Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

Jules Harvey’s baseball cap and gleaming lenses rose on the horizon of her carrel. Lucinda turned away, pretended she hadn’t noticed. Thinking of Falmouth’s imperative, she blurted: “What exactly is your complaint, sir?”

“Same as always,” said the complainer. “Nostalgia, except it’s not just regular nostalgia. More like nostalgia vu. Longing for longing, instead of for the thing in question.”

Lucinda printed L-O-N-G-I-N-G, shielding the pad from view with her shoulder. When she turned, however, she saw Jules Harvey padding in his high-tops through the doorway, through the gallery front.

“Women’s bodies don’t interest you anymore?” she asked. She instantly regretted a question which sounded too interested.

“I can’t even think about women’s bodies clearly now, that’s what I’m trying to explain. All I can think about is particular women. Their faces, their words. The bodies are totally eclipsed. It’s like I can’t see the sun anymore. I used to have a sense of purpose in life.”

“A guy stuck his face in my armpit a few minutes ago,” she whispered. “A total stranger, at a restaurant.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I’m in shock, I guess. He crept up while I was sitting with my eyes closed.”

“See, there’s a person with priorities.”

“I don’t think he’s much of a person at all.”

“I bet you he’s a leader in his field. Those types thrive in the modern world.”

“He’s not as assertive as you’re imagining. He drifts around like a human dandelion. I should have knocked his block off, but he’s too sad-looking.”

“Now you’re making me jealous. I’m sure I’m twice as sad-looking as your dandelion man—”

Falmouth and the journalist swept into the maze of cubicles, Falmouth babbling in a continuous stream, alive to his imagined public. The photographer orbited, snapping with a tiny camera in his meaty paws.

“Can I call you later?” Lucinda whispered.

“What?”

“Give me your number. I can’t talk now.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“I’ll explain later. I have to start taking complaints.”

“I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’ll call you,” he said, and hung up.

lucinda strode Sunset Boulevard, past her own parked Datsun, feeling jubilant and deranged. Men in cars slowed to examine her, a rare walker, but Lucinda didn’t turn her head. The sidewalk bowled beneath her like a gerbil’s wheel, the city curling to meet her footfalls. A Jeep trolled past with a bumper sticker she’d never seen before, reading pour love on the broken places. The rippled April heat dispelled the cloistered atmosphere of Falmouth’s gallery.

The job was worse than her last, making cappuccinos at the Coffee Chairs. It robbed her of a solitude she hadn’t known she’d craved until now, the peace achieved performing some simple purpose adequately, in full view of the public but with her dignity and mystery intact. Operating the blistering, groaning espresso machine—thumping out plugs of steam-soaked coffee and tamping fresh grind in its place, venting the pressured steam through the valves in controlled bursts, flash-toweling grit from the joints and threads before burning your fingers—was like playing bass, an anonymous service full of secret satisfaction at precision, clarity, tempo. And it brought her a version of fame. She watched the café’s customers recognize her everywhere she went, but declined their glances. Falmouth’s callers, by comparison, tugged at her private self, blotted at her with their egos.

Falmouth would be lucky if some museum purchased his lunatic archive of woe and stored it in its basement, there to rot. Complaint was a tide, a drab surf rinsing up everywhere, and by declaring his project Falmouth had drawn the tide to his door. But the complaints existed before Falmouth, and they’d go on after. No one should be forced to listen to them. She couldn’t be paid enough. Let Falmouth take the calls himself: that’s what Lucinda would have liked to tell the reporter from the Annoyance . That was her complaint. Why hadn’t the brilliant complainer offered her his number? He didn’t sound like anyone’s husband. Lucinda saw how little she’d visualized him at all. He was the murmur in her ear, nothing else. Had she ruined things, become too intimate in asking to call? Shouldn’t that be what he wanted?

Lucinda’s fugue carried her through the doors of No Shame, past a few studious browsers at long shelves of rubber prosthetics and electronic implements, vials of frictionless liquids, and chic racks of videos, with their florid, meaty artwork, to the counter.

“Is Denise here?”

The woman beside the cash register pointed Lucinda to a half-open door. “On break.”

Lucinda leaned into a storeroom heaped with cartons, through a doorway decorated like a shrine with thumbtacked Polaroids of unhappy male faces. Denise sat in a wooden folding chair with an unwrapped sandwich on a carton in front of her, sneakers planted in a desert of foam peanuts.

“What’s up?” said Denise.

“Falmouth’s driving me crazy.” Lucinda didn’t mention the man whose name she didn’t know. The air in the storeroom was heavy, the boxes crammed with erotic supplies too abject to contemplate. Lucinda, perspiring, felt a pleasurable twitching in her calves and realized with what force she’d barreled down Sunset. She ran her fingers down the row of Polaroid mugs. “Who are these?”

“The shit list. When we catch a shoplifter we take their picture. Or anyone else we don’t want coming back.”

Lucinda looked for Jules Harvey, but he wasn’t included.

“It’s dead today,” said Denise. “They don’t need me. Grab a seat.”

“I’ve been in a dimly lit storefront all morning. Can we go get a beer?”

“Just let me wolf this sandwich.”

“I’ve got an even better idea. Let’s go to the zoo.”

Denise widened her eyes. “You want to see Matthew?”

“They fired him. That’s why it’s a good time to go. We can look at the animals.”

“Okay.”

Lucinda riffled the Polaroids again. “You keep the camera here?”

Denise pointed to a cabinet.

“Let’s take it along.”

the majority of Los Angeles’s kangaroos reclined in a gaggle under tree shade on a tan, scrubby hill. Shelf the Flyer, ostracized instead in a concrete pit, sprawled on her back in desultory glamour, displaying piebald stomach, one leg cocked to the sky in a forlorn show of submission to no one in particular. The pavement of her angled asylum was stained here and there with pissy or vomity streaks, the floor scattered with sun-blanched tatters of uneaten salad. Lucinda, gripping the Polaroid camera, tilted her body as far as she could over the rim of the enclosure and snapped Shelf’s portrait. The camera obediently chugged out its product. Lucinda unsheathed the pregnant black square and wagged it in the dry air.

“I can’t get that song out of my head,” said Denise.

“What song?”

“You know, ‘Monster Eyes.’”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know, the tune, the riff, the words, whole thing. Bedwin’s more unstable these days, but more of a genius, too.”

“Yeah,” Lucinda admitted. “It’s really good.”

The zoo was a maze of circular trails disordered by construction, paths barred by scaffolding, displays shielded with plywood. The visible animals seemed to stand off-kilter on their portion of raw-scraped land, their outcroppings. A ram with an erection tiptoed the sculpted ridge of an artificial mountaintop, pacing a ewe who darted on the flip side of their finite mental kingdom. Monkeys dripped from distant palms, more fruit than creature, refusing to dance. A coyote exasperated the limits of his cage, sniffing distance from hills he might have known. Turtles pedaled in dust. The zoo was an abrasion, Los Angeles’s arid skeleton poking into evidence.