You Don't Love Me Yet (6 page)

“It’s good to see you,” Matthew said. He patted her clumsily on the elbow, then withdrew.

Now she spotted the glitch of panic in his raccooned eyes, his extra day’s stubble. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a really gargantuan salad you’re making,” she said.

“It’s a lot,” he confessed blankly.

She counted the green and purple heads in his cart, calculating volumes of leafy material. “Some sort of coleslaw sauna treatment, or are you throwing a dinner party?”

“I have a visitor.”

“Someone I know?”

He regarded her evenly, with a still, small defiance.

“A sick friend?” she asked.

“I guess you could say that. Someone who needs my help.”

Lucinda was silenced now.

“I think I should be getting back,” said Matthew. He pivoted his cart toward the registers.

“I’ll see you at rehearsals,” she called to his departing back. She felt like the redhead now, a thirsting stranger. “Don’t forget.”

At home Lucinda boiled the cauliflower whole, suffused it with butter and pepper, then devoured it with knife and fork as if it were a soufflé. The dish was either lame and lonely, or grand, she couldn’t decide, but consoled herself imagining translated French names—“white brain,” possibly, or “virgin moon.” She poured a scotch, just a small one, sat breathing its mellow fumes, barely drinking. Then wrecked the evening irretrievably by glancing in the hallway mirror for the foot’s command: it smiled encouragement and she dialed the complainer’s number. No answer. He had no machine. Each echoing chime of the unanswered line cast another band of shadow across her heart’s floor. After twelve rings she gulped the scotch and retreated to bed.

t
he set list grew. Bedwin had written four new songs: “Dirty Yellow Chair,” “Nostalgia Vu,” “Astronaut Food,” and “Secret from Yourself.” He presented them to the band at the same afternoon rehearsal where Lucinda unveiled the news of the Aparty gig, the chance to play quietly in front of several hundred of Falmouth’s well-dressed art friends. It was easy to picture them as tastemakers, rumormongers, a milieu capable of making a new band its pet overnight. Together, songs and gig, it presented an orgy of possibilities. Nobody knew what to say. The songs were so fine that Bedwin himself seemed astonished. The band’s only outlet for its bewildered gratitude was to commence rehearsing diligently. So they shirked paying jobs and sleep, gathering four of the next five nights to burnish the treasury of new material. Talk grew respectfully minimal. Denise regularly fixed sandwiches for Bedwin at the breaks, assuming this caretaking duty without resentment. Matthew arrived on time and expressed no exasperation at the intervals of tuning among the instrumentalists, gazing fixedly at middle distances while waiting for the players to resume behind him, then carving deep into the material, despite seeming otherwise somewhat wasted, skinnier than ever. At each set’s conclusion distraction overtook him, and he left before the others.

Lucinda held her secrets close. She felt a proprietary elation at having brought the others to this place. Yet hid inside the music, fingers throbbing on the neck of her instrument with a grace beyond her knowledge, agent of some higher purpose. The songs told her how to feel. She’d waited a week for a phone call which refused to come, then succumbed two nights in a row to the temptation to dial the complainer’s number. For reward, only listened to his line howl in vacancy. She felt no impatience. Her complainer would reemerge and find her, the songs said so. In the meantime she dwelled in his words, now made plastic and catchy by Bedwin and the band. Bedwin had written a backup harmony vocal for “Astronaut Food.” Since they only owned two microphones, Lucinda curled down to meet Denise at the mike stand mounted close on her snare drum to sing, “Am I just astronaut food for you? Are you gonna take me along to the moon?” The sentiment might have seemed plaintive or piteous, but she and Denise always felt beaming joy as their voices braided.

The fifth night in their siege of rehearsal, the last night before the Aparty, Bedwin said, with an air of pre-defeat: “What about ‘Robot Head in Mourning’?” Everyone understood: the phrase was a possible band name. The band still didn’t have a name and they’d grown embarrassed even to try. Proposals weren’t so much shot down as left to perish in the air. They’d even resorted once to sticking pins in a dictionary, with no success.

“Sounds more like an album title than a band name,” said Denise.

“Mourning like dead or morning like morning has broken?” asked Lucinda.

“I was thinking like dead but it doesn’t matter,” said Bedwin. “We could spell it different ways at different times.”

“I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said
pour love on the broken places
,” said Denise.

“I’ve been seeing that thing everywhere!” said Lucinda. “I saw it on a T-shirt the other day. What does it mean?”

“We could call ourselves ‘The Broken Places.’”

“Don’t you think that’s pathetic?” said Matthew.

“Pathetic is good,” said Bedwin. “Maybe we should use the word ‘pathetic’ in the name.”

“The Pathetic Fallacies,” suggested Lucinda.

“The Pathetic Chickens,” said Bedwin.

“Why chickens?” said Denise.

“Okay, hens,” said Bedwin. “The Pathetic Hens.”

“That’s terrible,” said Denise.

“Okay, the Fallacy Hens,” said Bedwin.

“We really need a name before the gig,” said Lucinda.

Matthew was nearly out the door, his mike cord bundled and shoved underneath Denise’s couch, his guitar case in hand.

“What about that one from before?” said Denise, looking up from cinching the screw on her hi-hat. “The opposite of a molar or something?”

“Not a molar,” said Bedwin. “The opposite of a wisdom tooth. Idiot Tooth.”

“Yeah, Idiot Tooth, I like that one, I always think about it.”

“How much can you like it if you can’t even remember it?” said Lucinda. She tucked her bass into the felt bed of its case. “Anyway, wasn’t there a band called Mystery Tooth?”

“Spooky,” said Bedwin, almost under his breath.

“What?”

“Spooky, Spooky Tooth.”

“Why does there always have to be something self-deprecating in the name?” said Matthew from the kitchen doorway. His beard was a week old now, a black frost that had overtaken his sallow cheeks nearly to his eyes. “What was that other name you guys liked? The Tedious Knives?”

“Knifes,” said Bedwin.

“What?”

“It was knifes, with an ‘f.’”

“Tedious, forlorn, morbid, crappy, futile.”

“The Futiles?” suggested Denise.

“Let Falmouth decide,” said Matthew. “I’m sure he’ll have a suggestion. Maybe he should bill us as the Papier-mâché Band. Or the Deaf-mutes.” He departed, not quite slamming Denise’s door. The rest were silent and unnerved in his aftermath, their songs all chased away. Bedwin slowly wound his cord around his amp’s handle, blinking at the floor. Denise leaned into her fridge and took out a beer. She waved the bottle at Bedwin, who shook his head. Lucinda stuck out her hand and Denise passed her a cold bottle.

“Things feel a little weird,” Bedwin ventured.

“It’s the gig,” said Denise. “We’re all a little cuckoo.”

“We sound good.”

“We sound great.”

“The new songs are okay, huh?” Bedwin didn’t meet Lucinda’s sudden glance.

“They’re the best songs,” said Denise. She put down her beer and opened her arms to Bedwin. He tolerated her embrace, his shoulders square, terror swimming in his eyes.

“I guess I’ll go home now,” said Bedwin.

After he’d shambled through the door Denise said, “So, what’s the matter with Matthew?”

“That’s not my department anymore.”

“Sure, but what’s your theory?”

Lucinda gobbled her beer and swallowed hard before speaking. “My theory is he has a new girlfriend who doesn’t speak such good English.”

“I’m not sure I understand you.”

“Maybe hostage is a better word.”

“Does this have something to do with the zoo?”

Lucinda nodded, wide-eyed.

“You want something harder than that beer?”

t
he two figures tumbled up the stairway in sloppy tandem, index fingers pressed to their whiskey-swollen lips, elbows at each other’s ribs. They left the hallway’s lightbulb chain un-pulled, as if illumination was their enemy, and so tripped on the stairs and over their feet. The banisters and stairs, even the walls of the stairwell felt muffled in dust, but beneath the dust’s mousy odor the drunken sleuths might have detected another scent, an acrid clue to what they were after, urine from another sphere. It was strong enough to bite its way even through their occluded noses. They sniffed their own fingertips stupidly, shrugged in the dark, advanced on creaking tiptoe.

“You got the key?”

“Fssshh.”

Inside the apartment, Denise flattened like a moth against the white hallway, pinned in moonlight that spilled through the kitchen. Lucinda slid past her, teeth bared and eyeballs bugged in commitment to their idiot foray. Their noses said they neared some goal. The rooms throbbed with mulchy life force, festering salad, mammalian sweat.

Matthew slept with his door open, sprawled on his back, nude outlines covered by a thin sheet. His penis was stiff under the sheet, a totem draped in pale shadow, nighttime body divorced from mind, rehearsing its secret forces. The invaders froze, shared a glance of dread, gnawed the insides of their cheeks. Matthew’s tongue lolled from his mouth, his head strained into its pillow as though smashing through dreams. Denise and Lucinda edged crabwise through the spotlight of the doorway, hands flat to the wall.

Past him, the smell was stronger. The room they discovered, Matthew’s parlor, with television, stereo, couch, held no answers. Lucinda duckwalked into its middle to examine its corners. There was no animal besides themselves.

At first sight the bathroom appeared empty. Yet here, their noses testified, was the source. Their eyes adjusted to the dimness as they bumped into the middle of a checkerboard tile floor strewn with celery butts and shards of cabbage. The invaders peered together into the only secret place remaining, a clawfoot bathtub glowing like an ivory icon in the gloom.

Shelf the Flyer gazed up at them, her yellow eyes training calmly on each of theirs in turn. The kangaroo lay on her side, filling the waterless basin of the tub, elegant legs spread like a book, neck and forepaws and tail slack as a sleeper’s. A trail of kangaroo piss beaded to the tub’s drain.

Denise mimed a scream. Lucinda clutched her around the shoulders. Knees tangling, heels skating in lettuce slime, they nearly tumbled to the floor. Shelf only blinked and tightened her whiskers, didn’t shift another muscle.

Lucinda held up a finger in a plea for stillness from Denise, then lowered Matthew’s toilet seat, slid jeans and underwear to her thighs, plopped down and peed, inspired to seek relief herself. She left it unflushed. Let it be their calling card, a reply to the stink. Matthew would likely credit it as some prodigious act of the kangaroo’s.

As Lucinda and Denise turned from the dim bathroom to the moonlit corridor the figure lurched into view—or had he stood there longer, just listening? Matthew loomed and swayed, wreathed in his sheet, eyes turtled in bafflement.

“Lucinda?” he croaked.

Caught, the drunken women only stared.

“This is so totally fucked up.”

Now they ran for the doorway, still mute, as if by fleeing they might persuade Matthew to retreat to dream and incorporate them as apparitions. Forget any clues they left, the front door they now unlocked or their handprints smearing in the stairwell’s dust. The essential thing was to give no testimony. The kangaroo in the bathtub had understood this principle, and kept cool. It was already impossible to be certain they’d seen her.

l
ucinda slid through more dark, past Falmouth Strand’s desk, on tiptoe again though there was no one to fool. It was two, three, or four in the morning, she couldn’t tell, wore no watch. Lucinda wasn’t ready to face her empty bed or the mocking twin faces of the foot sign. She’d delivered Denise to her own door, piloting her car on the empty Sunset Boulevard soberly, gingerly. Now, here alone in the gallery, she still felt drunk.

Seated at her unlit cubicle she lifted the phone and dialed the first six digits of the number she’d memorized without intending to, then circled her finger over the last, daring fate or at least gravity to cause it to descend. At that moment she heard herself snort or snore loudly, then woke with a jerk from some sudden depth, her head elbow-propped on the phone’s receiver, its mouthpiece mashed to her lips and slathered in saliva. The line rang.

“Hello,” he answered on the third ring.

“I called you,” Lucinda said stupidly.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Were you asleep?”

“Nope.”

“Mishomnia?”

“I was just awake.”

She widened her jaw, licked her lips, tried to gather herself. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“You were waiting?”

Lucinda moved the phone’s receiver from her head in confusion, as if the complainer lived within the instrument. The object gripped in her hand told her nothing, might as well have been a hair dryer or thermos. For an instant she weighed replacing it in its cradle. Instead she returned it to her ear and discovered again his breath hushed against a backdrop of howling static and her own mental buzz.

“I want to see you,” she said.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“I need to.”

“I’m free tomorrow night.”

Lucinda issued a sound like a thwarted sneeze.

“You know the Ambit Hotel?” he said. “Downtown, on Sixth.”

“Uh, sure.”

“Meet me at the rooftop bar at nine.”

“Okay, wait, how will I know you?”

“We’ll be the only two people looking for each other.”

“Okay.”

“Nine o’clock, don’t forget.”

“Okay.”

“Get some sleep.”

“Okay.”