Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet

Lucinda pocketed her snapshot and they walked, searching for the smaller birds and lizards, the depressed little poems veiled in foliage.

“The band’s horoscope today said ‘a new venture or long-range goal will be given a shot of confidence,’” said Denise. “I think it meant the new song.”

“The band’s horoscope?”

“I read it every week. The band was born on February sixteenth.”

“We’re more fetal, I think,” said Lucinda. “We need to play a gig. And we need a name.”

“We need more good songs,” said Denise.

“We have good songs. ‘Hell Is for Buildings’ sounded great last night.”

“We need more. And ‘Canary in a Coke Machine’ needs a better ending. Also, Bedwin needs to learn to stand up while he plays. He can’t sit when we’re onstage.”

“Maybe we could get him a really high chair. That might be weird.”

“Maybe you could write new lyrics to ‘Sarah Valentine,’” mused Denise. “Maybe the problem is the lyrics.”

“Who is Sarah Valentine anyway? It’s sort of a cursed song.”

“I think Bedwin went out with a Sarah once for about five minutes.”

“I didn’t realize Bedwin could shake hands in five minutes. I thought he was more the pining-unspoken-for-years type. I always assumed Sarah was someone who didn’t know there was a song about her.”

“Matthew looks good, though,” said Denise. “He’s getting more like a real lead singer.”

“What do you mean, like a real singer?”

“Just much sexier and more relaxed, the way he stands at the microphone with his toes pointed and slurs the words, like he can barely be bothered to pronounce the consonants. Like how he sang the new song. You know what I’m talking about.”

Lucinda didn’t speak. Panting from their ascent to the monkey terraces they quit walking, parked in front of a lemur with cartoon-hobo eyes.

“Do you think Matthew is happy in the band?” said Denise.

“I think he’s depressed,” said Lucinda irritably. “I think his life is practically falling apart.”

“Really? He seemed okay to me.”

“He’s terrible, terrible.”

“Do you think he’ll leave the band?”

“Never. We’re all he has.”

“What about you?”

“I love the band. The band is fine. It’s even better now that Matthew and I have broken up. A lot of the great rock-and-roll bands are founded in breakups, love triangles, love-hate situations. The band couldn’t be better.”

Lucinda heard herself parroting Falmouth, and shut up. Turning her back on the dewy moonish lemur, she grabbed Denise’s arm, tugged the smaller woman to her side, so they stood hip to hip. They stepped in tandem, feeling an alliance beyond the grasp of language. They were the girls in the nameless band, the rhythm section.

“Let’s go back and see that mountain goat with his crazy red penis.”

“Maybe he’ll catch her and fuck her.”

“He’ll never catch her. She always stays on the other side of that little fake mountain. The zoo made a mistake, they brought the wrong goats, she doesn’t like him. He’s going slowly insane.”

“Maybe, but maybe she’ll let him catch her. I think it might be today. I want to see.”

“I bet they all fuck at night,” said Lucinda. “The whole zoo. All night every night, when we’re not looking.”

through her kitchen’s rear window on Reservoir Street Lucinda could see, over the rooftop of a tire shop and against a background of shaggy palms, the high rotating sign of the Foot Clinic. It depicted a cartoon foot with features and tiny limbs: one side a happy, cared-for foot, beaming and confident, white-gloved hands jubilantly upraised, the other side a moaning, broken-down foot, neglected and weary, grasping at crutches and with its big toe wreathed in bandages. Lucinda’s view took in a three-quarters slice of the sign as it turned in its vigil over Sunset Boulevard: happy foot and sad foot suspended in dialogue forever. The two images presented not so much a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot-based philosophical system. This was Lucinda’s oracle: one glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she’d delegated to the foot god.

Beside the candle on her table lay half a Cafe Tropical Cuban sandwich in a nest of foil, a torn scrap of canary paper with a phone number scribbled on it, a Polaroid snapshot of a supine yellowish kangaroo in a band of shaded concrete, and a cordless telephone.

When Lucinda had parted from Denise and returned to the gallery she’d found the hubbub dissipated, the journalists and Falmouth gone, the fort held down by the interns, the two girls settled into a rhythm, answering the steadily blinking phones and transcribing complaints. Lucinda rejoined them. After the evening surge had peaked one of the interns leaned in at Lucinda’s cubicle and passed her the scrap of paper.

“He said you’d know who he was,” the intern announced drily.

Now, fingertips nudging the dangerous scrap of paper, the boundary-smashing digits, Lucinda glanced up. The foot sign completed a turn, face wheeling into view: sad foot. Lucinda left her phone untouched.

Instead she took the Polaroid to her desk and located a ballpoint pen, an envelope, and a stamp. Writing left-handed to disguise her script, she lettered I NEED YOU in capitals on the photograph’s fat bottom margin, practically engraving the words in the glossy sandwich of paper. Then, still with her left hand, she wrote MATTHEW PLANGENT on the envelope, and below it, Matthew’s address. Slid the Polaroid into the envelope. Touched her tongue to the flap’s glue and sealed it. Stamped it and put it in her purse.

the song, “Shaft of Light, Piece of String,” sounded fantastic. They were playing it in a narrow hallway, but the crowd was happy. You couldn’t keep from thinking the stage should have been put at one end or another instead of in the middle of the hallway so we wouldn’t keep having to crane their necks to acknowledge the audience on the other side, but nobody minded. Lucinda said she heard a rat or a squirrel under the stage, it was distracting. “Shaft of Light, Piece of String” had seven choruses. Bedwin really was a genius. The band finally had a name, but nobody could remember whether it was Famous Vomit Ferry or Long-Term Pity Houseguest, and hadn’t the word “houseguest” already been used somewhere? Denise sang something that sounded like a hymn, it was unexpected for the drummer to sing but we tried to act cool about it, they didn’t want to offend her because it was religious. The stage was too tall. The chorus of the new song went “I’m a little doughnut” but Matthew kept saying “I want a little doughnut.” It was too late to correct him. The audience really liked it anyway. Famous Pity Magnet was really popular and they sounded really good.

The band was dreaming.

we’re going to have a party,” Jules Harvey explained in his dry, blank voice, as he fingered his heavy black frames and gazed down at the tablecloth. Harvey sounded astonished by his own words, uncertain they’d reach his listeners’ ears before wafting off in the breezeless air. Falmouth sat studying Lucinda for her response, his arms crossed against his suit as though bodily containing impatience. The three sat around a table on the Red Lion’s patio, neglecting steins of afternoon lager that had been plunked down by a waitress in lederhosen. A rap beat blared from a car on the street below, fracturing the boulevard’s gelled soundscape.