezes, her breath cinched in anxiety. She might pull the bedspread to cover herself or insert her body within the layers of sheet but feared rustling, giving herself away to what now seemed enemies. Bedwin and the complainer clanked plates in trickling water, noises that made proof she was alive and only a few feet from the kitchen where the two had been eating and talking.

“Just scrape the plate, I’ll do the dishes later.”

“Thanks for the meal and everything, I mean for being so understanding about the songs.”

“They’re your songs, Bedwin.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Never speak of it again.”

“Okay. See you later.”

“Sure, see you later, except honestly you probably won’t, if I get the drift of things.”

“Honestly, I expect that’s true.”

“Hold on a second and I’ll go down in the elevator with you. This place actually depresses me a little bit right now, I don’t want to be alone here.”

They were gone. Silence reigned, the impossible morning restored to her alone. She crept from behind the curtain. Her clothes had been collected and ruined in the tall chrome garbage pail, layered into a compost of char and bacon grease, eggshells, coffee grounds, rinds of squeezed oranges and bloated, soaking limes. If she retrieved the clothes she’d be wearing breakfast. She didn’t want them anyway, they’d been polluted by hate as much as by garbage. To fetch them would confess that she’d been concealed, that she’d heard what she’d heard. She wormed one hand in and found the pocket of her jeans, seized her keys and a few balled dollars. Her forearm emerged speckled with oil-dark grounds, which she swept back into the mass.

She wouldn’t wear his clothes for a thousand reasons. Too huge for her, she’d be garbed in the costume of a hobo clown. Better go naked to her car than that. She thought of stripping the green curtain from his bed, sweeping her way to the elevator and out draped royally in velvet. But no souvenirs, not today. There was just one thing in this place that no longer belonged to the complainer, besides herself. Falmouth’s drawings, the record of the band’s rehearsals. She undraped the enormous pad’s pages from where they lay across the pinball machine, rolled them into a neat tube which she pinned beneath her armpits. The cone of pages made a rigid dress planing from ribs to knees, a child’s drawing come to life. Falmouth would have been proud. Barefoot, clutching keys, elbows pinned to ribs, she managed an exit garbed in the cone, down the elevator alone, out into the vacant glare of morning. Nobody saw her wriggle into her Datsun, half nude. The drawings went into the backseat. Falmouth’s charcoal, never set with any fixative, had impressed a faint record of the in-most of the drawings on her moist hips and belly, a hieroglyphic procession of smudged figures. She rubbed these off easily, raising a slight pinkness on her flesh, then drove home, eyes set straight ahead on the freeway, oblivious to gawkers, bare of clothing, drawings, or any other thing she’d ever imagined could conceal her.

the porpoises arced from the wave tops parallel to the beach, just yards from where the surf itched and boiled at the sun-bright sand. Equidistant, and rotating like targets in an arcade as if mounted on cogs beneath the line of the water, the animals kept silent time with the walkers on the beach, seeming apart, hallucinated, ethereal, embodying heedless liberty despite their almost military precision. The porpoises might seem to have come to welcome and escort the sand-walkers, the gulpers of gullet-warming scotch from a bottle they’d left behind in a nook in the rocks, the intoxicated lovers who explored El Matador Beach, a site of nearly catastrophic beauty only twenty-five minutes from the baked interior west of La Cienega on which they ordinarily mapped their whole lives.

El Matador’s sand was littered with ragged geologic forms, pylons and archways of stone scoured by salt-bearing wind. The sky made a blue forgiving table over the sand’s glare, which was impossible to face directly, as though the lovers fire-walked the sun’s surface itself. Pale humans, they felt their vanities smashed in this collision of water, stone, and sky, so the sea creatures turning like pinwheels struck a note of mammalian solidarity, a solace. But no, it was a lie. The walkers subtly sped up to keep time, but the porpoises’ indifference was soon made plain. In their easy looping they swam twice as fast as the walkers advanced, escorting no one. Then they were gone, try as you might to locate them again in the glistening expanse. The lovers were alone again in this place, together.