You Don't Love Me Yet

three

the song, “Shaft of Light, Piece of String,” sounded fantastic. They were playing it in a narrow hallway, but the crowd was happy. You couldn’t keep from thinking the stage should have been put at one end or another instead of in the middle of the hallway so we wouldn’t keep having to crane their necks to acknowledge the audience on the other side, but nobody minded. Lucinda said she heard a rat or a squirrel under the stage, it was distracting. “Shaft of Light, Piece of String” had seven choruses. Bedwin really was a genius. The band finally had a name, but nobody could remember whether it was Famous Vomit Ferry or Long-Term Pity Houseguest, and hadn’t the word “houseguest” already been used somewhere? Denise sang something that sounded like a hymn, it was unexpected for the drummer to sing but we tried to act cool about it, they didn’t want to offend her because it was religious. The stage was too tall. The chorus of the new song went “I’m a little doughnut” but Matthew kept saying “I want a little doughnut.” It was too late to correct him. The audience really liked it anyway. Famous Pity Magnet was really popular and they sounded really good.

The band was dreaming.

we’re going to have a party,” Jules Harvey explained in his dry, blank voice, as he fingered his heavy black frames and gazed down at the tablecloth. Harvey sounded astonished by his own words, uncertain they’d reach his listeners’ ears before wafting off in the breezeless air. Falmouth sat studying Lucinda for her response, his arms crossed against his suit as though bodily containing impatience. The three sat around a table on the Red Lion’s patio, neglecting steins of afternoon lager that had been plunked down by a waitress in lederhosen. A rap beat blared from a car on the street below, fracturing the boulevard’s gelled soundscape.

“Okay,” said Lucinda, confused. Harvey, in his Detroit Tigers baseball cap and sneakers, and Falmouth, overdressed at one o’clock in a seersucker suit and yellow tie, had swept in together and nabbed her from her cubicle for the meeting. The two had bored her with small talk before finally announcing their project. Now she waited to understand.

“Jules is a promoter,” said Falmouth. “We’re collaborating on a happening.”

“I have a rather large loft,” said Jules Harvey apologetically.

“It’s going to be a dance party,” said Falmouth. “Only the rule is you can’t bring anyone you know. And you have to wear headphones. You have to listen to whatever you prefer to dance to, your own mix. If people don’t have their own headphones we’ll provide them at the door, like neckties and jackets at a club. What I want is a sea of dancing bodies, each to their own private music. I might call it Party of Strangers. Or maybe Aparty, like apart, y.”

“I get it.”

Falmouth held up a cautioning finger. “There’s more. Instead of beginning and ending gradually and spontaneously, like the usual party, I want the start to be perfectly regimented. Everyone has to arrive at exactly such and such o’clock and begin dancing immediately. Latecomers will be turned away. And then at the end, same thing. I may buy a starter’s pistol.”

“Falmouth had been thinking the backdrop ought to be perfect silence,” said Jules Harvey. “But I suggested it might be even better to have a band playing, very quietly, with nobody paying any attention.”

“I thought your little consortium might want the gig,” said Falmouth. He spoke grudgingly, as though Jules Harvey had persuaded him against his instincts. Harvey had a talent for insinuating himself, Lucinda suspected. She felt a pang of sympathy for Falmouth, usually so eager to patronize others, here so effortlessly co-opted.

“Attractive people playing and singing in the classic format: guitar, drums, singer, etcetera,” said Jules Harvey. “Falmouth gave me the impression that you and your friends could answer the call. Only you must be able to play exceedingly quietly. Really, you should be nearly inaudible.” He spoke with the same plodding earnestness with which he’d praised her armpit.

“I suppose it’s possible,” said Lucinda. She took a long drink of her beer.

“Between Jules’s efforts and my own, we ought to stir up a certain amount of attention,” said Falmouth. “Who knows? It could be the break you’ve been waiting for.”

“I’ll have to talk to the others,” she said.

“Falmouth forgot to tell me the name of your band,” said Harvey.

“We haven’t—”

“Maybe there should also be food no one is allowed to eat,” said Falmouth, his attention meandering. In his typical way, Falmouth now took it for granted that the band was enlisted. “Cooks might be preparing something to one side. Delicious smells emanating through the party. And then servers in black tie could load up trays and stand ready at the edges of the dance. Suddenly, just as they take a first step into the room, I fire the pistol a second time, the party’s over, and everyone is whisked out of the room before they can eat anything.”

She envisioned presenting this chance to the band: their first gig, a thing they’d have expected to come by way of Denise, their beacon of professionalism, or Bedwin or Matthew, who knew musicians—anyone but Lucinda, their self-taught bassist. Matthew, distrusting Falmouth, would take the offer for an insult. She’d need to emphasize Jules Harvey, the famous party promoter, and his rather large loft. They’d be forced to play inaudibly, sure, but to a huge crowd. Most bands debuted to barely anyone at all, to a handful of drunks. Here, they’d be an element in an artwork. Falmouth’s allure, his knack for offhand success, would infect them. And Jules Harvey’s eerie sincerity would ensure nobody mistook the band for merely one of Falmouth’s mean jokes. Harvey would make it clear they were picked for a reason, attractive people in the classic format. After showing how quietly they could play they’d give evidence of what else they were capable of, the quiet, nearly overlooked band, the art band, the band not like any other.

she was the most beautiful woman I ever slept with. Except in a way I never did. It’s a funny story, actually.”

“Tell me.” The other cubicles were dark. Falmouth had left early, his interest in complaint already wandering, perhaps overtaken by his Aparty. Lucinda was alone in the gallery when he called, her fabulous complainer. She’d switched off the lamp at her own desk and leaned into the shadow, beyond the spill of ambient light from the storefront’s fluorescents. No one passing on the street would know she was there. No one expected her anywhere. There was no rehearsal. If he hadn’t called her at the gallery she might have dialed his number, which nested in her pocket, inscribed on paper softened to tissue from handling. She might have dialed it or not. She might have again consulted the foot to decide. It didn’t matter. He’d called.

“She was the kind of beautiful woman who makes other women angry,” he said. “They’d see her and begin accidentally breaking stuff or getting stomachaches and needing to go home. She was a kind of beautiful catastrophe in that way. She’d ruin parties.”

“I’m not like that,” said Lucinda.

“Beautiful, or envious?”

“Envious.”

“I had that feeling about you.”

This was what she wanted to hear, his feelings about her. Yet he didn’t know her. Lucinda and the complainer were occult to each other, their mingled voices a conspiracy of imagination. For all she knew he could be only blocks away. Yet for now, his previous existence on earth was fascinating and horrible and she had to know more.

“What made her so beautiful?” It sickened her slightly to ask, as though she were one of the women with stomachaches, fleeing parties.

“She was tall and smooth and strange,” he said. “Like an alien, with impossibly long limbs. You couldn’t keep from staring at her, picturing her in certain situations, all tangled in sheets.”

“How did you meet?”

“She was the wife of someone I used to know. They got married when she was eighteen or nineteen, I think. He used to stand around guarding her all the time, as if he was shielding her body from a blast. She’d have this look on her face that was sort of bored and panicked at the same time. It was like she was a hostage and they were trying to find a place in the world to hide her. I pitied them in a lot of ways.”

“What happened?”

“It was a few years later when I saw her again. At a dinner party. Their marriage had fallen apart, I never knew the details, but she was alone. I think by then she was trying to make up for some of what she’d missed, marrying so young. But it was hard for her. She stood out, she was too immaculate in a way, she had some kind of gawky elegance that made it difficult for her to get properly defiled.”

“Go on.”

“We talked. You know, about sex.”

“And—”

“I told her I couldn’t explain why but that I only wanted one thing from her, and that was to make her come with my mouth while she was watching television. And ideally while she smoked a cigarette, too, but she wasn’t a smoker.”

“You can’t have everything.”

“No.”

“So that’s why you never slept with her? Because the television was on?”

“It was just something to talk about the first few times. I’d talk and she’d listen, and laugh at me. She had this deep laugh, you didn’t know where it came from because she had a normal, mild voice, but then this stomach-based laugh would chuckle out of her, like she was laughing at you with her whole soul. The laugh was revealing, but what it revealed was her distance. It let you know how far away she’d gone to hide from her body and from the world and the responses of all the men she’d met.”

Lucinda didn’t want to joke now, didn’t want to risk interrupting his story. She waited, the only sound the humming of Falmouth’s ionizer as it labored at the room’s dead air. She could hear him listening, too, sensed his satisfaction at this deepening between them, her breath-held anticipation of his words.

“One night I guess she got tired of laughing and saying no and she took me to her apartment, this huge place she’d lived in during her marriage. Once she’d decided, we didn’t discuss anything. It was a somber ritual, as if we felt answerable to some third party we didn’t want to disappoint. She had a television but no cable, so we put in a video. Her former husband was a film scholar, he’d left all these videos behind. It was in another language, something Scandinavian. The glow was the only light in the room. I guess she was reading the subtitles. I couldn’t.”

Lucinda released a soft click from the well of her throat.

“It took a really long time. I think she must have watched half that movie. And when it was over she was still quiet. I could tell she was just waiting for me to leave. I assumed that was the end of it, but she called me about a week later and told me I could visit again if I wanted. This time it didn’t take so long and when she came she started laughing at me, that same fathomless lunatic belly laugh. I was just kneeling there in my clothes between her long legs and I guess I looked sort of stupid. She sashed up her robe and just started laughing.”

“I’d laugh too,” said Lucinda softly.

“Of course you would.”

“Finish the story.”

“It became a regular thing for a while. I’d visit her apartment and she’d put in a video and sprawl on her chair in front of the television, it was a ratty yellow armchair, and throw her robe open. And she’d laugh afterward. She’d just look at me and laugh madly, and I’d laugh too. It was like I was escorting her on some long passage from where her reserve and her beauty had exiled her, only the voyage could never be finished for her. She’d come and laugh and then it would be time for me to go. Nothing was ever discussed. After a few times I began to push a little. I told her I wanted to tie her up, tie her to the bed or a chair, take away her control. I promised I wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want me to do, wouldn’t do more than I’d done, if that was what she wanted. I only wanted to bind up her limbs and stop her from laughing, maybe, restore the trepidation she’d felt that first time. When I brought it up she’d only laugh and turn on the television. Then we’d drown ourselves in dialogue from foreign films and the little sounds she’d make and the flickers on the wall and the colors projected on her stomach and her filthy yellow chair. She always tried not to make any sounds until she had to. Then she’d explode and start laughing and send me out to my car. It was a perfect relationship, so I had to wreck it.”

“How?”

“I kept pushing, trying to get her to allow me to tie her up. And one day she let me. I had no idea what to do, I’d spent all my energy just persuading her, never imagining it would come true. So, I brought over all my neckties and cinched her to the bed. I covered her eyes, too. And turned on the overhead light, which I’d never done. And then it was suddenly over. I had her there, I was able to stare as long as I liked. I could see her breathe and wait, her stomach trembling. But there wasn’t anything left to do. I didn’t say anything. I just went into the kitchen and ate some of her food. She began mewing, this sound that was practically like a kitten or a bat—meanwhile I was raiding the fridge. Then I found a pair of scissors, and I went in and silently cut the tie that held her right wrist to the bedpost, then placed the scissors on the table beside her, where she’d be able to find them. Then I left.”

“That’s it?”

“We never spoke again.”

In the silence Lucinda studied the electronic surf of tone on the line, a sound like distant galaxies collapsing. Falmouth’s gallery might have been a kind of capsule whirling in vast blank space. Then human sounds trickled in from the street—a slammed car door, a bubble of argument—and repainted the world.

“For a while I was thinking that was kind of a sexy story but it gets really depressing at the end.”

“I should have warned you.”

“When you left her there, was that your way of taking revenge? Because she didn’t care about pleasing you?”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“You never wished she’d touched you?”

“I suggested the arrangement in the first place.”

“I still think it might have been revenge.”

“It might be true.”

“You don’t know?”

“It’s a secret, I guess.”

“So you do know.”

“No. I meant the other kind of secret. It’s possible there’s a reason I left her lying there, but I don’t know it. Even before I left the room, all I could think about was what she might have to eat in the refrigerator. I could make up a reason but then I’d be lying to you. If it exists it’s a secret from myself.”

“She’d say it was revenge.”

“I’m open to the suggestion. All I remember is her gawky limbs and that crazy laugh, the flicker of Swedish films across the arms of that filthy yellow chair, the color and texture of her pubic hair when I finally got to examine it in bright light. It’s not some fable about revenge.”

“I guess the best secrets from yourself are the ones that even if someone else tells them to you, you still don’t know them.”

“Sure.”

“I can’t decide if your story is funny or depressing.”

“Maybe it’s both. Haven’t you ever noticed that whenever anybody wants to convince you that you ought to be interested in anything really gloomy, the first thing they tell you is how it’s actually quite funny?”

“What about the girl in your story? Did she find it depressing, or funny?”

“I don’t think it counted for that much one way or the other. We were only one another’s astronaut food.”

“What’s astronaut food?”

“You know, stuff in little packets that you keep lying on the shelf. Everyone has some lying around. The people you imagine you might be with but you know you never really will be. The people who if you’re in a couple but you’re a little bored or restless you meet them for coffee a lot and the other half of your couple isn’t really thrilled about it. Or if you’re single, they’re the people you’re keeping on a mental list just so you don’t feel like there aren’t any possibilities. Friends who are almost more than friends but really, they’re just friends. Astronaut food, bomb-shelter provisions. If you were ever going to have anything with them it would have happened already. Sometimes you even fall into bed with them, but it doesn’t count for much. It’s always a mistake to try to get any nourishment out of that stuff. But not a big mistake. That’s the beautiful part, how the stakes are so low.”

“Only if everyone agrees that they’re mutual astronaut food.”

“Oh, absolutely. You can screw up your astronaut food a million ways. Even just letting them know. Though they sense it at a certain level, nobody wants to be told. The worst is when someone falls in love and then gets all self-righteous about breaking up with their astronaut food, as if there’s anything to break up about.”

“What about the situation when someone is acting like they’re only astronaut food, but really has hopes of something more.”

“Yes.”

“Would you say I’m astronaut food for you?” The question tumbled from her lips. He’d never asked her whether there was anyone in her life, never asked her age or name or what she looked like. But then what had she learned about him?

“I don’t know,” he said tenderly. “It’s possible. Am I astronaut food for you?”

“I almost called you from my apartment last night,” she said, hearing her breath interfere with the syllables, knowing he heard it too.

“Why didn’t you?”

“The foot said no.”

He hesitated. “Is the foot a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then you should listen to him.”

“The foot’s not a he.”

“Oh.”

“I have to go now,” she said, suddenly abashed.

“Why?”

“I haven’t eaten dinner.”

“Are you going to masturbate?”

“Not on the telephone.”

bedwin opened his door with a shocked look on his face. Lucinda stood with a white, grease-spotty bag containing two piping slices fetched from Hard Times, the pizzeria at the base of the hill above which Bedwin’s tiny cottage apartment was perched, hoping to bribe her way into his digs. The nature of his home life had been a subject of keen speculation among the other members of the band.

“Want something to eat?”

Bedwin only stared. He was fully dressed in his usual costume: sneakers, plaid shirt buttoned to his Adam’s apple, analog wristwatch, glasses. Lucinda imagined him sleeping in it.

“Can I come in?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Did I interrupt something?”

“No, I was just, uh, watching a movie.”

“What movie?” She followed him through his door, into a low passage lined with book-tumbled shelves, claustrophobically close.

“It’s called Human Desire. By Fritz Lang.”

Bedwin lifted the takeout bag from Lucinda’s hands and scuttled into the kitchen, stranding her in a room whose every surface was crazed with media. Records and videotapes and compact discs strained every shelf to its limit, along walls layered with ephemera: concert tickets, 45s thumbtacked through their spindle holes, and Magic Markered set lists retrieved from the floors of concert stages, many with chunks of duct tape still clinging to their edges. His two armchairs were populated by tottering books, piled so high they served as dusty dummy companions. The television, stacked with the videocassette player on a milk crate, faced an empty patch of carpet. Its screen displayed the black-and-white image of a locomotive, trembling in frozen static beneath the word PAUSE in blue.

Bedwin returned from the kitchen with two small plates in hand, the triangles of pizza draped over their edges. “I don’t have any beer or anything.”

“That’s okay.” She’d quaffed a beer beforehand, looking to take the edge off her panicky enthusiasm. “The movie good?”

He looked shocked again. “It’s one of the ten greatest films of all time.”

“So you’ve seen it before.”

“I guess you could say I’m studying it.”

“I don’t want to interrupt if you need to—”

“No, it’s fine. But if you want to watch it I don’t mind rewinding to the beginning.”

“That’s okay.”

“Sure,” he said, his tone only slightly injured.

“I’d love to see it another time,” she said. “I wanted…”

Bedwin waited, his pupils wide. The two of them stood balancing pizza on tiny plates, crowded together in the room’s clear spot.

“Is there a place to sit in the kitchen?”

“Sure, sure.”

They perched at two corners of Bedwin’s red linoleum table, their pizza before them. Bedwin nibbled, ready to understand her invasion here. Lucinda imagined she could say or do anything and rely on his obedience, a disturbing prospect, actually. Perhaps she’d underestimated the responsibilities entailed in invading the sanctum of a mind as tender as Bedwin’s. In the room behind them the player reached some limit and clicked off the film, the space filling with blue light and a dim undertone of static.

Her own agenda boiling within her, Lucinda tried to pacify herself with a few bites of pizza before pulling the crumpled yellow sheets from her bag and smoothing them across the table between them.

“Look, here’s the thing,” she said. “I have some more ideas for songs. Do you like ‘Monster Eyes’?”

“It’s so great,” he said, with fannish sincerity and awe.

“Maybe we can do it again. Look.”

The five sheets were headed with titles. Beneath them, fragments of lyrics lurched in urgent scrawl to the margins, oblivious to printed lines. The jottings resembled crazed dictation, perhaps some Ouija boardist’s blind record. She hadn’t examined them since fleeing the gallery, but she didn’t have to. Bedwin would see and understand. Each notion would make the root of a song as good, as unexpected and pure, as “Monster Eyes.” Bedwin only had to set them to music.

“What’s that—‘Astronaut Food’?”

“Yes.”

“I like that.” Bedwin murmured phrases to himself, discovering them aloud. “Secrets from yourself…bomb-shelter provisions…”

“And this one,” she said, overeager, rustling pages. Bedwin flinched, taken aback. “‘Dirty Yellow Chair.’ See?”

“Yes…it all looks terrific, Lucinda.” He spoke gently, wonderingly.

“Nobody has to know I gave you these. Let’s just pretend you came up with them yourself, okay?”

“You don’t want to write them with me?”

“No. Just take them. You don’t need any help from me, you know it.”

“I shouldn’t tell the others?”

“It’ll confuse them. Matthew won’t like it. You’re our songwriter. These are just ideas, anyway. They’ll be your songs.”

“Sure, sure. Lucinda?”

“Yes?”

“Are you okay? Because you seem a little excited, I mean maybe a little bit upset about something.”

“Nothing, I mean, nothing’s wrong, everything’s great.”

“Okay, no problem, I was just checking.”

“Maybe I’ll let you get back to your movie now.”

“You could watch a little. It’s really a tremendously interesting film. Or at least finish your pizza.”

“I’m not really hungry,” said Lucinda. She stood, brushing her lips free of possibly imaginary flour. She’d barely eaten. She recalled the last words of her talk with the complainer and felt the urgent call of her fingertips to her own body. She ought to be in the bathtub, afloat in silence and dark, so that she could recapture the twilight realm of the phone call. She might even call him: she thought this for the pleasure of thinking it, even as she was certain she wouldn’t. But she needed to be home, to dwell on their talk. Her errand had been essential: she needed to deliver the yellow crib sheets, the guilty jottings. Those were for the band, and they belonged here with Bedwin. She’d had to deliver them, and now she had to go. Even as she skirted the table’s edge and high-stepped through the blue-glowing piles of books and records she realized she’d forgotten to tell Bedwin about the Aparty, the gig of playing silently. It didn’t matter. The songs were more important. She’d brought them to him and he’d understood. She’d announce the gig to the band at their next practice.

Bedwin followed her halfway, magnetized in confusion, holding his slice up near his mouth.

“Thanks, Lucinda, for, you know, coming by.”

“Sure. Forget it. Just write those songs.”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye, Bedwin.”

lucinda lowered a cauliflower head into her basket, where, with a five-pound bag of Integral Fare’s own granola, it dragged at her arm like a cannonball. She hoisted the freight to her hip and browsed in the greens for something featherweight, a bundle of rocket or watercress to camouflage her sorry load. Integral Fare ought to issue backpacks for those like her, shoppers embarrassed to push a monumental rolling cart with items scant enough for the express line. As she reached into the display a robot sprinkler began its misting cycle, instantly soaking her sleeve.

In the early-evening presence of so many moodily lit vegetable shapes it wasn’t remarkable to notice a slight pheremonal hubbub as shoppers ogled one another, or postured over their selections, waiting to be noticed. Tonight Lucinda felt a personal flutter, a disturbance in her field. A young redhead in a leather coat lingered pensively near a man in torn jeans. Her pursuit brought her edging through Lucinda’s orbit. The man loaded a rolling cart with heads of cabbage and lettuce and bundles of beets and celery, a flaunt of healthfulness, Lucinda thought with irritation, even as she realized the man in jeans was Matthew.

He appeared oblivious to both women. His cast was grim, lip bitten in ponderous consideration of kale and bok choy. Lucinda poked him in the waist with a carrot.

“Ow.”

“Ever feel you’re being watched?” she asked. Behind them the red-haired girl’s posture tightened in disappointment. She melted off to another aisle.

“I didn’t see you there.”

“I didn’t mean me. Several eyeballs were stuck to your pants. You ever notice that this produce section is a real meat market? Ha ha.”

“Sorry?”

“When I haven’t seen you for a while I forget how handsome you are,” she said. “Like a model on a billboard advertisement for vegetarian cigarettes.”

He blinked at her and fumbled at the cabbages in his cart. The robot sprayer arm finished its cycle. Lucinda heard the trickling of new moisture in the leaves. A scent of dampened mulch rose through the conditioned air.

“You’re not too much fun. At least say something, like ‘All cigarettes are vegetarian.’”

Matthew only stared. Lucinda felt the dawning of a new and original awkwardness between them. She’d relied on the band to enmesh them in something still near enough to a liaison, the tension of a bass player half turned to a singer, plumbing notes, jerking the song from his body. The voltage of the band’s aspirations, fierce as lust. Here they were nothing but two shoppers, bearing bald homely groceries in opposite directions.

“It’s good to see you,” Matthew said. He patted her clumsily on the elbow, then withdrew.

Now she spotted the glitch of panic in his raccooned eyes, his extra day’s stubble. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s a really gargantuan salad you’re making,” she said.

“It’s a lot,” he confessed blankly.

She counted the green and purple heads in his cart, calculating volumes of leafy material. “Some sort of coleslaw sauna treatment, or are you throwing a dinner party?”

“I have a visitor.”

“Someone I know?”

He regarded her evenly, with a still, small defiance.

“A sick friend?” she asked.

“I guess you could say that. Someone who needs my help.”

Lucinda was silenced now.

“I think I should be getting back,” said Matthew. He pivoted his cart toward the registers.

“I’ll see you at rehearsals,” she called to his departing back. She felt like the redhead now, a thirsting stranger. “Don’t forget.”

At home Lucinda boiled the cauliflower whole, suffused it with butter and pepper, then devoured it with knife and fork as if it were a soufflé. The dish was either lame and lonely, or grand, she couldn’t decide, but consoled herself imagining translated French names—“white brain,” possibly, or “virgin moon.” She poured a scotch, just a small one, sat breathing its mellow fumes, barely drinking. Then wrecked the evening irretrievably by glancing in the hallway mirror for the foot’s command: it smiled encouragement and she dialed the complainer’s number. No answer. He had no machine. Each echoing chime of the unanswered line cast another band of shadow across her heart’s floor. After twelve rings she gulped the scotch and retreated to bed.

the set list grew. Bedwin had written four new songs: “Dirty Yellow Chair,” “Nostalgia Vu,” “Astronaut Food,” and “Secret from Yourself.” He presented them to the band at the same afternoon rehearsal where Lucinda unveiled the news of the Aparty gig, the chance to play quietly in front of several hundred of Falmouth’s well-dressed art friends. It was easy to picture them as tastemakers, rumormongers, a milieu capable of making a new band its pet overnight. Together, songs and gig, it presented an orgy of possibilities. Nobody knew what to say. The songs were so fine that Bedwin himself seemed astonished. The band’s only outlet for its bewildered gratitude was to commence rehearsing diligently. So they shirked paying jobs and sleep, gathering four of the next five nights to burnish the treasury of new material. Talk grew respectfully minimal. Denise regularly fixed sandwiches for Bedwin at the breaks, assuming this caretaking duty without resentment. Matthew arrived on time and expressed no exasperation at the intervals of tuning among the instrumentalists, gazing fixedly at middle distances while waiting for the players to resume behind him, then carving deep into the material, despite seeming otherwise somewhat wasted, skinnier than ever. At each set’s conclusion distraction overtook him, and he left before the others.

Lucinda held her secrets close. She felt a proprietary elation at having brought the others to this place. Yet hid inside the music, fingers throbbing on the neck of her instrument with a grace beyond her knowledge, agent of some higher purpose. The songs told her how to feel. She’d waited a week for a phone call which refused to come, then succumbed two nights in a row to the temptation to dial the complainer’s number. For reward, only listened to his line howl in vacancy. She felt no impatience. Her complainer would reemerge and find her, the songs said so. In the meantime she dwelled in his words, now made plastic and catchy by Bedwin and the band. Bedwin had written a backup harmony vocal for “Astronaut Food.” Since they only owned two microphones, Lucinda curled down to meet Denise at the mike stand mounted close on her snare drum to sing, “Am I just astronaut food for you? Are you gonna take me along to the moon?” The sentiment might have seemed plaintive or piteous, but she and Denise always felt beaming joy as their voices braided.

The fifth night in their siege of rehearsal, the last night before the Aparty, Bedwin said, with an air of pre-defeat: “What about ‘Robot Head in Mourning’?” Everyone understood: the phrase was a possible band name. The band still didn’t have a name and they’d grown embarrassed even to try. Proposals weren’t so much shot down as left to perish in the air. They’d even resorted once to sticking pins in a dictionary, with no success.

“Sounds more like an album title than a band name,” said Denise.

“Mourning like dead or morning like morning has broken?” asked Lucinda.

“I was thinking like dead but it doesn’t matter,” said Bedwin. “We could spell it different ways at different times.”

“I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said pour love on the broken places,” said Denise.

“I’ve been seeing that thing everywhere!” said Lucinda. “I saw it on a T-shirt the other day. What does it mean?”

“We could call ourselves ‘The Broken Places.’”

“Don’t you think that’s pathetic?” said Matthew.

“Pathetic is good,” said Bedwin. “Maybe we should use the word ‘pathetic’ in the name.”

“The Pathetic Fallacies,” suggested Lucinda.

“The Pathetic Chickens,” said Bedwin.

“Why chickens?” said Denise.

“Okay, hens,” said Bedwin. “The Pathetic Hens.”

“That’s terrible,” said Denise.

“Okay, the Fallacy Hens,” said Bedwin.

“We really need a name before the gig,” said Lucinda.

Matthew was nearly out the door, his mike cord bundled and shoved underneath Denise’s couch, his guitar case in hand.

“What about that one from before?” said Denise, looking up from cinching the screw on her hi-hat. “The opposite of a molar or something?”

“Not a molar,” said Bedwin. “The opposite of a wisdom tooth. Idiot Tooth.”

“Yeah, Idiot Tooth, I like that one, I always think about it.”

“How much can you like it if you can’t even remember it?” said Lucinda. She tucked her bass into the felt bed of its case. “Anyway, wasn’t there a band called Mystery Tooth?”

“Spooky,” said Bedwin, almost under his breath.

“What?”

“Spooky, Spooky Tooth.”

“Why does there always have to be something self-deprecating in the name?” said Matthew from the kitchen doorway. His beard was a week old now, a black frost that had overtaken his sallow cheeks nearly to his eyes. “What was that other name you guys liked? The Tedious Knives?”

“Knifes,” said Bedwin.

“What?”

“It was knifes, with an ‘f.’”

“Tedious, forlorn, morbid, crappy, futile.”

“The Futiles?” suggested Denise.

“Let Falmouth decide,” said Matthew. “I’m sure he’ll have a suggestion. Maybe he should bill us as the Papier-mâché Band. Or the Deaf-mutes.” He departed, not quite slamming Denise’s door. The rest were silent and unnerved in his aftermath, their songs all chased away. Bedwin slowly wound his cord around his amp’s handle, blinking at the floor. Denise leaned into her fridge and took out a beer. She waved the bottle at Bedwin, who shook his head. Lucinda stuck out her hand and Denise passed her a cold bottle.

“Things feel a little weird,” Bedwin ventured.

“It’s the gig,” said Denise. “We’re all a little cuckoo.”

“We sound good.”

“We sound great.”

“The new songs are okay, huh?” Bedwin didn’t meet Lucinda’s sudden glance.

“They’re the best songs,” said Denise. She put down her beer and opened her arms to Bedwin. He tolerated her embrace, his shoulders square, terror swimming in his eyes.

“I guess I’ll go home now,” said Bedwin.

After he’d shambled through the door Denise said, “So, what’s the matter with Matthew?”

“That’s not my department anymore.”

“Sure, but what’s your theory?”

Lucinda gobbled her beer and swallowed hard before speaking. “My theory is he has a new girlfriend who doesn’t speak such good English.”

“I’m not sure I understand you.”

“Maybe hostage is a better word.”

“Does this have something to do with the zoo?”

Lucinda nodded, wide-eyed.

“You want something harder than that beer?”

the two figures tumbled up the stairway in sloppy tandem, index fingers pressed to their whiskey-swollen lips, elbows at each other’s ribs. They left the hallway’s lightbulb chain un-pulled, as if illumination was their enemy, and so tripped on the stairs and over their feet. The banisters and stairs, even the walls of the stairwell felt muffled in dust, but beneath the dust’s mousy odor the drunken sleuths might have detected another scent, an acrid clue to what they were after, urine from another sphere. It was strong enough to bite its way even through their occluded noses. They sniffed their own fingertips stupidly, shrugged in the dark, advanced on creaking tiptoe.

“You got the key?”

“Fssshh.”

Inside the apartment, Denise flattened like a moth against the white hallway, pinned in moonlight that spilled through the kitchen. Lucinda slid past her, teeth bared and eyeballs bugged in commitment to their idiot foray. Their noses said they neared some goal. The rooms throbbed with mulchy life force, festering salad, mammalian sweat.

Matthew slept with his door open, sprawled on his back, nude outlines covered by a thin sheet. His penis was stiff under the sheet, a totem draped in pale shadow, nighttime body divorced from mind, rehearsing its secret forces. The invaders froze, shared a glance of dread, gnawed the insides of their cheeks. Matthew’s tongue lolled from his mouth, his head strained into its pillow as though smashing through dreams. Denise and Lucinda edged crabwise through the spotlight of the doorway, hands flat to the wall.

Past him, the smell was stronger. The room they discovered, Matthew’s parlor, with television, stereo, couch, held no answers. Lucinda duckwalked into its middle to examine its corners. There was no animal besides themselves.

At first sight the bathroom appeared empty. Yet here, their noses testified, was the source. Their eyes adjusted to the dimness as they bumped into the middle of a checkerboard tile floor strewn with celery butts and shards of cabbage. The invaders peered together into the only secret place remaining, a clawfoot bathtub glowing like an ivory icon in the gloom.

Shelf the Flyer gazed up at them, her yellow eyes training calmly on each of theirs in turn. The kangaroo lay on her side, filling the waterless basin of the tub, elegant legs spread like a book, neck and forepaws and tail slack as a sleeper’s. A trail of kangaroo piss beaded to the tub’s drain.

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.

“You can drink if you want,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Do you want me to put my fingers inside you?”

“Please, yes.”

“Two?” He raised his glass and uncurled paired fingers to show them to her.

“Yes.”

“Only if you promise it’s a secret forever. I don’t care if it seems stupid to you, just a common act, no big deal. You can’t ever describe this to anyone, neither can I. The way it feels, the look I see on your face, even just the fact that I’m going to do the particular thing I’m going to do.”

“Please do it now.”

“Promise.”

“Why?”

“Because if it’s a secret it’s going to change how it feels. I want you to feel that.” He sipped from his tumbler once more and set it aside.

“I promise.”

One hand still bridged on her stomach, he reached with his other for her mouth. Lucinda gobbled his fingers avidly, slicking them. She heard her own zoological sounds, not only a snort as she widened her throat and breathed around his knuckles but also a hum and squeak deep in her chest.

“Don’t give it a name,” he said. “Don’t even mention it to me.”

“Uhnn.”

“This doesn’t need a name,” he repeated, then moved his two fingers from her mouth and pushed them inside her.

“Oh, god.” She took another drink, too much, and when she tried to swallow felt a sticky trickle of whiskey leak from the corners of her mouth, over her chin.

“Enough now,” he said, and took the glass from her.

“Don’t take your hand away,” she said, her voice very small.

“Shhh. I won’t.”

“I’m—”

“Shhh.” He moved deeper, pressing his thumbprint to her clit. She abruptly came, shuddering against his whole arm with her swaying body, grasping at his back through his damp shirt.

the jazz ran out sometime without Lucinda noticing. He never restarted it, though they quit the bed several times to rearrange the lights, to draw the shades against the wall of offices that faced them, to run water in the basin to splash and slurp, to wash her scent off both their faces, though not before she’d sampled herself from his chin and nose. Lucinda was in a hotel robe and then out of it again. His body, once he removed his clothes, was thick. More generous than Matthew’s, than anybody’s. It surprised her how little she minded. His penis too. His hair, white at his throat, darkened below the curve of his stomach, as though night’s setting had recorded itself across the field of his body. The television was on for a while, music videos they drowned with their own groans. When her foot swept a miniature bottle from blocking the digital clock face it read one thirty.

He forced her to wait once until she couldn’t wait anymore and then when she came it was enormous, and she began laughing and couldn’t stop for a while.

“That was the funny one,” he said.

“Are you counting?” she said, still laughing.

“Sure, and giving them all names too, and that was the funny one.”

“What were the others?” She panted to a halt.

“The fast one, the big one, the ugly one, and the one where you kicked me.”

“The funny one was the big one.”

“You can have your own names.”

“You weren’t there, you don’t know.” She laughed again. “And none of them were ugly. Fix me another drink.”

“Another another.”

“Yes.”

Unexpectedly he was shy, donning his robe each time he went to the minibar.

“Carl?” It was the first time she’d said his name since the car.

“Yes?”

“Who is this a secret from?”

“Nobody, really. Not on my end.”

“Oh.”

“You?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

They were both in robes when the room-service guy, another eager child in a hotel costume, arrived with two flying saucer–shaped covers, lifting them like a magician to present their hamburgers. He placed the tray on the foot of the bed and while the complainer scribbled on the check he gawked at the state of the room with open delight. He thanked them and told them to have a good night like they were beautiful and crazy, then backed from the room in dazzled wonder, as if having gazed on the masters of some performance art. The complainer muted the television, the bejeweled rappers and squirming entourages now trapped behind aquarium glass. He slapped at tiny bottles of ketchup and mustard, pooling them, red and yellow side by side, in the center of his plate, then dipping his burger’s bitten edge to swirl the colors together.

“I think the staff likes us,” Lucinda said through a mouthful of hamburger. The warmth of the meal drew her toward helpless drowsiness.

“Probably they’re massed in the hallway with their ears to the wall.” He wore mustard on his upper lip. “Probably I could make a room-service call without the telephone.”

“More whiskey.”

“You haven’t finished the last one.”

“More burgers,” she said, raising her burger.

“More bed, more music, more night.”

“Room service, bring me a room.”

“Exactly.”

The liquor ran out and he kept making her drink water, insisting she’d thank him later. Maybe that was because he was older, maybe that was what passed for wisdom in a place and on a night like this, between two such people as themselves. Lucinda sucked droplets from the last of the little bottles instead, slurped the residue from her glass. Burger wreckage still at their feet, she said, “Let’s make another secret.” She curled in his lap and parted his robe and tried to raise him again, fruitlessly. He was spavined, mushy as a bar of soap.

“Here, drunk girl,” he said, beckoning her up to the headboard. “You want to make a secret?”

“Yes.”

“Lie back.”

“Okay.”

“Now pick up the telephone.”

“Who am I calling?”

“Someone you shouldn’t.”

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know, but you do. The maybe person, from before.”

“The maybe person?”

“The one this is maybe secret from. Everyone has someone they shouldn’t call.”

She looked at him horrified, delighted.

He brushed his stubbly chin across her thighs, moved below. “Go ahead.”

“It’s too late,” she said, not even glancing at the clock, which had whirled irretrievably past two, three.

“If there’s one thing I know it’s that it’s never too late.”

“I’ll make noise.”

“You’ll control yourself.”

“Okay, but wait, ah, just do that for a minute.”

“Sure, but dial the phone.”

Matthew’s number rang three times, then clicked through to the false ring of voice mail. She knew it too well. “I’m getting his machine,” she whispered.

“Leave a message,” said the complainer, his mouth full, the words mashed into her.

“Saying what?” she panted.

“Sing something,” he said. “Make up a song.”

At the voice mail’s tone she began. “Kangaroodle roo, pouchie the kangaroo, don’t make kanga dootie on the floor ohhhh nooooh…” Gasping, she covered the receiver with her palm.

“Nice,” he whispered. “Another verse.” A waft of herself rose with his face from between her thighs, penetrated even her whiskey-dimmed nostrils.

“Kangaroodle dee, don’t make any pee, don’t make fun of me, you sad and glorious roo, you dootie pooper you…”

The complainer’s mouth began to make her come again. She wrestled the phone onto its cradle with spasming fingers, not before appending a pleasure-drenched chortle, a kind of hoot-gasp, to the message she’d left.

“Now you,” she breathed.

“Now me what?”

“Now you on the phone. Now I do you.”

“Drunk girl, I’ve got nothing left, haven’t you noticed? Besides, I’ve got no one to call.”

“I thought everyone did.”

“Everyone except me.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Your eyes are x’s.”

The sex ran out and now tangled in their robes and still atop the bedcovers and with the lights and television on they dozed, and then more than dozed, fell fast asleep, despite never having decided to, or not Lucinda, anyway. She passed out picturing herself dressing and retrieving her car, even as her beard-chafed cheeks and kiss-swollen lips moused in the nest of his elbow, one arm thrown across his stomach and one leg cantilevered over the tray which had been set just barely aside, so when she woke briefly, early light seeping in to delineate the curtain’s edge, her foot dipped into ketchup and mustard and crumbs. She grunted, whisked the foot clean as she could with sleep-numbed fingers, then tucked it beneath her robe, shivering. The complainer snored beside her, and murmured too. Before she fell asleep again she thought she heard the words “more love on,” or perhaps it was “pour love on.” Or she might have imagined it entirely.

lucinda woke in a cocoon of ripe headache, her senses withdrawn against the obnoxious fact of daylight, the planet’s insufferable expedition through widths of light and dark. The man she’d slept beside had gone from the bed but she sensed him operating somewhere, manipulating gaily clanking artifacts outside her range of tolerable awareness. She touched her eyelids, tender wallets of pain, felt her orbs rustle within.

“Coffee?”

She made him out, a mass diffusing the glare.

“What time is it? Is it afternoon yet?”

“It’s pushing afternoon.”

“I have a gig tonight,” she said. “My band, I mean.”

“Here.”

The coffee smelled like an enemy. “I think I need a drink, actually.”

“I’d have to let them in to restock the minibar.”

“I want a drink in my house. Drive me home.”

“I’d have to drive your strange little car.”

“What’s strange about my car?”

“It bumps into things.”

Lucinda pulled him, dressed, to her side of the bed. Hunching free of the binding sheets and robe, she squirmed bare limbs across him, and briefly humped his leg, a leftover animal temblor, then fell back. He was enormous, she saw now. Beneath his clothes he was a hill to climb, pink and hair all over, impossible to encompass. She wasn’t through trying. Let the hellish sunshine make its case, the previous night wasn’t finished. She and the complainer were a secret buried here, at the world’s unreachable core, beyond the encroach of her headache or any other contradictory evidence. She needed to keep him near. Not in the hotel, though. She needed to take him to her apartment, show him the foot sign, her former god. She needed him to hear her play her bass, see her practice her art. And she needed to do something to him that would make him at least once more as gloriously deranged as he’d made her again and again in the hotel bed.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes what?”

“Drive me home in my strange little car.”

the freeway was like a saddle on the splayed city, a means both of mastering it and of shrinking from intimate contact with its surfaces. The complainer handled her Datsun capably, zipping across lanes. Lucinda watched exits blink past, Glendale, Alvarado, Rampart. When the chance came for Silver Lake she bit her tongue.

“Here, take Western.” She pointed him off the freeway, suddenly inspired. “Park on the right. This is my favorite liquor store. The Pink Elephant. It’s beautiful. Look at that Dumbo mural, it’s like cave art. This city is full of primitive geniuses. If they put that in a gallery it would sell for a million dollars. I don’t know why they haven’t been sued by Disney.”

“Maybe they’re owned by Disney.”

“Get us a fifth of something. No more stupid little bottles.”

“Blue label?”

“At this point I’d take yellow or even green label.”

He returned, slid a bottle in a bag down by her feet, then resumed the wheel. She motioned for him to aim the Datsun down Hollywood Boulevard. She halted them in front of the Celebrity Motor Inn, a three-story palace of neon and rotting palms, ironwork skyway suspended between its wings, a majestic relic amid the ruined commercial strip. Skyway lit from beneath, the inn was like a piece of day-for-night footage against the pale sky.

“Nothing against your Ambit room-service burgers but that’s what I call a hotel.”

“I thought we were going to your apartment.”

“I changed my mind. I don’t see your place, you don’t see mine. Fair’s fair.”

“I’ll go sign the register,” he said, pulling into the parking lot. “Mr. and Mrs. Dead Noon.”

at the shop on Sunset the band’s drummer frowned as she packed a shipment for delivery, a mammoth latex implement not modeled on any human part, shaped instead as a squirrel riding a dolphin, each peeping through a separate cellophane window of the product’s glossy cardboard package. She bound it with its invoice in a triple thickness of bubble wrap, feeling irritated still to be at work. She’d swapped shifts with another clerk to earn her freedom this afternoon, and her substitute should have appeared by now. The drummer hoped to nap before the time came to load her kit into the trunk and backseat of her car. The party promoter had made the band promise to arrive for a sound check at five, though how it mattered wasn’t clear, since they were meant to be inaudible. Putting the package aside, the drummer dialed the phone, not for the first time. There was no answer, and she didn’t leave a message.

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.

she 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.

lucinda 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.

Falmouth’s interns sighted the band members and shooed Apartygoers aside to open a path to the elevator’s doors, two paint-blistered steel portals studded with rusty bolts. One intern rapped at the doors and they parted to reveal a wizened Asian man in a porkpie hat and suspenders, manipulating a brass-handled wheel with one hand while gripping a smoldering cigarette and a folded-over Korean newspaper in the other. He arched an eyebrow, grunted, and seized Lucinda’s amp, brandishing his newspaper like a flyswatter to brush the curious throng back from the doors. The band followed him inside.

“Mr. Oo doesn’t speak English but he knows Korean kung fu,” Jules Harvey explained, bowing to usher them from the elevator at the seventh floor, the top. Harvey wore a forest-green three-piece suit with a zipper in place of its buttons. He still wore his Tigers cap and high-top sneakers, and gaped like a turkey through his frames. “I’m positive he could slay you with that newspaper.” The tiny man had grabbed the amplifier and bass and now soldiered across the vast empty space of the loft toward the distant riser. There, Matthew sat alone in a small grove of their equipment, behind Denise’s kit, tapping his fingers on her snare. The riser was unexpectedly high, and their unoccupied microphones and monitors looked persuasively professional from this angle, rescued from their rehearsal space.

The floor was a plain of polished wood, scattered with pillars, the ceiling a barren lid pressing low overhead, decorated with track lighting and a dingy, unlit mirror ball. The triangular loft formed a funnel pointing to the riser where the band would play, or mime playing. The prospects of the crowd downstairs fitting itself obediently inside seemed, to Lucinda, poor. Even if they could all squeeze up through the chute of the elevator, what chance they’d fall in line with Falmouth’s commands? The interns scurried off now, presumably to find their leader. Lucinda, with Denise and Bedwin, followed. Crossing the open dance floor Lucinda felt exposed, a cat in a cathedral.

Jules Harvey scurried beside her, hands joined behind his back. “There isn’t anything to be concerned about,” he mused in his soft voice. “If we begin late it shouldn’t compromise the underlying premise in any important sense.”

“I wasn’t concerned,” said Lucinda. “We’re ready whenever you like.”

“I was thinking more of Falmouth.”

“Is something wrong with Falmouth?”

“Perhaps after you greet your compatriots you’d be willing to follow me.”

“Maybe we better go now.”

Denise and Bedwin continued toward the stage, while Lucinda followed Harvey. Behind the elevator was hidden the loft’s tiny kitchen and bathroom, and above, connected by a short spiral stair, nestled an elevated sleeping platform, with a ceiling so low Lucinda had to stoop. The melancholy living space was a mole’s burrow, suggestive of Harvey’s secret armpit-sniffer’s despondency. “Will you remove your shoes, please?” said Harvey at the top of the stair. Lucinda crushed the backs of her sneakers with her toes, squeezing them off without untying the laces.

The scene had an air of private ritual. Falmouth knelt on Jules Harvey’s futon, his knees surrounded by a heaped disarray of headphones and portable tape and disk players. Two shopping bags of additional equipment slumped unpromisingly on the floor. A gun nested in the cushions. Lucinda recalled something about a starter’s pistol. She hoped it wasn’t as real as it looked. The small shelf beside Jules Harvey’s bed contained candles and two neat stacks of glossy magazines, possibly pornographic. The two interns sat coolly sharing a joint on a love seat in the corner. Their unspeaking presence seemed almost malevolent now, Falmouth’s fantasy of a world decorated with servile girls gone sour.

Headphones clung crookedly to Falmouth’s dome. Sweat trickling on his jaw, he stabbed buttons on a scuffed silver Walkman, then rolled his eyes and thrust the rig aside.

“Where have you been?” he said to Lucinda.

“I took a shower. What’s wrong?”

“It’s no good,” he said. “Jules invited too many people and they didn’t bring anything to listen to and when they all come upstairs they’re going to destroy everything. We don’t have enough tape players. Half of these don’t work at all. We can’t let them in, it’s too many. Did you see?”

“I saw,” said Lucinda. “It’s half of Silver Lake.”

“This happens,” said Jules Harvey. “An invitation becomes exponential, something gets in the air. Suddenly it’s the party everyone has to be at on a given night, the party of the season. We couldn’t have foreseen how your list and mine would catalyze. People are afraid not to be at an event like this. Many others will eventually lie and claim they were.”

“It wasn’t meant to be a party,” said Falmouth. “That’s the problem. You threw a party.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jules Harvey. Steel flashed behind his usual gray tone of haplessness. “It’s what I do.” Lucinda understood that Harvey really was indomitable, the human equivalent of a cartoon turtle who appeared to plod ineffectually, yet when you tried to outrun him, turned up seated calmly on a log a few feet ahead of you, smoking a cigar and annotating a racing form with a stub of pencil.

Falmouth gestured for his interns, who didn’t budge. “We’ll be selective,” he said. “I won’t let them up without headphones.”

“I’d prefer not to disappoint so many people,” said Jules Harvey.

“What do you suggest, then?” said Falmouth.

“Let’s have them up. We can feed and entertain them for a while. Get them on your side, Falmouth, then you can propose something. Here.” Harvey reached across Falmouth’s knees and plucked the pistol from the cushions. “One of you children handle this.”

One of the interns nodded and stubbed out the joint, took the pistol from Harvey.

“It makes a very loud noise, so be careful. When you’ve got their attention, try to explain.”

The intern nodded, and she and her companion moved to the spiral stair. Lucinda saw that some mysterious but unmistakable transfer had occurred. These were Jules Harvey’s interns now.

When they were gone, Lucinda said, “I ought to go down and, uh, greet my compatriots.”

Harvey spread his hands. “Maybe we should all go. We can leave this stuff up here for now.”

Falmouth nodded disconsolately. The sacks of headphones and tape players seemed irrelevant now, the very medium of his great project demoted to “stuff.”

“Do you want something to drink, Falmouth?” said Harvey.

“I’d like some water, please.”

Lucinda led the other two downstairs. Denise and Bedwin hovered at the base of the stair. Jules Harvey led Falmouth into the kitchen and Denise told Bedwin, speaking as if to a child, “Go with them. I’m sure Jules can help you find something.” Bedwin drifted in after Harvey and Falmouth, leaving Denise and Lucinda alone.

“There’s an aura of doom around here,” said Lucinda.

“I guess we all get to keep our day jobs,” said Denise.

“By my count you’re the only one who has one.”

“Don’t you work for Falmouth?”

“I don’t see a big future for myself in complaints.”

“We can all move into my apartment,” said Denise. “We’ll be one of those bands that’s also a utopian collective, an experimental group marriage, and then we can all kill one another.”

“Don’t forget a certain, ahem, bathtub-dweller.”

“There’s room for everyone.”

“What’s Bedwin looking for, anyway?”

“He wants a stool for onstage. He said playing standing up makes him feel naked.”

Falmouth came glaring from the kitchen, startling them. “Don’t be so blatant with your mutinies,” he said ferociously.

“What do you mean?”

“That you imagine I’ve fallen so low I’d accept the charity of living in the squalor of your band is disgusting enough. What I really can’t fathom is how you awarded me the nickname ‘bathtub-dweller.’”

The interns rematerialized, stopping Falmouth in his tracks. They stood like Shakespearian courtiers, waiting to deliver their report. Jules Harvey, apparently attuned to the young women by some deep wavelength, emerged from the kitchen and bowed at them to begin, ducking his baseball cap with Buddhist complacency.

“We failed,” announced one of the interns. The other nodded, consenting that they spoke with one voice.

“Did you fire the gun?” asked Harvey.

“Yes. We fired the gun and opened a dialogue with what seemed like a reasonable faction.”

“I’m surprised they don’t yet have elected representatives,” said Falmouth.

“It also helps that Mr. Oo had the fire extinguisher,” the intern explained, ignoring Falmouth. “I think that got their attention more than the pistol.”

“Fire extinguisher?”

“A contingent of sound poets had lit a bonfire between two parked cars. But Mr. Oo put it out.”

“Go on.”

“At a certain point negotiations broke down. They figured out there isn’t anything to drink up here.”

“That’s not necessarily the case,” said Harvey. “I always have a few bottles in reserve.”

“You have to listen,” insisted the intern. “They don’t need us anymore. They intercepted your caterers. Someone leaked a rumor that the banquet wasn’t going to be made available to the dancers. That isn’t actually true, is it?”

Jules Harvey looked at Falmouth, who shrugged. Lucinda was impressed at Harvey’s effect on the students. She’d never heard them speak so many words while in Falmouth’s dominion.

“They’re having a sort of tailgate party now,” said the intern. “I think it’s even bigger than before. A couple of the servers are friends of ours from school, as it happens. They’re walking around with trays of chicken satay and tuna belly on rice crackers.”

Jules Harvey scratched his chin and adjusted his spectacles, summoning his deepest resources. The rest of them stood twitching slightly, deferring to his turtle authority.

“Go back downstairs, but don’t use the gun this time. What we want is more along the lines of a whispering campaign. Tell a select few that the band is about to start. Propose that they might want to get a good spot near the stage. You don’t have to talk to strangers. Let the majority be curious. Mention it to those server friends of yours, especially if they’re young and attractive.”

“Should we say which band?”

“They don’t have a name,” said Falmouth bitterly.

“It’s better that way. Just say the band is about to start. It implies that anyone would know which band it was, suggesting a reference to something already confirmed as desirable by others. That’s why they’re all here anyway.”

“To see the band?” asked Lucinda, confused.

“No. I mean because most of them heard someone refer to ‘that party everyone’s going to tonight,’ as if they should already know about it. Like ‘that restaurant everyone goes to,’ or ‘that girl everyone’s trying to date.’ It’s much better than anything specific.” Harvey urged the interns to the elevator. “Go now. Falmouth, come help me open the windows.”

“For jumping, I hope.”

“I want them to hear.”

“Hear what?”

“The band, of course. They’ll have to play loud.”

Lucinda understood now that her old friend had gone up against a force more profound than Jules Harvey. Falmouth’s past works had involved manipulating people’s despair, pensiveness, ennui. Those were malleable materials, lightly guarded by their possessors. The Aparty was another matter. Here, Falmouth had tried to appropriate other people’s happiness, and been met with that property’s devastatingly blithe resistance. Happiness was disobedient, had its own law. As a freshly minted local expert, Lucinda felt qualified to know.

matthew sat on the riser’s edge, taking the private interlude as an opportunity for tuning his guitar. For Matthew, Lucinda knew, this was a humbling ordeal, one which, like certain bodily functions, stood a better chance of being accomplished without witnesses. More than once at rehearsal he’d abandoned the effort and shamefacedly handed his guitar to Bedwin for adjustment. Lucinda felt a surge of tenderness. She almost wished they could leave Matthew alone there, not prick the bubble in which he dwelled, elegant as a black-and-white photograph of some legendary figure caught backstage. He’d shaved, trimmed his sideburns into neat wedges, donned a black turtleneck, shined his boots, made every attempt to retrieve himself from the kangaroo’s slough his apartment had become and make himself ready for the band’s unveiling. He’d be the last to know they were going to play aloud. Lucinda wanted to be the one to tell him.

Bedwin had found a step stool in Jules Harvey’s kitchen. He placed it on the riser in the clear spot behind his monitor. Then Denise led him away, promising snacks, leaving Lucinda and Matthew with the equipment. Matthew offered her a hand up onto the riser. She accepted for the pleasure of the contact of their palms, his cool, hers hot. She was in a fever, her body an engine churning at toxins. Matthew reached out and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. He spoke gently, as if he’d been the one to rouse her from the late-afternoon fugue on her couch.

“You have a wild happy look in your eyes.”

“Denise seemed pissed that I missed the sound check.”

“It mostly involved Falmouth criticizing our clothing.”

“It might be more important than you think. Jules Harvey wants us to play. I mean, with sound coming out.”

“What about Falmouth’s important art?”

“It’s still important in principle. But something more spontaneous decided to happen in actuality.”

She rescued her bass from its fuzzy coffin, then moved to plug in to her amp and begin tuning. She felt Matthew peering at her, unbudged from his seat on the riser. She wondered if he’d made himself pretty for her sake. She wondered if her provocations on the telephone, the kanga dootie song, had somehow shifted him slightly in her direction again, as opposed to that dim specter she’d encountered in the supermarket.

“Lucinda?”

“Yes?”

“I need to talk to you about the, uh, marsupial situation.”

“I owe you an apology.”

“I don’t care about that,” he said, with a warmth and sincerity that instantly absolved her of both break-in and phone call. “I need your help.”

“Yes?” She felt her breath catch, slightly.

His eyes grew shy. “Maybe this isn’t the right time.”

“Anytime,” she said.

“Tomorrow, let’s talk tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

Denise and Bedwin returned, Bedwin with both hands around a sardine sandwich. They’d been consulting with the interns, who now scuttled across the great empty room in the direction of Jules Harvey’s kitchen.

“Jules wants us to start in five minutes,” said Denise. “We need a set list.” She unfolded a sheet of paper and smoothed it against the riser’s plywood, then uncapped a marker and waved the others to kneel beside her.

“Start with ‘Monster Eyes,’” said Lucinda.

“We’d play it to an empty room,” said Denise. “All they’ll hear from the street is the bass line.”

Matthew said, “So let’s pick something that’ll sound good from the street. Something loud that we don’t care about, like ‘Hell Is for Buildings’ or ‘Crayon Fever.’”

“I don’t want to play ‘Crayon Fever’ at all,” said Denise. “We can’t start with something old and depressing. We have to inspire ourselves.”

“‘Dirty Yellow Chair,’” suggested Bedwin.

Denise wrote it in block letters at the top of the page.

“We’re wasting that as the first song, too,” said Lucinda.

“No, she’s right,” said Matthew. “We need to hear ourselves sound good.”

“Then ‘The Houseguest,’” said Bedwin, pointing a finger at the blank space where Denise’s marker circled in the air. They all looked at Bedwin, who only chewed his fish sandwich noisily. This new task of constructing a set list might rightly belong to their auteur.

“What about ‘Temporary Feeling’ next?” said Denise, looking to Bedwin now.

“Mmmm, ‘Astronaut Food,’ then ‘Temporary Feeling,’” said Bedwin. The others nodded, as though hurrying to board a vehicle that might depart without them. The sequence of songs began to feel inevitable in the manner of language or music itself, as though Bedwin were revealing to them a hidden grammar embedded in the band’s motley offerings.

“Right, sure, there’ll be an audience by the time of ‘Astronaut Food,’” said Denise. Lucinda imagined the drummer was anticipating their showpiece, the two women harmonizing on the single microphone.

“Why not ‘Monster Eyes’ after ‘Temporary Feeling’?” asked Matthew.

Bedwin nodded, and Denise jotted it down.

“‘Secret from Yourself,’” said Lucinda, captivated now.

“‘Hell Is for Buildings.’”

“‘Sarah Valentine.’”

“‘Nostalgia.’”

“‘Canary.’”

“Maybe hold ‘Actually Quite Funny’ for a first encore?”

“What about ‘Tree of Death’?”

They called out the names eagerly, unafraid of mistakes. Denise wrote nothing down without Bedwin’s oracular consent. In this manner the set list was hashed out.

the first chords, chunks of noise, rebound in the gulch of buildings. They seem, to those on the sidewalk, an atonal clatter, one unrelated to the tick and throb of drum and bass which had reached them independently, conveyed an instant before through the curb to their calves and knees, perhaps even as high as their genitals. Soon, though, the listeners’ ears wrangle the dissonant sounds into sensible conjunction, a kind of on-the-spot reconstruction of this music’s sense in the first place. Any listener schooled in the form could peel it off echoing architecture as easily as resolve it through a radio’s static. Those staticky growls were, sure, amplified guitars, echoing in the cage of the drumbeat. Vocals, too, though distorted by the street’s reverb effect a general drift was discernible, twice through a verse, building to a chorus: hey, everyone knows how this works, knows it in their bones, even if unable to articulate it exactly: rock ’n’ roll. It’s what makes this band sound alike to any other that makes them intriguing, at this distance: they could be the Beatles, heard from the street. Or, just as easily, the Beards. The crowd buzzes with the general sense that an obscure evening has located its raison d’être. At least you’d have to go upstairs to know. Whoever they were, they were playing live, and you, on the sidewalk with skewered Thai chicken in your hand, are missing the set. Anyway, you were curious to see what this famous party loft was about after all, despite the spontaneous curbside revel’s rude charms.

The band concluded their opener’s last chorus just as Mr. Oo levered open the freight elevator doors and the first clutch of guests spilled onto the floor. Someone—Jules Harvey? the appropriated interns?—had located a master control panel for the loft’s lighting, and fiddled until the stage was encircled with a blobby series of wide purplish spots from a track of lamps mounted behind the band, angled to glare in the eyes of anyone standing near enough to discern the band’s faces, and casting the floor between stage and elevator into dark. Without footlights to provide underlighting, the band appears mysteriously remote, silhouettes draped in indigo as they confer with one another and their set list, nodding, perhaps mumbling a word or two, but inaudible above the low crackle and drone of speakers broadcasting nothing but their own electronic readiness, at top volume. A female voice, the drummer’s, counts “One, two, three, four,” and the second song is launched, with a single rim shot like a firecracker, igniting the guitarist. He’s a feeble figure, hunched atop a tall stool, and apparently unable to play without watching his fingers, but who now lays out an unexpectedly slab-like power chord, stretching a sneakered toe from where it had been curled inside a spoke of his stool to trigger a distortion pedal on the stage floor.

“The Houseguest” is a weirdly grim number, a defiant tirade by a guest wronged by his hosts, over a set of changes that might be the billionth rewrite of some three-chord chestnut, “You Really Got Me,” say, or “Twentieth Century Fox,” but played with conviction and vigor by the band, who associate the song, one of their earliest, with the uncovering of their own capacity to join in birthing ferocious noise. No one’s ever quite dared to query the guitarist, who delivered this lyrical concept to the band whole formed, on its source; no one ever will. The song’s a confidence builder for the singer, who finds that it liberates some element of rageful self-pity his own temperament usually quashes. He loves twisting his body as he bellows the raw quatrain that fits into a gap of feedbacky silence between the rolling changes:

I’m the house GUEST

I can’t get no REST

In your guest BED

I’ll sleep when I’m DEAD

The moment he’s delivered the word “dead” the singer’s voice is drowned in the band’s wave again. Though he’ll go on enunciating the houseguest’s complaint, these are the sole words a listener could distinguish with any confidence, and certainly the only ones that matter. The singer’s altered by them into a performer with a series of false faces to wear, urgent charades to put across. The band feels this, and it’s one reason the song is an unquestioned favorite. Tonight the band’s audience feels it too.

For that’s what they’ve become, in the space of a song: an audience. Drinks or cigarettes in hand, in bunches of two and three and four, unused Walkmans clipped to their belts or shoved in a purse, attentive to the band or babbling at conversations uninterrupted from their beginnings on the sidewalk, acquaintances of Falmouth’s and Harvey’s, journalists from local weeklies, art collectors, disc jockeys, graduate students, catering staff, an uncertain few who’d called the complaint line in the past week and been enlisted to the Aparty by Falmouth’s interns, curious seekers who’d received no invitation at all, even a few who’d spontaneously stopped their cars to see what the fuss was about—all had meandered together into a single entity, one massed along the periphery of purple light that covered the stage, and scattering from that front toward the kitchen, where Harvey and the interns now splashed together vodka and mixers, just to keep the atmosphere up. The party had become a show. It had never even considered being a conceptual art piece. It never would.

Without pause the band’s into “Astronaut Food.” On this number, more melodic and inviting than the previous, the women in the band make a bid to usurp the singer’s spotlight, and about a hundred men watching ask themselves why they’ve never had the eyes before to see they ought to have asked the drummer or the bassist on a date. Jubilantly singing into the single microphone the two women look fresh and alive, a thousand percent less ordinary than at the retail outlets or previous social gatherings from which these men are fairly certain they recognize them. As if sensing this shift, the singer glares at the audience between verses, daring them to presume in their dawning hunger for the figures onstage. This, in turn, is sensed by and thrills the women, who seem in a way to be taunting the singer behind his back.

This band’s got something, and some of the something they’ve got is the allure of an enclave at odds within itself and yet impenetrable to others, its members exchanging small gestures of disaffection within their troupe that makes others crave to be included in the fond dissension.

“Temporary Feeling” is quieter, in a way that disseminates silence in the room, chatterers and gabblers at the loft’s edges hushed by the effort of those nearer to the band who strain to follow the lyric. As far as anyone can make out it’s an intimate tale, in murmured passages of unrhymed lyric, prose stanzas which might or might not be the singer’s own confession, pages exported from a journal. Another magic spell this band trades in is the mystery of authorship: If a heart’s revealed here, whose? If a famous conceptual artist is putting on this show, should something about this band be taken to be in quotation marks? Is this band a stalking horse? Is the song a fiction, or a cover version, or the lament of someone hiding in plain sight? Who’s moving that mouth?

Seeded with quiet, the crowd hears itself exhale between the waning final chord of “Temporary Feeling” and the advent of their own clapping. This first full and unembarrassed burst of applause marks a threshhold in the audience’s belief that tonight’s performance is no accident but the event they’d come here to witness in the first place. It’s into the face of this loose barrage of cheers and whistles that the four members of the band, not pausing to mutter “Thank you” or to revel in praise they’d be petrified to believe they’d earned, serves forth, with a drum kick and a bass thrum and a chiming guitar figure, the instantly legible hook of their next song.

The song is “Monster Eyes,” and it comes set to make an impression. For band and audience alike, the evening finds its watershed, dividing Before from After. In the audience’s case, the watershed divides the perfectly agreeable songs they can no longer quite remember from the one they’ll go out humming, the one that causes everyone, during its third chorus or through the howl of cheers that erupt in its wake, to lean into someone’s ear and bark through cupped hands, “These guys are good!” or “I love this song!” The rest of the band’s set will unfold as confirmation: the audience has seen and celebrated something, and is entitled to feel special for having done so. Jules Harvey has done it again. Or Falmouth Strand. You weren’t sure what anything had to do with anything else, but cool people were certainly involved. You weren’t wrong to come out tonight. You’d found yourself right in the thick of something. You had to be there, the night they first played “Monster Eyes,” and you were.

For the band, this first public rendition of what’s instantly become their hit song is the moment when time stops its hectic flow and earth’s atmosphere expands, just a little, to make room for something new, embodied by themselves. It’s the moment when they realize that rather than being as good as they’d always hoped, or even better than they hoped, they’re simply as good as they are, no hope required. Enshrined behind the even newer songs—“Dirty Yellow Chair,” “Secret from Yourself,” and the others resulting from the sheaf of titles Lucinda presented in Bedwin’s apartment—“Monster Eyes” no longer seems, to the band, in any important sense new. It’s a fixture in their lives, a given. They can’t remember where it came from because the truth is that the song was there all along, waiting to be given the air, allowed to breathe. The song represents the band’s nature impatiently asserting itself: here’s what we sound like, already!

The rest of the set is gravy. The audience rolls over for the grinding, staticky “Hell Is for Buildings,” which the guitarist furls right into the cheers for “Monster Eyes,” as though to urge the band past any possible complacency. “Secret from Yourself ” goes over too, the singer animating the lyrics with Kabuki theatricality, making them a remonstration of the audience’s own failings, then forgiving them, barely, in the final verse. “Canary in a Coke Machine” makes light relief, gets a little sloppy and lets everyone off the hook. Then “Shitty Citizen” and “Nostalgia Vu,” which build in their way rather nicely to “Actually Quite Funny,” which had become, while nobody was looking, a show closer. Afterward there’s no place to hide during the applause and shouting for more, no curtain to drop, no backstage, though singer and bassist do step to one side while the guitarist sits nodding on his stool and the drummer mumbles “Thank you” several times into her mike. Someone—Jules Harvey? the interns?—locates the light switches again and kills the purple spots, so the band is left represented by the connect-the-dot glow of their equipment’s power indicators, while the vibrating crowd is illuminated only by the answering glows of their cigarette tips and the oceanic moonlit blue leaking through the windows. Into this dark the crowd roars. Then lights come back up, and bassist and singer scoot back to their places.

What’s left for an encore? First, “Sarah Valentine,” if only because it would have broken their hearts not to play it. The other three members suspect the song of being prehistoric, some acoustic ballad the guitarist penned in high school and smuggled into their company. Tonight, who cares? The singer dips his mike stand to where the guitarist sits on his stool and the embarrassed guitarist warbles the last chorus, possibly a future ritual invented on the spot. Then, the song finished, someone in the crowd yells out “Monster Eyes” in the thick of the cheering. Other voices laugh recognition, and the cheering grows louder. The band members meet eyes and accept a plan without speaking, the guitarist mutters “Thank you” now as the familiar chords strike up again. Those two words being the only words the band has spoken from the stage all night, and now it’s too late to adorn them, let alone to banter. Apparently they were to be the taciturn sort of band, who knew?

They play it again. It’s a victory lap, now that there’s nothing left to prove, no hard sell to put across. Doing so, they tear down the room once more, ensuring the crowd will dissolve into the night buzzing with the intoxication of this song. The second time, the listeners have begun to parse the lyrics, take them to heart—hey, this song’s about you and me and the dangerous way we feel sometimes! It’s about all of us! But it’s about me most of all, each listener thinks. It’s most particularly about dangerous me.

Now there’s no clamor for a further encore. The band’s played their perfect song for a second time, leaving nothing to wish for except disappointment, and who wishes for that? So, with no way to celebrate without getting silly, as the unseen hand behind the purple spotlights now shifts a single white spot to the mirror ball and the room is spangled, silly’s what the crowd gets. Old imperatives, seemingly shrugged aside by the tyrannical revelers, are now revived. Those who brought along headphones and tape players don them and begin dancing asynchronously in the zone before the stage, one guy with a crew cut and his eyes squeezed closed doing a James Brown strut, a woman with orange bangs and headphones big as earmuffs sliding across the floor as though shuttling on some great invisible loom. The interns move through those on the fringes of the dance offering the shopping bags full of tape players and headsets, making more than a few converts, though massing everywhere are dozens upon dozens of celebrants who’d never understood what was expected of them in the first place. These others fall to babbling, eating and drinking, and mocking the dancers. It’s Falmouth’s Aparty, sort of. No one’s quite so apart as Falmouth might have envisioned, and the artist himself may well have quit the scene in disgust.

The band’s not forgotten. The gathering seems specially arranged to leave their set ringing in listeners’ ears, nothing intruding on the echo of their chords but laughter and conversation and the mute, foolish dancing. Most feel it would be uncool to throng the band with an overt show of congratulations, so the four are left free to pack instruments and compare impressions, in their attempt to believe what’s occurred, the version of themselves that’s newly sprouted into existence. The band’s hardly oblivious, though, to the awestruck or lustful gazes of nearby audience members. Someone in range of their hearing indulges in a pretentious explication of the band’s influences. Another voice can be heard trying to sing the chorus of their momentous song. And the band will hardly be left to themselves for long. Wending through the mass of ecstatic dancers are several presences, calculating watchers on whom the band has made an impression. An evening like this brings them out of the woodwork.

they spoke in fragments, giving blundering accounts of what they’d felt onstage.

“You were so hot on ‘Canary’—”

“I was just listening to Matthew.”

“But I’ve never heard you play like that.”

“Did I skip a verse of ‘Nostalgia’?”

“Sure, but who cares?”

“We’ve never played ‘Shitty Citizen’ so fast.”

“It sounded good.”

“It sounded great. You finally really played a solo in that break, Bedwin.”

“I just sort of suddenly knew what to do. I was waiting.”

“You picked a good time to figure it out.”

Denise began to twist apart her kit. Matthew and Lucinda, taking her cue, began winding cord. Bedwin sat rubbing his eyes, as though he’d watched too much television or was trying to believe or disbelieve a dream. It dawned on them only gradually that their eggshell of privacy had been pierced. When no one was looking the lip of the stage had been approached by men of guile and influence, unyouthful men in youthful clothes. The impresario in his baseball cap and zipper jacket, Jules Harvey, flanked by two others, one in jeans and a cowboy shirt and a small gold earring, the other wearing an ostentatiously rumpled brown corduroy suit, each with immaculately trimmed sideburns. The newcomers matched Harvey’s rabbity intensity. They pitched forward on the balls of their feet as they waited for an introduction, eyes drilling side to side as if to defend their territories.

Behind them stood another man, older than the rest, and taller—taller even than Matthew—with a rocket of stone-white hair topping through a wide, scarflike headband. He bore a galactically sad, houndish expression on his eroded-cliff features, patiently waiting his turn. And too, floating through the crowd was yet another figure, one Lucinda would have recognized if she’d sighted him. She hadn’t, yet. The band gave an audience to the phalanx at the stage’s edge.

“You’re a very hard band to see,” said the man at Harvey’s left, the one in corduroy. He grinned and thrust his hand at Matthew. “Very off the map, in a manner of speaking.”

Matthew took his hand.

“It’s always an interesting sign when music people get mixed up with art people. There’s a good track record there. I can think of at least three or four very interesting examples that have made certain people who will go unnamed tremendously useful sums of money.”

“We’re not really mixed up with art people,” said Matthew. “We just did this one gig as a favor to Falmouth. We’re more our own thing.”

“That’s the spirit,” said the corduroy man. “Listen, in the next days, even in the next five minutes, a lot of people are going to be trying to shake this hand that I’m shaking, and I just hope you’ll recall I was first. Rhodes Bramlett. Considerable Records.”

“We should get going,” said Denise, tapping Matthew on the shoulder with a drumstick, offering fake smiles to the men at the edge of the stage. “Nice meeting you.”

“I’d like to be in touch in the next few days,” said Rhodes Bramlett, in a kindly, seeking tone. “Who would I be getting in touch with if I was?”

“We’ll find you,” said Denise. “Now we’re leaving.”

“Of course,” said Jules Harvey. “But let me introduce you to another friend of mine. Mick Felsh, this is Monster Eyes.”

“That’s not our name,” said Lucinda.

“No, of course,” said Harvey amiably. “What is your name? As your de facto manager, I ought to know.”

“We don’t have one,” said Denise. “And you’re not our de facto anything.”

“Pretty good name for a band, though,” said Bedwin to himself.

“No name, I like that,” said Mick Felsh, the man in the cowboy shirt. His voice was disarmingly nasal and high, a non sequitur to his garb. He spoke as if Bramlett of Considerable, inches away, were in fact a figment of a distant universe, impossible to perceive. “You people don’t need me to tell you this, but that was a dynamite set.” Felsh offered his hand to Denise, perhaps making a quick calculation of who among the players ought to be solicited, perhaps only hoping to put a brake on their departure. “I was telling Jules I’d love to help you guys demo some of that material. No need to worry about any kind of contract or commitment if it makes you guys uncomfortable. Just get into my studio and see how it feels. Get a document of the set you’re playing these days, sort of Monster Eyes circa now, before anything changes, because you’d be surprised.”

“Nothing’s going to change,” said Denise. “Except we’re going to get better.”

“It could be fun to record some demos, though,” said Matthew.

“I wouldn’t do anything without—” began Bramlett.

“One copy of the master,” countered Felsh, his hand raised like a Boy Scout’s. “You take it out the door with you.”

“Doesn’t matter, since we’re not ready,” said Denise. “Lucinda, help Bedwin pack up his stuff.” Bedwin was ground to a halt, sat dope-eyed on his stool in the midst of their mike stands and cable. Lucinda tried to rouse herself but fell slack. She’d succumbed to a tidal exhaustion, the accumulated physical insult of too much joy, too many fish tacos and bass notes and orgasms flying in and out of her boundaries.

“We could all go sit upstairs,” said Jules Harvey. “Just take a few minutes to talk. These moments don’t come so often.”

“Nah, we’re in a hurry,” said Denise.

“Where are we in a hurry to?” asked Matthew.

“Yes, where are you going?” said Harvey. “This party’s hardly over.”

“To a place where bands go after gigs,” said Denise. “A secret destination, known only to bands.”

Now the tall man with the headband full of white hair and the mournful craggy face loomed into view, nudging Mick Felsh aside effortlessly, without seeming to notice the smaller man. He was dressed in a long, battered peacoat, missing buttons. He stood with his hands deep in its pockets as though braced against some arctic wind. He placed himself before the band and smiled and shook his head, mouth parted as if to speak, none of the sorrow banished from his eyes.

“Okay,” he said finally. His voice rumbled, thrummed.

“Hey, I know you,” said Matthew. “You’re Fancher Autumnbreast.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been listening to you since I was a kid,” said Matthew.

Fancher Autumnbreast closed his eyes, shook his head again, sighed. “Sure, sweetheart.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Denise, nudging Matthew again. “Let’s go.”

“No, you don’t understand,” said Matthew. “Fancher Autumnbreast, from KPKD. The Dreaming Jaw.”

“What’s The Dreaming Jaw?”

“His midnight radio show, for like the last thousand years.” Matthew didn’t disguise his impatience. “He’s fairly important, if you care anything about the history of music in this town.”

“Let alone if you want to make some,” added Jules Harvey.

“When I was a child I pretty much just wanted to be you,” said Bedwin to Autumnbreast, so softly he was barely heard.

“Look.” Autumnbreast ignored Bedwin, Denise, Harvey, anyone else, removed one gnarled, elegant hand from the peacoat’s pocket and pushed a single finger against Matthew’s chest. “Find me. You’ll play your song. On the Jaw. Live in studio.”

“Which song?”

“You know, babykins.”

Fancher Autumnbreast turned and threaded through the chaotic, musicless dance floor. Jules Harvey and Mick Felsh and Rhodes Bramlett all stared and watched him go, as did the band. Autumnbreast left in his place a conspicuous vacancy, an authority gap.

Denise spoke first. “Let’s just take the guitars. Jules, if you’re supposed to be our manager now, you can make sure nobody screws with our equipment. Bedwin, guitar to the elevator, now. Matthew too. We’ll break down when the party’s out of the way, tomorrow maybe.”

“Your equipment is safe,” said Harvey, bowing. Felsh and Bramlett bowed too, not wishing to seem ungracious. Denise had won this round, it appeared. But she’d named Harvey as their manager, in front of the others. Perhaps he’d act as if authorized to speak for them. Word might even spread, by the same osmosis that had launched the evening in the first place.

Obeying Denise, Matthew seized up Lucinda’s bass as well as his own guitar and started for the elevator. Bedwin too. Perhaps they hoped for another passing encounter with their hero, Fancher Autumnbreast. Denise pushed the cymbals and kicks she’d already partially broken down into some rough order. Lucinda slid off the stage.

At that moment he moved within the perimeter of lights and revealed himself. The complainer. Carl, Carlton. He stood in his same loose pants and untucked shirt covering the blunt hairy fact of his body, and gazing at her with his droll handsome disheveled look, his gone-to-seed glamour. He’d been there, surely, throughout the show. Had seen them play.

The band had discovered itself onstage like Helen Keller, connecting at last the idea or name for a thing to the thing itself, a blundering into a new world they’d never dared to name. At the same time another world had uncovered itself to Lucinda when she made herself drunk and naked for the complainer. Now they weren’t two worlds, but one. It was all too much, he was too much for her, standing so patiently at the stage.

“The way you play that instrument makes me think of the way you fuck, if you don’t mind my saying that.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “It’s a bass.”

“I mean to say very beautifully and forcefully.”

“Thank you.”

“With great sincerity and even with what I’d be tempted to call originality, if I didn’t think originality was a word people throw around a lot without knowing what they’re talking about.”

“Uh, thank you.”

“Because to really judge the originality of something you’d have to be familiar with all the possible precedents and sources, which very few people are ever likely to be.”

“I’m not completely sure I understand.”

“I couldn’t help feeling I was listening to myself.”

Lucinda examined him for signs of anger, found none. His words had been delivered with perfect cheer, as eloquent and seductive as if he’d been pouring them into her ear on the telephone in that time so long past, that telephonic life which felt now like a distant journey, recollected in postcards.

“How did you know to come here?”

He shrugged. “Someone on the complaint line suggested I come to this unusual dance party they were planning. One of the other receptionists, you weren’t there that day. Then I saw a notice in the paper that the famous complaint guy was putting on a performance piece at this loft. It wasn’t that hard to guess you’d be here, though the show was a surprise.”

“Falmouth is my friend.” She wanted him to know her life completely now. If he’d recognized the song lyrics and wasn’t angry there might be nothing to hide. She’d let her new worlds be joined. She wanted him to know Falmouth and the others, was impatient that it all even needed explaining. That Falmouth and Matthew were, technically, her exes was a minor note. The complainer, of all people, would understand.

“I felt like if I squinted I could practically see myself onstage.”

There might be something mildly autistic in the complainer’s reactions, a flatness to the face with which he addressed the world. His stance toward hotels and automobiles and women’s bodies, his cataloging of her orgasms, his deafness to social pretense, all had a strangely equable quality. It made Lucinda love him more, not less. He crossed the grain of ordinary life, deliriously indifferent.

“I used your words as lyrics,” she blurted.

“I noticed.”

“Bedwin wrote the music. The guitarist.”

“Does he know?”

She shook her head, wide-eyed. “Nobody knows.”

She pushed away from the stage, nearer to him.

“I usually collect hundreds, if not thousands, per verb or noun.”

“I don’t have my checkbook.”

“I’ll take a hostage.”

The complainer reached his hand into her hair, cradling her skull. She kissed him, on tiptoe, felt the grit of his unshaved cheek. She found herself folded into his encyclopedia of clothes and hair and limbs. His free paw bridged her buttocks and drew her higher into the embrace. In the kiss Lucinda tasted traces of their night and afternoon, hints of herself or the Ambit’s mustard and ketchup unrinsed from his face.

Someone tapped her shoulder. She turned and found the two appropriated interns standing unexpectedly close. They didn’t speak, but like spectral sentinels nodded to indicate Denise, who waited a few yards from the stage, her rack toms tucked beneath one arm. Lucinda nodded and Denise lowered her head and moved through the dancers, for the elevator.

“I have to go be with the others.”

“The others in the band.”

“Yes.”

“Can I come?”

She stared, not understanding.

“I’ve never been in a band before,” he said.

She capped his mouth with her hand to silence him and to keep herself from kissing him again before the lingering interns. Then, helplessly, mouthed the back of her own hand instead, as though seeking him through prison bars. “Call me tomorrow,” she whispered through her fingers. “Or tonight.” Then escaped.

denise hadn’t lied, Tang’s Donut was a place bands went to celebrate and debrief after shows. The others recognized this at once. Though by the standard of most gigs they’d played the Aparty ludicrously early, at Tang’s it might as easily have been four in the morning. Traffic buzzed past on Sunset and Fountain, isolating Tang’s like a reef in time. Elderly chess opponents in vintage suits nudged pawns across squares at their booths, under clicking, humming fluorescent fixtures, as though installed there by some miraculous hand that had plucked them from a 1930s Vienna kaffeehaus. Trays of cold congealed muffins lay untouched and unloved within the fingerprint-layered lead-glass cases, while the customers invariably queued for the same buttermilk doughnuts, dough flash-fried in irregular clumps with a browned horny crust, which gave way to the peachy-yellow fluff inside, too hot to eat if you badgered the drowsy, indifferent counterman to serve you from the cooling racks in the kitchen behind him.

Crowded at their booth, they juggled steaming buttermilk-dough fragments between fingers and lips, gobbling them when they could stand to. Here, it turned out, was why you wanted to play a triumphant gig: in order to eat Tang’s doughnuts afterward. True, you could come here after merely seeing some other band play. They’d all done that. So, you sought glory then in order not only to sit at Tang’s but to feel you deserved to. Denise slurped peppermint tea, made from Tang’s hot water and a tea bag she’d stashed in her jacket, while Matthew, in vegetarian solidarity with his secret captive, sipped orange juice. Lucinda, heedlessly, drank coffee. Bedwin, hot chocolate.

“I feel like we left some opportunities back there,” said Matthew.

“Those people only dug us because there are women in the band,” said Denise. “They see it as some kind of marketing hook.”

“We don’t know that for a fact,” said Matthew. “Anyway, it’s not like that with Fancher Autumnbreast. He’s got nothing to gain.”

“Anyone who likes us already likes us for the wrong reasons,” said Denise. “We’ve only ever played one set.”

“A lot can happen in one set,” said Lucinda. They fell silent in contemplation of it. The performance fizzed inside them like carbonation, the bubbles destined to unbind, bob to the surface, expire. Perhaps that was even what they’d come here for. Tang’s was a sort of detox ward, a safe zone in which the band could decant, settle back into the safety of their familiar, unfamous lives.

“We sort of got a manager tonight,” said Bedwin. He dunked a chunk of doughnut deep into his hot chocolate, displacing the liquid to the rim and nearly over.

“Maybe a name, too,” said Matthew. He’d crumbled his own doughnut to fragments and spread the fragments around his place mat, wrecking his cake like his bathroom stowaway had wrecked her salad.

“That can’t be our name,” said Lucinda, a little panicked at all she knew and couldn’t say. “It’s a song. It can’t be both a song and a band.”

“Why not?” said Bedwin.

“It’s stupid. Who does that?”

“Hey hey we’re the Monkees,” said Bedwin.

“That only proves my point.”

“Black Sabbath has a song called ‘Black Sabbath.’”

“I don’t want that to be the name.” Lucinda resisted speaking the famous phrase itself, as if to do so were to invoke the band’s occult debt. She wanted the phrase to be smothered in silence, made a footnote. Never mind that it was the title of their hit. They’d write more that were better, leave “Monster Eyes” in the dust. Only Bedwin had any reason to suspect her, but he showed no sign he recalled that the lyrics originated outside himself. Her deception was as safe with him as it would be with a cat or a dog.

Lucinda was the band’s invisible betrayer and its invisible angel at once. Ward of their innocence, she’d inserted the complainer’s language into their art like LSD slipped into a punch bowl. Now she must persuade them that the effects were natural, that though the world had transmuted around them, the hallowed unit of the band remained untouched. Lucinda would take the crime on herself. The others would never know. She only needed to control the whims of the complainer, the least controllable person she’d ever encountered.

“Are We Not Men, We Are Devo,” continued Bedwin. “‘Clash City Rockers.’ ‘Give It to the Soft Boys.’ And the Verlaines have a song whose whole chorus is just the word ‘Verlaine’ over and over again.”

“That’s enough, Bedwin,” said Denise. She placed a quarter of her doughnut onto a napkin and pushed it, like a raft with humanitarian cargo, across to Bedwin, who’d been eyeing hers after gobbling his own.

“Our manager is an armpit sniffer,” said Lucinda despondently. The four again fell silent, unsure how to encompass this remark.

“I do that,” said Bedwin eventually.

“I mean other people’s armpits,” said Lucinda.

the phone rang and Lucinda slugged to the pillow’s edge. She stretched the receiver from its cradle to her head, which was too ponderous to raise from its nest. The receiver, too, was too heavy to hold, so she rested it on her face.

“Hello?”

“You awake?” asked Matthew.

“What time is it?” She’d been fathoms deep, possibly dreaming of the complainer, but the phone’s chime had shattered any dreams, her first eyeful of daylight sweeping the remains off like motes on its beams. But it should have been the complainer calling, she felt.

“Ten,” said Matthew. “Can we talk?”

“Marsupial predicament?”

“Yes.”

“Come in half an hour.”

She allowed her eyes to sag again for what seemed an instant. When she reopened them and padded into her kitchen she found Matthew there, having used his key. Or perhaps she’d left it unlocked. He scrounged in her refrigerator, hip-deep into the appliance. She stretched her T-shirt around her knees and peered over his shoulder. He rattled at back layers of condiments, prying at shrunken fists of tinfoil, artifacts she hadn’t examined in months.

“You won’t find anything in there,” she said. “I fed it all to a fugitive yak who lives in my hamper.”

“I’m broke,” said Matthew. “Will you buy me breakfast?”

“Sure, but I have to go to the gallery. Falmouth owes me a paycheck. I’ll put pants on.”

Matthew didn’t turn to see. “If you feel like it,” he said, sucking a glob of something, peanut butter or chèvre, from his finger. “Uck.”

They took Matthew’s Mazda, with its moonroof open. A tape Lucinda had heard a hundred times before squeaked in the deck, a mix of bands from New Zealand and Australia that Matthew collected on vinyl like holy relics from another realm. Sunset Boulevard blazed, empty, rinsed in sunshine, the stray cars like bugs streaming in the footprint of a vast lifted rock.

“Where is everyone?” said Lucinda, shielding her eyes from the glare. “Is it some kind of holiday?”

“Saturday.”

“Where are all the people?”

“In bed, like you usually are.”

“Don’t you have any other music?”

“The tape’s stuck in the player.”

Falmouth was at his desk the morning after the debacle, seeking consolation in routine. The gallery office was shuttered against the day’s light, Falmouth’s face lit by the blue-toned screen as he attacked his e-mail. Falmouth was the first person Lucinda knew to use it. It might have been his invention, an artwork he’d tricked the world into adopting, the true Aparty. Lucinda stood beside him and cleared her throat. Matthew hung back, never happy to visit the gallery.

“Boss, I need some money.”

Falmouth looked up, scowling. “Didn’t you people get some sort of signing bonus last night? Isn’t a number-one record worth anything anymore?”

“We’ll reimburse you out of our first royalties.”

“No, you’ll waste it all on cocaine and prostitutes, because that’s what rock stars do.”

“Just enough for breakfast.”

“This is severance pay. You’re all fired. I had an epiphany last night. The world of complaints can carry on without my help. It has a certain inexorable momentum. Frankly, I’m not sure it needed me in the first place.” Falmouth’s gallery had a crestfallen air, Lucinda saw now. An enterprise that teetered on despondency, it had been restrained from that brink by Falmouth’s will, a gambler’s bluff. Today the place felt vacated, rustling with ghosts of spectators moved elsewhere, to the next curiosity.

“You already fired me the other day,” she said gently.

“That was different, that was affectionate.”

“In retrospect this will be affectionate too.”

“You’re losing me.” Falmouth waved his hand. “You know what I would like? For someone to take me to breakfast every once in a while.”

“You want to come to breakfast?” said Lucinda, surprised, glancing at Matthew. Yet perhaps Falmouth was innocent of the grudge.

“I’ll still pay,” Falmouth said, almost begging now.

“Matthew and I have things to discuss,” she began.

“Your future recording career under the hand of Jules Harvey,” suggested Falmouth, his voice withering.

“I don’t even want to hear that name today,” said Lucinda.

“Come along,” said Matthew. “I don’t have any secrets.”

Falmouth climbed past the passenger seat, into the back of Matthew’s Mazda, another astonishment on this first morning after the Aparty. Falmouth ordinarily piloted his own car to any rendezvous, refusing passenger status even in a front seat. Now he sat dreamily trapped in Matthew’s two-door, seated on a cushion leaking yellow foam, his shoes topping a heap of rubbish. The backseat had likely been the kangaroo’s transport, though Falmouth had no way of knowing that. Oddly childlike, he rubbed at the five o’clock shadow on the back of his head and blinked at the street as though seeing it for the first time.

“What about that place that makes that great oatmeal frittata?” he said. “With the strawberries and cottage cheese on top.”

“Hugo’s, you mean?” said Matthew.

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Fine with me. Lucinda?”

“How about oatmeal frittatas, Lucinda?” said Falmouth. “Since I’m paying, and Matthew’s driving.”

It only took an accumulation of two ex-boyfriends acting un-characteristically cheery to make a swarm, a blooming conspiracy. Lucinda wondered irritably whether she was missing a phone call at home. She wanted to tell Matthew and Falmouth how she was changed entirely, not who they took her to be, not a mere bassist or ex-girlfriend, foil for banter, kangaroo confidante. Her liaison and bender with the complainer had thrown her world off its rails, but not hers alone. If Matthew and Falmouth felt in some way changed this morning it was due to how the complainer had crept into their lives too, through the gallery telephones, through the lyrics and his secret collaboration with Bedwin. She wanted to tell them but the complainer’s injunction of secrecy felt as profound as his touch, the trails he’d left across her.

Calls might be stacking up on her machine. If they spoke she’d want to see him. Anything seemed possible: Carl might even be waiting for her in her house, or outside it. The carousel only seemed stopped because she instead bumped along in Matthew’s shockless Mazda, hell-bent for brunch. Matthew and Falmouth were at the moment discovering common ground, an animated cartoon they both liked, something to do with a Chihuahua and a cat. She should cherish this interlude, perhaps. Besides, she was ravenous for frittata. Sunlight strobed through the moonroof. She tilted her head back and shut her eyes to feel it batter her lids.

matthew explained to Falmouth about Fancher Autumnbreast’s radio show, The Dreaming Jaw. Playing one of Autumnbreast’s live in-studio sets had launched careers, everyone from the Rain Injuries to Souled American to Memorial Garage. Matthew also explained how Autumnbreast had been Janis Joplin’s boyfriend, the only one, according to her, who’d never taken advantage of her. He’d also spent a famous weekend consoling Marianne Faithfull in Morocco after her breakup with Mick Jagger. The three of them sat outside, on Hugo’s long deck, spectating as new brunchers grouped at tables around them. Their own chairs had been pushed back from the table, their meals demolished, oatmeal and egg white and curds scattered to plates’ edges and beyond, juice glasses emptied, coffees filled a third and fourth time. Matthew’s fingers stole across the settings to harvest appetizing chunks that had been abandoned on Falmouth’s and Lucinda’s plates. He looked healthier than in weeks, his sallowness fleshed again with glamour, with rock-star prospects. The kangaroo seemed forgotten for the moment.

Falmouth smoked and listened intently as Matthew talked, pursing his lips and shaking his head, stripped of irony. He interrogated Matthew precisely. It was as though his solipsism had been dissolved by the revelation of a rock-and-roll demimonde hiding in plain sight before him, now uncovered by the events of the Aparty.

“This person, this Autumnbreast, never wanted to play music himself?”

“He’s more like the most virtuoso listener who ever lived,” said Matthew. “When he listens, other people hear things. He’s like a site, an occasion for things to happen. His radio show’s like a clearing in the woods where the history of contemporary sound just happens to stroll through.”

“See, I like that very much,” said Falmouth. “It’s not a passive role. His sensibility declares itself, and others pay attention. He’s presiding.”

“Right.”

“Who cares?” said Lucinda.

They both stared.

“What a lot of malarkey. Presiding. You only like the way that sounds because it reminds you of yourself. It’s like the gallery. You don’t want to be an artist, it’s too vulnerable. You want to be a collector instead, a curator of happenings. But that’s what pushed you into the arms of Sniffles Harvey.”

Falmouth blinked, smoked, refused to lash out.

“And you,” she said, turning to Matthew. “You only like Autumnbreast because he calls you sweetheart, Matty-o, honey bunch.”

“I don’t think he actually called me honey bunch, Luce.”

“I thought we were supposed to be an art band, something alternative.” She felt herself growing vicious, couldn’t quit. “I didn’t realize you’d fall over your own feet getting caught up in some sleazy sixties rock dude’s clutches.”

“He’s responsible for getting attention for a lot of alternative bands,” said Matthew, with defensive precision.

“I’ve never heard of any of those bands you mentioned. Except the Rain Injuries. And you hate those guys.”

“Well, that’s probably because you don’t listen to much of anything, Luce.”

“Now, friends,” said Falmouth, making an appeal for peace.

“And anyway, all those legendary women this clearing in the woods ever-so-sweetly presided over but never took advantage of,” Lucinda continued, “I can’t help noticing they were all conveniently smashed on alcohol or suffering a famously devastating breakup at the time.”

“Huh?” said Matthew.

Lucinda’s eyes stung. Her throat began to tighten and she understood, reluctantly, that she was crying. “I’m just saying Mr. Funbreast sounds like a rebound operator to me.”

“What’s the matter, Luce?” said Matthew.

“Nothing.” She pressed her knuckles against her trembling chin, swallowed hard.

Falmouth stubbed his cigarette and peered at her. Lucinda fell silent, cast her gaze to the far avenue, shook the slime of tears from her cheeks.

“Did I say something?” said Matthew.

“We were only joking, Lucinda, whatever we said,” said Falmouth.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine, you’re crying,” said Falmouth.

“I’m fake-crying.”

“Why would you do that?”

“For sympathy.” She tucked what had welled, the joyous trauma of the past days, back into its hidden compartment. Something in Matthew might have been triggered by her sniping, however, or perhaps by the sight of her tears. He’d lapsed into his old recessive state, his joy in the gig unsustainable. Perhaps he’d also recalled Shelf the Flyer, maundering in her dismal basin.

“I wish I could fake cry as well as that,” said Falmouth.

“I’ll teach you.”

“Sniffles Harvey—that was a good one.”

“You don’t even know how he earned that name.”

“Of course I do. He was sniffling all around your band like a truffle pig. Trying to take credit for it himself, as if you were some strange lucky outgrowth of his loft.”

“Let’s give last night a break,” said Lucinda. “Forget about Harvey and Summerbreast or any of these other spooky characters circling around.”

“What other spooky characters?” said Falmouth.

“Nothing, I just mean let’s give the whole thing a rest. Try to enjoy the morning.”

“That’s what we were doing,” said Matthew.

“But not even mention the band, just pretend we’re our regular selves.”

“I think I just saw someone I think I know,” said Falmouth, rising from his seat.

it’s like I got into some kind of horrible chess match with Dr. Marian. All I wanted was for them to take Shelf back into the general population. They said she was gouging the other kangaroos but solitary confinement is a self-perpetuating thing, she wasn’t learning anything about proper socialization by being stuck in the pit.” Matthew had begun to confess his and the kangaroo’s dilemma the moment Falmouth had left him and Lucinda alone.

“They call it the pit?” asked Lucinda.

“Sure.”

“That’s what it looks like. I mean, that’s what a visitor would probably call it. But there’s something horrible about knowing that you people call it that too.”

“It just kept escalating between us. I was totally discredited because I tried to go around Dr. Marian, to the board. Everyone in the office kept freezing me out.”

“You appealed to the zoo’s board about a single kangaroo?”

“I wrote a letter.”

“Isn’t Dr. Marian the one who hired you?”

“The bad vibes up at the office aren’t really important anymore,” he said. “My problem is I can’t get anyone to pay attention now that I’ve, you know—taken Shelf away.” Matthew sagged in his chair as though only now relieved of some burden of denial, as if Lucinda and Denise hadn’t broken in and seen for themselves. Perhaps he’d persuaded himself that episode was truly a dream, a kangaroo piss-fever hallucination.

“You want attention for that?”

“My plan was to leak it and embarrass the zoo. I tried to get the Times and the Weekly to come and see Shelf. I said I was holding her hostage to protest her treatment. I even tried News Eleven. But they won’t return my calls.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Dr. Marian outflanked me. When the paper or the television calls, she says the zoo’s not missing any kangaroos. They think I’m a crank. She won’t even confirm that I worked there, just says I’m familiar to them, a publicity hound, some kind of zoological stalker, and that attention only encourages me. At the same time, she won’t admit to anyone at the zoo that I’m fired. Actually, I’m not fired.”

“What?”

“The department secretary called and said they were holding my paychecks in the office, but they won’t forward them. They’re trying to get me to come in, so they can surround me and conduct some kind of brainwashing.”

“That sounds a little paranoid.”

“You get used to putting a gorilla in a straitjacket or shooting an ibex in the throat with a twelve-ounce dart you’d be surprised what you’d be willing to do to a human being, Luce. These people are like Nazi doctors, they’ve persuaded themselves they’re engaged with primal factors outside the ken of normal human beings.”

“Were you ever recruited to join some kind of vigilante faction? I suppose the gorillas themselves could be employed in death squads, after enough shock treatment.”

“Don’t make fun of me.” He shrank into the corner of his chair, his eyes revealing real fear, as if the restaurant might be surrounded at that moment by Dr. Marian’s operatives.

“It can’t be easy, just the two of you in that apartment,” Lucinda said, gently now, thinking of that dungeon of lettuce and urine.

“I’ve been telling myself it’s going to get better,” Matthew droned, ponderous in his guilt.

“You probably thought it would be different when you got her out of the pit.”

“I think she blames me. I used to be the one who cheered her up. We’d talk and she’d lift her head and I could tell she didn’t want me to leave. Now it’s like she associates me with the zoo. She won’t even look at me.”

“Moving in together might not have been the best idea.”

“She has a problem with high expectations,” Matthew said, his gaze on some middle distance, as if facing some unseen advocate for the kangaroo, a mediator or marriage counselor. “It began with her parents.”

“What about her parents?”

“Shelf was born right here, in Los Angeles. Her parents were sort of famous. They were sent here as a gift to Linda Ronstadt from an Australian fan. Linda Ronstadt didn’t know what to do with them, so she gave them to the zoo. There was a lot of publicity at the time, and I think it was confusing for the kangaroos. They got special treatment and then were expected to melt into the regular population. I suppose they imparted a certain lack of realistic perspective to Shelf.”

“Maybe Fancher Autumnbreast should take her to Morocco,” said Lucinda. “It worked for Marianne Faithfull.”

“Either you want to help me or you don’t, Lucinda.”

“I’m sorry. Tell me what I can do. I’m hardly a kangaroo person.”

“Go and collect my checks,” he said. “I’m totally broke.”

“They’d let me?”

“It’s worth a try. At least there’s nothing they can do to you.”

Lucinda reached across the table and nudged Matthew’s fingertips, offered a smile. An immense noontime melancholy had suffused their table. The lives at nearby tables, pairs of couples, families, the clank of silver and happy conversation, all evoked what they’d deserted. Their days were rich and strange, full of kangaroos and gigs, things other brunchers couldn’t know, but they were impoverished too, bereft of ordinary solidarities which had once seemed near at hand as the spoons and forks on the table between them, as their browsing fingertips.

The fugue dissolved and they noticed Falmouth. He sat at another table, deep in the porch’s shadow, legs crossed, scribbling on a pad propped across his knee. As they turned to him he lifted his pen from the page and squinted at the results.

“What’s that?” said Lucinda.

“I’m entering a new phase of radical openness to suggestion. It took you and Jules Harvey to make me understand. You’ve been taking an admirable risk with your horrible music. From this point on my only conceptual medium will be myself. My own behavior and choices, the way I respond to the opportunities to transform daily experience into art. I’m done trying to bully others into being my canvas and oils, in other words.”

“That’s nice, but what are you doing?”

“I borrowed this pen and pad from the waitress,” he said. “She’s one of my students. It’s only ballpoint and it skips but I think that’s good, a happy accident, the kind of thing I’ll be open to from now on.”

“Okay, but what are you drawing?”

“You.”

He turned the pad around. Matthew and Lucinda were depicted in feathery blue ballpoint strokes, seated with their heads leaned together at the table, under shelter of the deck. Another figure loomed between them, paws bridging their shoulders, pointy ears brushing the porch, feet crammed under their table. Long whiskers extended from the grinning cartoon mammal’s nose, past Lucinda’s and Matthew’s heads, radiating like beams of light in a child’s drawing of the sun.

“Is that a ten-foot rat?” said Lucinda. “Or your idea of a kangaroo?”

Falmouth shrugged. “It’s me, really. A spirit-representation of my love and concern for you on this beautiful morning.”

“You’re a strange person, Falmouth.”

“Thank you.”

“Were you listening to us talk?”

“Half listening.”

“So, any half thoughts?”

“On what?” Falmouth reversed his pad and resumed sketching, squinting at them like some alfresco painter. The morning had drifted to afternoon, a sweet languor investing in their bodies and words. Cars swooped on the 101, a long block away, but the sitters on Hugo’s porch went contentedly nowhere, weekending.

“You’re a master of provocation, Falmouth. What about taking on the Los Angeles Zoo?”

“I’ve never been one for causes.”

Matthew had eased into silence, disburdened of his secrets and fears. Anyone could speak of zoos and kangaroos now. These were public facts, not some private concern.

“Think of it as a performance piece,” said Lucinda.

“I’m out of that line, I told you. Sounds more like a job for Sniffles Harvey.”

“Screw Harvey. If you help with the zoo we’d let you manage our band. Like Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.” Lucinda pictured him as the giant mammal, his tender ghostly paws on their shoulders, guiding the band forward.

“I don’t want to manage anything, thank you.” Examining his work, Falmouth ran fingers spotty with ink over his sweaty dome and left a blue smudge high on his brow. He shrugged conclusively and tore the page from the waitress’s pad. “Here. I award you the first result, a token of my affection.”

“Thank you,” said Lucinda.

“It’s great,” said Matthew, barely looking.

“Are you hungry again?” said Falmouth. “I know it’s ridiculous, but I could eat.”

“I’m starved,” said Matthew inattentively. He stretched his legs under the table, his posture oblique and catlike. He’d shifted back into his body, recovered his vanity.

“Let’s go to San Pedro and get crabs,” said Lucinda. “It seems like nobody ever goes to San Pedro anymore.”

“That’s a long way,” said Falmouth.

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d had these crabs. Also the Mexican garlic bread they’ve got on the wharf. When’s the last time you saw the Pacific Ocean, Falmouth?”

“Oh, I’ve seen the ocean. It’s you pale starving musicians who never go west of La Cienega.”

“And the beer,” said Lucinda. “The beer tastes good by the water.”

“I’d have to get gas,” mused Matthew.

“Do they have bibs?” said Falmouth, glancing at his spotless white shirt. He flagged the waitress, motioning with her own pen for the check. They’d go to San Pedro, it was unmistakable, but there was pleasure in protracting the debate, letting their craving grow. Hugo’s kitchen was still pumping out frittatas heaped with curds for late brunchers, while sparrows crept at their feet pilfering crumbs and the indolent hours unfurled. Maybe elsewhere Lucinda’s phone rang off the hook. Maybe a disgruntled Shelf shredded Matthew’s shower curtain or was pillaging his kitchen, maybe Falmouth’s gallery had been set on fire by irate complainers, it didn’t matter. Today, the day after the Aparty, they were escape artists, had dissolved their grievances in the coffee and sunlight, and now nothing could touch them. They’d become that rarest version of themselves, uncomplainers.

he did not call. He had not called. There was no call. Not, anyway, on Saturday. By the time Matthew dropped Lucinda at her doorstep it was nearly dark again and, happily polluted with beer and lemon butter–drenched crabs and just one margarita, fingernails still grainy with pepper and salt, she’d not troubled to think of Carl, her complainer, for hours, since the moment on Hugo’s deck when, long having decided not to speak of him to Falmouth or Matthew she’d also realized she could free herself of any thought of him, for at least the day. If she were in love with him he’d return to her mind, just as if he were in love with her he’d surely ring her phone. Not that it meant the opposite if he hadn’t. He never had, she realized, never at that number, only on the complaint line. Not that she’d rushed home to check. Blotted with beer and sunshine, she’d thought of anything else, or nothing, at her doorstep. Instead embraced her friend-exes, each of whom had stepped from the car to make farewells. Or perhaps Falmouth only moved from the backseat to the passenger seat she’d vacated. Anyway, they embraced. She kissed them both with tongue, for sport. Falmouth, then Matthew. Both met her with surprised but willing mouths, as if caught forming a word to remain unspoken. They tasted of garlic and beer. Falmouth of cigarettes too. If neither utterly swooned to her kiss neither rebuffed her. Besides, she gave them barely a chance. Just tongue and a smudge of her hips and goodbye. She checked the machine with her keys still in her hand, the light switch unreached, not so much thinking of the complainer in particular, just drunken automatism. He hadn’t called. He didn’t call Sunday, either.