You Don't Love Me Yet (20 page)

“Let’s try again,” said Lucinda hopelessly. “Matthew, maybe if you just sing—”

Denise ticked at her drum again, daring them to follow. Lucinda thrummed the bass figure. Rhodes Bramlett nodded approval. He, at least, was undiscouraged. Bedwin, though, had cinched both feet on the lip of his chair, knees twinned as though to protect his guitar from attack. Autumnbreast’s voice was conspicuous in its absence now, and no sign, encouraging or otherwise, came from Morsel.

“Carl, will you promise not to come in before Matthew?” said Denise.

“I promise to embrace the song and everything I feel, and everything you feel, too.” He lay immobile, his belly rising and falling with his breath. His voice filled the room, seeming endless, self-sustaining, horrible, the same voice that had once blazed its trail inside Lucinda, across Falmouth’s complaint line. Now she seemed to behold it from a million miles away, as if a comet in her sky, tail shedding interstellar slush and gravel in the guise of heat and light, now passed through to some other, colder night. “Maybe we should sing it a cappella,” he continued. “Or recite it like a one-act play, which might help bring out the drama in the words—”

Dr. Marian came through the door and stood spotlit in the band’s midst. Her prowlike chest and chin, her front-heavy bun of hair, nearly a pompadour, her flashing, careworn eyes, all demanded their absolute attention. Even Rhodes Bramlett scrambled to his feet, as though already under indictment. Dr. Marian only scowled at Bramlett once, and waved him to the exit. He slinked off.

“Mr. Plangent,” Dr. Marian said. “Ms. Hoekke.”

No one spoke.

“I begin to see the problem.”

“You do?” said Lucinda.

“It’s unmistakable. Mr. Vogelsong—am I saying that right?”

“That’s my name. Who are you?”

“That’s not important right now. May I see you outside, Mr. Vogelsong?”

The complainer was silent. No one rescued him from the cooling clarity of Dr. Marian’s request. He flounced on the tiles, his white hair sloppy, his posture poor even lying on his back, taking up uncommon amounts of space and air. Dr. Marian stood, bulletlike, arms crossed under her breasts,
Monitor
challenging
Merrimac
.

“Do I have to?” he said at last.

“Yes. You’ve come to an end here, Mr. Vogelsong.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“You’re a hard woman to refuse.” A certain lascivious quality flickered in his tone, pointlessly. He batted his lids at her, upside down.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You don’t know me that well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” She pointed at the door.

He giggled, feebly.

Dr. Marian was less the band’s new manager than a figure of death, it seemed to Lucinda. The complainer had invoked the word and she’d come in black to collect him. Now he squirmed onto his stomach and crawled from amid the band’s equipment, making a path around Matthew’s mike stand. Dr. Marian held open the rubber-sealed door. The complainer remained on all fours, his expression that of a supplicant. She offered a curt nod as he passed over the threshold and continued down the corridor, padding along the carpet beneath rows of framed photographs of local luminaries. Dr. Marian went after him with a crisp air of unfinished business. The door sealed behind her.

The room was restored to silence, underlined by the ambient hum of their amplified unplayed guitars. Morsel sat silent, framed at her console in the control room. She met them with a level, not-unfriendly gaze. Matthew coughed resoundingly, his back to the others. The coils of Denise’s snare rattled in sympathy with the cough. Lucinda swayed hips and instrument rightward, filling some of the space the complainer had vacated. She imagined she could sense the warmth of the complainer’s absented weight through the soles of her sneakers, but it was surely only foolish imagination. Even if so, it was felt only by her. It was otherwise as if they’d come to this room without him. They made a foursome again, a band utterly changed by having accommodated the complainer, having binged on his lyrics and his apartment, yet, embarrassingly, still themselves: Denise, fixed at her set, emanating resolve; Bedwin, clinging to his instrument’s neck for solace; Matthew, infinitely damaged and proud, without even a guitar to disguise his singer’s fear of irrelevance; Lucinda, negotiating between, medium for the band’s yearning and confusion, their betrayer and fool, their bass player. Denise now stirred them with a beat, metronomically clean. Lucinda fitted her bass notes around the drum’s tick. Bedwin joined too, his chords a perfect emanation from his hiding place, his nerd’s gauze of self. There was only a held breath at the point when Matthew ought to have come in and didn’t. The singer stood making himself ready, seeming to weigh the band and the song with his shoulders. They bypassed him to play an instrumental verse, an overture. He met the song at the second pass. Lucinda had never heard him sing this way. She thought she heard a measure of the complainer’s tormented yawp in his approach, as though he’d subsumed Carl’s voice in his own. It didn’t matter. It was the best they ever played.

Morsel tiptoed out when no one was looking, so when they finished they were entirely alone. Autumnbreast didn’t speak if he was listening. It was hard to believe he’d heard. No one congratulated them, no one was on the line, no one had broadcast or bootlegged their small, enraptured song. They waited in the booth in dumb embarrassment until Morsel reappeared. She offered them release forms, which they signed without reading.

“We weren’t on the radio, were we?”

“Just the first part of the interview,” said Morsel. “After that the station went to a cart, a prerecorded feature on Mr. Autumnbreast’s charitable work with rescued greyhounds who worked at racetracks, including his own companion animal, Verve.”

“Not the song.”

“Not the song.”

“Thank you.”

“Good luck.”

Matthew walked Lucinda out. Denise and Bedwin were already gone. Lucinda’s car was where she’d left it, but Carl had her key. They abandoned it, rode in an elevator to the top of a parking garage to Matthew’s Mazda and loaded Lucinda’s bass into the backseat. He turned the key in the ignition, then stopped, staring across the roof at a tall figure folding his legs into a small sports car.

They walked over. Fancher Autumnbreast seemed to wait for them. There was no companion animal in the car, a canvas-topped convertible Porsche with a leather brassiere cupping its headlamps.

“Pretty,” said Autumnbreast, once Lucinda and Matthew stood at his driver’s window. His expression was fond and wounded, resigned as if to inevitable historical forces, famine, genocide, tyranny.

“Sorry?”

“You’re pretty.”

“We wanted to apologize.”

Autumnbreast lifted his hands from the wheel, shut his eyes.

“Will you have us back on the show?”

Autumnbreast blinked, tried to find words. “Who?”

“Us. Monster Eyes.”

Autumnbreast smiled forgivingly.

“What you saw in us before, it can’t be completely gone,” said Matthew.

Autumnbreast raised a fist as though in solidarity, curled it to his own lips, and kissed each of his four knuckles, his eyes again gently lidded.

“Are you saying it’s gone?” demanded Lucinda.

Autumnbreast sighed, seeming to wish they could interpret his gnomic gesture and spare themselves the squalor of mere language. Seeing their wide waiting eyes, he spoke.

“It’s so gone, buttermilk, it’s like it was never there.”

s
he only understood that she’d fallen asleep and where when his telephone rang, a whirr or chortle you’d produce by great effort with a hand-cranked eggbeater. She opened her eyes. Orange zones of lamplight glowed throughout the loft, the kitchen counters lit like a derrick at sea. The bed too glowed within its green curtain, another outpost she must have lit during her initial circuit, an attempt to lure him back by bringing his apartment to life. The turntable’s needle crackled, endlessly rein-scribing the loose spiral between an LP’s final song and its label, a subliminal noise mimicking a cricket’s call. Matthew had dropped Lucinda here hours ago. Her car was still in Culver City unless the complainer had returned there with her key to drive it.

In an
ALL THINKING IS WISHFUL
T-shirt and holey underwear she sprawled in a large paisley chair, her bare knees cradling a two-thirds empty bottle of scotch. Her mouth tasted of drink. She scratched her calf where it had wrinkled hotly against the chair’s arm. Two of her fingers were stuck together.

She’d meant to masturbate, was pretty certain she’d failed.

The black laminate telephone gargled a second time, reposing its problem.

Lucinda gaped at it stupidly. Really, the holes were so small she doubted the complainer’s clubby fingers could fit in them. But she was being confused: you could answer a telephone you never dialed. Not that she’d ever seen him do either. But it might be him calling. He might know she’d come here and be cuddling this bottle with her thighs in a chair, curled beside the telephone as if she was seeking its warmth.

The phone seemed to take months between rings, allowing agonies of indecision, and now she was sure it had stopped. But no, it rang again. She worked to remoisten a snoring tongue dried to clay against back molars.

“Hello?” The receiver was a carpenter’s C-clamp she pressed to one side of her face. She gripped her right wrist with her left hand for support.

“Uh, hello,” said a young woman’s voice. “Is Carl there?”

“No.”

“Oh, okay.”

“He’ll be right back. I can take a message.”

“Oh, thanks, I’ll call another time.”

“Do you have a yellow chair?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is your name Susan Ming?”

The caller hung up.

s
he woke desperate to pee at six when the uncovered window flooded the complainer’s loft with sky, the lamps still lit, Lucinda still in her chair, the bottle drained. She showered and left her damp towels where they fell, dressed in the previous day’s clothes, then burned herself trying to operate his espresso machine, her sole former art now eluding her. She settled instead for a remedial beer, the chill bottle relief for her scorched thumb. In shame she called no one for a lift, paid a cab instead to take her to Culver City to rendezvous with a locksmith at her parked car. It was barely eight in the morning, the streets brightly vacant.

“What happened to your car?” asked the locksmith, nodding at the crinkled bumper, still fresh enough to raise notice, the metal raw where the paint had crackled.

“It bumped into something,” said Lucinda.

Her Datsun recaptured, she piloted home. The car limped, as though it had accommodated to the complainer’s mass, his breakneck lefts full of body English and swearing. She parked and slugged to the door of her scorned apartment, exhausted in nine a.m. sunlight. Unlike the car, Lucinda’s rooms weren’t marked by the complainer’s use, his cavalier hands, but instead by her own neglect, a habitat she’d molted like a shell. She crept in, averting her gaze from the slaw of mail beneath the door slot and the answering machine’s blinking message counter. She avoided any glimpse of the foot sign, too, uninterested in its smug fateful knowledge. What she wanted was to hear the complainer coming again, overspilling himself against her breasts, mumbling his gratitude, moving southward to finish her. She slid between her old bed’s stale crumby layers and dozed in melancholy.

s
he kept herself from returning to Olive Street until after dark, just, though she dialed his number a half-dozen times waiting. The foot sign, when she at last glanced, was out of order, its fuse blown or gears jammed. Her view was of its stilled edge bisecting the pale wash of dusk above Sunset, no foot to be seen, sick or healthy. She called the clinic to complain, but the foot doctors weren’t picking up the phone either. Los Angeles was the largest inhabited abandoned city on earth.

She drove back under a spell of apprehension. It was as if she and the band had fallen into a void, dead air, somewhere between the last digits of Morsel’s countdown and the zero of their own thwarted possibilities. As for Carl, Lucinda only wanted him back, wanted once more to be tickled and fooled and swallowed, be made undisappointed and whole. Nothing more. She examined the bumpers of neighboring cars for his slogans, the words he’d moaned in her ear and hidden in plain view throughout the world, but couldn’t find any.

She discovered him there behind the green curtain, packing a black leather case that sat open on his bed. Toothbrush and underwear, nothing else, gear for an astronaut’s departure, or a child’s sleepover. He rolled his shaggy head at the sound of her entrance. The lamps she’d lit still blazed. Her damp towels still lay crumpled like tribute at his feet. Yet nothing in the loft belonged to her, unless it was the pile of Falmouth’s drawings of the band, drooping ignored over the hood of the pinball machine in the distant corner. The drawings spoke of her life before this disaster, far from this place.

“Where are you going?”

“I’d like to avoid feeling guilty if that’s at all possible.”

“You don’t need to feel guilty, just explain.”

“There’s someone else.”

“I saw.” The truth fell on her like injurious rain: she already knew.

“Yes,” he agreed. “You were there when it happened.”

“Did you and Dr. Marian know each other from before?”

“No. I’ve never met anyone like her.”

“That’s beautiful,” said Lucinda, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice.

“You can stay here if you want,” he said. He struggled to zipper the tiny case with his mittenlike hands. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but in the meantime I’d be thrilled if you and the band made use of the place.”

“You don’t want to be in the band anymore?”

“Marian thinks I should simplify. Anyway, I really wasn’t helping things, was I?”

“I thought you were proud of the songs.” Lucinda knew she’d begun sulking.