You Don't Love Me Yet (18 page)

“Why not?”

“Denise thinks you’re ruining the fun,” said Matthew. “We were talking about universal principles and you turned it into rock trivia.”

“I don’t understand a word he said,” said Falmouth. “Let’s change the subject.” He took the open bottle and topped off their glasses. Wine had no particular influence on Lucinda here, so she could drink as much as she liked. Here she was never drunk and always dreamy, as though adjusted to the intoxication of the surroundings, the roseate glow of the furniture, the imperial views of Los Angeles, so timeless and far away.

“A rock band by its worst, most incompetent member,” said Carl, unexpectedly resuming, as though to salvage Bedwin’s attempt. “The greatness of a song, by its worst singer.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Matthew distantly.

Light caught the complainer’s glass as he lofted it above his ravaged spaghetti. The bell of crystal was smudged with heavy fingerprints, and bore lip-shaped gobbets of sauce around its rim. The complainer’s appetite painted every clear surface it touched. I am like that glass, thought Lucinda, happily.

t
he cassette tape of New Zealand bands was still stuck in Matthew’s player, chiming circular chords, when Lucinda opened the door of his car where he waited for her outside Carl’s building, but he snapped it off defensively as she slid into her seat. The day’s air was bleachy and shadowless, its temperature that of a sleeping body. Lucinda winced in the glare, bargaining with a hangover the breakfast beer she’d chugged did nothing to alleviate.

Matthew had returned Shelf the Flyer to the zoo the night before, a solo clandestine operation. His stealthiness, Lucinda supposed, formed a gesture of dignity in defeat, as well as a warning to Dr. Marian that he retained the capacity to breach her defenses. What remained today was to bring in not the animal but himself. To accept amnesty, to be allowed to resume watching over his wards and drawing a paycheck. In this perhaps more difficult hurdle he’d asked Lucinda to escort him inside, to act as witness to seal the result of her earlier negotiations. She found it impossible to say no, though as she felt the weight in the air between them she wondered, too late, if the request had as much to do with a wish to bear her away from Carl’s loft. It was Lucinda’s first time outside the loft in most of a week. As they drove to the zoo in perfect silence she felt the whining surface of the highway through the Mazda’s flimsy chassis. Restored to ground level, she felt antlike, exposed, alarmed.

Arrived, they strolled among the exhibits, browsing incognito on the eucalyptus-littered paths. In the noon sun the zoo resembled a tray of compartments that had been shaken and plunked back to earth by some careless child, the inhabitants of each exhibit dizzy, pressing themselves to the walls or bars of their enclosures as if expecting to be lifted and shaken again. A hyena rolled its eyes at them, begging with a sideways tongue. Three giraffes bunched as if tethered at the ankles. Woolly goats teetered in gutters.

They found the false outback full of kangaroos, sprawled in textbook melancholia. Lucinda couldn’t tell at a glance whether Shelf was among them, or instead segregated in some kind of debriefing room elsewhere.

“Is she there?” Lucinda asked.

“Don’t you recognize her?”

“No,” she admitted.

So the episode ended, Shelf blending into the population at last. Matthew gazed stoically. No kangaroo returned his gaze. Perhaps Shelf had been cured of expectations after all.

The zoo offices, warned by Shelf’s reappearance, had seemingly been made ready for Matthew’s return. Though he crept in braced for ambush, the girl at the desk greeted him blithely. Lucinda waved and smiled, compensating for Matthew’s glum demeanor. Other vets or orderlies in white coats passed through, hailing him in friendly tones. He only grunted, clearing out his mailbox, sifting the recyclable memos into a bin, pocketing sealed envelopes. Then they turned to Dr. Marian’s office. There lay the one severe test.

“Mr. Plangent.” The zoo director turned her barrel-chested authority from her paperwork and scrutinized the two of them, her deep-pocketed eyes glistening.

“Dr. Marian. You’re looking well.”

“And yourself. But enough pleasantries. We’ve got creatures that require your attention.” Dr. Marian slapped a pile of folders that might have been prepared for this moment. “Duncan needs his claws recauterized, first thing.”

“Duncan?”

“The Taiwanese lynx. You remember.”

“Sure, sure.”

“And there’s a tenacious rhinovirus among the tufted capuchins. Just the two-year-olds.”

“We’ve seen that before.”

“Indeed we have.”

“I’ll schedule in some dropper work on their sinuses.”

“I never doubted you would.”

“I’ll just have to drive my friend home first, and get my locker key.”

“That’s fine.”

“Thank you.”

Lucinda felt invisible, a bystander to codes that had no need of her presence. She turned to leave, still unacknowledged, but Dr. Marian said, “Ms. Hoekke?”

“Yes?”

“I listened to the tape you sent me.”

Lucinda had almost forgotten. She waited, not wishing to presume.

“Some of it was very interesting.”

“It’s just a rehearsal tape. If we recorded in a studio the results would be much better.”

“Nonetheless, I found much to like. I’m still not clear on how you envision my role, however.”

Matthew busied himself examining the stack of files, displaying absolute neutrality, an unwillingness even to show surprise in this instance.

“There are, uh, elements which have shown an interest in the band,” said Lucinda. “Not exactly preying, but putting themselves forward obtrusively. Middle-aged men of a certain stripe. I somehow pictured that you might—keep them in line. Give us some breathing room.”

“Yes, I see.” Dr. Marian left no uncertainty that she was aware of the power deriving from her inverted pyramidal form and ramrod posture, from the white stripe in her raven hair. Male guilt crackled around her like Frankensteinian electricity.

“We’re playing live on the radio on Friday,” said Lucinda. “Four in the afternoon, on KPKD, a show called
The Dreaming Jaw
. You could come and observe.”

“I’ll have to clear some things on my schedule.”

“We’d be grateful.”

Lucinda and Matthew continued unspeaking back through the maze of the zoo, pausing over no animals, stalking their way to the parking lot. Matthew walked slightly ahead, perhaps managing embarrassment. No words passed between them until he tucked his Mazda under the curbside shadow of the Olive Street tower.

“You seem ticked at me,” said Lucinda.

“This whole thing’s just a little strange, that’s all.”

“What whole thing?”

Matthew glanced at the building, perhaps about to name the complainer, then thought better of it. “Just the way everything is totally rearranged and exactly the same. It’s depressing to see Shelf back inside. You know that feeling of wondering if something ever really happened? Of wondering if something was ever real in the first place?”

“It’s all real, Matthew.”

“I know.”

“You don’t like my new friend, that’s what you mean.”

“I like your new friend a lot, actually. I do think he looks a little fat onstage with the rest of us. I guess I’m not supposed to say that.”

“He’s not fat, he’s just a grown-up. We’re the ones who look strange. We’re anorexic, we’re ghosts, we’re tinder.”

“I thought we looked pretty good.”

“You don’t like him.”

“If there’s anything I don’t like it’s his effect on you. The way you act. I probably wasn’t supposed to say that, either.”

“You can say whatever you want.”

“Well, here’s one thing. I hope you never felt I was trying to suck dregs, or that there was any aspect of dreg-sucking going on between you and me, because I never did, not once.”

“I never felt that at all.”

“No matter how many times we broke up and then called each other late at night and then ended up in bed together again, I would never have described anything between us as a dreg suck.”

“I promise you, neither would I.”

“I don’t want to screw up anything with the band. I’m very excited about Friday.”

“So am I. You’re not screwing anything up, Matthew. Nothing could be screwed up.”

“Thanks for helping me today, Lucinda, I really appreciate it, and Shelf does too. I think I’m going to drive away now, if you want to get out of the car.”

t
he radio station’s unglamour was sobering. No one would have pictured Fancher Autumnbreast, paragon of bohemian taste, amid the bland commercial edifices and slickly nostalgic boutiques and dozy, off-brand policemen of Culver City. The band converged on Duquesne Avenue in three cars: Bedwin with Denise, Carl driving Lucinda’s Datsun, Matthew alone. Now they stood assembled in the vanilla-carpeted lobby of the station’s studio as if dragged into the day’s light for a medical procedure. Their misspelled names checked off in an appointment book by an unimpressed receptionist, they were led upstairs and abandoned to a greenroom full of surfing and cigar magazines, bottled water, and wicker cornucopia full of bruised grapes, coagulated brie, and sesame crackers.

“I’d like to explode a place like this with a bomb, if it could be okay to say that.”

“You need to build up your immunity. If we rocket to the top it’ll require a series of compromises with antiseptic environments.”

“Shouldn’t we have brought spray paint or a television set to push out a window?”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to destroy a television set at a radio station.”

They glimpsed Autumnbreast only momentarily, a figure in a gray sweat suit with orange piping. He hailed them with a vigorous bout of silent winking and finger-snapping through a large window as they set up their instruments in a crowded booth. Only the complainer seemed free of the pall that eclipsed the group, the apprehension that they were the wrong band with the wrong song. They feared that they might be unready, or the opposite: they might be over-practiced, fallen out of synch, and had ruined the song. Maybe they’d gotten out of the wrong sides of their beds. Wasn’t four in the afternoon, anyway, a famous energy sink, a vortex of enervated human attention? Who would listen to the song, who would care? Or perhaps they’d arrived at the wrong time in the history of
The Dreaming Jaw
to make clear use of its indisputable influence on musical fashion. Maybe they’d even been tricked. This wasn’t the real KPKD, or the real Autumnbreast, but some obscure counterfeit. While they blunderingly tuned instruments in a glass-and-foam booth in Culver City some other band enjoyed glory that belonged rightly to them, in some other place that felt more encouragingly real.

The complainer, exempt, jabbered. “Do you know why people fall out of love in small apartments?” he said, apropos of nothing. “Because they can’t gaze at each other over a large enough distance. You need to be able to watch the other person as if you weren’t there to be seen yourself, like sighting a creature in the forest.”

“Who did you fall out of love with in a small apartment?” Lucinda asked. She felt as though Carl spooled from her, an astronaut outside the space station, drifting on his tether.

“Nobody. I mean, lots of people. When I was married I lived in a basement apartment in San Francisco.”

“You were married?” said Denise.

“About a million years ago. Another era, like prehistory. The Susan Ming Dynasty.”

Matthew and Bedwin went on plinking at their instruments, testing microphone levels for the engineer on the far side of the glass, a blasé goth girl with lank black hair and a nocturnally pale complexion, a silver ring piercing one eyebrow. Her own mike channel bled into their booth, ceaseless incomprehensible staticky asides directed to unseen others.

“Was your wife’s name Susan Ming?” Lucinda whispered to the complainer. Before he could answer they were overwhelmed by Fancher Autumnbreast’s looming passage into the booth. Autumnbreast squinted his mournful brow as if across some great distance, though the tiny booth barely contained him and the band. Despite the tracksuit he gave off traces of patchouli and clove, redolent smoke. Shaking his leonine head and showing the slightest of smiles he embraced Matthew. Then he reached for Lucinda, kissing each cheek and tipping her elegantly, fingertips at the small of her back, like a Flamenco dancer. Bedwin he chucked under the chin. Bedwin blushed. Autumnbreast then blew a kiss to Denise, his gesture fulsome. The four quivered slightly, puppyish under his hand.

“Oh, you dizzy kids.” He squinted one eye, a wink stilled to a sardonic frieze. The band waited, enspelled. Finally Autumnbreast lifted his chin at the complainer, who stood grinning at his keyboard. “Who he?” he asked Matthew.

“New band member,” said the complainer, sticking out his hand. “Carl’s the name.”

Autumnbreast squinted more deeply, suggesting the complainer was difficult to make out, a form vanishing in wavering heat lines on far asphalt. “Hmmm,” he said.

“Yes?” said the complainer.

“Fifth Beatle,” said Autumnbreast.

“Ten minutes,” warned the buzzing voice of the engineer. Lucinda looked up to discover Jules Harvey standing at the glass, slightly behind the goth girl at her board, peering in at them pleasantly from beneath his baseball cap. Who’d notified him of their appointment here? Not Denise, surely. Perhaps Matthew or Bedwin had fallen under his bland spell. Or Fancher Autumnbreast might have been plugging their appearance in advance, so Harvey might have heard it on the radio.

Autumnbreast widened his hands. “Everybody beautiful?”

They gawped, perplexed.

“You’re miked?”

“They’re miked,” the engineer cut in.

“Then you’re beautiful,” said Autumnbreast, as though knighting them with the scepter of his esteem. “Except you, Beatle. What do you do?”

“Play this keyboard, sir.”

“Sing?”

“I do, sir.”

Autumnbreast shook his head, sighed, furrowed, pursed. “Goof.”