You Don't Love Me Yet (21 page)

“The songs are great. But it’s just not really my kind of thing, trying to be liked. For instance, I really screwed up the radio show.”

Lucinda astonished herself by saying, “I thought it went okay.”

“You’re being kind.”

“I was here before,” she said. “I answered the telephone, I hope that’s okay. I have a message for you.”

“Yes?”

“Susan Ming called.”

“Who’s Susan Ming?”

Lucinda felt in a panic that she’d had nothing to drink, was hopelessly sober. The world, unenlivened by alcohol or music or sex, was tinny, pallid, unwound. She felt starved for the complainer’s talk, his language that once seemed capable of saying anything and now appeared capable of saying nothing. No language could tell what she knew at this moment: that she’d loved the complainer more than she’d ever managed to say.

“I must have gotten the name wrong,” she said at last.

“Or it was a wrong number,” he said helpfully.

“There’s something you said before,” she began, wanting to break through to him, to remind him of their language. “That a genius of sex was a terrible thing to be—”

“To
only
be,” he corrected. “Anyway, I think I called it sad, not terrible, although that would probably make a better lyric in a song.”

“Please be serious with me,” she cried.

He opened his palms. “This part of my life isn’t serious.”

“Which part is?”

“There is no other part.”

She fled.

m
atthew wasn’t home. It was too late for the zoo, but without the kangaroo pinning him to his apartment he was freed to his nightclub crawling, his life full of bands he was shocked Lucinda had never heard of. She drove to Denise’s apartment, knocked. Nothing. The windows were dark. She tried No Shame, feeling sordid and guilty among the evening clientele, the couples browsing videos. Denise wasn’t at the counter. Lucinda asked the clerk, who said Denise wasn’t on again until tomorrow. Then mentioned he’d seen the show at Jules Harvey’s loft. How he’d loved it, especially that one song.

Were Matthew and Denise together? Possibly the whole band was together, apart from her. She’d let the universe slide into ruin while she frolicked with the complainer, and now anything was possible, even likely. She drove to Falmouth’s gallery, but the doors were locked, the window dark. Cars whistled past on Sunset, Saturday night under way.

Lucinda hadn’t visited Falmouth at home for years. She barely recalled where he lived. She couldn’t ambush him there now in desperation. He might mock her distress. Or worse, be sincere, and sketch her. It was the band she needed. Monster Eyes, the dreamers, the fools, her only friends.

s
he appeared at Bedwin’s cottage door without offering this time, no pizza, no yellow pages of cribbed lyrics, only a bottle of scotch as good as that she’d drained at the complainer’s, acquired at the Pink Elephant in defiant nostalgia. She cracked the seal on the bottle at the curb in front of Bedwin’s steps and slugged a shot straight from its lip. Bedwin was home, of course. He opened the door to his converted garage, his secret grotto, in a T-shirt, blue-piped at neck and biceps, with the words
BIG STAR
emblazoned on his sweet puny chest.

“What are you doing?” Lucinda demanded, before he could ask it of her.

“Just watching a movie,” Bedwin said helplessly, as though he knew it was an indefensible reply.

“That’s funny because it’s the same thing you were doing the last time I visited you, remember? When I came with the lyrics?”

“Sure, Lucinda, I remember.”

“You’re not watching the same movie, are you?” She peered past Bedwin’s shoulder at the screen, winking like an electric eye from his cavern of stuff. On it, a jocular engineer beckoned from the narrow window of a massive locomotive. “Something about choo-choos?”

“
Human Desire
, by Fritz Lang.”

“The one you’ve watched, like, a hundred times.”

“Not a hundred, but yes, that’s right.”

“Can I come in?”

“Do you have more lyrics?” His tone was flat, eerie, as accusingly innocent as a child’s.

“No, it’s just Saturday night and I figured I’d drop in.”

“Yeah, sure, okay.”

She carved a space beside him on his musty floor amid the propped-open paperbacks and video clamshells and they watched his movie, as though repairing what Lucinda had neglected on her last visit, a full and earnest entry into Bedwin’s universe. Lucinda drank straight from the bottle, while Bedwin fetched himself a beer from the refrigerator. Bedwin dimmed the lights, so the screen was the sole glow, blue patterns playing across their faces and curling around the bottle of scotch. The film’s characters, confusingly, both worked on trains and rode as passengers on trains frequently in their spare time. It had a strange lulling rhythm, alternating between urgency and languor. The many looming shots of trains, tracks, and tunnels had a documentary authority that tended to dwarf the actors, one of whom was not Spencer Tracy, another not Marilyn Monroe. Lucinda detected Bedwin murmuring along very softly with the dialogue. Bedwin had allowed her inside a moment as pure and private as if she were watching him in sleep, digits jerking and eyelids trembling with a dream.

“Explain to me what you see in this,” she said. “I really want to know.”

“It’s too much to explain.”

“Just in this scene, then. Right now. What are you seeing?”

Bedwin turned his moonish face to her, surprisingly near. The blue screen stretched in miniature reflection in each of his lenses, the sun in a tiny solar system that also contained Lucinda’s reflection and the space-capsule enclosure of Bedwin’s book-lined room. Behind these teaspoon realms, she glimpsed his eyes: moist, large, feeble, and utterly unfamiliar.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well, lately I’ve been focused on text fragments more than anything else,” he said.

“Text fragments?”

“For instance, in the train yard, did you notice how they kept passing that sign that said ‘Safety First—Think,’ but the word ‘Safety’ was cut off so all you could see was ‘fety’?”

“I think I did,” she lied.

“It’s as if the word itself had been wounded, the way a limb might get severed on a train track.”

“I don’t understand.”

“‘Fety First—Think.’ It’s like an uncanny message from the unconscious of the film to the audience of 1954, telling them they live in a fundamentally unsafe reality.”

“Wow.”

“You can help me find more, if you want,” he said hopefully.

“I’d love to.”

“Watch this, this is an incredible one. On the wall of the bar, look. It says ‘If You Don’t See What You Want, Ask,’ but the way the sign is formatted all you can read is ‘You Don’t See You Want,’ which if you repunctuated it could be read as, ‘You don’t see, you
want
.’ It’s this total rebuke to the viewer’s objectivity, the presumption that the audience can watch the behavior of the characters without becoming complicit in some way.”

“My god, Bedwin, that’s brilliant.”

“I know, I know.” He seemed not to be taking credit. Rather, the film’s profundities had exfoliated themselves under his watch. And now hers as well.

“What about this one?” Lucinda said. “Look, it says ‘Perfect Beer.’”

“Uh, you’re right, it does.”

“What do you think that’s about?”

“I don’t know, Lucinda, I guess that was just a brand of beer at the time that they were advertising in the bar.”

“I know, but ‘Perfect’? Doesn’t that seem like they’re at least slightly overstating the case?”

“Overstating which case?”

“What beer is perfect, right?”

“But it’s not a fragment,” said Bedwin. “The words are whole.” His tone failed to mask disappointment.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, the scotch causing her to slur now.

“It’s okay,” he whispered back, ever suggestible.

“I’m just getting the feel.”

“It’s your first time,” he said generously.

“You’ve opened my eyes.”

Bedwin goggled behind his frames, flattered beyond speech. She lifted the glasses from his face and placed her forefinger alongside his nose, to smooth the ruddy gutter where the glasses had pressed his tender flesh, soothing him like a lobster for the slaughter. His lips parted. She kissed him. She hadn’t lied. He’d opened her eyes, not to the insane excavation of text fragments from the movie about murderous train engineers but to Bedwin himself, his nobility and beauty. She ached to feel his precarious attention shifted entirely to the subject of her.

The band’s secret genius was also Lucinda’s, hiding in plain sight. It was Bedwin she loved, the answer to the question she’d only just formed. Wasn’t he, after all, the true author of ‘Monster Eyes,’ before it had been poisoned by her with the complainer’s lyrics? Bedwin lurked patiently, waiting to be recognized. If he watched her for a hundred or more times she’d reveal fragments he could painstakingly trace and study. Unlike Fritz Lang’s film, she’d never be the same twice. In Bedwin she’d never inspire monster eyes, no. Someone so helpless could never discard her. As she kissed Bedwin and laughed and pulled him nearer to her she realized she’d be to him as Carl had been to her: enlivening, total, incomprehensible. Only she’d never abandon him, never quit her new life.

“Oh, wow, gosh, Lucinda,” Bedwin breathed, from behind his panting return of her kisses, unwilling to stop but needing to register amazement.

“Yes, it’s crazy, it’s good.”

“Wow, but I had no idea you felt—”

“I know, it’s incredible we didn’t think of it sooner.”

“I guess—”

“Don’t guess, there’s nothing to guess.” Lucinda covered him, tipped him. Bedwin’s legs wriggled from beneath him and he and Lucinda fell enlaced, to occupy the oasis of carpet in Bedwin’s vault, his snail shell. The film played in the background, urgent pensive voices under the soundtrack,
We weren’t meant to be happy…it’s always too late, isn’t it? If only we’d been luckier, if something had happened to him in the yards…
Lucinda invaded Bedwin’s T-shirt, palmed the knob of bone over his heart, the sprouts of hair defending his largish nipples. He licked and snuffled against her neck, supporting himself on his elbows, his fingertips gentle at her waist. She tugged her own blouse free.

“Lucinda?”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sleeping with Carl?”

“I was, but I’m not anymore.”

“Oh. Can I ask you something else?”

“Yes, Bedwin, anything.”

“Did Carl really write the lyrics to ‘Monster Eyes’ and those other songs?”

“Yes, Bedwin, he did. I mean, the parts that you didn’t write or I didn’t write.”

“What parts did you write?”

“Just some of ‘Monster Eyes,’ I guess. Not the others. That was all you and Carl.”

Bedwin’s breath came in ragged shudders as Lucinda’s hand ranged to his belly.

“Is it okay?”

“Yes,” he managed. “It’s just strange.”

“This, you mean? Or collaborating with Carl?”

“Both.”

She tried to smother his doubts on either subject, clambering so her unbound breasts swam onto his chest, whirling her tongue at his ear. She tore at the fly buttons of his jeans, which gave way easily.

“Luce—”

“Bed.”

“Oh—”

She might have expected he’d be reticent, soft and afraid in his underwear, needing to be teased or beguiled. Instead he sprang into her palm, too ready, and all at once jetted soggily across her wrist.

“Oh, Bedwin,” she said, astonished.

“Sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“There are ways—”

“No, not that. I mean I can’t help being sorry.”

Blue ghosts swam through the room. Lucinda blotted her wrist against Bedwin’s shirt. He sighed his remorseful satisfaction, his spidery hands still idling at her waist. Lucinda lingered so early in her arc of arousal that any chance of reciprocity felt absurd. Bedwin stood as much chance of locating her desire now as of expertly piloting a steam shovel or minesweeper. She kissed the top of his head. He groped for his glasses, which were crushed beneath her hip. As he replaced them on his face he turned from her.

“I didn’t know I meant anything to you,” he said simply.

“Oh, Bedwin.”

“I miss a lot of things. Stuff goes over my head.”

“You’re the smartest—”

“Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen. I’m afraid of what you’ll see inside me. I’m ashamed, like you’ll look in my eyes and see some kind of foul matter, something messed up.”

“You’re a beautiful man, Bedwin.” Even as she spoke she understood they could never be together, that she’d come to him drunk on shame herself, reeling from the complainer’s rejection. She saw Bedwin whole and real at last. Beautiful, in his way, he wasn’t hers, had never been.

“I know there’s a price for looking away,” he said. “Everyone else is making stuff happen with their eyes. Connections, transactions. I don’t know if you can understand how angry I feel sometimes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. I just didn’t know that you could see me. You always seemed a little, uh, frantic. I hope you don’t mind my saying that.”

“It’s okay. I probably am frantic.”

They were silent again, Bedwin straightening himself, rotating his head as if to shake water from his ear. Then he abruptly plunged to kiss her breasts, still bared in the blue gloom.

“Oh, Bedwin, no.”

“What?”

“Just not now.”

“Okay. Lucinda?”

“Yes?”

“What are we going to tell Denise?”

“What do you mean, tell Denise?”

“You know.”

A horror fell on her at his words. She had every idea what Bedwin was talking about, all at once.

“I thought she just liked feeding you a lot of root beer and baloney sandwiches,” she said.