You Don't Love Me Yet (16 page)

Lucinda handed a bottle to the complainer from the six beneath her chair, then twisted the cap off a fresh one for herself. Clipped ends floated as she moved, as though she dwelled in a snow globe of hair.

Denise found a push broom and plowed clippings into an ersatz animal behind Lucinda’s chair. Lucinda darted up and brushed herself against the complainer, parted lips raking his collar, then turned, huddling in her goose-pimpled arms, to fetch her shirt.

“Don’t stop on my account,” said the complainer, taking a long pull on his beer. “I’ll just sit and watch.”

“It doesn’t look finished?” Lucinda slid her T-shirt and sweater, still balled together, over her head, scattering more hair.

“I’m no judge. It seems you’re after a hairstyle that complements the band’s sound, something wild and natural, like a flock of hedgehogs. Are you going to confront the singer, though? Because now he’s the only one with girlish hair.”

“Matthew.”

“And the person on the stool is Bedwin, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll play keyboards, I guess.”

Lucinda put her finger to her lips, though she felt a thrill at the image, Carl’s big shoulders hunched over a Farfisa organ, jostling onstage somewhere between Bedwin’s stool and Denise’s kit.

“I feel like you’re Lucinda’s imaginary friend,” said Denise, not seeming to have noticed his remark. “Like I’m not really supposed to be able to see you.”

Lucinda widened her eyes at Carl: I haven’t told our secret, she beamed into his thoughts. He couldn’t reasonably be angry that Denise had noticed their embrace at Jules Harvey’s loft. Lucinda realized she wanted Denise to know.

The complainer seemed not to register Lucinda’s alarm. He drew a chair from the gallery’s darkened corner, into their pool of light, and seated himself. “I’d make some joke about how difficult it is for us imaginary friends,” he said. “The constant struggle to remain visible, etcetera. But the truth is I think it’s you guys, the band, I mean, who are figments of
my
imagination.”

Lucinda vibrated, hearing his voice, seeing him here again before her, real. Since the night of the gig and their parting she’d binged on drink and crabs, talked on telephones and operated heavy machinery, even sort of kissed someone else, two someone elses. Swimming in her desultory bedsheets Sunday morning she’d masturbated three times, the last humping the ridge of a throw pillow. Yet it all seemed less than a parenthesis now, events not even so vivid as dreams, more like tableaux glimpsed on a television playing in the background somewhere, one no one had thought to switch off.

“How are we figments of your imagination?” said Denise. She inspected him defiantly, wary of sarcasm. She’d pulled up a rolling office chair and plopped down, stretching her legs between Carl and Lucinda as if to assert that she wouldn’t be reduced to third-wheel status.

The complainer emptied his beer with a satisfied gasp, put the bottle aside. “Just a minute,” he said, and drew a matchbox from his shirt pocket. He slid open its drawer to produce a tightly rolled joint, then struck a match to spark its tip. “Here’s the thing,” he said, through his first whalelike indraft and burst of exhaled fume. “I spent the last few days thinking about this. It really knocked me for a loop at first. You singing my songs, I mean.”

“Your songs?” said Denise. Lucinda was struck dumb, could only listen.

“My little scribblings, my first drafts,” he said. He handed the joint to Lucinda. “My complaints, whatever you want to call them. That was you scratching away with a pen on the other end of the line, wasn’t it?”

Lucinda nodded, hypnotized. Carl was claiming the band. She couldn’t justifiably object. Any ground she stood on was under water, tide lapping at her knees or higher. In truth, she wanted him to have what he liked. That was in the nature of her discovery, her strange new love. More, the aura of her submission widened to enclose Denise as well. Lucinda was only curious about what the complainer might make Denise do.

Lucinda drew weakly on the joint, crossing her eyes to be certain its lit end flared. She’d never been a cigarette smoker, and when she puffed marijuana she felt like a fraud, contriving at an act natural to others. Clutching at a lungful, she passed the smoldering joint to Denise, as if to transmit some whiff of complicity. Denise accepted it without meeting Lucinda’s eye.

“The things you said, the things that became lyrics, you were thinking them for the first time when you said them to me, right?” Lucinda heard plaintiveness leak into her voice.

Carl shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m always worrying away at one motif or another. I was taken with what you did with ‘monster eyes’ and ‘astronaut food.’”

“Everyone likes ‘Monster Eyes,’” Lucinda gushed, grateful to escape to this point of universal consent.

“It’s got itchiness, like I was telling you,” said the complainer. “Everyone likes it because everyone thinks it’s about them. Like a decal of the soul. I’d say I wish I’d thought it up myself, if I hadn’t.”

“You thought up ‘Monster Eyes’?” said Denise. She sucked at the joint, gobbling smoke like a pro, even as she squinted at Carlton in suspicion.

“The words came out of this mouth.”

“You didn’t mean them as a song, though,” urged Lucinda.

“No, I imagined I was seducing you,” he admitted. “Which I seem to have done while writing a song in my spare time. I’m very impressed with myself.”

Denise’s gaze was fixed on Carlton, as if to meet his challenge with the most essential part of herself, more on the band’s behalf than on Lucinda’s. She kept the marijuana cigarette tucked between her fingers, her cupped hand hovering near her mouth, puffing very slightly. Lucinda had seen before how the drummer would enter a state of fierce intoxication, crafting a thick foggy lens of drug or drink through which to peer out at the world, a transparent shield. “So you tricked Lucinda into using your shitty lyrics,” she said. Her tone wasn’t wholly unfriendly. “And now you want to take credit for songs that were basically written by Bedwin, someone you’ve never met.”

“I’d like very much to meet him.”

“Do you want to destroy the band?”

“How could I want to do that?” he said. “I basically am the band.”

“What do you want out of this? What exactly do you think is going to happen?”

“I want what we all want,” said Carl. “To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the external world, to see if they can be embraced. What’s incredible is that it happened without my knowledge. Like putting on clothes somebody laid out on a bed for you and finding the pockets are full of money and car keys and an address book full of new friends.”

“Now you’re getting to the point,” said Denise. “You see us as a fund of young new friends.” She handed the joint back to him, reduced to a mushy nub. “One of whom you get to fuck.”

“Isn’t there a tradition of liaisons within musical groups?” he said. “I’m surprised you don’t have any already.”

“I can choose who I fuck, Denise,” said Lucinda.

“I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t your choice. Though if I were in the mood for white hair I’d be more inclined to go for that Fancher Autumnbreast, myself. At least he’s sort of a hipster. No offense, Carl, but you don’t really look like a member of a rock-and-roll band.”

“None taken. Maybe I should ask you for a haircut.”

“I wouldn’t fool with that,” said Denise. “Your long hair is all you’ve got going for you. We could dye it black or orange, maybe. But then we’d have to do your eyebrows, too. It’s probably hopeless.”

“I can dress up like this Autumnbreast, if you tell me how. I’ve never seen him, just heard his voice on the radio.”

“It’s not the clothes but how you wear them.”

“I’m sure that’s true. Like our singer, Matthew. Is that who you’re drawn to, personally?”

“You don’t know me well enough to ask me that, Carl,” said Denise. She might have turned a little red.

“You’re right, it’s better for band members to leave these things unspoken,” said Carl.

“I didn’t say anything like that.”

“Maybe I misread the onstage vibes.”

“Being in a band isn’t about hair or clothes,” said Lucinda, wanting to blunt the hostilities. “The point is the music.” The assertion, which she’d only uttered as a diversion, seemed instantly both profound and obvious. She waited for Carl’s and Denise’s acclaim, not so much to confirm her point as to test their grasp of essential realities.

“That may be true,” said Carl. He siphoned the soggy nubbin of joint, then tossed it sideways into the shadows of the gallery. “Only, as a good friend of mine used to say, you can’t be deep without a surface.”

They stared at him, the bass player and drummer, trying to digest the phrase, which conveyed itself into their minds like a drug itself: toxic, gnarled, ineradicable.

“Deep without a surface,” repeated Denise.

“Yes,” said Carlton. “You can’t be, that’s the point.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Lucinda understood that Denise only meant it as a brave show of resistance to the phrase’s colonizing effects.

“Did a good friend of yours really used to say that?” said Lucinda. She felt obscurely jealous.

“No, I made it up just now.”

“That could be the name of an album,” said Denise.
“Deep Without a Surface.”

“The kind of guys who name an album that would have songs that each took up a whole side,” said Lucinda.

“They could be called the Deep Surfaces,” said Denise.

“Or Deep and the Surfaces,” said Lucinda. “There wouldn’t be any pictures of them on the record sleeve.”

“Just their instruments,” said Denise. “Because all that matters is the music.”

“Whereas for our band the opposite is true,” said the complainer.

Again they stared at him as if his words had opened up some pit in the floor.

“I just realized,” said Denise. “‘You can’t be deep without a surface’ describes the situation perfectly. The lyrics you wrote, they wouldn’t amount to anything at all if we hadn’t played them onstage. They wouldn’t be worth ten cents if they weren’t coming out of Matthew’s mouth.”

“Matthew makes a very nice human bumper sticker or coffee mug,” said Carl.

“If you tried to take his place it wouldn’t work,” said Denise.

“I’m not taking his place, I’m assuming my own.”

“You act like you’re some skinny backup singer, some inconspicuous element. We’re not an orchestra, Carl. We can’t just give you a tambourine and hide you behind an amp or something.”

“A lot of groups have five members, don’t they?”

“Have you looked in the mirror? Remember when they tried to put Frankenstein in a tuxedo? What was that movie?”

“
Last Tango in Paris
?”

“Exactly.”

Lucinda felt vertigo watching Carl and Denise’s jesting struggle. She wished to brush away their banter, wave it off like smoke. Was the complainer moving nearer to Lucinda, or farther away? It seemed both at once. She wanted him to want her body, not her band. She wished to be swallowed, laid open with her robe undone across a dirty yellow chair. But his appetite seemed to be drifting. There was confusion here too, since the image of the dirty yellow chair came from a song, though not originally. That was the problem: Carlton’s claim on the band was perversely justified, and impossible to disentangle. The more Denise denied him that claim the further he inched in, an intrusion that would have seemed impossible an hour earlier.

“Nobody takes Matthew seriously,” said Lucinda. “Last week at the supermarket I saw a woman watching him like he was an ocelot on a nature show, like she wanted to go to the pet store and buy one for herself. It’s not so easy being a human bumper sticker.”

“Sad,” said Carl.

“It is sad. The whole band relies on his charisma. We’re exploiting him. I think he senses it.”

“There’s nothing sadder than being a genius of sex,” said the complainer. “Evoking nothing but pleasure in the eyes of others.”

“I never thought of it that way,” said Denise. “It’s sort of an involuntary condition.”

“In another age people like him became priests or nuns,” said Lucinda dreamily.

“Let’s go out and beat up some unattractive people,” said Carl.

Lucinda and Denise stared at him. He raised his hands as if at gunpoint. “Though arguably that would be taking things too far.”

Denise sprang from her chair, fitful. “Matthew’s not the problem,” she said. She seemed to be carrying on some internal dialogue. “Matthew can take care of himself.” She began to pace, stalking the perimeter of their chairs like the zoo’s coyote working its cage’s limits. “I’m thinking of Bedwin now.”

“Bedwin?”

“Yes, he’d have to be treated gently. The band is his whole planet, he doesn’t know anything else.”

Carl shrugged. “So his planet just got a little more—various.”

“You don’t know him,” said Lucinda. “All he does is watch the same black-and-white movie over and over and write songs.”

“He could take the fact that he collaborated unknowingly with someone like you very badly,” said Denise. She hung on the rim of darkness, her features shrouded, as though playing to an unseen crowd. Her words seemed to take it for granted that the three of them all dwelled within some common understanding or intention.

“Who does he think wrote the lyrics?” said Carl.

“If I understand Bedwin, he doesn’t think about it. He might not even remember which ones are his and which Lucinda brought to him.”

“Sounds fine to me,” said Carlton. “Why not just leave it at that?”

“What do you mean?”

“When somebody’s living in a delusory world, it isn’t necessarily your job to pull them out of it. Not unless you’ve got a better one to offer in its place.”

“You mean a better delusion?” said Lucinda.

Carl shrugged, as if to say,
What else?
“What needs saying? Doesn’t he trust the two of you?”

“Of course.”

“So what do you say we just leave it up to us?”

Denise strolled the shadow boundary, no longer agitated. She glanced at Lucinda, perhaps seeking a sign. Lucinda and the complainer sat in a triangle with Denise’s vacated chair, under lights still wreathed in smoke. Lucinda had abandoned her sneakers on the floor and raised her socked feet to the chair’s lip, hugging her knees to her breasts. Carlton sprawled in the abdicated space between them, his thighs spread wide, one foot upright and the other limply horizontal, between Lucinda’s empty sneakers, his posture grotesquely unashamed and inviting. His shirt was misbuttoned, skewed, riding up to expose a river of hair. Carl was pubic all the way to his neck.