Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet

they met at the museum to end it. There, wandering through high barren rooms full of conceptual art, alone on a Thursday afternoon, Lucinda Hoekke and Matthew Plangent felt certain they wouldn’t be tempted to do more than talk. Too, driving into the canyon of vacated plazas of downtown Los Angeles felt suitably solemn and irrevocable. The plan was not to sever as friends, or as bandmates, only as lovers.

Lucinda saw him first. A tall, malnourished vegetarian, Matthew was obliviously handsome, lead-singer handsome. He was dressed as for his work at the zoo and for the band’s practices, in black turtleneck, jeans, and speckless suede work boots, which Lucinda knew he kept in his locker when he entered the animals’ habitats. Matthew had presumably been excused from his veterinary nursing duties for the afternoon, or possibly it was his day off. For the past four years Lucinda had been assembling espresso drinks and clearing dishes at the Coffee Chairs, but she’d quit her job the day before, part of the same program of change that included this final rupture with Matthew. Instead, to pay her rent Lucinda had agreed to work for her friend Falmouth Strand in his storefront gallery.

On her way into the museum Lucinda had paused at two heroic pillars of neon, mounted on either side of a doorway, and seen only versions of herself and Matthew: discrete, sealed, radiant. Now, sighting Matthew, she felt her senses quicken, her balance shifting to her toes. He squinted warily at a television monitor on a white pediment, some sort of video art. Perhaps it was the case that for him, as for her, everything in the museum had been reduced to an allegory of their dilemma. Exhausted by the old tug of his beauty, his scruffy intensity and lean limbs, Lucinda was ready to send Matthew and his allure out voyaging elsewhere.

She joined silently to his side, the tiny hairs of their arms bristling together electrically. The two wandered like zombies through the exhibition, hesitating for a long while at a pair of basketballs floating perfectly suspended at midpoint in a glass water tank.

“The thing is we’ve done this so much before we’re too good at it.”

Matthew’s gaze remained fixed on the tank. “You mean there’s nothing to say.”

“Yes, but also we don’t believe it’s real because we’ve fallen back together so many times afterward. We need to make a difference between this time and all those others.”

“This time we’re serious, Lucinda.”

“On the other hand, the advantage to so many practice breakups is we know we still like each other, so we don’t have to worry that we’re not going to be friends.”

“Yes.”

“The band will be okay.”

“Yes.”

“If we seem like we’re barely speaking to each other Denise and Bedwin will be completely confused. We can’t let the band worry about us. Bedwin’s fragile enough as it is.”

“Yes.”

“Is something else wrong?”

“It’s nothing. There’s a sort of crisis with one of the zoo’s kangaroos, that’s all.”

“You were thinking about a kangaroo just now?”

“I just kind of wish we were in someplace more private so I could hold you and maybe just kiss you a little bit.” His dark woeful eyes flitted past her, as if hounded. “I feel like I can’t even look at you.”

“I feel the same way, but that’s the point. We have to stop now, change our patterns.”

“I should stop having breakfast at the Coffee Chairs.”

“You can go to the Coffee Chairs all you like. I quit yesterday.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m going to work for Falmouth.”

Matthew disliked Falmouth. Lucinda and Falmouth had been together, briefly, in college. Matthew had always behaved jealously around Falmouth, though he denied it.

“Work how? Doing what?”

“He offered me a job in a sort of theatrical piece he’s putting together. A fake office that needs fake office workers to answer real telephone calls.”

“Calls from who?”

“I don’t know. A complaint line, he said.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either, yet. But Falmouth will make it clear. Speaking of which, he has a piece in here somewhere, he showed me once.”

“Is that why we’re here? Is this about Falmouth?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are you trying to tell me you’re going to be with Falmouth now?”

“I could never be with Falmouth again. You know me better than that. He isn’t even going to be at the gallery most of the time, that’s why he needs to hire me. Come on, this way.”

She dragged him by the hand, through impoverished galleries, white rooms barely ornamented apart from seven tiny pyramids of wheat germ.

“Here, this is Falmouth’s thing.”

Falmouth’s object had been plopped ingloriously in the middle of an atrium, seemingly exiled. A white crate or cube. Matthew circled it skeptically.

“This white box is everything I can’t stand about contemporary everything.”

“No, wait, see, it’s not a box.”

Matthew read aloud the artwork’s identifying label, on the opposite wall. “ Chamber Containing the Volumetric Representation of the Number of Hours It Took Me to Arrive at This Idea , Mixed Media, 1988.”

“It has a door, look.”

“I don’t know if you’re supposed to—”

“Falmouth built it, don’t worry.”

“Hey, it’s a little room.”

“See, why would all this stuff be in here if we weren’t meant to see it?”

“It’s just like Falmouth to hide the good part.”

“I wonder if there’s anything to drink in that refrigerator.”

“It would have to be like airplane drinks, little bottles.”

“Let’s find out.”

Matthew touched her at the waist and guided her through the low entrance to the chamber. “Hurry,” he said, “before anyone comes.”

Inside, she crouched, seated herself on the sled-size bed. Then took Matthew’s hand and tugged him onto her lap. “Close the door, quick.” She slid her hand along his hip, to the waist of his thready, pale-bleached jeans. He wore no underwear. His smooth belly flinched to concavity under her fingertips.

“Wait—”

“Kiss me.”

“Does this door lock?”

“Who cares, no one’s here, we’re the only ones in the whole museum.”

Lucinda braced against the tiny bedposts as Matthew wrinkled her jeans over her knees. The refrigerator slid to the room’s corner as she batted it with her toes, but there was nowhere else to put her leg. Matthew arched low to keep from topping against the room’s ceiling. Lucinda kissed his craning neck.

“The last time,” she managed.

“Of course.”

“For real, it has to be for real.”

“It is for real.”

“The band, we can’t mess up the band—”

“We won’t, they won’t know the difference, it’ll just be you and me as friends and the band will be fine.”