You Don't Love Me Yet

two

there’s a certain kind of talk I have with women,” the voice complained. “I say whatever I’m thinking about love and sex and blah, blah, blah, I’ve heard myself a thousand times. But as normal as it is for me—this kind of frank talk, I mean—for women it seems like it’s always the first time in their lives they’ve ever spoken that way.”

“There’s nothing so strange in that,” Lucinda suggested. “You’re accustomed to yourself, but you surprise others.”

“Surprise would be one thing,” said the complainer. “But I change others. I affect people. Women. Something happens to them, but nothing happens to me. The sameness of my life is confirmed by the effect I have on women. They’re always changed. Maybe if I met somebody who wasn’t surprised by me something new would happen.”

“You mean falling in love?” Perhaps the caller was only some dreary seducer, impressed with his own unresponsiveness.

“Oh, I’ve fallen in love.”

Lucinda adjusted the telephone on her shoulder and craned sideways to peer beyond the edge of the cubicle. Falmouth wasn’t at the storefront gallery’s reception desk. She caught scent of his coffee pot, dregs charring to a shrill odor. Vehicles coursed outside. At four in the afternoon the sun on Sunset Boulevard was as pale and flinty as morning light. Cubicles at either side of Lucinda sat empty. The office was little more than library carrels that Falmouth’s carpenters had slapped together, then painted gray.

The yellow legal pad before Lucinda lay bare. She raised her pen and mimed script in the air. “Tell me,” she said.

“Look,” he said, “I fall in love every five minutes. I might be half in love with you now.”

“You’re not the first caller to this line to say that,” she said.

“Love is everywhere.”

“I’m supposed to be writing down your complaints,” she reminded him.

“Okay, right,” he said. “Well, today’s complaint can be about what happens when I fall in love. Though I try not to, anymore. It makes me bad at being where I am.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If I really fell in love with you, then when we hung up the phone I’d be stuck halfway. I’d be all disjointed in time and space, half there and half here. And I don’t even know where there is. Whereas now, we get off the phone, no trouble. I’m where I am, like the Buddhists prefer.”

“We all want to keep the Buddhists happy.”

“The little Buddhists inside of ourselves, those are the ones I worry about.”

“But you still haven’t really told me what happens when you really fall in love,” she said. “Only that you want to avoid it.”

“My eyes destroy you.”

“What?”

“I have this condition called monster eyes. I find something not to like and it becomes enormous, it becomes the whole world. Once it was a woman’s fingernails. I started to think they were too weird and short and stubby, and then it was all I could think about. I tried encouraging her to work on her cuticles, to push them up—am I disgusting you?”

“No.”

“I told myself that if she’d just work on her hands I’d go back to adoring her. But really there were other things about her voice and personality and the way she fucked that were waiting to take the place of the fingernails. I’d begun to erode and degrade her in my mind. With my monster eyes.”

Cradling the pen at the point like chalk, Lucinda wrote, in block letters, M-O-N-S-T-E-R E-Y-E-S.

“So,” he continued, “sometimes I think the kindest thing I can do for a person is keep them out of range of those eyes. Like keeping a wolf out of moonlight.”

“You mean a wolfman,” Lucinda corrected.

“Well if he isn’t exposed to the moon it doesn’t have to get to that point.”

“But isn’t a wolfman a man before he sees the moon? Rather than a wolf? But anyway, the danger in a wolfman seeing the moon isn’t to the wolfman—”

“Or the moon.”

Stymied, Lucinda drew a rudimentary wolfman on the pad: a smiley face fringed with snaky hairs. What seemed hippieish sideburns gained a fiercer cast as she scribbled them nearly to the eyes.

“The thing about a wolfman is that something repulsive emerges from hiding,” said Lucinda. “But that isn’t the fault of the person who sees it. Maybe she just had ugly hands—”

Turning, Lucinda found Falmouth scowling over her shoulder at the block letters and pie-faced wolfman on the canary pad. Where had he been lurking? Falmouth turned his wrist to show Lucinda his watch, then pointed to the phone, where a square red button of translucent plastic blinked. Another complaint, waiting to be recorded. She shrugged guiltily.

“I’m sorry, sir, our time is up,” she told the caller.

“Tell me your name,” said the complainer.

“You know I can’t do that, sir.”

“Okay, I’ll call again tomorrow.”

“That’s your prerogative,” she said into the phone. It was one of the generic replies Falmouth had originally scripted for her and the other complaint receptionists. She hung up before he could reply, and took the next call.

who were you talking to when I came in?”

“Who do you think? A complainer.”

“It sounded like you knew him.”

“He had a lot to say.” It wasn’t a lie. He’d had a lot to say the day before, too. That he’d called each day of the past week Lucinda left unmentioned.

Lucinda and Falmouth sat in white plastic chairs at the edge of Sunset Boulevard’s sidewalk, under the shade of the Siete Mares patio. Falmouth faced west, squinting in the declining April sun. They’d departed the Strand Gallery for an early dinner, after the arrival of Falmouth’s two interns to man the complaint lines. Falmouth had culled the spookily young and confident interns from his students at CalArts, where he taught a class on installation art. At his gallery, a showcase solely for his own spectacles, Falmouth employed only women. Soon Falmouth would need more than three of them. The frequency of calls had mushroomed as word spread through Los Angeles, by means of bright orange stickers reading “Complaints? Call 213 291 7778,” mounted on public telephones, also by the interns, in restaurants, cocktail bars, and hotel lobbies.

Two ruined plates of fish tacos lay before them, the table covered with shreds of spilled cabbage and dots of red sauce and sour cream. Falmouth, though, sat unstained and impeccable in his trim brown sharkskin suit and vintage tie. He’d begun wearing tailored suits, polished shoes, and silk ties during his and Lucinda’s last year of college. The rest of their friends wore T-shirts and jeans, then and now. The suits debuted at the same time Falmouth had begun to lose his hair. Lucinda recalled poignantly the wisps that had wreathed Falmouth’s ears and neck, overlapping his collars, even as the bareness on top expanded, naked, undeniable, silly. Lucinda and Falmouth’s affair had been finished just before he began shaving his dome clean. Falmouth’s first and most successful piece of art was himself, installed in the larger gallery of the world.

“Don’t lose control of the dialogues, Lucinda,” Falmouth said. “You can’t begin thinking the complaint line is somehow a real service. The Echo Park Annoyance is coming tomorrow for an interview. We ought to seem institutional. As though we’re recording these complaints for some scientific or altruistic purpose, yet couldn’t care less about the yearnings of any given caller. It’s not a hipster chat line.”

Lucinda recognized Falmouth’s jabber as a symptom. “You’re nervous about this interview.”

“Be dispassionate,” he said, dismissing her sympathy. “This piece needs to have a certain gloss.”

“Some men find it erotic to talk to a woman on the telephone, Falmouth. You underestimated the titillation effect. I get breathers.”

“You’re mistaken. I had titillation in mind. When you take a complaint you ought to sound like a beautiful nurse. Patient but slightly bored. As if you’re wearing a uniform that you’ll remove only after the conversation, not during. As if your real life is elsewhere.” Falmouth turned and bugged his eyes at an old woman laden with shopping bags who paused on the sidewalk, overhearing him. The woman shook her head and resumed plodding. Falmouth motioned with cupped hands, as if scooting the woman along the sidewalk by the buttocks.

“Maybe then you should have hired someone who had a real life elsewhere,” said Lucinda.

“Has it never been explained to you that self-pity undermines sarcasm? Pick one or the other, then stick with it.”

Lucinda daubed at her stained plate, scooping fallen shreds of fish and cabbage, slurping from her fingers. Falmouth sighed, radiating disappointment that Lucinda wouldn’t tangle with him.

“Falmouth, when you and I were together, were you in love with me?”

He winced. “I suppose I was. It appeared so at the time, didn’t it? Do you want a cigarette?”

“Maybe you only seemed to be in love. Suppose, appear, seem, I hate those words.”

“Why are we discussing this now?”

“Nothing, it’s just someday I want to be in love without supposing or appearing or seeming.”

“You want to be in love? Or you want somebody to be in love with you? It can’t be both, that’s like mingling self-pity and sarcasm. What’s the latest development with Matthew?”

Sunset gloom had overtaken the boulevard. Falmouth looked tired. He was anxious about the complaint piece. And older. They were all getting older.

“We’ve broken up,” Lucinda said. “I’ll see him tonight, at practice.”

“So you’re friends.”

“Matthew’s too mild to be anybody’s enemy. And we refuse to wreck the band. So instead we’re miserable.”

“Voilà. It’s love.”

“I want real true clear passion, not murk and misery.”

“You underestimate the value of your inertia and dismay.” Falmouth had been slumbering, coasting through the talk. Now his attention gelled. “Misery’s much better than happiness. It’s auspicious that you’re in a band together.”

“Just because we’re as unhappy as a great rock band doesn’t mean we don’t suck.”

“You’re being too hard on yourselves. Most great rock bands are not only unhappy, they also suck, if you listen closely enough.”

“You never knew anything about music, Falmouth.”

“No, I never did. Don’t you want a cigarette?”

the band barely fit into its rehearsal space, formerly the living room of drummer Denise Urban, now with its floor triply carpeted and bay windows draped with a bedspread to insulate the band’s sounds from irritated neighbors. Denise, muscular and nearly breastless in a scant white T-shirt, blue eyes half covered by her high hennaed bangs, balanced on a stool crammed between her kit and the French doors to her bedroom. On a couch of threadbare gingham, beneath bookshelves drooping on their brackets, sat Bedwin Greenish, the band’s lead guitarist, lyricist, and arranger. Bedwin wore plaid shirts buttoned to his throat, and cut his hair himself, with children’s scissors. He sat coiled around his black electric guitar, corduroyed legs tangled in themselves, one sneakered foot bobbing, head dipped so that his glasses neared his fingers, which spidered on the guitar’s fret-work noiselessly.

Matthew stood at the room’s center, leaning on his microphone stand with his back to the drums, acoustic guitar strapped across his shoulder but dangling untouched. Matthew knew only rudimentary chords, his strumming inessential to the band’s sound. He turned and stared unhelpfully while Lucinda, arriving last, wrestled her enormous hard case through the kitchen doorway. The room was silent enough to hear Bedwin throat-humming the notes of an imaginary solo.

“Hey,” said Lucinda.

“Hey,” said Denise.

“Um?” said Bedwin.

Matthew nodded as Lucinda fitted herself into her accustomed spot at his left elbow. A bass player’s stance, pivot between drummer and singer, the only player to absorb everyone’s reactions. She’d face Bedwin too, if he ever looked up. But it was Matthew’s presence to which she attuned now, his delicate eyes so firmly unglanced in her direction. She felt a kind of heat impression of his contour glow along the side of her body that was turned toward his.

The sensation, pleasant or unpleasant, was familiar enough to ignore. She plugged in and tuned her strings. “Somebody give me a G.”

Bedwin plucked a note, unamplified, then turned himself up and plucked it again. Denise rattled her snare warningly. Matthew coughed.

Lucinda boinged her ill-tuned string, but her ear failed her. “Sorry, another G?” Matthew and Bedwin each replied with their guitars. This time she nailed it.

“So, Bedwin’s got something new he wants to try,” said Matthew, still not looking at anyone in particular.

“Great,” said Lucinda. Bedwin himself didn’t seem to register the discussion, his glasses still magnetized to the guitar’s neck.

“Sure, but let’s do a run-through first,” said Denise. The heartbeat of their music, she was also the conscience of the band’s claim to professionalism. They hadn’t practiced in ten days. So, the four shrugged halfway through their set list: “Shitty Citizen,” “Temporary Feeling,” “The Houseguest,” and “Hell Is for Buildings.” Then worked a few times over the ending to “Canary in a Coke Machine,” struggling with the elusive full-stop timing. The band possessed these five songs, and five more. It was enough to make a set which, crisply played, lasted thirty-five minutes. A credible duration, if you relied on between-song patter and false starts, plus a break after “Sarah Valentine” and, you’d have to hope, a round of applause calling them back to the stage to finish with “Secondhand Apologies.” Credible, except the band was sick of “Crayon Fever” and “Temporary Feeling.” The oldest songs in their set, both felt embarrassing and slight. They all rooted for Bedwin to write more songs. He hadn’t in a while. Not that anyone meant to start panicking about it.

Lucinda adored thumping the fat strings of her instrument, constructing with the stretched notes a physical bridge between Denise’s peppery beat and Bedwin’s chords, a bridge across which Matthew’s voice could scurry or shamble or cavort. She felt she ought to hide her secret passion for rehearsal, the uncommon extent of pleasure she felt in simply generating the same figures over and over, those low, mumbling bass lines Bedwin had scripted with her capacities in mind. She wasn’t the fastest, but she’d been assured by better players that she possessed all anyone needed: She swung. She had feel. Lucinda took solace in these notions without comprehending them fully. Bass players were a secret guild, each abiding with the ungainly, disrespected instrument for the thankless benefit of music itself. Lucinda had read somewhere of the argument as to who derived the most pleasure from the sexual act, the male or the female. She felt certain the musical reply would be: the bass player.

Halfway through teaching the band his new song—he’d stepped to the drums and quickly set a rhythm figure for Denise to play, shown Lucinda a bass line by playing it on the upper two strings of his guitar, then strummed chords for Matthew to follow—Bedwin seemed to lapse into glazed discouragement at his spot on the gingham cushions. The song was sprightly and appealing, its changes easy to remember and play, and the band cycled through several choruses hopefully, waiting for Bedwin to further enlighten them. But rather than suppling lead lines on his guitar or offering Matthew a lyric, he fell to silence, then issued a faint moan. The players ground to an incongruent halt.

“Hey, Bedwin,” said Matthew. “You okay?”

“Sure…sorry…”

“Bedwin,” said Denise, more sharply. “Did you eat anything today?”

“Um, sure, yeah.”

“Tell me what you ate.”

“I, uh, definitely had some raisin bran.”

“I mean any dinner or anything, Bedwin. Before coming to rehearsal.”

“I can’t tell you exactly when it was,” he mumbled defiantly.

Sighing, Denise slid from behind her drums. “I bought some groceries today, all the stuff you like. How about some ginger ale and a baloney sandwich? I got some beer, too, if anyone wants one.”

Bedwin shifted his guitar to one side, expending minimum effort in freeing himself from its weight, then ambled behind Denise into the kitchen. Lucinda and Matthew were left alone. Matthew ducked his head under his guitar strap and parked his instrument against an amp. Lucinda unloaded her bass. Accompanied by the faint music of Denise’s refrigerator, which began chortling and whining the moment its door was opened, and the tinkering of a blade in jars of mustard and mayonnaise, the two moved to the empty cushions. The ramshackle couch saddled obligingly, dipping their bodies into contact at elbow and shoulder.

“I’m in trouble,” said Matthew.

“What trouble?”

“I quit on Tuesday. Dr. Marian was so pissed she won’t even let me into my locker. Shelf is dying of ennui and nobody will admit it.”

“Who’s Shelf?”

“The kangaroo. You remember.”

Lucinda and Matthew had sworn not to speak on the telephone. The ten days since their breakup had passed without those chance encounters for which, heart tripping, she’d braced at the entry to each of his regular haunts, the Back Door Bakery, Hard Times Pizza, Netty’s. Their abandoned intimacy dwelled like a rumor between them, independent and charged.

Lucinda put her hand into Matthew’s hair. He leaned his skull into her hand. Lucinda spotted a tiny nesting of dandruff grains in the blazing red cup of his ear, as usual.

“You’ll be back in a week,” she said.

“I don’t know this time.”

“Did you leave something important in your locker?”

“More I’m worried about Shelf.”

“Shelf’s probably just a little depressed.”

“Shelf’s fucking inconsolable.”

“You see aspects of yourself in the kangaroo,” Lucinda said gently. “But you’re not dying.”

“I might be suffocating slowly, who knows, it’s hard to tell. Like all of us. We’re turning thirty and we haven’t done anything. Look at Bedwin. He can’t even feed himself, and he’s our genius.”

“The song’s good.”

“It’s not a song yet,” said Matthew. “He hasn’t got any lyrics, he told me.”

Inside the kitchen, Bedwin choked, wolfing his food. A kettle rattled on its burner. Denise went on puttering at the stove and refrigerator, allowing them privacy.

“Anyone can write lyrics,” suggested Lucinda.

“Anyone can be in a lame band, anyone can scoop up the hair shed by a depressed molting kangaroo, anyone can wipe the tears from the infected eyes of a bandicoot, anyone can put a monkey in handcuffs,” said Matthew savagely. “For that matter, anyone can answer telephones in fucking Falmouth’s stupid pretend gallery, or work in a porn store—”

“Denise doesn’t work in a porn store,” whispered Lucinda. “Keep your voice down.”

“Masturbation boutique, whatever it is.”

Lucinda saw she’d roiled Matthew by touching his hair, by breaching the distance. If he’d been the one to speak consolingly she’d surely now be in his role. Abjection and solace switched between them as lightly and easily as electric current.

“Bedwin’s the only one of us who actually lives for his art,” said Matthew, more evenly. “And see where it gets him.”

“Maybe you really should quit the zoo.”

“I can’t abandon Shelf.”

“Is Shelf a male or a female kangaroo?”

“A flyer.”

“What’s a flyer?” Lucinda, suddenly in the grip of an absurd jealousy, felt certain she knew the answer.

“That’s the word for a female. A lady kangaroo.”

“Of course,” she said bitterly.

Denise and Bedwin emerged from the kitchen. Matthew and Lucinda fumbled apart on the couch.

“What about one of those beers?” said Lucinda.

“Sure.” Denise grabbed one from the fridge. Lucinda twisted off the beer’s cap and pulled a long sip from its neck. Matthew frowned, turned his back to the band. They reclaimed their instruments and, at Denise’s prompting, encored “Tree of Death,” probably their favorite among their songs if they were honest with themselves. Bedwin, restored by the sandwich, managed a plinking, gnarled solo. Matthew lowered his voice to a whisper during the bridge, seducing an audience that wasn’t there.

Outside, a moonless night had fallen on the terraced apartments of Landa Street and Kenilworth Avenue, shadow swarming the concrete steps, bushed with jade plants, that wended up from the silence of parked cars, so distant from the blacktop heat and scurry of wheels on Silver Lake and Hyperion. Beyond the band’s windows something four-footed crashed in the under leaves, daring itself to raid Denise’s garbage bin. Inside, the quartet was complete for one instant, rollicking in the embrace of the sound they produced themselves, free from time and hesitation. If only it could go on forever. Bedwin wrote short songs.

The band didn’t have a name yet, though they’d discussed it hundreds of times.

The whatever-it-was got into the garbage, whining as it ravaged a foil-lined takeaway bag.

“Let’s play the new one,” said Lucinda, after the band stuttered to silence. “I can’t get it out of my head.” She slugged the last of her beer, went to the fridge and found another.

“I already told Matthew and Denise,” said Bedwin. “I really don’t have any lyrics.”

“No problem,” said Lucinda, wiping her mouth. “You’ll write some.” She set the new bottle at the base of her amp and retook her place, expectantly.

“I’ve been trying. I’m having a sort of problem with language.”

“What do you mean?”

“With sentences…words.”

“We know what language is, Bedwin,” said Denise, not unkindly.

The three had turned to Bedwin now, half consciously, as though reaching out to support someone freshly released from a hospital, a man tapping down a ramp on crutches.

“My problem is I don’t believe in the place where the sentences come from anymore.”

“Lucinda says anyone can write lyrics,” said Matthew.

“Go to hell,” said Lucinda. “Let’s just play it. I’ll make up some words, sure.”

“I didn’t mean—” began Matthew.

“No, you’re absolutely right,” said Lucinda. “Pick up your guitar.”

Lucinda plumped at her bass strings, jump-starting the song, and planted her thighs in a new stance, facing Denise, demanding the drums’ reply. Denise met the call, ticked the beat double-time. The sound was sprung, uncanny, preverbal, the bass and drum the rudiment of life itself, argument and taunt, and each turn of the figure a kiss-off until the cluster of notes began again. Who needed words? Who even needed guitars, those preening whiners? Lucinda felt violently unapologetic. And when the guitars wended in she wasn’t any sorrier. Meeting Lucinda’s challenge had stirred even Bedwin, who now confessed with his lead line that the wordless song had a melodic hook.

Denise sped up and no one cared.

The thing that rooted in garbage heard them. It dropped the chicken carcass it had plucked from the foil bag and bayed its own song into the tops of the trees.

“Monster eyes,” Lucinda called out at the peak of the chorus. The others turned and gaped.

“Get you out of range of my monster eyes,” she sang atonally at the chorus’s reprise. “Best thing I ever did for you, was get you out of range of my monster eyes—”

Then she fumbled her way into the verse’s start: “Before my eyes destroy you, better run, better run—” She hummed to dummy another line: “Nuh nuh huh feel my eyes abhor you, dunna nuh, dunna nuh—”

Matthew, not looking at Lucinda, grabbed the lyric at the next pass. He pigeoned his toes and shouted it at the draped windows as if to press it out into the night, then dropped register, incanting the lyric as a warning instead, his hair falling forward, gorgeously, into his eyes. Bedwin nodded. He quit playing lead fills in favor of the raw chord changes, chiming the riff on the downbeat. Denise thwacked her cymbal incontinently, railing above the sound the band was making. The words were freighted with a righteousness and panic each player felt as a confession. A voicing they couldn’t have sanctioned alone, only collectively. They chanted it in murmurs together the next time through, the now-already-inevitable chorus, inseparable from Bedwin’s chords:

Get you

out of range

of my

monster

eyes—

Their hearts huddled around the fledgling song as if it were a tendril of bonfire in wild darkness, something they nurtured which fed them in return.

lucinda, in shorts and sleeveless top, stretched in her chair in front of Millie’s Café, shading her eyes with one bare arm. Coffee steamed untouched on the table, too hot for the day. Noon light had drawn her to the sidewalk table like a snake lured to bathing on rock. Sporadic pedestrians blobbed past on their shadow forms. Los Angeles was a desert. The cars on Sunset Boulevard felt miles away across the margin of curb, tumble-weeds scouring paths to nowhere.

Deep in the luxury of Lucinda’s trance an alarm sounded. She lifted her arm from her eyes. A small man in black horn-rimmed glasses and a backward baseball cap had silently leaned to fit his face into her armpit, his nose nearly brushing her sprig of hair, his lips and eyelids narrowed in an expression of savor. The man, perhaps fifty, wore a wrinkled suit jacket over a gray T-shirt, with jeans and sneakers. He hopped back as she shifted, as though she’d startled him. She supposed she had. He had an abrupt flustered quality, like a woken duck.

“How do you do,” he said, righting himself. “The way you were sitting was extraordinarily lovely. I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

“Well, you did.”

“Then I regret it. Jules Harvey.” He offered his hand, which she took unthinkingly.

“Luc—” she began, then stopped, dropping his hand.

“Luce? I wonder if you could tell me where to find Maltman Avenue.”

Lucinda’s tattooed waitress edged to her table, slipping the check beneath a saucer.

“Maltman’s the next block.” Lucinda pointed. “Look, you shouldn’t do that.” She slurped her tepid coffee, worthless now. It should have been iced.

“You mean—”

“Sneak up on people,” she said. She didn’t want to hear what he’d call it.

“I know, I know.” He pursed his lips, weighing the indulgence. At last he sighed, seeming to find it in himself to forgive. He fished in his jacket’s interior pocket for a folding map. “Have you heard of the Falmouth Strand Gallery?”

she walked Jules Harvey to the gallery’s entrance, a precinct of chaos. The Annoyance’s photographer, a hulking blond in a leather jacket, slugged shoulder-loads of equipment from his double-parked van in through the doorway. Just inside, Falmouth presided, gesticulating furiously. Explaining some point to the Annoyance’s writer, whose nodding dreadlocks shrouded the steno pad on which he jotted Falmouth’s words.

“Jules,” said Falmouth, interrupting himself when they walked through the door. “I’m thrilled to see you. We’re a bit of a mess. You met Lucinda, I see.” He bugged his eyes at Lucinda, a glare of panic reserved solely for her sake.

Jules Harvey nodded, his expression serene. Perhaps to him the episode on the sidewalk was a reasonable prelude to introduction. He dithered his hands, peering into the gallery’s dimmed recesses. “I’ll just have a look…there’s no hurry…”

“Lucinda can show you the complaint office.”

Jules Harvey trailed Lucinda into the small maze of carrels. One of Falmouth’s interns, seated in her cubicle, waved her pen in greeting, then frowned back to her call. On the canary pad before her she’d scrawled: nobody ever told me about aging/moisturizer/death. Lights on Lucinda’s phone blinked, another three complainers waiting. Now they called in the morning, too. Falmouth’s genius or folly, whichever it was, had slowly expanded to swallow Los Angeles.

“Wait in there,” Lucinda told Jules Harvey, nodding at another empty cubicle. “You can listen, just don’t pick up the phone.”

“Sure.” Harvey adjusted his black glasses frames and took the seat, meek as a clam. Lucinda had to remind herself he’d invaded her periphery, robbed her private smells.

“Complaints,” she said into the phone.

“Say something so I know it’s you,” said the voice she recognized.

Lucinda had to catch her breath. “We’d be happy to register any dissatisfaction you’ve experienced, sir.”

“I had to hang up on that other girl three times,” the caller said.

“There’s no need for that now, sir.”

“Yes, I can hear it’s you.”

“Yes.”

None of the other complainers interested Lucinda at all. They’d roused her curiosity for the first days, a week at most. After ten days she felt herself turning into a recording instrument. The complainers spoke of their husbands and wives and lovers and children, from cubicles of their own they whispered their despair at being employed, they called to disparage the quality of restaurants and hotels and limousines, they whined of difficulties moving their bowels or persuading anyone to read their screenplays or poetry. They fished for her sympathy. Using Falmouth’s scripted lines she dealt with them crisply, addressing them as ma’am and sir, cutting them off before they’d become familiar. The only one that mattered was the brilliant complainer, who interested her entirely too much. His words were like a pulse detected in a vast dead carcass. They seemed born as he spoke them, blooming in the secret space between his voice and Lucinda’s ears.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it since we hung up. When I was younger I used to love women’s bodies. I’d drive myself crazy picturing them. It was like women themselves were just the keepers of these glorious animals I wanted to pet. I kept trying to push them out of the way so I could get to this agenda I had with their, you know—flesh.”

Lucinda was grateful now for the gallery’s infestation by the journalists. Falmouth would be kept at bay. If only there hadn’t been an armpit sniffer one cubicle away. She hoped Jules Harvey was listening to the intern’s calls, not her own. Lucinda could hear the intern murmuring assent into her receiver, her pen scribbling noisily, filling the pages of legal pads with accounts of complaint, as Falmouth required.

“Later,” the complainer went on, “I realized it wasn’t women’s bodies I loved, it was women, actual women. I know that doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment. But women became my actual friends.”

“That doesn’t sound like a problem,” whispered Lucinda.

“For a while it wasn’t. For a while I was happy to have sex with the bodies of my friends. But eventually it wore me down. I couldn’t remember what I loved about the bodies because I’d become too fond of the women. It was like a vicious triangle.”

Jules Harvey’s baseball cap and gleaming lenses rose on the horizon of her carrel. Lucinda turned away, pretended she hadn’t noticed. Thinking of Falmouth’s imperative, she blurted: “What exactly is your complaint, sir?”

“Same as always,” said the complainer. “Nostalgia, except it’s not just regular nostalgia. More like nostalgia vu. Longing for longing, instead of for the thing in question.”

Lucinda printed L-O-N-G-I-N-G, shielding the pad from view with her shoulder. When she turned, however, she saw Jules Harvey padding in his high-tops through the doorway, through the gallery front.

“Women’s bodies don’t interest you anymore?” she asked. She instantly regretted a question which sounded too interested.

“I can’t even think about women’s bodies clearly now, that’s what I’m trying to explain. All I can think about is particular women. Their faces, their words. The bodies are totally eclipsed. It’s like I can’t see the sun anymore. I used to have a sense of purpose in life.”

“A guy stuck his face in my armpit a few minutes ago,” she whispered. “A total stranger, at a restaurant.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I’m in shock, I guess. He crept up while I was sitting with my eyes closed.”

“See, there’s a person with priorities.”

“I don’t think he’s much of a person at all.”

“I bet you he’s a leader in his field. Those types thrive in the modern world.”

“He’s not as assertive as you’re imagining. He drifts around like a human dandelion. I should have knocked his block off, but he’s too sad-looking.”

“Now you’re making me jealous. I’m sure I’m twice as sad-looking as your dandelion man—”

Falmouth and the journalist swept into the maze of cubicles, Falmouth babbling in a continuous stream, alive to his imagined public. The photographer orbited, snapping with a tiny camera in his meaty paws.

“Can I call you later?” Lucinda whispered.

“What?”

“Give me your number. I can’t talk now.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“I’ll explain later. I have to start taking complaints.”

“I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’ll call you,” he said, and hung up.

lucinda strode Sunset Boulevard, past her own parked Datsun, feeling jubilant and deranged. Men in cars slowed to examine her, a rare walker, but Lucinda didn’t turn her head. The sidewalk bowled beneath her like a gerbil’s wheel, the city curling to meet her footfalls. A Jeep trolled past with a bumper sticker she’d never seen before, reading pour love on the broken places. The rippled April heat dispelled the cloistered atmosphere of Falmouth’s gallery.

The job was worse than her last, making cappuccinos at the Coffee Chairs. It robbed her of a solitude she hadn’t known she’d craved until now, the peace achieved performing some simple purpose adequately, in full view of the public but with her dignity and mystery intact. Operating the blistering, groaning espresso machine—thumping out plugs of steam-soaked coffee and tamping fresh grind in its place, venting the pressured steam through the valves in controlled bursts, flash-toweling grit from the joints and threads before burning your fingers—was like playing bass, an anonymous service full of secret satisfaction at precision, clarity, tempo. And it brought her a version of fame. She watched the café’s customers recognize her everywhere she went, but declined their glances. Falmouth’s callers, by comparison, tugged at her private self, blotted at her with their egos.

Falmouth would be lucky if some museum purchased his lunatic archive of woe and stored it in its basement, there to rot. Complaint was a tide, a drab surf rinsing up everywhere, and by declaring his project Falmouth had drawn the tide to his door. But the complaints existed before Falmouth, and they’d go on after. No one should be forced to listen to them. She couldn’t be paid enough. Let Falmouth take the calls himself: that’s what Lucinda would have liked to tell the reporter from the Annoyance. That was her complaint. Why hadn’t the brilliant complainer offered her his number? He didn’t sound like anyone’s husband. Lucinda saw how little she’d visualized him at all. He was the murmur in her ear, nothing else. Had she ruined things, become too intimate in asking to call? Shouldn’t that be what he wanted?

Lucinda’s fugue carried her through the doors of No Shame, past a few studious browsers at long shelves of rubber prosthetics and electronic implements, vials of frictionless liquids, and chic racks of videos, with their florid, meaty artwork, to the counter.

“Is Denise here?”

The woman beside the cash register pointed Lucinda to a half-open door. “On break.”

Lucinda leaned into a storeroom heaped with cartons, through a doorway decorated like a shrine with thumbtacked Polaroids of unhappy male faces. Denise sat in a wooden folding chair with an unwrapped sandwich on a carton in front of her, sneakers planted in a desert of foam peanuts.

“What’s up?” said Denise.

“Falmouth’s driving me crazy.” Lucinda didn’t mention the man whose name she didn’t know. The air in the storeroom was heavy, the boxes crammed with erotic supplies too abject to contemplate. Lucinda, perspiring, felt a pleasurable twitching in her calves and realized with what force she’d barreled down Sunset. She ran her fingers down the row of Polaroid mugs. “Who are these?”

“The shit list. When we catch a shoplifter we take their picture. Or anyone else we don’t want coming back.”

Lucinda looked for Jules Harvey, but he wasn’t included.

“It’s dead today,” said Denise. “They don’t need me. Grab a seat.”

“I’ve been in a dimly lit storefront all morning. Can we go get a beer?”

“Just let me wolf this sandwich.”

“I’ve got an even better idea. Let’s go to the zoo.”

Denise widened her eyes. “You want to see Matthew?”

“They fired him. That’s why it’s a good time to go. We can look at the animals.”

“Okay.”

Lucinda riffled the Polaroids again. “You keep the camera here?”

Denise pointed to a cabinet.

“Let’s take it along.”

the majority of Los Angeles’s kangaroos reclined in a gaggle under tree shade on a tan, scrubby hill. Shelf the Flyer, ostracized instead in a concrete pit, sprawled on her back in desultory glamour, displaying piebald stomach, one leg cocked to the sky in a forlorn show of submission to no one in particular. The pavement of her angled asylum was stained here and there with pissy or vomity streaks, the floor scattered with sun-blanched tatters of uneaten salad. Lucinda, gripping the Polaroid camera, tilted her body as far as she could over the rim of the enclosure and snapped Shelf’s portrait. The camera obediently chugged out its product. Lucinda unsheathed the pregnant black square and wagged it in the dry air.

“I can’t get that song out of my head,” said Denise.

“What song?”

“You know, ‘Monster Eyes.’”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know, the tune, the riff, the words, whole thing. Bedwin’s more unstable these days, but more of a genius, too.”

“Yeah,” Lucinda admitted. “It’s really good.”

The zoo was a maze of circular trails disordered by construction, paths barred by scaffolding, displays shielded with plywood. The visible animals seemed to stand off-kilter on their portion of raw-scraped land, their outcroppings. A ram with an erection tiptoed the sculpted ridge of an artificial mountaintop, pacing a ewe who darted on the flip side of their finite mental kingdom. Monkeys dripped from distant palms, more fruit than creature, refusing to dance. A coyote exasperated the limits of his cage, sniffing distance from hills he might have known. Turtles pedaled in dust. The zoo was an abrasion, Los Angeles’s arid skeleton poking into evidence.

Lucinda pocketed her snapshot and they walked, searching for the smaller birds and lizards, the depressed little poems veiled in foliage.

“The band’s horoscope today said ‘a new venture or long-range goal will be given a shot of confidence,’” said Denise. “I think it meant the new song.”

“The band’s horoscope?”

“I read it every week. The band was born on February sixteenth.”

“We’re more fetal, I think,” said Lucinda. “We need to play a gig. And we need a name.”

“We need more good songs,” said Denise.

“We have good songs. ‘Hell Is for Buildings’ sounded great last night.”

“We need more. And ‘Canary in a Coke Machine’ needs a better ending. Also, Bedwin needs to learn to stand up while he plays. He can’t sit when we’re onstage.”

“Maybe we could get him a really high chair. That might be weird.”

“Maybe you could write new lyrics to ‘Sarah Valentine,’” mused Denise. “Maybe the problem is the lyrics.”

“Who is Sarah Valentine anyway? It’s sort of a cursed song.”

“I think Bedwin went out with a Sarah once for about five minutes.”

“I didn’t realize Bedwin could shake hands in five minutes. I thought he was more the pining-unspoken-for-years type. I always assumed Sarah was someone who didn’t know there was a song about her.”

“Matthew looks good, though,” said Denise. “He’s getting more like a real lead singer.”

“What do you mean, like a real singer?”

“Just much sexier and more relaxed, the way he stands at the microphone with his toes pointed and slurs the words, like he can barely be bothered to pronounce the consonants. Like how he sang the new song. You know what I’m talking about.”

Lucinda didn’t speak. Panting from their ascent to the monkey terraces they quit walking, parked in front of a lemur with cartoon-hobo eyes.

“Do you think Matthew is happy in the band?” said Denise.

“I think he’s depressed,” said Lucinda irritably. “I think his life is practically falling apart.”

“Really? He seemed okay to me.”

“He’s terrible, terrible.”

“Do you think he’ll leave the band?”

“Never. We’re all he has.”

“What about you?”

“I love the band. The band is fine. It’s even better now that Matthew and I have broken up. A lot of the great rock-and-roll bands are founded in breakups, love triangles, love-hate situations. The band couldn’t be better.”

Lucinda heard herself parroting Falmouth, and shut up. Turning her back on the dewy moonish lemur, she grabbed Denise’s arm, tugged the smaller woman to her side, so they stood hip to hip. They stepped in tandem, feeling an alliance beyond the grasp of language. They were the girls in the nameless band, the rhythm section.

“Let’s go back and see that mountain goat with his crazy red penis.”

“Maybe he’ll catch her and fuck her.”

“He’ll never catch her. She always stays on the other side of that little fake mountain. The zoo made a mistake, they brought the wrong goats, she doesn’t like him. He’s going slowly insane.”

“Maybe, but maybe she’ll let him catch her. I think it might be today. I want to see.”

“I bet they all fuck at night,” said Lucinda. “The whole zoo. All night every night, when we’re not looking.”

through her kitchen’s rear window on Reservoir Street Lucinda could see, over the rooftop of a tire shop and against a background of shaggy palms, the high rotating sign of the Foot Clinic. It depicted a cartoon foot with features and tiny limbs: one side a happy, cared-for foot, beaming and confident, white-gloved hands jubilantly upraised, the other side a moaning, broken-down foot, neglected and weary, grasping at crutches and with its big toe wreathed in bandages. Lucinda’s view took in a three-quarters slice of the sign as it turned in its vigil over Sunset Boulevard: happy foot and sad foot suspended in dialogue forever. The two images presented not so much a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot-based philosophical system. This was Lucinda’s oracle: one glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she’d delegated to the foot god.

Beside the candle on her table lay half a Cafe Tropical Cuban sandwich in a nest of foil, a torn scrap of canary paper with a phone number scribbled on it, a Polaroid snapshot of a supine yellowish kangaroo in a band of shaded concrete, and a cordless telephone.

When Lucinda had parted from Denise and returned to the gallery she’d found the hubbub dissipated, the journalists and Falmouth gone, the fort held down by the interns, the two girls settled into a rhythm, answering the steadily blinking phones and transcribing complaints. Lucinda rejoined them. After the evening surge had peaked one of the interns leaned in at Lucinda’s cubicle and passed her the scrap of paper.

“He said you’d know who he was,” the intern announced drily.

Now, fingertips nudging the dangerous scrap of paper, the boundary-smashing digits, Lucinda glanced up. The foot sign completed a turn, face wheeling into view: sad foot. Lucinda left her phone untouched.

Instead she took the Polaroid to her desk and located a ballpoint pen, an envelope, and a stamp. Writing left-handed to disguise her script, she lettered I NEED YOU in capitals on the photograph’s fat bottom margin, practically engraving the words in the glossy sandwich of paper. Then, still with her left hand, she wrote MATTHEW PLANGENT on the envelope, and below it, Matthew’s address. Slid the Polaroid into the envelope. Touched her tongue to the flap’s glue and sealed it. Stamped it and put it in her purse.