You Don't Love Me Yet (23 page)

six

t
he porpoises arced from the wave tops parallel to the beach, just yards from where the surf itched and boiled at the sun-bright sand. Equidistant, and rotating like targets in an arcade as if mounted on cogs beneath the line of the water, the animals kept silent time with the walkers on the beach, seeming apart, hallucinated, ethereal, embodying heedless liberty despite their almost military precision. The porpoises might seem to have come to welcome and escort the sand-walkers, the gulpers of gullet-warming scotch from a bottle they’d left behind in a nook in the rocks, the intoxicated lovers who explored El Matador Beach, a site of nearly catastrophic beauty only twenty-five minutes from the baked interior west of La Cienega on which they ordinarily mapped their whole lives.

El Matador’s sand was littered with ragged geologic forms, pylons and archways of stone scoured by salt-bearing wind. The sky made a blue forgiving table over the sand’s glare, which was impossible to face directly, as though the lovers fire-walked the sun’s surface itself. Pale humans, they felt their vanities smashed in this collision of water, stone, and sky, so the sea creatures turning like pinwheels struck a note of mammalian solidarity, a solace. But no, it was a lie. The walkers subtly sped up to keep time, but the porpoises’ indifference was soon made plain. In their easy looping they swam twice as fast as the walkers advanced, escorting no one. Then they were gone, try as you might to locate them again in the glistening expanse. The lovers were alone again in this place, together.

“I concede the fact that this beach exists and has always existed outside of us but right now it feels to me like this is our emotional landscape made real. If you could read the meaning of the insane shape of those cliffs and pillars you’d know everything I feel about you.”

“It’s like a giant heart or a brain we’re walking inside, though maybe I’m drunk. I feel like those gulls are watching us now.”

“People are psychedelic to each other, under ideal conditions.”

“Who said that?”

“Nobody, I mean, I did, just now.”

“I can’t believe we never came here. Who told you about this place?”

“Falmouth. He said he was sick of looking at me, I was too happy. He said he’d pay me for the day if we followed his exact instructions, to drive up the coast and ignore all the beaches until we got to El Matador. We’re supposed to eat at Neptune’s Net, too, a fish shack farther up the highway. You have to admit he has some good ideas.”

“He has a lot of good ideas.”

“Matthew?”

“What?”

“Why do you never get jealous?”

“I do get jealous.”

“Tell me what you love about me.”

“Everything.”

“No, come on, something specific.”

“I love most of all your wild integrity.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

They’d been reunited for two or three days, depending how you counted, a dizzy sleepless binge. Two weeks had passed since the Monday morning Lucinda delivered the unruined drawings to the storefront gallery and presented them to Falmouth. Falmouth, rousing himself, had hired Lucinda to supervise matting and framing the charcoal-on-paper artworks in archival settings. His show opened in another month, under the title “Monster Eyes: Disband.” Falmouth had totally repoised himself, shaved the stubble that had briefly revealed him as not bald, only balding. These days he was usually talking on the phone or squinting at his computer, waving Lucinda through, letting chicken-salad sandwiches stiffen on rafts of wax paper on his desk, too busy for lunch. The opening’s after party would be thrown by Jules Harvey.

Denise and Bedwin had absconded, like Bonnie and Clyde, into their universe of baloney and ginger ale. There had been no further bargaining or recrimination, the songs were taken, gone, theirs. One morning a few scraps of equipment, microphones, stands, cable, had been delivered anonymously to Falmouth’s storefront. These belonged rightfully to Matthew; his zoo income had been their stake when the four had formed the band. Two days later Lucinda opened the
Echo Park Annoyance
to find a notice among the music listings, billing the defectors’ first gig, at Spaceland, opening for the Rain Injuries.
Urban and Greenish, acoustic duo, formerly of Monster Eyes.

Lucinda nudged Matthew back to the sandy nook where they’d half buried the bottle of Oban. She tripped him, stuck her ankle between his and shoved his skinny frame down to the moist shaded sand. He leaned on his elbows and they both sipped from the bottle. Lucinda unbuttoned his jeans and nibbled the tiny procession of hairs, so scant it was like punctuation, stray commas and parentheses, trailing to the coils below. He wore no underwear. El Matador was too public, but she cooled him in her mouth for just a moment, a promise for later. Matthew’s head lolled, his throat’s knuckle to the sky. His substance throbbed, so real and hot, smoother than her numb chappy lips. His narrow pelvis barely filled his jeans. His elegant scrawny limbs, so familiar and unfamiliar at once. Everything between them was new and right. Matthew tugged his jeans over himself and they fled the shaded cranny and scrambled back through the beach’s maze of forms and up the ice plant–ridged knoll to where they’d left Matthew’s Mazda.

Neptune’s Net was another revelation, as grand and strange as the name suggested. Its broad eating porch overlooked the coastal highway and beyond, to the waves dotted with surfers bobbing like floes. The restaurant was a secret destination only to them, mobbed by eaters: middle-aged valley couples, tanned Malibu executives, feral bands of teens, Asian families like strings of ducklings, bikers in chaps, anyone but hipsters, the vast galaxy of anyone who’d never in a million years attend Jules Harvey’s parties, a vision as humbling in its way as the indifferent sea and sky. They chowed in pure animal bliss, at long picnic tables strewn with carapaces of shrimp, crab, and lobster, oil-stained paper trays of fried scallops and clams, french fries, squeezed sleeves of ketchup and tartar, drained bottles of Corona and Zima. Matthew and Lucinda placed an order at the counter, lobster and shrimp, then took their numbered token and went to pick beers from a back room loaded with glass-fronted coolers.

“Sapporo,” said Lucinda, pointing at the tall silver canister that had drawn her eye.

They sat waiting at the edge of the porch, sharing a picnic table with a large woman in a lime pantsuit with a tiny dog. She sat alone over a lobster and a tray of fries, her leashed pet coursing at her ankles. Matthew and Lucinda gazed over the highway, where convertibles slid to destinations even less imaginable than this one, Big Sur, Baja, Alaska. The restaurant’s loudspeaker crackled out numbers, so loud they echoed off the cliffs above, never theirs. Matthew and Lucinda felt at the exact edge of their lives, feeling them close, closer, as near at hand and yet elusive as the wind that whistled in their hair: the true complete lives in which they would at last drown, the oceanic voyage into their thirties and beyond, through which their inchoate yearnings would be either soothed or disappointed, or both.

Somehow, Lucinda knew, they’d be famous. When they were it would be funny to say that they had once been in a band. The fantasy expanded: Urban and Greenish would be famous too, and it would be lovely and funny that they had been in a band together, when they were younger. Those who admired their work would see it as a measure of the inevitability of their fame, that they were all once in the same band. Lucinda drained at her Sapporo, pleased by its seeming bottomlessness, its cool buzz thrilling her blood like a higher form of oxygen. Would she and Matthew be together forever or would it later only be funny or odd that they had once been in a band together too? But this was nonsense, a glitch in her mood. She and Matthew belonged together. It was only astonishing they’d wasted so much time not seeing what was likely obvious to others. Certainly Falmouth had known, though he’d been too wise to press her. He’d given them a gift, a sort of unofficial wedding present, by commanding them to visit this place. In his way, Falmouth was a romantic. Lucinda loved him, too.

The pantsuited woman’s tiny dog barked cyclically at his master’s discarded lobster shell, thinking it had discovered a villain. The woman heaved a sigh and asked Matthew and Lucinda if they would guard her seat and her food while she locked the dog in the car. They agreed, then without consultation pillaged the mound of fries the moment the woman was out of sight of the porch.

It was at that moment a bicycle built for two rounded the curve of highway, laboring northward to ascend the ridge on which Neptune’s Net perched. Two figures of substance, dressed absurdly in black sunglasses, baggy sweatpants clipped at the ankles, and white rubber-soled shoes resembling a nurse’s, teetering on the elaborate bicycle’s wobbling tires, knees trembling with the effort of depressing the pedals. Dr. Marian in the rear seat, the complainer in front, both their ruddy faces shining with sweat. They looked immutably right together, a symbiotic unit. Dr. Marian leaned forward in her seat, her expression fierce as she whispered in the complainer’s ear, incanting him forward. She worked too, resolutely fair, her powerful thighs driving downward in coordination with his. The complainer’s expression was grim, his mouth set, eyes helpless, yet his bearing conveyed some measure of inner placidity Lucinda had never glimpsed. The tandem bicycle reached the top and the riders’ struggle eased. They began to coast, their backdrop the first blush of a pale distant sunset.

The complainer wore a T-shirt reading
nobody knows i’m suicidal.

“Look,” Lucinda said.

“Is that—”

“Shhh, just let them pass.”

The riders were soon gone beyond the curve of highway, off toward who knew what. Perhaps merely a different fish shack, higher up the coast. Lucinda was glad they’d appeared. It was another harbinger of happiness for herself and Matthew, but she felt glad too that the couple had passed without detecting their audience at the porch rail.

“Does he ever come around the zoo office?”

“A couple of times.”

“Do you talk?”

Matthew shrugged. “He’s a very friendly guy.”

Lucinda decided not to ask more. “It’s strange to think about now,” she said.

The large woman returned without her dog. Matthew and Lucinda daubed guiltily at the greasy corners of their mouths and scooted away from her fries.

“What’s strange to think about?” said Matthew.

“The whole thing.” Lucinda stopped herself. “I mean, that he was actually in the band.”

“There’s something I never told you.”

“What’s that?”

“At certain times I felt like Carl was the only real artist out of all of us,” said Matthew. “I mean, I suppose this is kind of crazy, but he reminded me of Elvis Presley, like he was some kind of idiot savant trying to invent something new, to break through to a new kind of sound.”

“It’s possible, I guess.”

“Okay, it’s ridiculous.”

“Yes.”

“It’s totally ridiculous.”

Lucinda was done with this part of the conversation. “You know what I love most about you?” she asked.

“What?”

She grabbed his arm, grabbed his neck, pulled him to her, whispered against his bristly sinewy cheek. She felt so hungry she almost wanted to take a bite. Neptune’s Net would call their number soon. “The way the veins in your forearms stick out. And the ridge of muscle that runs along your waist. I love that you’re skinny.”

“That’s superficial, Lucinda.”

“You can’t be deep without a surface.”

—fin—

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Amy Greenstadt, for help inventing this story. Thanks also Pamela Jackson, Will Amato, Diane Martel, Alice Eckles, Maureen Linker, Alexis Rivera, Kat Silverstein, Philip Price, Heidi Julavits, Rodrigo Fresán, Rebecca Donner, Lauren Mechling, Sean Howe, Andrew Hultkrans, Chris Sorrentino, Bill, Richard, Amy.

also by jonathan lethem

The Disappointment Artist
(essays)

Men and Cartoons
(stories)

The Fortress of Solitude

This Shape We’re In

Motherless Brooklyn

Girl in Landscape

As She Climbed Across the Table

The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
(stories)

Amnesia Moon

Gun, with Occasional Music

with carter scholz

Kafka Americana

as editor

The Vintage Book of Amnesia

The Year’s Best Music Writing 2002