You Don't Love Me Yet (10 page)

Falmouth’s interns sighted the band members and shooed Apartygoers aside to open a path to the elevator’s doors, two paint-blistered steel portals studded with rusty bolts. One intern rapped at the doors and they parted to reveal a wizened Asian man in a porkpie hat and suspenders, manipulating a brass-handled wheel with one hand while gripping a smoldering cigarette and a folded-over Korean newspaper in the other. He arched an eyebrow, grunted, and seized Lucinda’s amp, brandishing his newspaper like a flyswatter to brush the curious throng back from the doors. The band followed him inside.

“Mr. Oo doesn’t speak English but he knows Korean kung fu,” Jules Harvey explained, bowing to usher them from the elevator at the seventh floor, the top. Harvey wore a forest-green three-piece suit with a zipper in place of its buttons. He still wore his Tigers cap and high-top sneakers, and gaped like a turkey through his frames. “I’m positive he could slay you with that newspaper.” The tiny man had grabbed the amplifier and bass and now soldiered across the vast empty space of the loft toward the distant riser. There, Matthew sat alone in a small grove of their equipment, behind Denise’s kit, tapping his fingers on her snare. The riser was unexpectedly high, and their unoccupied microphones and monitors looked persuasively professional from this angle, rescued from their rehearsal space.

The floor was a plain of polished wood, scattered with pillars, the ceiling a barren lid pressing low overhead, decorated with track lighting and a dingy, unlit mirror ball. The triangular loft formed a funnel pointing to the riser where the band would play, or mime playing. The prospects of the crowd downstairs fitting itself obediently inside seemed, to Lucinda, poor. Even if they could all squeeze up through the chute of the elevator, what chance they’d fall in line with Falmouth’s commands? The interns scurried off now, presumably to find their leader. Lucinda, with Denise and Bedwin, followed. Crossing the open dance floor Lucinda felt exposed, a cat in a cathedral.

Jules Harvey scurried beside her, hands joined behind his back. “There isn’t anything to be concerned about,” he mused in his soft voice. “If we begin late it shouldn’t compromise the underlying premise in any important sense.”

“I wasn’t concerned,” said Lucinda. “We’re ready whenever you like.”

“I was thinking more of Falmouth.”

“Is something wrong with Falmouth?”

“Perhaps after you greet your compatriots you’d be willing to follow me.”

“Maybe we better go now.”

Denise and Bedwin continued toward the stage, while Lucinda followed Harvey. Behind the elevator was hidden the loft’s tiny kitchen and bathroom, and above, connected by a short spiral stair, nestled an elevated sleeping platform, with a ceiling so low Lucinda had to stoop. The melancholy living space was a mole’s burrow, suggestive of Harvey’s secret armpit-sniffer’s despondency. “Will you remove your shoes, please?” said Harvey at the top of the stair. Lucinda crushed the backs of her sneakers with her toes, squeezing them off without untying the laces.

The scene had an air of private ritual. Falmouth knelt on Jules Harvey’s futon, his knees surrounded by a heaped disarray of headphones and portable tape and disk players. Two shopping bags of additional equipment slumped unpromisingly on the floor. A gun nested in the cushions. Lucinda recalled something about a starter’s pistol. She hoped it wasn’t as real as it looked. The small shelf beside Jules Harvey’s bed contained candles and two neat stacks of glossy magazines, possibly pornographic. The two interns sat coolly sharing a joint on a love seat in the corner. Their unspeaking presence seemed almost malevolent now, Falmouth’s fantasy of a world decorated with servile girls gone sour.

Headphones clung crookedly to Falmouth’s dome. Sweat trickling on his jaw, he stabbed buttons on a scuffed silver Walkman, then rolled his eyes and thrust the rig aside.

“Where have you been?” he said to Lucinda.

“I took a shower. What’s wrong?”

“It’s no good,” he said. “Jules invited too many people and they didn’t bring anything to listen to and when they all come upstairs they’re going to destroy everything. We don’t have enough tape players. Half of these don’t work at all. We can’t let them in, it’s too many. Did you see?”

“I saw,” said Lucinda. “It’s half of Silver Lake.”

“This happens,” said Jules Harvey. “An invitation becomes exponential, something gets in the air. Suddenly it’s the party everyone has to be at on a given night, the party of the season. We couldn’t have foreseen how your list and mine would catalyze. People are afraid not to be at an event like this. Many others will eventually lie and claim they were.”

“It wasn’t meant to be a party,” said Falmouth. “That’s the problem. You threw a party.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jules Harvey. Steel flashed behind his usual gray tone of haplessness. “It’s what I do.” Lucinda understood that Harvey really was indomitable, the human equivalent of a cartoon turtle who appeared to plod ineffectually, yet when you tried to outrun him, turned up seated calmly on a log a few feet ahead of you, smoking a cigar and annotating a racing form with a stub of pencil.

Falmouth gestured for his interns, who didn’t budge. “We’ll be selective,” he said. “I won’t let them up without headphones.”

“I’d prefer not to disappoint so many people,” said Jules Harvey.

“What do you suggest, then?” said Falmouth.

“Let’s have them up. We can feed and entertain them for a while. Get them on your side, Falmouth, then you can propose something. Here.” Harvey reached across Falmouth’s knees and plucked the pistol from the cushions. “One of you children handle this.”

One of the interns nodded and stubbed out the joint, took the pistol from Harvey.

“It makes a very loud noise, so be careful. When you’ve got their attention, try to explain.”

The intern nodded, and she and her companion moved to the spiral stair. Lucinda saw that some mysterious but unmistakable transfer had occurred. These were Jules Harvey’s interns now.

When they were gone, Lucinda said, “I ought to go down and, uh, greet my compatriots.”

Harvey spread his hands. “Maybe we should all go. We can leave this stuff up here for now.”

Falmouth nodded disconsolately. The sacks of headphones and tape players seemed irrelevant now, the very medium of his great project demoted to “stuff.”

“Do you want something to drink, Falmouth?” said Harvey.

“I’d like some water, please.”

Lucinda led the other two downstairs. Denise and Bedwin hovered at the base of the stair. Jules Harvey led Falmouth into the kitchen and Denise told Bedwin, speaking as if to a child, “Go with them. I’m sure Jules can help you find something.” Bedwin drifted in after Harvey and Falmouth, leaving Denise and Lucinda alone.

“There’s an aura of doom around here,” said Lucinda.

“I guess we all get to keep our day jobs,” said Denise.

“By my count you’re the only one who has one.”

“Don’t you work for Falmouth?”

“I don’t see a big future for myself in complaints.”

“We can all move into my apartment,” said Denise. “We’ll be one of those bands that’s also a utopian collective, an experimental group marriage, and then we can all kill one another.”

“Don’t forget a certain, ahem, bathtub-dweller.”

“There’s room for everyone.”

“What’s Bedwin looking for, anyway?”

“He wants a stool for onstage. He said playing standing up makes him feel naked.”

Falmouth came glaring from the kitchen, startling them. “Don’t be so blatant with your mutinies,” he said ferociously.

“What do you mean?”

“That you imagine I’ve fallen so low I’d accept the charity of living in the squalor of your band is disgusting enough. What I really can’t fathom is how you awarded me the nickname ‘bathtub-dweller.’”

The interns rematerialized, stopping Falmouth in his tracks. They stood like Shakespearian courtiers, waiting to deliver their report. Jules Harvey, apparently attuned to the young women by some deep wavelength, emerged from the kitchen and bowed at them to begin, ducking his baseball cap with Buddhist complacency.

“We failed,” announced one of the interns. The other nodded, consenting that they spoke with one voice.

“Did you fire the gun?” asked Harvey.

“Yes. We fired the gun and opened a dialogue with what seemed like a reasonable faction.”

“I’m surprised they don’t yet have elected representatives,” said Falmouth.

“It also helps that Mr. Oo had the fire extinguisher,” the intern explained, ignoring Falmouth. “I think that got their attention more than the pistol.”

“Fire extinguisher?”

“A contingent of sound poets had lit a bonfire between two parked cars. But Mr. Oo put it out.”

“Go on.”

“At a certain point negotiations broke down. They figured out there isn’t anything to drink up here.”

“That’s not necessarily the case,” said Harvey. “I always have a few bottles in reserve.”

“You have to listen,” insisted the intern. “They don’t need us anymore. They intercepted your caterers. Someone leaked a rumor that the banquet wasn’t going to be made available to the dancers. That isn’t actually true, is it?”

Jules Harvey looked at Falmouth, who shrugged. Lucinda was impressed at Harvey’s effect on the students. She’d never heard them speak so many words while in Falmouth’s dominion.

“They’re having a sort of tailgate party now,” said the intern. “I think it’s even bigger than before. A couple of the servers are friends of ours from school, as it happens. They’re walking around with trays of chicken satay and tuna belly on rice crackers.”

Jules Harvey scratched his chin and adjusted his spectacles, summoning his deepest resources. The rest of them stood twitching slightly, deferring to his turtle authority.

“Go back downstairs, but don’t use the gun this time. What we want is more along the lines of a whispering campaign. Tell a select few that the band is about to start. Propose that they might want to get a good spot near the stage. You don’t have to talk to strangers. Let the majority be curious. Mention it to those server friends of yours, especially if they’re young and attractive.”

“Should we say which band?”

“They don’t have a name,” said Falmouth bitterly.

“It’s better that way. Just say the band is about to start. It implies that anyone would know which band it was, suggesting a reference to something already confirmed as desirable by others. That’s why they’re all here anyway.”

“To see the band?” asked Lucinda, confused.

“No. I mean because most of them heard someone refer to ‘that party everyone’s going to tonight,’ as if they should already know about it. Like ‘that restaurant everyone goes to,’ or ‘that girl everyone’s trying to date.’ It’s much better than anything specific.” Harvey urged the interns to the elevator. “Go now. Falmouth, come help me open the windows.”

“For jumping, I hope.”

“I want them to hear.”

“Hear what?”

“The band, of course. They’ll have to play loud.”

Lucinda understood now that her old friend had gone up against a force more profound than Jules Harvey. Falmouth’s past works had involved manipulating people’s despair, pensiveness, ennui. Those were malleable materials, lightly guarded by their possessors. The Aparty was another matter. Here, Falmouth had tried to appropriate other people’s happiness, and been met with that property’s devastatingly blithe resistance. Happiness was disobedient, had its own law. As a freshly minted local expert, Lucinda felt qualified to know.

m
atthew sat on the riser’s edge, taking the private interlude as an opportunity for tuning his guitar. For Matthew, Lucinda knew, this was a humbling ordeal, one which, like certain bodily functions, stood a better chance of being accomplished without witnesses. More than once at rehearsal he’d abandoned the effort and shamefacedly handed his guitar to Bedwin for adjustment. Lucinda felt a surge of tenderness. She almost wished they could leave Matthew alone there, not prick the bubble in which he dwelled, elegant as a black-and-white photograph of some legendary figure caught backstage. He’d shaved, trimmed his sideburns into neat wedges, donned a black turtleneck, shined his boots, made every attempt to retrieve himself from the kangaroo’s slough his apartment had become and make himself ready for the band’s unveiling. He’d be the last to know they were going to play aloud. Lucinda wanted to be the one to tell him.

Bedwin had found a step stool in Jules Harvey’s kitchen. He placed it on the riser in the clear spot behind his monitor. Then Denise led him away, promising snacks, leaving Lucinda and Matthew with the equipment. Matthew offered her a hand up onto the riser. She accepted for the pleasure of the contact of their palms, his cool, hers hot. She was in a fever, her body an engine churning at toxins. Matthew reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. He spoke gently, as if he’d been the one to rouse her from the late-afternoon fugue on her couch.

“You have a wild happy look in your eyes.”

“Denise seemed pissed that I missed the sound check.”

“It mostly involved Falmouth criticizing our clothing.”