Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet

“Okay,” said Lucinda, confused. Harvey, in his Detroit Tigers baseball cap and sneakers, and Falmouth, overdressed at one o’clock in a seersucker suit and yellow tie, had swept in together and nabbed her from her cubicle for the meeting. The two had bored her with small talk before finally announcing their project. Now she waited to understand.

“Jules is a promoter,” said Falmouth. “We’re collaborating on a happening.”

“I have a rather large loft,” said Jules Harvey apologetically.

“It’s going to be a dance party,” said Falmouth. “Only the rule is you can’t bring anyone you know. And you have to wear headphones. You have to listen to whatever you prefer to dance to, your own mix. If people don’t have their own headphones we’ll provide them at the door, like neckties and jackets at a club. What I want is a sea of dancing bodies, each to their own private music. I might call it Party of Strangers. Or maybe Aparty, like apart , y .”

“I get it.”

Falmouth held up a cautioning finger. “There’s more. Instead of beginning and ending gradually and spontaneously, like the usual party, I want the start to be perfectly regimented. Everyone has to arrive at exactly such and such o’clock and begin dancing immediately. Latecomers will be turned away. And then at the end, same thing. I may buy a starter’s pistol.”

“Falmouth had been thinking the backdrop ought to be perfect silence,” said Jules Harvey. “But I suggested it might be even better to have a band playing, very quietly, with nobody paying any attention.”

“I thought your little consortium might want the gig,” said Falmouth. He spoke grudgingly, as though Jules Harvey had persuaded him against his instincts. Harvey had a talent for insinuating himself, Lucinda suspected. She felt a pang of sympathy for Falmouth, usually so eager to patronize others, here so effortlessly co-opted.

“Attractive people playing and singing in the classic format: guitar, drums, singer, etcetera,” said Jules Harvey. “Falmouth gave me the impression that you and your friends could answer the call. Only you must be able to play exceedingly quietly. Really, you should be nearly inaudible.” He spoke with the same plodding earnestness with which he’d praised her armpit.

“I suppose it’s possible,” said Lucinda. She took a long drink of her beer.

“Between Jules’s efforts and my own, we ought to stir up a certain amount of attention,” said Falmouth. “Who knows? It could be the break you’ve been waiting for.”

“I’ll have to talk to the others,” she said.

“Falmouth forgot to tell me the name of your band,” said Harvey.

“We haven’t—”

“Maybe there should also be food no one is allowed to eat,” said Falmouth, his attention meandering. In his typical way, Falmouth now took it for granted that the band was enlisted. “Cooks might be preparing something to one side. Delicious smells emanating through the party. And then servers in black tie could load up trays and stand ready at the edges of the dance. Suddenly, just as they take a first step into the room, I fire the pistol a second time, the party’s over, and everyone is whisked out of the room before they can eat anything.”

She envisioned presenting this chance to the band: their first gig, a thing they’d have expected to come by way of Denise, their beacon of professionalism, or Bedwin or Matthew, who knew musicians—anyone but Lucinda, their self-taught bassist. Matthew, distrusting Falmouth, would take the offer for an insult. She’d need to emphasize Jules Harvey, the famous party promoter, and his rather large loft. They’d be forced to play inaudibly, sure, but to a huge crowd. Most bands debuted to barely anyone at all, to a handful of drunks. Here, they’d be an element in an artwork. Falmouth’s allure, his knack for offhand success, would infect them. And Jules Harvey’s eerie sincerity would ensure nobody mistook the band for merely one of Falmouth’s mean jokes. Harvey would make it clear they were picked for a reason, attractive people in the classic format. After showing how quietly they could play they’d give evidence of what else they were capable of, the quiet, nearly overlooked band, the art band, the band not like any other.

she was the most beautiful woman I ever slept with. Except in a way I never did. It’s a funny story, actually.”

“Tell me.” The other cubicles were dark. Falmouth had left early, his interest in complaint already wandering, perhaps overtaken by his Aparty. Lucinda was alone in the gallery when he called, her fabulous complainer. She’d switched off the lamp at her own desk and leaned into the shadow, beyond the spill of ambient light from the storefront’s fluorescents. No one passing on the street would know she was there. No one expected her anywhere. There was no rehearsal. If he hadn’t called her at the gallery she might have dialed his number, which nested in her pocket, inscribed on paper softened to tissue from handling. She might have dialed it or not. She might have again consulted the foot to decide. It didn’t matter. He’d called.

“She was the kind of beautiful woman who makes other women angry,” he said. “They’d see her and begin accidentally breaking stuff or getting stomachaches and needing to go home. She was a kind of beautiful catastrophe in that way. She’d ruin parties.”

“I’m not like that,” said Lucinda.

“Beautiful, or envious?”

“Envious.”

“I had that feeling about you.”

This was what she wanted to hear, his feelings about her. Yet he didn’t know her. Lucinda and the complainer were occult to each other, their mingled voices a conspiracy of imagination. For all she knew he could be only blocks away. Yet for now, his previous existence on earth was fascinating and horrible and she had to know more.

“What made her so beautiful?” It sickened her slightly to ask, as though she were one of the women with stomachaches, fleeing parties.

“She was tall and smooth and strange,” he said. “Like an alien, with impossibly long limbs. You couldn’t keep from staring at her, picturing her in certain situations, all tangled in sheets.”

“How did you meet?”

“She was the wife of someone I used to know. They got married when she was eighteen or nineteen, I think. He used to stand around guarding her all the time, as if he was shielding her body from a blast. She’d have this look on her face that was sort of bored and panicked at the same time. It was like she was a hostage and they were trying to find a place in the world to hide her. I pitied them in a lot of ways.”

“What happened?”

“It was a few years later when I saw her again. At a dinner party. Their marriage had fallen apart, I never knew the details, but she was alone. I think by then she was trying to make up for some of what she’d missed, marrying so young. But it was hard for her. She stood out, she was too immaculate in a way, she had some kind of gawky elegance that made it difficult for her to get properly defiled.”

“Go on.”

“We talked. You know, about sex.”

“And—”

“I told her I couldn’t explain why but that I only wanted one thing from her, and that was to make her come with my mouth while she was watching television. And ideally while she smoked a cigarette, too, but she wasn’t a smoker.”

“You can’t have everything.”

“No.”

“So that’s why you never slept with her? Because the television was on?”

“It was just something to talk about the first few times. I’d talk and she’d listen, and laugh at me. She had this deep laugh, you didn’t know where it came from because she had a normal, mild voice, but then this stomach-based laugh would chuckle out of her, like she was laughing at you with her whole soul. The laugh was revealing, but what it revealed was her distance. It let you know how far away she’d gone to hide from her body and from the world and the responses of all the men she’d met.”