You Don't Love Me Yet (9 page)

Above Hyperion Boulevard, the band’s guitarist sat cross-legged on his carpet, bathed in blue light, his mouth open, as his videocassette recorder slow-motioned through a passage in
Human Desire
, a bar scene, Glenn Ford tussling with a drunken Broderick Crawford over Gloria Grahame. The guitarist seemed uninterested in the performances, instead drew nearer to the screen, trying to decipher the words written on signs pinned to the walls of the bar, which at the level of resolution of his television was impossible. The guitarist picked his nose with a curled forefinger and squinted closer. His other hand absent-mindedly cradled his crotch. The blue figures on-screen swam forward, captives of slow motion.

On Effie Street the band’s singer stood wielding a knife at his kitchen counter. He still wore his T-shirt and underwear, the costume he’d decided to wear to bed since an intrusion into his house the night before last. He’d slept late after lying awake until dawn, having been woken by his phone ringing at some odd hour. The singer chopped a bundle of unrinsed kale into a careless salad. The
Los Angeles Times
lay across his counter, a copy pilfered from the doormat of the singer’s neighbor across the hall. He’d scoured the City section for an article which he’d hoped to see but which hadn’t appeared. Its absence dismayed him. The remaining sections were unread. Though it wouldn’t have been difficult for the singer to refold the paper and return it to the doormat, it was instead destined to be thrown over his bathroom tile, to absorb certain spillings and stainings. As he switched from the kale to a mass of celery, the singer mused on the voice-mail message he’d listened to at dawn, the baby-talk song with its strangely accurate, if mocking, encapsulation of his dilemma. The singer felt lonely. He decided to take his next chance to entrust the band’s bass player with his secret. After all, she already knew it.

On Hollywood Boulevard, in pale afternoon light bent through tweed curtains, the band’s bass player drew herself, panting, from the still-trembling body of her lover, who lay with his head tipped over the foot of the bed. His hands, which had encircled her, palms nudging her breasts, now fell to his own thighs. His blotched penis draped in an arc to his stomach. There were no robes here. No music. They’d poured from the new bottle into plastic cups, which sat in a spilled pool of whiskey on the side table, beside the telephone. The bottle was half empty, but the bass player didn’t feel drunk anymore. She undoubled her knees and stretched her feet to cradle his ribs. Leaning back, her sweaty shoulders sealed like a decal to the headboard. The motor inn was a perfectly tawdry arena. If possible she’d have her car and apartment destroyed by remote control, and begin again from here. It was as if the hotel rooms they’d inhabited were the telephone line they’d dwelled in earlier, now expanded to contain the whole of Los Angeles.

She felt like a marine creature, a pilot fish, a dipper or darter around the perimeter of some animal greater and slower than herself. Or possibly not an animal but a planet, a distant body. The complainer seemed remote not only in space but in time, the progression of his hair, dark to white, a horizon of years. As though she crawled toward him across some time-lapse vastness, a desert or ocean floor which bloomed and declined before her eyes. Every darting movement she made, her whole lithe, slippery course across his body, the seeking effort of her mouth and hands, was an attempt to close this margin between them. But with no apparent malice or guile he’d shunted away, as though their exact proximity was polar, regulated by magnetic force.

She’d heard herself laughing and producing other noises which had no simple name, but hadn’t spoken sentences in hours. Language had come out of the complainer, though. As before, when he’d muttered in his sleep. The same words, she was certain of it now.

“Carl?” Her own voice shocked her, restored her modesty slightly.

“Yes?”

“When you were coming did you say ‘pour love on the broken places,’ or was I just imagining it?”

“I said that, yes.” He propped on his elbows.

“Over and over again under your breath.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I guess I just needed something to say.”

She began to see that all of what she felt, the strange abject yearning that had grown inside her through this journey to nowhere conducted across the two hotel beds, across this night turned to afternoon, might have a name. If he could say the word, why couldn’t she? He’d asked her to keep it a secret, though, and she would. Her tenderness and awe, the risk of love, would be kept secret between her and herself.

She persisted with her question. “Where did it come from? Those particular words.”

“I made it up.”

“You couldn’t have.” She spoke tenderly, not wishing to disillusion him.

“Not just now, I mean. Before.”

“I read the same words on a bumper sticker.”

“You did?” He brightened.

“Yes.”

“It’s on T-shirts, too. And coffee mugs.”

“Why?”

“That’s my work. My latest. I’m the author of a line of slogans. Sometimes I can’t get them out of my head.”

“So it doesn’t mean anything in particular that you were saying that while we made love?” It gave her a clandestine thrill to say the word aloud, as though releasing pressure in a covert orgasm or sneeze. He’d opened himself to her, despite these ridiculous explanations. She vowed to adore him wordlessly and perfectly. They’d discuss anything but what they really felt, the silently expanding center of the universe.

“When I’ve coined an itchy phrase it’s all I can think about until I come up with another one.”

“An itchy phrase?”

“That’s what it’s called, an itchy or gummy phrase.”

“Tell me another one.”

“Let’s see. One of my favorites is ‘All Thinking Is Wishful.’ I had a good run with that a few years ago.”

“What’s a good run?”

“To make a good living I only have to come up with something as gummy as that every six months or so.”

“What do you do the rest of the time?”

He widened his palms and made an apologetic face.

Here it was, at last. She’d discovered him, her fat man, her fat life. The complainer was like a house she didn’t have to shrink to enter, a doorway she didn’t have to turn sideways to pass through. To truly love someone was to make them feel ridiculous and free, she felt. The complainer’s hair was white but he was more like a child than anyone she knew. She wondered if he knew what he had shown her: how it was possible to replace disappointment with astonishment.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

In reply he turned his head and gnashed at her foot.

“There’s a place I want to show you where they serve these great fish tacos.”

What occurred after they’d checked out of the motel she couldn’t reconstruct, except that he’d had to drive her car again, and that she’d given him her keys and told him the address of her apartment on Elsinore. She wondered, vaguely, whether they’d been seen by anyone she knew, either at the taco stand’s parking lot or as they drove on Sunset, window cranked so she could rest her chin, doglike, on the passenger door’s top and gulp cool air. By the time she gathered that the distant pastoral sound of trickling water was her own kitchen sink, where the complainer stood rinsing her blouse clean of flecks of what had begun rushing out of her in the Siete Mares parking lot, he’d already stripped her clothes, tucked her into bed on her couch, and pulled her shades against the day’s light, which skewed in orange stripes over the couch and her bedspread. It might have been three or five or seven in the afternoon or evening. Lucinda’s eyes ached, as though bruised from behind by the force of her stomach’s expulsion of the food. She tremored within her blankets, impossibly happy.

“Carl?”

“You’re awake again,” he whispered, as though there were someone else to overhear.

“I wasn’t asleep.”

He drew near to examine her, perhaps less interested in her testimony than in the report of his own eyes.

“I puked because I’m in love with you,” she said, trashing her vow.

“Sleep now.”

“I’m not tired. I have to get up.”

He placed his fingers to her lips, then tiptoed backward to the doorway, and was gone.

s
he was woken by the doorbell what might have been twenty or a thousand minutes later, bolting upright in her nest of blankets on the couch, measuring her disbelief that she was home, that she was alone, that he was gone. Maybe this was him, returned.

“Come in,” she croaked.

Denise hustled in and shut the door behind her, her gaze mapping the scene in rapid evaluation.

“It’s eight, Lucinda.”

“Why is it eight?”

“It just is, that’s all.”

“I fell asleep. I mean, starting at an unusual time, I guess.”

“I don’t need an account of your movements,” said Denise. “We’re on at nine. I’ll run the shower.”

Naked and humbled, Lucinda tramped to a place beneath the steam, while the day’s telephone messages—Denise, Falmouth, Matthew, Denise again—unspooled in the background, an epic of beckonings, censures, lengthening silences. Meanwhile, Denise shifted Lucinda’s bass and amplifier through the door, to her car. Lucinda charted Denise’s progress as a series of scraping and rustlings as Denise negotiated the apartment’s slanted concrete walkway, which was shrouded in overgrown jade and aloe. At last came a decisive slam of the car’s trunk.

“Here.” Denise wrenched off the hot water and offered a towel, hustling Lucinda along. “I laid out clothes.”

For months Lucinda had auditioned in her closet for a first-gig wardrobe, the perfect art-band garb, precedent for a new public identity. She’d settled on nothing definite. Now she donned the brown corduroys and orange capped-sleeve T-shirt Denise had chosen, incapable of resisting a fate likely as good as any other.

“I guess I missed the sound check.”

“It isn’t only the sound check, Lucinda. Loading in and breaking down is part of being in a band. It isn’t just, you know, the drummer’s job.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Denise sighed. “We were worried, that’s all. Anyway, it was sort of anticlimactic, more of a no-sound check, really.”

Lucinda wanted to explain, but couldn’t begin. In a night and a day her world had parted into halves impossible to reconcile or even mention to each other.

Bedwin waited in Denise’s passenger seat, so Lucinda clambered into the back, beside her instrument. “Where’s Matthew?”

“At Jules Harvey’s loft, with our stuff.”

“Are you okay, Lucinda?” asked Bedwin.

“I’m fine, Bedwin. I’m just waking up from a really strange sleep and a very sudden shower.”

“That sounds difficult.”

“I’m terrific, really.”

Lucinda leaned her head between Denise’s and Bedwin’s headrests, touched her fingers to their heads from behind, felt them tighten their shoulders to their seats, resisting her. If she couldn’t confess the subject of her happiness she could try to infect them with it nonetheless. The complainer had shown her that her happiness was all one thing, an arrow running, for instance, through her delirious visitation of the two hotel rooms, through drink and talk and sex and food and sleep and even vomit. The arrow of her happiness pierced all those moments and this one as well, the arrival of her friends to whisk her to Falmouth’s Aparty. The big moment that had come at last, come for them all. For Matthew, estranged from the human world and needing to be pulled back. For Denise, so fierce and nervous on the band’s behalf. For Bedwin, their terrified genius, who’d written such excellent songs, though not without secret assistance from Lucinda and Carl. Which proved what she felt: that the source of her happiness was a stream through all their lives, a bass figure under all their music, even if she was its sole hearer. Her instrument, wedged stiffly in the seat beside her, never reproachful or impatient, only waiting for her to plug it in and plumb its wood-and-wire soul: she loved it too.

Lucinda touched Bedwin’s and Denise’s napes again, put her fingers in their hair, which, she noticed, was cut the same length, and equally amateurishly. Sometime since seeing her last Denise had hacked her red-hennaed bangs into something more Joan of Arcish. Maybe Lucinda should take a child’s scissors to her own hair as well. Haircuts signified change, and she felt changed. Plus it would give the band a look.

“It’s our legendary first gig,” she said. “Robot Head in Mourning or whatever it turns out we’re known as. Some grainy photograph from this night will appear in the booklet of the box-set retrospective of our entire career.”

Denise and Bedwin said nothing. Denise drove intently out of the side street, onto Sunset.

“Be excited or something.”

“I guess I’d be more excited if we were behaving a little more like a band right now,” said Denise. “Also if we were playing aloud. That would probably make a difference in how I felt.”

“Maybe we will, maybe we’ll shock everyone by suddenly playing aloud—”

“Won’t they all be wearing headphones?” said Denise.

“Well, yes.”

“I think Denise was just trying to say that helping to move the equipment is an important aspect of being—”

“I told her already, Bedwin,” said Denise.

l
ucinda penitently lugged her own amp as the three band members filtered through the horde of the Aparty’s invitees. The April night was clear and warm and smelled of lime and fir, like the desert’s rim, the place you’d reach in a day if you walked east out of the city, which you’d never do. Distant wheeling spotlights grazed the sky west of Koreatown. Here, far-twinkling stars were visible, five or six of them at least. The Aparty’s invitees massed at a rehabbed industrial building on Olympic Boulevard, whose freight elevator served as the undistinguished entrance to Jules Harvey’s loft. They spilled into the street, arriving in bunches, a pedestrian explosion excited by the unlike-liness of itself. Lucinda saw faces she recognized. Mildred Zeno, the painter, Matthew’s previous ex. They had something in common now, Lucinda supposed, like former opponents traded to the same team. Gillian Unger, Lucinda’s old cohort at the Coffee Chairs. Perhaps she still labored there, beneath the espresso steam. Meade Everdark, columnist for the
Echo Park Annoyance
, leaned his elbow on the roof of a parked Jeep, gesturing with animation as he proved some point to the passengers inside. Clay Howl and Richard Abneg, guitarist and drummer of the Rain Injuries, stood swapping heavy looks with someone who might be Bruce Wagner. John Huck offered a cigarette to Maud Winchester. Denied early entrance by Falmouth’s rigid concept, they inaugurated festivities curbside instead, and gabbling and smoking scanned the crowd for their friends. They swapped earphones to sample one another’s dance mixes, broke out bottles or joints they’d secreted on their persons, having rightly feared a dryish occasion upstairs. The steward from Ixnay produced stem glasses and stood doling red wine to a queue of art-school ingenues.