You Don't Love Me Yet

four

the receptionist wore a lab coat and black-frame glasses, and perhaps wasn’t a receptionist at all but a zoological veterinarian who’d taken a seat at the receptionist’s desk. She was too young, though, to be Dr. Marian. The girl sat alone paging through the newspaper and eating a drippy egg-salad sandwich and Lucinda had to speak to get her attention, feeling more like an intruder than she’d expected, Matthew’s paranoia rubbed off on her. She was within her public citizen’s rights to stroll into the zoo’s offices, she reminded herself.

“Excuse me for bothering you. I, ah, need to pick up some checks.”

“Checks?”

“For, um—” Lucinda mimed questing for a name on her tongue’s tip, then glanced at a scrap of paper yanked from her pocket: “Matthew, yes, Matthew Plangent.”

“I think he’s sick.”

“Sorry?”

“He’s out sick.”

“Oh, right, that’s why I’m picking up his—materials.”

“What kind of materials?”

“Paychecks and any other materials that would be waiting here for him.”

The girl shrugged and tipped her chin in the direction of a grid of twenty or thirty cubbyholes on the wall at Lucinda’s left. These were labeled with last names, alphabetically. Lucinda scooped the bundle of envelopes and circulars that filled Matthew’s cubby and tucked them into her bag, trusting the checks to be among them.

“Is there a Dr. Marian or someone with that name here?”

“Down the hall to your right.”

The brass nameplate beside the pebbled-glass door read MARIAN RORSCHACH, B.V.SC., M.R.C.V.S., PH.D., DIRECTOR. The door was ajar, but Lucinda paused to rap on the glass. Classical music seeped from the room.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Marian?” Lucinda parsed a silhouette moving against a daylit window, fragmented to pixels by the door’s glass. She felt her heart lurch, regretting her gambit at the last moment, too late.

“Come in.”

Marian Rorschach wore a white coat too, over a black turtleneck that reminded Lucinda of Matthew’s own frequent costume, though Dr. Rorschach’s had been stretched around gallon-size breasts where Matthew’s was draped on a skeleton. Her heavy-fleshed face was deeply handsome, dark eyes glittering in pouchy seats. Her full black hair, bound Japanese-style in a sagging bun, bore a skunklike streak of white. She gnawed a paper clip while she studied a sheaf of papers open on her computerless desk as Lucinda entered. Now she removed the clip from the corner of her mouth and twisted a dial on a small transistor radio at her desk’s corner, lowering the volume.

“Can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak with you for a moment.”

“Concerning?”

“I write for the Echo Park Annoyance,” said Lucinda. “I’m here concerning an alleged marsupial that may have been expropriated from your premises.”

“Expropriated.”

“In so many words, yes.”

Dr. Marian raised one eyebrow and gestured at a leather chair to one side of the desk. “Sit down.”

“Thank you, I’ll stand.” The chair was low and soft, a possible bid for advantage on the part of Dr. Marian.

“What’s your name?”

“My name isn’t important.”

“I see, I see.” Dr. Marian tapped her pen against her desk and studied Lucinda. “You talk like a cop,” she said suddenly, her tone heavy.

“Thank you,” blurted Lucinda.

“But I don’t think that’s where you got this wrong impression of yours,” Dr. Marian continued. “In fact, I don’t think you really know anything about any alleged marsupials at all, not from the sound of things.”

“You might think that and be wrong,” said Lucinda. This sport of insinuation recalled a game she’d played as a child, of pulling her fingers from underneath another child’s hands and slapping them on top, an escapade which inevitably turned frantic, then painful. “For all you know this rookie reporter might have stumbled into a very close encounter with the alleged aforementioned.”

“I’m glad you say rookie,” said Dr. Marian. “It saves me saying it.”

“I meant eager and tireless, not gullible.”

“Gullible is another excellent word I thank you for supplying.”

Lucinda opted for bluntness. “Your establishment is missing a kangaroo, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir. We’re missing nothing.”

“One of your protégés has gone guerrilla.”

“The person in question is a malingerer who takes too many sick days, nothing more.”

Lucinda found herself trembling under Dr. Marian’s imperious command. She understood Matthew better now, seeing the regime he’d been negotiating. It aroused her sympathy, and a kind of jealousy as well.

“The person in question liberated a martyr kangaroo,” said Lucinda, working to keep any sulkiness from her voice.

“A foolish legend that I’ve heard circulating.”

“I’ve seen the captive, living anonymously among apartment dwellers, like Patty Hearst.”

“As I told the police, no sane person, let alone a zoo employee, would keep a kangaroo in an urban apartment. For one thing an adult kangaroo defecates three or four times a day with results approximately the size of a baseball glove, a catcher’s mitt specifically.”

“No sane person,” Lucinda echoed.

“That’s what I said.”

“There’s sense in that.” Lucinda felt herself bent helplessly, like light in a prism, into service to Dr. Marian’s interests.

“I’m glad you see the sense in what I say.”

“Of course certain persons might in certain local situations have acted less sane than other certain persons might have hoped. And would now therefore be facing more or less exactly a three-to-four-catcher’s-mitts-per-day type of situation.”

“There’s only one answer for a person in that type of situation,” said Dr. Marian. Lucinda noticed, perhaps too late, a susceptibility in Dr. Marian’s responses for matching her interrogator’s rhythms. Might this have been exploited? More likely it was only a glimpse of Dr. Marian’s ability to absorb and redirect what came within her orbit, particularly anything threatening to the zoo’s priorities.

“What’s the answer?” said Lucinda.

“Get sane in a hurry.”

“I see. And if that person were to want to come in from the cold, so to speak?”

“As you should understand from what I’ve said, it is and always will be a nonevent.”

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure.” Dr. Marian gestured at the door. Lucinda found herself moving toward it.

“Dr. Marian?”

“Yes?”

“You haven’t ever given any thoughts to lending your gifts to a greater variety of causes, say for instance to managing a very promising rock-and-roll band?”

“Is that a question you ask at the end of every interview?”

“Sorry?”

“I don’t read the Annoyance, and I was wondering whether that was some sort of generic question, like what is your favorite color or are you a morning person or a night person, or if it had something to do with my work at the zoo.”

“No, it isn’t generic. You’re an extraordinary negotiator and I just wondered if you would ever think of representing a musician or group.”

“I’d have to hear their music first.”

“Thank you very much,” said Lucinda. “I won’t take any more of your time.”

a carpenter pried with his hammer’s claw at the joints of the cubicle, squeaking a bent nail from agonized plywood. Beside him Lucinda sat in the middle of the gallery floor with an un-ringing telephone between her knees. The complaint office was being hurriedly disassembled, subject to Falmouth’s hostility to lazy transitions. Lucinda and the interns had convened to handle a last round of calls, while Falmouth himself tore the black paper from the storefront windows. The phrase “no more complaints,” with which he’d instructed them to answer the phones, had already cued sobbing panic in a few habitual callers.

The cubicle dividers fell and bands of afternoon light saturated the deeper recesses of the gallery. The interns appeared exhilarated by the destruction. In intervals between murmured farewells to their complainers they refreshed themselves with yoga postures and cigarettes, with takeout Chinese and flirting with the carpenters. Falmouth fretted among them, sidestepping whisk-broomed piles of chips and dust that might accrue to his black cuffs. After the weekend’s dissolution he’d donned a crisp suit, scraped head and chin free of stubble. His firm gaze didn’t confess any memory of a crab-salty kiss. Lucinda sat alone taking sporadic calls, pining for what she hadn’t known she’d miss. The only complainer who mattered hadn’t called. Now the stage set was being struck.

By evening the carpenters were gone. Falmouth’s interns wandered like cats in the lengthening shadows, cradling their phones. But by seven the calls had begun to trail away. The interns yawned, asked to be excused, delivered a round of hugs, vanished. Falmouth rinsed their chopsticks and he and Lucinda set into the cold ruin of takeout, prawns and snow peas sunk in an aspic of cornstarch and vinegar.

“I guess I need a job,” said Lucinda.

“Or a number-one record.”

“I need to pay the rent in two weeks. I may have to go back to the factory where they assemble cappuccinos.”

“Stay on the payroll. You can write my grant proposals.”

“What are you doing next?”

“Our official line will be nothing.”

A neatly zipped black leather portfolio leaned against Falmouth’s desk. He bore as well a telltale smudge of graphite on the heel of his right hand. Crumbs of pink eraser decorated his lap. He’d been drawing again. She didn’t confront him.

“Why can’t you say you’re doing nothing yourself?” she said.

“It’s better if I pay you to say it.”

They pushed the meal into the garbage. Falmouth moved to the master panel to switch off the overhead lights, but Lucinda said, “I think I’ll stay a bit longer.”

Falmouth raised his eyebrows.

“They’ll start ringing again around nine,” she said. “They always do.”

“I was afraid someone would get sentimental,” he said. “I didn’t realize it would be you. I asked the phone company to cancel the number. It should be cut off shortly after midnight.”

He left her alone there. The institute was an ember flaring on the brink of ash. Falmouth was right. Lucinda stayed for more than just the hope of the complainer’s call. She was a secret curator now. When they rang she answered in the old way. Let them think nothing had changed, until it was too late. She was Florence Nightingale, or a nun among the lepers. A man told her he’d suffered a paper cut on his testicle. Another said his nephew had stolen his collection of vintage lobby cards. A woman or possibly a child made a sound like a rabbit gnawing a carrot.

She thought about dialing the complainer’s number and didn’t.

The sixth or seventh caller was Denise. “There you are,” said the drummer. “Let’s go out.”

“I’m sort of on a vigil. A person might phone me here.”

“The one from the other night?”

“Yes.” They both knew who they were talking about. “Maybe you could come here.”

“You want something to drink?”

“Maybe pick up a six.”

“A six it is.”

“And hey, Denise?”

“Yes?”

“Who cut your hair?”

“I did it myself.”

“A six and scissors.”

he walked into the storefront, an hour after Denise. They’d forgotten to lock the door, and sat deep in the gallery’s rear, ignoring the line’s sporadic ringing. Lucinda sat encircled by her former hair, which lay in a pattern suggesting a controlled explosion. She’d removed her shoes and shirt, wore above her jeans only a pale blue brassiere, its surface furred with a hectic chiaroscuro of hair, as were her neck and shoulders and the knees of her jeans. Denise maypoled around Lucinda in her chair, a bottle in one hand, shears in the other, squinting and burping, making hedging adjustments to her initial ferocious attack. They had no mirror.

The complainer appeared in their ring of light and Lucinda’s hands flew up to feel the spiky new contours of her head. There was an obscure shame in his seeing the haircut sooner than her. A trickling of hair rained from her lifted arms into the hoisted cleft of her breasts, making her feel even more unhidden. Not that there was any privilege he hadn’t already claimed, or she hadn’t offered gladly. He smiled and scratched his jaw and she was struck again by the slightly penisy glamour of his cleft chin and nose, his sculpted lips, his baggy eyes. His hand slid to his stomach, to stuff his flopped shirttails into his belt, as though unconsciously feeling he ought to make some effort, having intruded on a scene of grooming.

“You’re the drummer,” he said.

“Denise.”

“Carl. Nice to meet you.”

“You were at the show.”

“Oh, yes,” he said shyly. “It was sensational.”

“Thank you.”

“Want a beer?” said Lucinda.

“Sure, thanks.”

Lucinda handed a bottle to the complainer from the six beneath her chair, then twisted the cap off a fresh one for herself. Clipped ends floated as she moved, as though she dwelled in a snow globe of hair.

Denise found a push broom and plowed clippings into an ersatz animal behind Lucinda’s chair. Lucinda darted up and brushed herself against the complainer, parted lips raking his collar, then turned, huddling in her goose-pimpled arms, to fetch her shirt.

“Don’t stop on my account,” said the complainer, taking a long pull on his beer. “I’ll just sit and watch.”

“It doesn’t look finished?” Lucinda slid her T-shirt and sweater, still balled together, over her head, scattering more hair.

“I’m no judge. It seems you’re after a hairstyle that complements the band’s sound, something wild and natural, like a flock of hedgehogs. Are you going to confront the singer, though? Because now he’s the only one with girlish hair.”

“Matthew.”

“And the person on the stool is Bedwin, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll play keyboards, I guess.”

Lucinda put her finger to her lips, though she felt a thrill at the image, Carl’s big shoulders hunched over a Farfisa organ, jostling onstage somewhere between Bedwin’s stool and Denise’s kit.

“I feel like you’re Lucinda’s imaginary friend,” said Denise, not seeming to have noticed his remark. “Like I’m not really supposed to be able to see you.”

Lucinda widened her eyes at Carl: I haven’t told our secret, she beamed into his thoughts. He couldn’t reasonably be angry that Denise had noticed their embrace at Jules Harvey’s loft. Lucinda realized she wanted Denise to know.

The complainer seemed not to register Lucinda’s alarm. He drew a chair from the gallery’s darkened corner, into their pool of light, and seated himself. “I’d make some joke about how difficult it is for us imaginary friends,” he said. “The constant struggle to remain visible, etcetera. But the truth is I think it’s you guys, the band, I mean, who are figments of my imagination.”

Lucinda vibrated, hearing his voice, seeing him here again before her, real. Since the night of the gig and their parting she’d binged on drink and crabs, talked on telephones and operated heavy machinery, even sort of kissed someone else, two someone elses. Swimming in her desultory bedsheets Sunday morning she’d masturbated three times, the last humping the ridge of a throw pillow. Yet it all seemed less than a parenthesis now, events not even so vivid as dreams, more like tableaux glimpsed on a television playing in the background somewhere, one no one had thought to switch off.

“How are we figments of your imagination?” said Denise. She inspected him defiantly, wary of sarcasm. She’d pulled up a rolling office chair and plopped down, stretching her legs between Carl and Lucinda as if to assert that she wouldn’t be reduced to third-wheel status.

The complainer emptied his beer with a satisfied gasp, put the bottle aside. “Just a minute,” he said, and drew a matchbox from his shirt pocket. He slid open its drawer to produce a tightly rolled joint, then struck a match to spark its tip. “Here’s the thing,” he said, through his first whalelike indraft and burst of exhaled fume. “I spent the last few days thinking about this. It really knocked me for a loop at first. You singing my songs, I mean.”

“Your songs?” said Denise. Lucinda was struck dumb, could only listen.

“My little scribblings, my first drafts,” he said. He handed the joint to Lucinda. “My complaints, whatever you want to call them. That was you scratching away with a pen on the other end of the line, wasn’t it?”

Lucinda nodded, hypnotized. Carl was claiming the band. She couldn’t justifiably object. Any ground she stood on was under water, tide lapping at her knees or higher. In truth, she wanted him to have what he liked. That was in the nature of her discovery, her strange new love. More, the aura of her submission widened to enclose Denise as well. Lucinda was only curious about what the complainer might make Denise do.

Lucinda drew weakly on the joint, crossing her eyes to be certain its lit end flared. She’d never been a cigarette smoker, and when she puffed marijuana she felt like a fraud, contriving at an act natural to others. Clutching at a lungful, she passed the smoldering joint to Denise, as if to transmit some whiff of complicity. Denise accepted it without meeting Lucinda’s eye.

“The things you said, the things that became lyrics, you were thinking them for the first time when you said them to me, right?” Lucinda heard plaintiveness leak into her voice.

Carl shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m always worrying away at one motif or another. I was taken with what you did with ‘monster eyes’ and ‘astronaut food.’”

“Everyone likes ‘Monster Eyes,’” Lucinda gushed, grateful to escape to this point of universal consent.

“It’s got itchiness, like I was telling you,” said the complainer. “Everyone likes it because everyone thinks it’s about them. Like a decal of the soul. I’d say I wish I’d thought it up myself, if I hadn’t.”

“You thought up ‘Monster Eyes’?” said Denise. She sucked at the joint, gobbling smoke like a pro, even as she squinted at Carlton in suspicion.

“The words came out of this mouth.”

“You didn’t mean them as a song, though,” urged Lucinda.

“No, I imagined I was seducing you,” he admitted. “Which I seem to have done while writing a song in my spare time. I’m very impressed with myself.”

Denise’s gaze was fixed on Carlton, as if to meet his challenge with the most essential part of herself, more on the band’s behalf than on Lucinda’s. She kept the marijuana cigarette tucked between her fingers, her cupped hand hovering near her mouth, puffing very slightly. Lucinda had seen before how the drummer would enter a state of fierce intoxication, crafting a thick foggy lens of drug or drink through which to peer out at the world, a transparent shield. “So you tricked Lucinda into using your shitty lyrics,” she said. Her tone wasn’t wholly unfriendly. “And now you want to take credit for songs that were basically written by Bedwin, someone you’ve never met.”

“I’d like very much to meet him.”

“Do you want to destroy the band?”

“How could I want to do that?” he said. “I basically am the band.”

“What do you want out of this? What exactly do you think is going to happen?”

“I want what we all want,” said Carl. “To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the external world, to see if they can be embraced. What’s incredible is that it happened without my knowledge. Like putting on clothes somebody laid out on a bed for you and finding the pockets are full of money and car keys and an address book full of new friends.”

“Now you’re getting to the point,” said Denise. “You see us as a fund of young new friends.” She handed the joint back to him, reduced to a mushy nub. “One of whom you get to fuck.”

“Isn’t there a tradition of liaisons within musical groups?” he said. “I’m surprised you don’t have any already.”

“I can choose who I fuck, Denise,” said Lucinda.

“I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t your choice. Though if I were in the mood for white hair I’d be more inclined to go for that Fancher Autumnbreast, myself. At least he’s sort of a hipster. No offense, Carl, but you don’t really look like a member of a rock-and-roll band.”

“None taken. Maybe I should ask you for a haircut.”

“I wouldn’t fool with that,” said Denise. “Your long hair is all you’ve got going for you. We could dye it black or orange, maybe. But then we’d have to do your eyebrows, too. It’s probably hopeless.”

“I can dress up like this Autumnbreast, if you tell me how. I’ve never seen him, just heard his voice on the radio.”

“It’s not the clothes but how you wear them.”

“I’m sure that’s true. Like our singer, Matthew. Is that who you’re drawn to, personally?”

“You don’t know me well enough to ask me that, Carl,” said Denise. She might have turned a little red.

“You’re right, it’s better for band members to leave these things unspoken,” said Carl.

“I didn’t say anything like that.”

“Maybe I misread the onstage vibes.”

“Being in a band isn’t about hair or clothes,” said Lucinda, wanting to blunt the hostilities. “The point is the music.” The assertion, which she’d only uttered as a diversion, seemed instantly both profound and obvious. She waited for Carl’s and Denise’s acclaim, not so much to confirm her point as to test their grasp of essential realities.

“That may be true,” said Carl. He siphoned the soggy nubbin of joint, then tossed it sideways into the shadows of the gallery. “Only, as a good friend of mine used to say, you can’t be deep without a surface.”

They stared at him, the bass player and drummer, trying to digest the phrase, which conveyed itself into their minds like a drug itself: toxic, gnarled, ineradicable.

“Deep without a surface,” repeated Denise.

“Yes,” said Carlton. “You can’t be, that’s the point.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Lucinda understood that Denise only meant it as a brave show of resistance to the phrase’s colonizing effects.

“Did a good friend of yours really used to say that?” said Lucinda. She felt obscurely jealous.

“No, I made it up just now.”

“That could be the name of an album,” said Denise. “Deep Without a Surface.”

“The kind of guys who name an album that would have songs that each took up a whole side,” said Lucinda.

“They could be called the Deep Surfaces,” said Denise.

“Or Deep and the Surfaces,” said Lucinda. “There wouldn’t be any pictures of them on the record sleeve.”

“Just their instruments,” said Denise. “Because all that matters is the music.”

“Whereas for our band the opposite is true,” said the complainer.

Again they stared at him as if his words had opened up some pit in the floor.

“I just realized,” said Denise. “‘You can’t be deep without a surface’ describes the situation perfectly. The lyrics you wrote, they wouldn’t amount to anything at all if we hadn’t played them onstage. They wouldn’t be worth ten cents if they weren’t coming out of Matthew’s mouth.”

“Matthew makes a very nice human bumper sticker or coffee mug,” said Carl.

“If you tried to take his place it wouldn’t work,” said Denise.

“I’m not taking his place, I’m assuming my own.”

“You act like you’re some skinny backup singer, some inconspicuous element. We’re not an orchestra, Carl. We can’t just give you a tambourine and hide you behind an amp or something.”

“A lot of groups have five members, don’t they?”

“Have you looked in the mirror? Remember when they tried to put Frankenstein in a tuxedo? What was that movie?”

“Last Tango in Paris?”

“Exactly.”

Lucinda felt vertigo watching Carl and Denise’s jesting struggle. She wished to brush away their banter, wave it off like smoke. Was the complainer moving nearer to Lucinda, or farther away? It seemed both at once. She wanted him to want her body, not her band. She wished to be swallowed, laid open with her robe undone across a dirty yellow chair. But his appetite seemed to be drifting. There was confusion here too, since the image of the dirty yellow chair came from a song, though not originally. That was the problem: Carlton’s claim on the band was perversely justified, and impossible to disentangle. The more Denise denied him that claim the further he inched in, an intrusion that would have seemed impossible an hour earlier.

“Nobody takes Matthew seriously,” said Lucinda. “Last week at the supermarket I saw a woman watching him like he was an ocelot on a nature show, like she wanted to go to the pet store and buy one for herself. It’s not so easy being a human bumper sticker.”

“Sad,” said Carl.

“It is sad. The whole band relies on his charisma. We’re exploiting him. I think he senses it.”

“There’s nothing sadder than being a genius of sex,” said the complainer. “Evoking nothing but pleasure in the eyes of others.”

“I never thought of it that way,” said Denise. “It’s sort of an involuntary condition.”

“In another age people like him became priests or nuns,” said Lucinda dreamily.

“Let’s go out and beat up some unattractive people,” said Carl.

Lucinda and Denise stared at him. He raised his hands as if at gunpoint. “Though arguably that would be taking things too far.”

Denise sprang from her chair, fitful. “Matthew’s not the problem,” she said. She seemed to be carrying on some internal dialogue. “Matthew can take care of himself.” She began to pace, stalking the perimeter of their chairs like the zoo’s coyote working its cage’s limits. “I’m thinking of Bedwin now.”

“Bedwin?”

“Yes, he’d have to be treated gently. The band is his whole planet, he doesn’t know anything else.”

Carl shrugged. “So his planet just got a little more—various.”

“You don’t know him,” said Lucinda. “All he does is watch the same black-and-white movie over and over and write songs.”

“He could take the fact that he collaborated unknowingly with someone like you very badly,” said Denise. She hung on the rim of darkness, her features shrouded, as though playing to an unseen crowd. Her words seemed to take it for granted that the three of them all dwelled within some common understanding or intention.

“Who does he think wrote the lyrics?” said Carl.

“If I understand Bedwin, he doesn’t think about it. He might not even remember which ones are his and which Lucinda brought to him.”

“Sounds fine to me,” said Carlton. “Why not just leave it at that?”

“What do you mean?”

“When somebody’s living in a delusory world, it isn’t necessarily your job to pull them out of it. Not unless you’ve got a better one to offer in its place.”

“You mean a better delusion?” said Lucinda.

Carl shrugged, as if to say, What else? “What needs saying? Doesn’t he trust the two of you?”

“Of course.”

“So what do you say we just leave it up to us?”

Denise strolled the shadow boundary, no longer agitated. She glanced at Lucinda, perhaps seeking a sign. Lucinda and the complainer sat in a triangle with Denise’s vacated chair, under lights still wreathed in smoke. Lucinda had abandoned her sneakers on the floor and raised her socked feet to the chair’s lip, hugging her knees to her breasts. Carlton sprawled in the abdicated space between them, his thighs spread wide, one foot upright and the other limply horizontal, between Lucinda’s empty sneakers, his posture grotesquely unashamed and inviting. His shirt was misbuttoned, skewed, riding up to expose a river of hair. Carl was pubic all the way to his neck.

The complainer had plopped himself in the middle of her life and band. Perhaps it was Falmouth’s fault. Carl had found his way to her ear, like a hummingbird pollinating a flower, solely due to Falmouth’s foolish project. The interns had planted stickers and had drawn the attention of an author of stickers, like calling to like, a coyote’s howl across canyons. Perhaps Carlton’s entry into the band should be seen in this light, as Falmouth’s latest art piece, committed unconsciously. Lucinda felt a clandestine devotion to Falmouth, whose imagination embraced more than he knew. But Falmouth was in her past, as was Matthew. Beautiful fallen displaced Matthew.

She could choose who to fuck. Her own words. And she had. She felt her choice in a place in her throat, a hollow pressurized walnut she couldn’t gulp away. She knew it at the juncture where her crossed heels sought the seam of her jeans, where she’d begun to sway and mash against herself, to covertly masturbate, just a little. The room seemed to tilt, to urge her forward in her chair. She stared at Carl. Carlton Complainer. To choose who to fuck is to choose who gets to fuck you. But not how. That was for them to know and you to find out. Lucinda was ready for Denise to leave now. She uncoiled from her chair and moved across to slide into Carl’s lap, made herself small enough to occupy him like a landscape. He grasped her hip and cinched her nearer to him. Kissed her hair, as she squirreled at his neck. A long moment elapsed, one that might have been five or twenty minutes. She sensed dimly Denise waving a silent goodbye, somewhere out of the range where anything much mattered. Then heard a click as the distant gallery door was shut against an instant’s susurrus of wheels tracing Sunset’s blacktop.

“I want a drink,” she said, even as she struggled at the buttons of his fly, trying to free him from his jeans.

“Let’s get you one.”

“I don’t even know your last name,” she said.

“Vogelsong.”

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“I don’t like it. It doesn’t sound like you.” With the native urgency of a child squatting to urinate on a highway shoulder she bunched her pants and underwear at her thighs, then lowered herself like a mouth. He hardened within her. She grunted, shuddering high in her gullet, lengthening her back, arraying herself like a question mark above him, a long doubting curl culminating in one irrefutable point.

“I can’t help it,” he sighed. “It’s my name.”

“Vocalsong, what’s that, it’s like Wetwater or Flavortaste or something—”

“It’s German,” he said. “Vogel means bird.” The complainer’s nostrils widened, the only evidence he was more than a venue for Lucinda’s tremors.

“Birdsong?”

“Song isn’t song. It comes from Vogelfang. It means fowling.”

It was a while before she could produce her question. “Fowling?”

“Catching fowls.”

“You mean hunting,” she said. “Catching their hearts with bullets.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Carlton Birdkiller.” She slid from him now, between his legs, to the floor. She’d orgasmed, he hadn’t.

“Carl,” he corrected.

“Carl Birdkiller.”

He rebuttoned himself. “You want to get a drink?”

“Yes, please.”