You Don't Love Me Yet

by Jonathan Lethem

  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.

  lucinda 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.”

  “And drink a large glass of water, you’ll feel better.” Lucinda nodded and hung up the phone.

  the morning light, when Lucinda cinched open her crumb-gummed lids, was unwelcome. She raised her face from a sleeve smeared with sleep drool, then she turned and saw the polished tops of Falmouth’s shoes. He touched her arm when she stirred.

  “You poor pathetic wretch,” he said caressingly.

  “Oh, Falmouth.”

  “You’re like a child marinating in your own crimes. You smell wrong.”

  Falmouth stood before her in his customary suit, a trim figure silhouetted in daylight, a Styrofoam coffee cup braced in his fingertips. One collar point was disarranged, straying upward from its home in his jacket, a poignant breach. His face betrayed tenderness.

  “What time is it?” she said.

  “Morning.”

  “All you do is work, Falmouth.”

  “Nothing matters but work. Someday you’ll grow up and then you’ll understand.”

  “My head hurts.”

  “It should hurt.”

  “We had band practice and then Denise and I drank whiskey.”

  “You’re unsuited for this world. Your only recourse is to become a rock star. Anything else is beyond you.”

  “We’re good, Falmouth.”

  “We’ll see about that. Go home and put yourself to bed.”

  “Don’t you need me today?”

  “You’re fired. My interns can answer the phones. They’re better than you anyway.”

  As she roused herself from the cubicle Lucinda felt a sweet nostalgic stirring of affection, almost like green shoots of horniness under the pavement of her hangover. Perhaps the nearer you came to abandoning a romance, evaporating it in friendship, the more piercing and beautiful the trace that remained. Watching Falmouth turn to his lonely desk, place his cup so delicately on its coaster, scowl wholly to himself as he browsed voice mail on his speakerphone, it occurred to Lucinda that one day her well-dressed friend would die. Perhaps then she would stand by Falmouth’s graveside and understand that he was the love of her life.

  The sentiment, foolish or not, struck her as worthy of the complainer. At that instant Lucinda recollected the rendezvous, at the gaudy rooftop bar, only hours away, and her throat was scalded by a hiccup laced with the essence of vomit.

  the Ambit’s rooftop was like a three-dimensional magazine Lucinda browsed with her whole body. It made her feel irrelevant, unseen, blurred with age. She milled among pink and green cocktails held aloft by peach and mocha teenage limbs. Each, cocktails and limbs, seemed lit by a similar incandescence. The starless night above her shuddered, too close. The complainer was nowhere, lurked behind no potted palm. No man examined her for any purpose whatsoever. No person was alone in that place besides Lucinda. She wandered for what felt to be years, then ordered a scotch, a double, slurped to the bottom, and headed for the elevator.

  Another party had formed in the lobby. The valet had abandoned his post, draped his jacket over his abdicated parking stand. Instead he hunched over the handles of a nearby soccer table, madly spinning the posts studded with podlike replica players. He strained heedlessly at the dials, trying to alter the ball’s trajectory with his knees and hips, emitting grunts and shrieks, shaking his head to free his bangs from his eyes. His opponent, a large man, stood calm and stolid with his back to Lucinda, weight equal on his eagled legs, merely twitching his wrists.

  It was the valet who noticed her. He straightened to show his readiness, despite dereliction of post and uniform. The large man flipped the dial once more, unfairly plopping the ball into the valet’s unguarded net, where it came to rest like a grape in a sock. Then turned. He was beautiful in a puffy, slightly decrepit way. His features, in the patio’s reddish light, appeared like a painted cameo fringed by his white-streaked mane of hair. His nose and chin were each deep-dimpled, his eyelids baggy above and below, his face resembling in its totality the male organ itself. The man’s clothes were loose, possibly camouflaging flab, his shirt’s top buttons undone to show more white-infested hair rising to mask his clavicle, sleeves sloppily rolled to the elbows, corduroy pants belted uselessly low, not holding anything together. He was unmistakable. The person playing table soccer with the valet was the person she’d come here to discover.

  “Complaints?” he
said.

  “One or two, I suppose.”

  “You probably think I’m late,” he said. “Actually, I was on the roof at eight thirty. But I couldn’t bear the noise, so I came downstairs.”

  “Why choose it in the first place?” she said, unable to disguise her peevishness. She handed the valet her ticket, wrapped in a pair of dollar bills. It shooed him, at least.

  He shrugged. “This place is convenient to my house. And I figured it was a backdrop where you’d stand out.”

  Did he refer to her age? He didn’t have any leg to stand on, himself. Beside him the valet was a child. She didn’t mind his seniority, though. It suited her.

  “You could have picked a place that was empty,” she said petulantly.

  “Would you have agreed to meet me in such an establishment?”

  “I wouldn’t have waited an hour, I’m sure of that. But now I see that wasn’t necessary in the first place.”

  “Let me make it up to you.”

  “I just asked for my car.”

  “Perfect,” he said. “I walked here.”

  “You live that close?”

  He stepped across the patio that housed the table soccer, shrinking the distance between them. “You make that sound like an accusation,” he said softly. “I hope we haven’t gotten off on the wrong foot. I guess you’re ticked you were waiting upstairs while I was down here the whole time. I’d chalk it up to my compulsive need to disappoint.” He took her by the elbow, enfolding her in his billowy body, and opened the passenger door of her car, which now stood running in the driveway. Lucinda felt a giddy paroxysm of relief as her grievance dissolved. The complainer was recognizably himself. That was all she required.

  The complainer ushered her into the seat, then stepped around the car and slid in at the wheel, groping for the lever to slide the seat back to make room for his legs and his fantastically large sneakers under her dashboard, loudly crumpling paper refuse behind the seat. He dismissed the valet, his former opponent, with a cheery wave. Then turned her car from the hotel’s driveway onto Sixth Street, into downtown’s empty canyons, his brow consternated as he peered past his knuckles, through the windshield. Hesitant to stare, Lucinda instead tasted with her whole body his significant displacement of the car’s atmosphere, the rustle of his aura. He was clumsy and beautiful and absolutely real.

  On a stepped pavilion a smudged man maneuvered a shopping cart to the lip of a vast inhuman fountain, alone amid sentinel buildings. He might have been the first mortal figure to cross that plain, a Thoreau approaching his Walden. In the passenger seat, waiting to know their destination, Lucinda felt encompassed by an oceanic tenderness that bloomed beyond the space of her car to cover the far solitary bum and his cart.

  “Everybody’s got wheels,” she said.

  “Sorry, I just left mine at home.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said, too dreamy to explain.

  “I don’t like to drive anyplace I can walk,” he said, squinting at the street before them. “I know that outlook’s a rarity in this burg. Still, you learn things at ground level. Don’t get me wrong, though, I love my car. My car is my friend.”

  Lucinda labored to breathe, as though he’d robbed her car of its spare oxygen, inhaled it all himself. His shaggy gray hair and shoulders seemed to balloon toward her. Tiny rivulets flowed along her ribs and the backs of her knees. On the barren roadway, streetlamps illuminated the Datsun’s interior in slow-flickering bands. Under cover of a flare of dark Lucinda placed herself against him, rubbed her chin on his arm through the thin, and slightly damp, cloth of his shirt.

  “I’m not nervous, but then again I’m not not nervous,” he said, without turning. “I find I actually don’t want to disappoint you.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Or be disappointed.”

  At the block’s end, freeway on-ramp in sight, the complainer leaned her Datsun to the left, pointed it at the darkened curb at the foot of another tower, and rolled it to, then over, the curb. The car’s nose bonked into a metal cable box on the sidewalk, producing a grinding noise. The complainer turned the key in the ignition, killing the engine. They perched there, tilted across the curb, facing the wounded cable box through the windshield.

  “If your car’s hurt I’ll pay for any damages.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine.” Lucinda slanted her knees, drawing herself across the gearshift. The two of them lurched together, jaws fitting bonily in place, his imperfectly shaved upper lip chafing hers. He pawed the small of her back, fingers soft and huge like a pastry bear claw. She encouraged him, touched arms and shoulders through his flimsy shirt. The windows fogged, the Datsun’s interior massing with exhaled steam. The car might explode, she thought, as she tugged free to consider him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Carlton. Carl.”

  “Lucinda.”

  “Lucinda the complaint girl.”

  “Carlton Complainer.”

  “Say Carl.”

  She said it into his mouth. His hands tangled in her clothes, his clubby fingertips working beneath her brassiere to bridge her ribs, as though measuring her breast. When she opened her eyes she found him inspecting her at close range. Her heart thudded against his palm.

  “What?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I want to take your clothes off and do things to you.”

  “I want you to do things to me too.”

  “But not in the car.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll have to drive us someplace.”

  “Your place is close.”

  “No.”

  She didn’t understand, didn’t care. “Should we go to my apartment?”

  “Back to the hotel, I think.” His questing hand toyed with the elastic threshold at her hip bone, made a sudden incursion below.

  “Wait, uh, I can’t think when you’re doing that.”

  “I need neutral surroundings. This is confusing enough as it is.”

  “Oh,” she sighed, pressing herself to his suddenly irresistible hand. She felt she could detect the exact texture of the whorls that tipped his wide fingers. The car teetered with her motion, as if on a crumbling cliff.

  “Also they’ve got really good room-service burgers at that hotel.”

  “Okay.”

  The valet unblinkingly reclaimed her Datsun at the entrance, only panning his gaze to note the scuff the car’s bumper had gained since he’d seen them last. Lucinda stood to one side at the check-in, swaying slightly, while the complainer registered. His touch had concentrated her blood somewhere between stomach and knees, leaving her higher brain entirely to the double scotch, which had perhaps been waiting in abeyance for this moment. The desk clerk, another child, handed over a single key card.

  The room was full of unornamented blond wood in clean lines, gleaming chrome fixtures, low glowing lamps, and a vast stainless steel tub, big enough for two kangaroos. Lucinda un-laced her sneakers and sprawled on the king-size bed, framing herself in the sea of cushions, but the complainer turned from her, in no hurry now. Rapidly browsing the complimentary CDs, he clicked one into the player—jazz—then crouched at the minibar. He tossed several miniature bottles to clank against one another in an indented billow of the bed’s comforter.

  “Something brown,” he said. “Rum and Coke?”

  “What?”

  “You taste brown.”

  “Scotch.”

  “Whiskey’s what we’ve got.”

  “Fine. Just come over here soon already.”

  Without turning, he said, “Take off your clothes.” He spoke wearily, as if imperfectly resigned to his role.

  Lucinda almost hurt herself getting sweater, shirt, and un-fastened brassiere over her head in one clump. The undergarment had been rotated beneath her armpits without her noticing, to form a kind of straitjacket. Tugging the ball of clothing from the neck, she poked herself in the eye. She slid
her pants off too, catching her socks with her thumbs so they cocooned within her pants legs, another soft sculpture she deposited at bedside.

  Only after she sat, trembling slightly, knees folded, feet crossed under her ass, did he turn and hand her a tumbler, then place himself on the bed’s edge beside her. Some sadness in his eyes made her attempt a joke. “We used to have so much to say to each other.”

  “It’s different now, yes,” he said, apparently taking her at face value.

  “Why?”

  “We’re creating secrets now, instead of telling them.”

  “Secrets from who?”

  “Whom.”

  “From whom.”

  “That depends on who you tell your secrets to. Open your legs.”

  She did. A long moment passed before he spoke again. “Don’t tell me you don’t confide in anyone.”

  He placed his hand on her thigh. Her voice trembled lightly, low in her throat, as she said, “Not anyone. Not right now.” The music in the room was distant, muffled by the pulse in her ears.

  “The world is full of tellers. You can’t even sit in a movie theater without hearing people share their thoughts.”

  “Not me,” she managed.

  “People are frightened of secrets, they remind them of death. Everyone tells just one person, but that person tells a thousand others.”

  “Not me.”

  “What about the complaint line?”

  “I haven’t told anyone about you.”

  “You will.”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “You can tell anyone anything you want, my name, how we met, whatever. But let’s create one real secret, let’s lock something in this room forever. Like a rock sitting on a beach somewhere, through all time and space.”

  His fingers fanned across her stomach, again as if taking her measure. His thumb stretched beneath the curve of her, still not touching where he’d gone so suddenly before. She felt it was possible he could lift his hand and she’d find herself raised to the ceiling aloft.