You Don't Love Me Yet

five

the band shed their instruments in their accustomed places, scattered across the vast Persian carpet at the west-facing windows of Carl Vogelsong’s thirtieth-story Olive Street condominium, a loft as high-placed above its surroundings as Jules Harvey’s, though otherwise its opposite. Harvey dwelled in a spartan corner, leaving the rest of his space as a tabula rasa for the enactment of public schemes, whereas the complainer spread his living space to every corner, saturating the cavernous room with antique furniture, lead-glass floor lamps and glass-paneled bookshelves, local arrangements of love seats and divans suggesting rooms without walls. His bed was partitioned from the wider space by a floor-brushing green velvet curtain on a polished wooden rail, and his lavish kitchen was formed of an archipelago of countertops and appliances around a monolithic six-burner range, a kind of theater-in-the-round in the loft’s middle. The complainer had hired a moving van and crew to shift the band’s equipment into the loft, having first cleared the blood-and-rust-colored carpet, itself the size of Denise’s whole living room, as a practice space.

In the past weeks the band had clocked their rehearsals to the sunset’s glow, as if claiming the power to orchestrate the melting of the continent’s last light into the far-twinkling surf. Then, usually, the complainer would order in Vietnamese or Sushi takeout, lemongrass chicken or Ventura hand rolls. The band would unpack white folded paper boxes across his oak table, a four-leaf large enough to bear piles of books and scatterings of ashtrays full of joint butts and a corral of the previous night’s wine-stained glasses at one end and still invitingly seat five or six at the other. Tonight, however, the table had been cleared, a starched cloth thrown over it, the complainer’s best china and crystal set out. While they practiced, Falmouth had been cooking, boiling down onions and garlic and pork sausages in a tremendous black skillet, brewing what he called his legendary sauce.

Falmouth had become domesticated to the band. Summer break had freed him from his teaching. With no students to impress he’d slacked in both conceptual edge and dress code, though his white T-shirts were uniformly crisp and bright, as if pulled from a dispenser like tissues. Since the disbanding of the complaint center his gallery remained barren. He’d done nothing but scribble in enormous spiral-bound pads with crayon or ballpoint, whatever lay at hand. A fly-on-the-wall at rehearsals, he’d by now produced dozens of sketches of the five working at their music, a pile of pages he shucked from his book as they were done, offering them to the band or letting them fall at his feet. Someone—Bedwin? Denise?—had draped the discarded pages in a stack on the glass top of one of the complainer’s several pinball machines, where they formed a loose dossier of the band’s incorporation of Carl and his small, upright organ into their company.

Carlton stood, as in Lucinda’s vision, between Bedwin, who still played seated, now in a salvaged barber’s chair, and Denise’s drums. He and Lucinda shared a mike stand. The band had slackened, made room, inching to the edges of the Persian. The complainer’s noodly organ riffs and atonal backing vocals found a place too, in a middle of their sound the band might not otherwise have known existed. Like a checker cab with an extra seat, they could carry him. When they played “Monster Eyes,” the song that was their signature, their credential, Carl shouted his backing vocals, and played his wonky organ fills in the manner of free jazz. The band’s response was to play louder and more careeningly, raising their energy to meet and contend with his. Matthew sang with daredevil brilliance, as though shrugging off a challenge he’d never acknowledge. The song grew resolute, intractable, like some enormous watch spring that gained force the more tightly it was wound.

Now, rehearsal concluded, they drifted from the carpet toward the table. Falmouth had set out a monumental steaming bowl of bare cooked spaghetti, a quarter-stick of butter melting at its peak. The complainer hoisted bottles of wine from a rack and clapped them on the table. Matthew set to grating a brick of cheese Falmouth had thrust into his hands. Glistening blobs of tomato spattered the stove in a halo at the burner where the sauce had simmered, its savor investing through the loft. Falmouth’s T-shirt was somehow spotless. Carl jerked the cork from a bottle while Falmouth elbowed past him, hands in oven mitts, to plunk the skillet between the candleholders. Matches were struck and touched to wicks, goblets splashed full, sauce ladled, Parmesan strewn to form a gooey lattice over oil-shiny plates of red-heaped noodles. Talk lulled as eating began, verbal noise replaced by a music of smacking lips, glasses clinked to teeth, the suck of spaghetti stretched by forks from pools of viscosity.

“There’s both sweet and hot sausages,” Falmouth lectured. “Though by now the peppered oil from the hot will have informed the entire base of the sauce. The secret ingredient is heaping spoonfuls of white sugar, more than you’d want to know about. Watch out for bay leaves, they’re as sharp as shark’s teeth. You’ve got one there, Bedwin.”

“Put it here,” said Denise, indicating an empty ashtray. Bedwin plucked the gleaming black leaf from the bird’s nest of his pasta and held it aloft in sauce-shrouded fingers.

“All the best meals require an elephant’s graveyard,” said Falmouth. “Piles of shells or pits or bones. Bay leaves are like a small piece of corruption in our food, like the element of a skull in certain early Renaissance marriage paintings.”

“You’d certainly never find one in a can of Chef Boyardee,” said Denise.

“A bay leaf, or a skull?” said Lucinda.

“Either.”

“Listen, we should have a toast,” said Matthew. “It’s our last rehearsal before we go on the radio. And Falmouth cooked.”

“Stop eating for a minute, you greedy pigs,” said Falmouth. “I propose a toast to ‘Monster Eyes,’ that awful song by that awful band.”

“No, no,” said Matthew. “To you, Falmouth. For this meal. For being our manager and spaghetti cooker.”

“I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not your manager. You need a proper advocate, someone who can tolerate your music.”

“To Falmouth and to ‘Monster Eyes’ and to Bedwin, our secret genius,” said Denise. “He who makes it all happen.”

“Yes, to Bedwin,” said Matthew. “For putting words in my mouth. May you never go solo, god help us.”

“I can’t sing,” said Bedwin, as if he really needed to reassure them.

Lucinda, wineglass lofted, suffered a stirring of resentment. Hadn’t she supplied the words to ‘Monster Eyes’ before their eyes? Had they suppressed all memory of the fateful rehearsal? Theirs was a band whose secret genius had a secret genius, a conspiracy huddled around a confusion. “Another toast,” she blurted. “From Carl, our newest member.”

The complainer was bent to his fork, connected by noodles to both teeth and plate. He ate streamingly, employing circular breathing like a horn player. Gulping, he made his eyes wide to show his willingness to speak once he’d choked down the mouthful. Matthew took up the second bottle and replenished their glasses.

“Okay, a toast,” said the complainer. He stood and licked his thumb. “I like Falmouth’s idea. To the stone in the cherry, the jellyfish in the lagoon, the loser among winners, the figure in the carpet, the crack in the Liberty Bell.” He cleared his throat. They waited, glasses poised, uncertain he was finished. Except for Matthew, who went on eating, pointedly ignoring him. “To the tiny mouse’s skull in the can of Chef Boyardee,” he went on, “the one which results in a settlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“Those aren’t really all the same thing,” said Denise.

“The jellyfish in the lagoon should be a song,” said Bedwin.

“Get to work on that, you genius,” muttered Matthew.

“More,” said Lucinda, raptly.

“To the shark’s tooth, the mouse’s skull, the sour note, the sour mash, the mash note, the sour grapes, the souring of an old friendship,” said the complainer. “To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions. To bad sex.”

“Watch yourself,” said Falmouth. “Some of us haven’t had bad sex in so long we forgot that it was bad.”

“To forgetting it was bad,” said the complainer, gulping back another mouthful of wine. “To telephoning an old lover and pretending to forget it was bad, to falling back into bed when you know you shouldn’t, to sucking the dregs.”

“You mean like a cup of coffee?”

“Exactly. The dregs of a relationship, like the dregs in a cup of coffee. To the greed of a coffee drinker for one last sip, when all that remains is a bitter sludge.”

Lucinda felt gripped by an irrational jealousy. Had an old lover called him on the telephone? The instrument in question was banished to a far corner of the loft, a single ancient black enamel model with a rotary dial. It rang seldom and was answered, in Lucinda’s sight, never. She’d stayed at the complainer’s loft around the clock lately, up with him past dawn after rehearsals, then sleeping late into the next day, when she’d wake to find Carl preparing breakfast at two or three in the afternoon. Hardly worth returning to her apartment before the band convened again. Besides, once she’d ferried in some spare underwear and socks there was nothing to return for. After rehearsal and dinner she’d help the others pack their instruments, then escort them into the corridor and elevator. She had no wish to rub in anyone’s face that she enjoyed special privileges yet no interest in hiding it, either. She felt a certain munificence in having ushered the band through so much, lyrics, gig, new member, new rehearsal space. Any trace of resentment in the others Lucinda chalked to confusion, perhaps even fear at what had overtaken them: the possibility of success. She now adopted Falmouth’s attitude: most artists were their own worst enemies. As for her, she’d left hesitation behind with her apartment, her hamper full of dirty clothes, her phone blinking with who-knew-what messages. She was no longer curious what the foot sign thought. The answer to any remaining question was yes: yes to staying beside the complainer, yes to what she felt when she was beside him. The answer to any other question, questions to do with the band’s feelings, or Matthew’s, anything outside the loft and the music they made there, was: yes, quit asking. Don’t imagine a broader ratification was due, from the foot sign or anywhere else. Embrace the bay leaf of the moment, which, unlike the foot sign, wasn’t divided into happy and sad but was instead sweet and fearful on both of its faces.

But who called the complainer’s telephone? It did ring. That he never answered it seemed to speak of the richness of his existence, and of their joint existence, now that she’d moved in with him in all but name. Other people’s apartments, including her own, seemed by comparison little more than foyers for the containment of telephones, tiny shoe boxes where to ignore a call might be to lose a chance to shift oneself from the shoe box into the broader realm of human life. In the complainer’s loft life was complete, so the telephone seemed negligible, a toad in a moat. Once she’d seen how he ignored it she forgave him not answering her earlier calls. Yet his phone did ring. If it had been Lucinda who was being ignored before, who was it now? Some old liaison, looking to suck dregs, or have dregs sucked?

The tall beautiful girl from the yellow chair?

The complainer was still toasting. “Just as the quality of a sporting event is determined by the level of play of the losing team, or the quality of a love affair by the way you feel when you’re apart. Or of a secret, by its telling.”

“I like this theory,” said Falmouth. “Let me try. The quality of a restaurant meal, by the appetizers. Of a film, by its subplot.”

“By the minor characters, I’d think,” said Matthew.

“Bedwin went to film school,” said Denise. “What is it, Bedwin, subplot or minor characters?”

He thought it over. “I had a professor who used to say that every movie had one actor you wished the whole movie was about. In a bad one you might only see them for a minute, they’d be playing a bellhop in a hotel or something. In a pretty good movie they’d have a supporting part. In a great movie you’d have the same feeling of wishing the movie was about them and they’d turn up in every scene. Right after that whoever it was would be a star in their next movie, but they’d never be as good.”

“Here’s another,” said Falmouth. “The quality of a dinner party is determined by the side conversations, unheard by the majority of the table.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Matthew. “If the best talk is going on behind my back, I’m bored.”

“I’ve got one,” said Bedwin. “It’s about a rock band.”

No one was sure they wanted to hear the principle applied to a rock band, but it was impossible to discourage Bedwin’s hard-fought attempts at conversation.

“Lay it on us,” said Matthew.

“The quality of a Rolling Stones record is determined by the quality of the one song that Keith Richards sings. Like Exile on Main Street and “Happy” or Some Girls and “Before They Make Me Run.”

“Oh, no, Bedwin, that’s no good at all,” said Denise despairingly.

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

the cassette tape of New Zealand bands was still stuck in Matthew’s player, chiming circular chords, when Lucinda opened the door of his car where he waited for her outside Carl’s building, but he snapped it off defensively as she slid into her seat. The day’s air was bleachy and shadowless, its temperature that of a sleeping body. Lucinda winced in the glare, bargaining with a hangover the breakfast beer she’d chugged did nothing to alleviate.

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

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

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

“Is she there?” Lucinda asked.

“Don’t you recognize her?”

“No,” she admitted.

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

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

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

“Dr. Marian. You’re looking well.”

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

“Duncan?”

“The Taiwanese lynx. You remember.”

“Sure, sure.”

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

“We’ve seen that before.”

“Indeed we have.”

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

“I never doubted you would.”

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

“That’s fine.”

“Thank you.”

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

“Yes?”

“I listened to the tape you sent me.”

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

“Some of it was very interesting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’d be grateful.”

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

“You seem ticked at me,” said Lucinda.

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

“What whole thing?”

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

“It’s all real, Matthew.”

“I know.”

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

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

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

“I thought we looked pretty good.”

“You don’t like him.”

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

“You can say whatever you want.”

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

“I never felt that at all.”

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

“I promise you, neither would I.”

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

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

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

the radio station’s unglamour was sobering. No one would have pictured Fancher Autumnbreast, paragon of bohemian taste, amid the bland commercial edifices and slickly nostalgic boutiques and dozy, off-brand policemen of Culver City. The band converged on Duquesne Avenue in three cars: Bedwin with Denise, Carl driving Lucinda’s Datsun, Matthew alone. Now they stood assembled in the vanilla-carpeted lobby of the station’s studio as if dragged into the day’s light for a medical procedure. Their misspelled names checked off in an appointment book by an unimpressed receptionist, they were led upstairs and abandoned to a greenroom full of surfing and cigar magazines, bottled water, and wicker cornucopia full of bruised grapes, coagulated brie, and sesame crackers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You were married?” said Denise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?” said the complainer.

“Fifth Beatle,” said Autumnbreast.

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

Autumnbreast widened his hands. “Everybody beautiful?”

They gawped, perplexed.

“You’re miked?”

“They’re miked,” the engineer cut in.

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

“Play this keyboard, sir.”

“Sing?”

“I do, sir.”

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

“Sorry?”

“You heard me, Beatle.” Autumnbreast repeated the word silently, as in a game of charades, pointing from himself to the complainer.

“I think I understand,” said Carl.

“Doctor, heal thyself,” said Autumnbreast.

“Seven minutes,” said the engineer.

“Are we being interviewed?” interrupted Denise, speaking in her confusion for the whole band. “Or just playing the song?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, yes what?”

“This gig’s easy, pumpkin. I tickle you, and you laugh.”

“Excuse me?”

“Be organic,” said Autumnbreast, pained to explain.

“Just speak into your mikes,” explained the engineer. “Try not to pop your plosives or say fuck or shit. I probably ought to get a quick sound check to balance the instruments, Mr. Autumnbreast.” Other figures now joined the engineer behind the glass, fitting themselves along the wall on either side of Jules Harvey: Rhodes Bramlett of Considerable Records, and Mick Felsh in his cowboy shirt. Bramlett and Felsh offered small gesticulations and nods of encouragement to the band once they were spotted, as if to say, Don’t mind us.

The complainer raised his hand. “Sir?”

“Yes, Beatle?”

“Our guitarist needs a chair.”

“Chair.”

Bedwin nodded shamefully.

“And,” the complainer went on, “I think I’d prefer to lie on the floor.”

“Are you sick?” asked Denise.

“No, it’s for the song. Can we put the microphone on the floor?”

“You want to sing on the floor?” said Matthew.

“I need to sing on the floor, yes.”

“You won’t be able to play the keyboard,” said Denise.

“You don’t need me on keyboard.”

No one could argue that point.

“I need to be on the floor to get the right emotion. I’ve just had a realization, that I wasn’t giving the band my all. Art requires sacrifice, even of one’s dignity.”

Lucinda loved most of all his careening integrity to his impulses, even if he might seem to be careening away from her. She would have played her bass on the floor if only to be beside him. But even if it was possible, there wasn’t room.

“Six minutes,” said the engineer. “I better get a sound check.”

Everyone waited for Autumnbreast, who said at last, “Mike Beatle on the floor, Morsel.”

“Thank you,” said Carl. “And a chair for Bedwin.”

“And a chair.”

The engineer Autumnbreast had called Morsel tramped from behind her instrument panel, through the rubber-sealed doors, which opened with a sound like a sneeze, and into the sound booth. She rearranged the complainer’s mike stand, loosening the hinge and capsizing the microphone so it hovered a few inches from the carpet. She was pure efficiency, a human clock ticking toward their on-air deadline. The band could only watch, reduced to an autistic helplessness. Fancher Autumnbreast sat cross-legged against the lip of the booth’s window, his back to Harvey, Bramlett, and Felsh, bridging his forehead with his fingers, radiating philosophical detachment from all present events.

“Try this,” said Morsel.

The complainer threaded his sneakered feet through Denise’s kit, laid his right arm under Lucinda’s mike stand, and settled his bulk across the cables that ribboned the carpet. Jules Harvey tapped on the window of the glass booth and mouthed inaudible suggestions. Rhodes Bramlett came through the door with a folding chair, which Matthew passed to Bedwin, who settled on it like a dog for a nap, tucking one foot under his thigh, curling the other into the chair’s struts and himself around his guitar. Bramlett didn’t depart, but instead squatted low against the wall, hiding behind Matthew. He raised a finger to his lips, pleading with the band not to finger him to Autumnbreast, who hadn’t seemed to register the A&R man’s intrusion. Mick Felsh, on the other side, looked perturbed that Bramlett had achieved this coup. He leaned in to whisper to Harvey, who remained serene.

Morsel scurried past Autumnbreast, through the sound-sealed door, and reseated at her control panel. Autumnbreast, like a human buttress, revealed no trace of urgency. His wide hand now fully masked his face, thumb and fingertips over his eyes, Hamlet with a headache.

“Three minutes,” said Morsel on the PA. “Everybody want to give me a little something? First, uh, the person on the floor.”

“I’m the man who wrote ‘Monster Eyes,’” began the complainer from the floor, in falsetto, as if improvising a new song, about himself.

“Okay, that’s fine,” interrupted Morsel. “Lead vocal, I grabbed your levels already. Chair guy, play a chord or two.” The engineer circumnavigated the room, eliciting twangs and mumbles. “Fair enough, sounds good, sounds good…Mr. Autumnbreast, we should probably get you into the booth.”

Autumnbreast turned and looked at her as if startled.

“One minute, sir,” said Morsel apologetically.

“Sure,” said Autumnbreast, coming out of his trance. “Okeedoke, kittens. This is radio.”

The band waited to understand.

“You won’t see me,” said Autumnbreast, “but I’m with you, all over and through you.”

“Give them the pep talk,” said Morsel on the PA.

“Pep talk.”

“They’re nervous, I believe.”

“Okeedoke. Listen. Million bands have done the Jaw. Here’s what I say. Secret to radio is, think of your favorite person. Got a favorite person?”

“Alex Chilton,” said Bedwin.

Autumnbreast winced. “Only think, not say.”

“Sorry.”

“Chilton set fire to my wallet,” mused Autumnbreast. “Paris, 1974. Marianne was there. Trying to impress her.”

“Thirty seconds, sir.”

“You were saying think of our favorite person,” nudged Matthew.

“Sure, dandelion. Favorite person. When you talk, pretend you’re them. Only it can’t be me. Because that’s who I’m pretending to be.”

“The booth, sir.”

Autumnbreast offered them one last expansive gaze, then swept out. Rhodes Bramlett remained wedged to one side of the window. Perhaps Bramlett was beneath consideration, a rat free to scurry where he liked. Silence enveloped the room. Even Morsel’s buzzing dimmed as she bore down on her instrument panel. Jules Harvey stood behind her, head cocked like a terrier. Denise tightened the wing nut on her lone cymbal, her brow furrowed, presenting musicianly integrity in the face of any circumstance. Bedwin appeared to be licking or gnawing his frets. Matthew postured at his mike stand, perhaps attempting to recapture an attitude essential to putting the song across, perhaps even trying out Autumnbreast’s advice. Who was Matthew’s favorite person? Lucinda had never known, a sad thought. The complainer lay with his eyes closed, possibly asleep. His shirt gaped at the buttons, permitting sproutage of unruly hairs. He looked essential, sexual, a fistlike ruddy bulb planted in the garden of the band.

“Three, two, one,” counted Morsel softly.

“Welcome,” came Fancher Autumnbreast’s voice. As he’d promised them, he was invisible, yet everywhere at once. He purred through the room, intoned in their bodies like a bass line. “Back. Me Jaw, You Dreaming. Wide-awake Dreaming. So. Here. Guests. Rare. Debut. Silver Lake. Echo Park. Friends. We’ve Heard. You’ve Heard. You’ll Hear. They’re Playing. For You, Live. They Were Four, Now They’re Five. Changes Already.”

Into the silence that followed came the profound, ear-ringing emptiness of outer space.

“MONSTER EYES,” said Fancher Autumnbreast. “Real Sweetheart People.”

At that moment it was unmistakable. Something had resolved from their miasmic hesitation, the band had been named. Fancher Autumnbreast had only to pronounce the syllables, publish them into the ether. Monster Eyes was the banner under which they flew, had perhaps always been so, without them knowing.

“Talk to Los Angeles, Monster Eyes.”

Nobody spoke.

“When, Bunnyrabbits. Where. Names. Influences. Are You Recording or Touring.”

Starting with Matthew and ending with Carl they each spoke their names, gave faltering hellos and thank yous.

“Met. How.”

“Matthew and I were working at a copy shop together.”

“She and Denise played in a band in school.”

“We always thought Bedwin was so talented.”

“I dialed a number I found stickered on a pay phone—”

“The Song,” interrupted Autumnbreast.

They were stopped again.

“Big Party, Major Scene. Everybody Knows Harvey. Jules Harvey. Slayed the Crowd. People Talking.”

“It’s ironic, actually, because we were originally meant to play silently—”

“Played It Twice. First Time, Ecstasy. Second Time, Fear.”

“Sorry?”

“I Fear You, Monster Eyes.”

“Uh, thanks a lot, that really means a lot to us, coming from you.”

“Who.”

“What?”

“Wrote It. The Anthem. The Howl.”

Simultaneously Bedwin said “Lucinda,” Lucinda said “Carl,” and Denise said “Bedwin.” The complainer, from the floor, said nothing.

“Group Mind. That’s Who.”

Through the glass, Lucinda saw Jules Harvey leaning nearer to Morsel, as though to guide the movements of her hands on the control panel with his eyes. He was in the grip of his fetish, sniffing the engineer’s armpit. Lucinda wanted to shout out a warning, but stifled it helplessly. Mick Felsh, staring avidly through the glass at the band, paid no attention.

Inside the booth, Rhodes Bramlett, still in his feral huddle, produced a pocket tape recorder. He held it half concealed in his cupped hands, tiny red indicator blinking under his chin. He was ready to stealthily record the song, perhaps for a bootleg release, or else to copyright the lyrics and chord changes, a legal obligation he’d brandish over the band until it ended in court. Again Lucinda throttled a cry.

“Unfetter Your Charisma,” said Autumnbreast. “Los Angeles Is Suffering to Hear You, Monster Eyes.”

“Sorry?” said Matthew.

“Sing Your Song.”

“First I want to explain something,” said the complainer. “Before we sing. If that’s okay.”

“Newest Member,” said Autumnbreast. “Lucky Man.”

“I do feel lucky, yes, thank you,” said the complainer.

“On the Studio Floor. Like a Drowned Eagle.”

“That’s what I wanted to explain. It came to me today that ‘Monster Eyes’ is really a song about death. The singer of the song is sort of a zombie, issuing a warning to the living.”

“Zombie.”

“Monster Eyes is really the force that degrades every living thing,” said the complainer. “When you look at the world or another person through monster eyes you’re sensing the putrefaction in beautiful things, the spoiled vegetables and tumors and decaying teeth, the funky odors that cling even to babies and beautiful women—”

The band was frozen. Lucinda spoke as if in a nightmare, to intervene. “I think what Carl means is that when you don’t love someone…you’re prone to…there’s a certain kind…”

“Some Things Don’t.”

“Sorry?” said Lucinda, into the aching loud silence.

Autumnbreast hadn’t finished his thought. He continued: “Need. Saying.”

“I’m not entirely sure we ought to play this song anymore,” said the complainer. “Maybe since we’ve come all this way, just one last time. But we should sing it honestly, like zombies, since it’s a zombie song.”

Autumnbreast’s Oz-like voice emitted the sole syllable with which he’d earlier indicted the complainer in person: “Goof.”

“That’s why I’m lying on the floor, so I can give it a more sepulchral voice-from-the-grave kind of sound.”

Denise had been silent since speaking her name. Now she raised her sticks and ticked off the song’s beat, voting for a musical escape from their interview. It was what Autumnbreast had requested, after all: their song. Bedwin fell in, lightly riffing the chord. It wasn’t the intro they’d rehearsed, but the song’s form was recognizable, though threadbare. Rhodes Bramlett grinned and aimed his tiny recorder. On the other side of the glass, Morsel stretched her open palms toward the ceiling in sinuous alternation, opening her armpits for Jules Harvey’s nosing study, her eyelids shut and lips pouted as she basked in the attention. Farther back, Mick Felsh had retreated into the shadows, where he consulted with another figure. Was it Autumnbreast, returned to admire their song? Felsh’s hands were clasped at his chest. He appeared to be apologizing to or pleading with this new form in the darkness.

Lucinda curled two fingers down to flesh the ghostlike song with her bass line. The complainer began to bark out the song’s first lyrics, Matthew’s opening lines, only in a garbled and deranged form. “Better conceal yourself from the light, oooh, my little pumpkin…there are things that come out at night, and they come out galumphing…um, I’m the one who’ll always cut you down to size…ah, excavating your flaws with my monstrous eyes, wow…” The microphone Morsel had set on the floor was well placed, capturing the complainer’s every hissed sibilant.

“Wait, wait—” Denise quit the beat, so the music unspooled, Bedwin’s chords reduced to choppy nonsense. “Carl, what are you doing?”

“Well—”

“That’s Matthew’s part. And you’re singing it wrong.”

“I’m improvising.” Flat on the floor as if gazing at clouds, the complainer remained blithe. It was as though they were trying to wake a dreamer, demanding he rise and walk. Or maybe the rest of them, destroying their chances on live radio, late for the party that was meant to be their lives, gone to school without pants, were the dreamers.

“You can’t do that now,” said Denise.

“It’s my song,” he said. “Matthew can sing it with me.”

“It’s not your song. You didn’t even write those lyrics, Lucinda did.”

The shadowy form on the far side of the glass made itself apparent. Dr. Marian. All in black up to her turtleneck collar, she seemed a floating array of white hands and face and skunk’s hair-streak, a dervish of authority. Mick Felsh had been banished from the control room. Now she confronted Jules Harvey. Startled from his pheremonal intoxication, he didn’t stand a chance. The bright disks of his glasses lenses bobbed as he nodded in reply to Dr. Marian’s rebuke. Dr. Marian pointed to the door, making his sole option apparent. Morsel returned to fiddling dials, looking somewhat chagrined, her paleness flawed with color high in her cheeks and at her throat.

“Let’s try again,” said Lucinda hopelessly. “Matthew, maybe if you just sing—”

Denise ticked at her drum again, daring them to follow. Lucinda thrummed the bass figure. Rhodes Bramlett nodded approval. He, at least, was undiscouraged. Bedwin, though, had cinched both feet on the lip of his chair, knees twinned as though to protect his guitar from attack. Autumnbreast’s voice was conspicuous in its absence now, and no sign, encouraging or otherwise, came from Morsel.

“Carl, will you promise not to come in before Matthew?” said Denise.

“I promise to embrace the song and everything I feel, and everything you feel, too.” He lay immobile, his belly rising and falling with his breath. His voice filled the room, seeming endless, self-sustaining, horrible, the same voice that had once blazed its trail inside Lucinda, across Falmouth’s complaint line. Now she seemed to behold it from a million miles away, as if a comet in her sky, tail shedding interstellar slush and gravel in the guise of heat and light, now passed through to some other, colder night. “Maybe we should sing it a cappella,” he continued. “Or recite it like a one-act play, which might help bring out the drama in the words—”

Dr. Marian came through the door and stood spotlit in the band’s midst. Her prowlike chest and chin, her front-heavy bun of hair, nearly a pompadour, her flashing, careworn eyes, all demanded their absolute attention. Even Rhodes Bramlett scrambled to his feet, as though already under indictment. Dr. Marian only scowled at Bramlett once, and waved him to the exit. He slinked off.

“Mr. Plangent,” Dr. Marian said. “Ms. Hoekke.”

No one spoke.

“I begin to see the problem.”

“You do?” said Lucinda.

“It’s unmistakable. Mr. Vogelsong—am I saying that right?”

“That’s my name. Who are you?”

“That’s not important right now. May I see you outside, Mr. Vogelsong?”

The complainer was silent. No one rescued him from the cooling clarity of Dr. Marian’s request. He flounced on the tiles, his white hair sloppy, his posture poor even lying on his back, taking up uncommon amounts of space and air. Dr. Marian stood, bulletlike, arms crossed under her breasts, Monitor challenging Merrimac.

“Do I have to?” he said at last.

“Yes. You’ve come to an end here, Mr. Vogelsong.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“You’re a hard woman to refuse.” A certain lascivious quality flickered in his tone, pointlessly. He batted his lids at her, upside down.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You don’t know me that well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” She pointed at the door.

He giggled, feebly.

Dr. Marian was less the band’s new manager than a figure of death, it seemed to Lucinda. The complainer had invoked the word and she’d come in black to collect him. Now he squirmed onto his stomach and crawled from amid the band’s equipment, making a path around Matthew’s mike stand. Dr. Marian held open the rubber-sealed door. The complainer remained on all fours, his expression that of a supplicant. She offered a curt nod as he passed over the threshold and continued down the corridor, padding along the carpet beneath rows of framed photographs of local luminaries. Dr. Marian went after him with a crisp air of unfinished business. The door sealed behind her.

The room was restored to silence, underlined by the ambient hum of their amplified unplayed guitars. Morsel sat silent, framed at her console in the control room. She met them with a level, not-unfriendly gaze. Matthew coughed resoundingly, his back to the others. The coils of Denise’s snare rattled in sympathy with the cough. Lucinda swayed hips and instrument rightward, filling some of the space the complainer had vacated. She imagined she could sense the warmth of the complainer’s absented weight through the soles of her sneakers, but it was surely only foolish imagination. Even if so, it was felt only by her. It was otherwise as if they’d come to this room without him. They made a foursome again, a band utterly changed by having accommodated the complainer, having binged on his lyrics and his apartment, yet, embarrassingly, still themselves: Denise, fixed at her set, emanating resolve; Bedwin, clinging to his instrument’s neck for solace; Matthew, infinitely damaged and proud, without even a guitar to disguise his singer’s fear of irrelevance; Lucinda, negotiating between, medium for the band’s yearning and confusion, their betrayer and fool, their bass player. Denise now stirred them with a beat, metronomically clean. Lucinda fitted her bass notes around the drum’s tick. Bedwin joined too, his chords a perfect emanation from his hiding place, his nerd’s gauze of self. There was only a held breath at the point when Matthew ought to have come in and didn’t. The singer stood making himself ready, seeming to weigh the band and the song with his shoulders. They bypassed him to play an instrumental verse, an overture. He met the song at the second pass. Lucinda had never heard him sing this way. She thought she heard a measure of the complainer’s tormented yawp in his approach, as though he’d subsumed Carl’s voice in his own. It didn’t matter. It was the best they ever played.

Morsel tiptoed out when no one was looking, so when they finished they were entirely alone. Autumnbreast didn’t speak if he was listening. It was hard to believe he’d heard. No one congratulated them, no one was on the line, no one had broadcast or bootlegged their small, enraptured song. They waited in the booth in dumb embarrassment until Morsel reappeared. She offered them release forms, which they signed without reading.

“We weren’t on the radio, were we?”

“Just the first part of the interview,” said Morsel. “After that the station went to a cart, a prerecorded feature on Mr. Autumnbreast’s charitable work with rescued greyhounds who worked at racetracks, including his own companion animal, Verve.”

“Not the song.”

“Not the song.”

“Thank you.”

“Good luck.”

Matthew walked Lucinda out. Denise and Bedwin were already gone. Lucinda’s car was where she’d left it, but Carl had her key. They abandoned it, rode in an elevator to the top of a parking garage to Matthew’s Mazda and loaded Lucinda’s bass into the backseat. He turned the key in the ignition, then stopped, staring across the roof at a tall figure folding his legs into a small sports car.

They walked over. Fancher Autumnbreast seemed to wait for them. There was no companion animal in the car, a canvas-topped convertible Porsche with a leather brassiere cupping its headlamps.

“Pretty,” said Autumnbreast, once Lucinda and Matthew stood at his driver’s window. His expression was fond and wounded, resigned as if to inevitable historical forces, famine, genocide, tyranny.

“Sorry?”

“You’re pretty.”

“We wanted to apologize.”

Autumnbreast lifted his hands from the wheel, shut his eyes.

“Will you have us back on the show?”

Autumnbreast blinked, tried to find words. “Who?”

“Us. Monster Eyes.”

Autumnbreast smiled forgivingly.

“What you saw in us before, it can’t be completely gone,” said Matthew.

Autumnbreast raised a fist as though in solidarity, curled it to his own lips, and kissed each of his four knuckles, his eyes again gently lidded.

“Are you saying it’s gone?” demanded Lucinda.

Autumnbreast sighed, seeming to wish they could interpret his gnomic gesture and spare themselves the squalor of mere language. Seeing their wide waiting eyes, he spoke.

“It’s so gone, buttermilk, it’s like it was never there.”

she only understood that she’d fallen asleep and where when his telephone rang, a whirr or chortle you’d produce by great effort with a hand-cranked eggbeater. She opened her eyes. Orange zones of lamplight glowed throughout the loft, the kitchen counters lit like a derrick at sea. The bed too glowed within its green curtain, another outpost she must have lit during her initial circuit, an attempt to lure him back by bringing his apartment to life. The turntable’s needle crackled, endlessly rein-scribing the loose spiral between an LP’s final song and its label, a subliminal noise mimicking a cricket’s call. Matthew had dropped Lucinda here hours ago. Her car was still in Culver City unless the complainer had returned there with her key to drive it.

In an ALL THINKING IS WISHFUL T-shirt and holey underwear she sprawled in a large paisley chair, her bare knees cradling a two-thirds empty bottle of scotch. Her mouth tasted of drink. She scratched her calf where it had wrinkled hotly against the chair’s arm. Two of her fingers were stuck together.

She’d meant to masturbate, was pretty certain she’d failed.

The black laminate telephone gargled a second time, reposing its problem.

Lucinda gaped at it stupidly. Really, the holes were so small she doubted the complainer’s clubby fingers could fit in them. But she was being confused: you could answer a telephone you never dialed. Not that she’d ever seen him do either. But it might be him calling. He might know she’d come here and be cuddling this bottle with her thighs in a chair, curled beside the telephone as if she was seeking its warmth.

The phone seemed to take months between rings, allowing agonies of indecision, and now she was sure it had stopped. But no, it rang again. She worked to remoisten a snoring tongue dried to clay against back molars.

“Hello?” The receiver was a carpenter’s C-clamp she pressed to one side of her face. She gripped her right wrist with her left hand for support.

“Uh, hello,” said a young woman’s voice. “Is Carl there?”

“No.”

“Oh, okay.”

“He’ll be right back. I can take a message.”

“Oh, thanks, I’ll call another time.”

“Do you have a yellow chair?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is your name Susan Ming?”

The caller hung up.

she woke desperate to pee at six when the uncovered window flooded the complainer’s loft with sky, the lamps still lit, Lucinda still in her chair, the bottle drained. She showered and left her damp towels where they fell, dressed in the previous day’s clothes, then burned herself trying to operate his espresso machine, her sole former art now eluding her. She settled instead for a remedial beer, the chill bottle relief for her scorched thumb. In shame she called no one for a lift, paid a cab instead to take her to Culver City to rendezvous with a locksmith at her parked car. It was barely eight in the morning, the streets brightly vacant.

“What happened to your car?” asked the locksmith, nodding at the crinkled bumper, still fresh enough to raise notice, the metal raw where the paint had crackled.

“It bumped into something,” said Lucinda.

Her Datsun recaptured, she piloted home. The car limped, as though it had accommodated to the complainer’s mass, his breakneck lefts full of body English and swearing. She parked and slugged to the door of her scorned apartment, exhausted in nine a.m. sunlight. Unlike the car, Lucinda’s rooms weren’t marked by the complainer’s use, his cavalier hands, but instead by her own neglect, a habitat she’d molted like a shell. She crept in, averting her gaze from the slaw of mail beneath the door slot and the answering machine’s blinking message counter. She avoided any glimpse of the foot sign, too, uninterested in its smug fateful knowledge. What she wanted was to hear the complainer coming again, overspilling himself against her breasts, mumbling his gratitude, moving southward to finish her. She slid between her old bed’s stale crumby layers and dozed in melancholy.

she kept herself from returning to Olive Street until after dark, just, though she dialed his number a half-dozen times waiting. The foot sign, when she at last glanced, was out of order, its fuse blown or gears jammed. Her view was of its stilled edge bisecting the pale wash of dusk above Sunset, no foot to be seen, sick or healthy. She called the clinic to complain, but the foot doctors weren’t picking up the phone either. Los Angeles was the largest inhabited abandoned city on earth.

She drove back under a spell of apprehension. It was as if she and the band had fallen into a void, dead air, somewhere between the last digits of Morsel’s countdown and the zero of their own thwarted possibilities. As for Carl, Lucinda only wanted him back, wanted once more to be tickled and fooled and swallowed, be made undisappointed and whole. Nothing more. She examined the bumpers of neighboring cars for his slogans, the words he’d moaned in her ear and hidden in plain view throughout the world, but couldn’t find any.

She discovered him there behind the green curtain, packing a black leather case that sat open on his bed. Toothbrush and underwear, nothing else, gear for an astronaut’s departure, or a child’s sleepover. He rolled his shaggy head at the sound of her entrance. The lamps she’d lit still blazed. Her damp towels still lay crumpled like tribute at his feet. Yet nothing in the loft belonged to her, unless it was the pile of Falmouth’s drawings of the band, drooping ignored over the hood of the pinball machine in the distant corner. The drawings spoke of her life before this disaster, far from this place.

“Where are you going?”

“I’d like to avoid feeling guilty if that’s at all possible.”

“You don’t need to feel guilty, just explain.”

“There’s someone else.”

“I saw.” The truth fell on her like injurious rain: she already knew.

“Yes,” he agreed. “You were there when it happened.”

“Did you and Dr. Marian know each other from before?”

“No. I’ve never met anyone like her.”

“That’s beautiful,” said Lucinda, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice.

“You can stay here if you want,” he said. He struggled to zipper the tiny case with his mittenlike hands. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but in the meantime I’d be thrilled if you and the band made use of the place.”

“You don’t want to be in the band anymore?”

“Marian thinks I should simplify. Anyway, I really wasn’t helping things, was I?”

“I thought you were proud of the songs.” Lucinda knew she’d begun sulking.

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

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

“You’re being kind.”

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

“Yes?”

“Susan Ming called.”

“Who’s Susan Ming?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Please be serious with me,” she cried.

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

“Which part is?”

“There is no other part.”

She fled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure, Lucinda, I remember.”

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

“Human Desire, by Fritz Lang.”

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

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

“Can I come in?”

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

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

“Yeah, sure, okay.”

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

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

“It’s too much to explain.”

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

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

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

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

“Text fragments?”

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

“I think I did,” she lied.

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

“I don’t understand.”

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

“Wow.”

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

“I’d love to.”

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

“My god, Bedwin, that’s brilliant.”

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

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

“Uh, you’re right, it does.”

“What do you think that’s about?”

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

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

“Overstating which case?”

“What beer is perfect, right?”

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

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

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

“I’m just getting the feel.”

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

“You’ve opened my eyes.”

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

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

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

“Yes, it’s crazy, it’s good.”

“Wow, but I had no idea you felt—”

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

“I guess—”

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

“Lucinda?”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sleeping with Carl?”

“I was, but I’m not anymore.”

“Oh. Can I ask you something else?”

“Yes, Bedwin, anything.”

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

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

“What parts did you write?”

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

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

“Is it okay?”

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

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

“Both.”

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

“Luce—”

“Bed.”

“Oh—”

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

“Oh, Bedwin,” she said, astonished.

“Sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“There are ways—”

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

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

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

“Oh, Bedwin.”

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

“You’re the smartest—”

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

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

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

“I’m sorry.”

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

“It’s okay. I probably am frantic.”

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

“Oh, Bedwin, no.”

“What?”

“Just not now.”

“Okay. Lucinda?”

“Yes?”

“What are we going to tell Denise?”

“What do you mean, tell Denise?”

“You know.”

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

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

“Ginger ale, Lucinda.” A tone of hurt entered Bedwin’s voice, as though this distinction was the world. Perhaps for him it was. It was just the sort of thing Denise would observe and attend to. Lucinda considered how a whole life, two lives, could be comprised of such gestures.

“Was there anything else between you?”

“Not technically, no.”

“What do you mean, technically?”

“I mean, I guess I just always felt there was an understanding that we were sort of heading in a certain direction. There was you and Matthew—I mean, not anymore, I guess. But you can see how it seemed. The two very attractive and sort of flighty people had gotten together and the two somewhat more, uh, quiet and serious ones—”

“No, no, Bedwin—”

“Well, of course not now that we’re, um—”

“No, Bedwin,” she wailed. “Two people can’t just drift toward each other so slowly, like glaciers, like continents, it’s not fair to their friends—”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have to go, Bedwin.”

“I love you, Lucinda.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, though it was only what she’d told herself an hour earlier, less. “You don’t, you don’t.”

For the second time that night she fled.

no complaints, no telephones, no band, no friends, no zoo, no kangaroo, no driving wildly to any other person’s apartment, not even her own, none except that one to which he might return. No clothes, either, her garments were a false skin. She shed them as she moved across the floor to the bed, scattered them one by one until she pushed through his green curtain nude. No conversation this time, no false confrontations. She never wanted to know who Susan Ming was, should never have asked in the first place. She would only exist here in the complainer’s bed until he returned.

He would. And find her. As he’d found her before, on the telephone, naked of anything but delight in him, expecting nothing. She’d return to that state. Had, in fact. And so waited, in the vast dark. Alone, consoled by the green curtain drawn around the smaller arena of the bed. The room was seamless to sound, a perfect rehearsal space, as it happened. Maybe all that had occurred to this point was only a kind of rehearsal. A demo tape. The band, her friends, her life. Now what mattered could begin. It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed. Seemingly permanent arrangements dissolved, stories piled up, exes amassed like old grievances. Always humorous in retrospect how important they’d seemed at the time. The little fiasco with Bedwin, for instance, already a legendary moment, rapidly receding into the past. Lucinda Hoekke was twenty-nine years old.

Spread on his comforter she made the attempt again to touch herself, inventorying what he’d had under his hands, what he’d nudged and lapped with his lips and tongue and blunt warm penis, all that she’d bared to him, now bared to the air and her own cool dry hands. What she’d given him was enough for anyone. She only had to have it ready here and not let the clutter of language rise up between the complainer and what she offered him—herself. She left herself unfiddled, unorgasmed, only triggered, tuned aware. In the perfect silence and the imperfect dark, night-lit clouds passing in pale drawn reflection on the white ceiling. She waited, closed her eyes, limbs buzzing with readiness. Parted lips. Imagined him returned. Soon enough snored.

The voices came to her, what seemed just instants later, in a dream of the loft flooded with orange sunlight, toasting her brain through shuttered eyelids. She basked in this light without opening her eyes, smiled and arched her back, kept from breaking the spell of her half slumber, not sure why the dream should please her so much as it did. It involved two people she adored, two members of Monster Eyes, her band.

“I appreciate your making the time to meet with me on such short notice.”

“Sure, buddy, why wouldn’t I?”

“This sort of thing is extremely difficult for me.”

“Do you want something to drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“Sorry, this place is a wreck. I’ve got to get someone in here to clean it up.”

“I don’t mind. It was very generous of you to let us rehearse here all those times.”

“Cripes, Bedwin. I was in the band then, remember? Quit thanking me for everything, you’re making me nervous. It’s like the buildup to some kind of accusation.”

“I don’t blame you for anything.”

“That’s a relief. I’m going to make some coffee. This is pretty early by my lights. Sure you don’t want any?”

“No, thanks. I’ve been up for hours. Anyway, I’m awfully sensitive to caffeine.”

“Me too, why else drink it? Pull up a chair, tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I need to talk to you about the songs.”

“What about them?”

“Now that we’re not working together, I figured we should address the, uh, situation of our sort of semi-voluntary collaboration, so we can find some way to resolve things and move forward.”

“This was your idea, or someone put you up to it?”

“Mine and Denise’s.”

“What about the rest of the band?”

“Actually, there is no more band.”

“That was sudden.”

“It happened last night.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not going to be possible for the band to go on from this point. I can’t explain any better than that.”

“Fair enough. I don’t need an explanation. What’s the scheme with the songs?”

In this uncannily exact and extensive dream Lucinda now heard the whirling racket of coffee beans in a miniature grinder, the tap-tap of the grind being emptied into the espresso machine’s strainer.

“Denise and I may continue with our musical project under another name. Several of the songs I’d like to go on playing. As I told you, I find this very awkward.”

“I get it. This is like a divorce settlement. What I can’t understand is why Denise didn’t come too.”

“She’s a little upset about this whole thing. Anyway, as I understand it the songs belong to you and me, no one else.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“I don’t want you to feel that Denise and I want nothing more to do with you from here on, but I think it’s important that I leave here today with this matter clarified one way or the other between us, so that no other, uh, parties will be able to, uh, exploit any ambiguities, if you know what I mean.”

“It’s a fascinating problem. Really, you could slice it a dozen different ways.”

“You should probably tell me what you have in mind.”

“For instance, we could just divvy them up, you get some, I get some. Or we could split them down the middle, lyrics and music. Take out what we came in with, right? Only, what good does that do anyone? Maybe we should split them the other way, you take the words, me the tunes. That way we’ve each got what we didn’t have before. You’re good at music, you can write new melodies. I can easily think up some more slogans for your songs. Let a thousand flowers bloom.”

“That’s an odd thought.”

“Or there’s the option of a nihilistic conflagration. We can declare the songs dead to either one of us.”

“However awkward, this collaboration represents a significant chapter in my creative life.”

“Well, that sinks it, then, I’d say. You sure you don’t want some of this coffee? It came out perfect.”

“If you had some orange juice, I’d have that.”

“Better yet, I’ve got a bag of oranges, we’ll squeeze some. Just let me wash off a chopping block. What a sty. You want some toast or something?”

“Sure. What do you mean ‘that sinks it’?”

“Well, despite collaborating on those songs, Bedwin, you’re looking at someone without a creative life, let alone one with significant chapters. The whole line of thinking is pretty exotic to me.”

“So you’re going to keep the songs just because you’ve never created anything of value to anyone before?”

“You don’t pull any punches, do you? Here, hand me that pitcher.”

“It’s full of crushed limes.”

“Maybe give it a quick rinse.”

“I didn’t mean to sound hostile.” Water ran, dishes clanked, the toaster’s coils clicked: the two were making breakfast together. “You have to excuse me, I’m no good at this kind of thing. I just can’t help wondering what value the songs have to you.”

“That’s the point I was trying to make.”

“Sorry?”

“You should help yourself. Take them outright, no charge.”

“Really?”

“Sure. If they mean that much to you. Truth is, I was never so into music in the first place. You know, I’ve got some bacon and eggs in here, it really wouldn’t be hard to put together a little fry-up.”

“That sounds good, actually.”

“Nobody doesn’t like a fry-up.”

Now the dream had become richly olfactory, and following on the scent of coffee and toast came fumes of sizzling bacon grease and butter.

“So if you were to, say, hear the song ‘Monster Eyes’ on the radio, even if it became, say, hugely popular and a sort of contemporary classic, you’d have no problem with that, we could expect nothing in the way of regrets or recriminations from you at any point in the future?”

“Nope.”

“There’s nothing you want in return?”

“Well, I was wondering if you and Denise already had a singer in mind.” There was an interval of silence before he spoke again. “Just kidding.”

“Oh.”

“But I’m curious—who’s handling the vocals?”

“Denise says I have a very expressive voice, I just have to trust it.”

“That’s great. Here, pass me that pepper. Actually, if you would, just keep this from sticking. That’s the way, move it gently from the edges of the pan.”

“I’m not much of a cook.”

“It’s coming along nicely. I like my eggs wet, in fact.”

Their talk was punctuated by the clank of silverware now, and by the sighs and smacks of hearty chewing. Lucinda idled, naked and unseen behind the green curtain, still in reverie. So long as she remained silent and selfless the two players were essentially as she preferred them: benign, enchanted, fond.

“I just realized I recognize those clothes on the floor.”

“I do apologize for the mess.”

“No, but I mean specifically those are Lucinda’s clothes.”

“She left a lot of stuff lying around here. She pretty much moved in for a while. But you knew that.”

“But what I’m trying to say is those are specifically exactly the clothes Lucinda wore last night, quite late last night in fact. I happen to be absolutely certain.”

“You could be right.”

“She’s awful.”

“She’s just a mixed-up person, Bedwin.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion, but I think Lucinda is a genuinely reprehensible person.”

“That’s why it’s no go with the band, huh?”

“I never want to see her again. I can’t even stand to look at those clothes.”

“We’ll just throw them in the garbage, then. Have to get this whole place swept out, but it’s a start.”

“There’s more, over there. Her underwear.”

“Holy smoke, it’s everywhere, you’re right.”

“Should we light it on fire?”

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“I suppose.”

“Just push it down in there with the eggshells.”

“Ugh, okay, there.”

No dream. Lucinda’s sick eyes opened to the blaze of day to which she lay bare, her lips and nipples and the microscopic hairs of her stomach and thighs alive to tiny breezes, her breath cinched in anxiety. She might pull the bedspread to cover herself or insert her body within the layers of sheet but feared rustling, giving herself away to what now seemed enemies. Bedwin and the complainer clanked plates in trickling water, noises that made proof she was alive and only a few feet from the kitchen where the two had been eating and talking.

“Just scrape the plate, I’ll do the dishes later.”

“Thanks for the meal and everything, I mean for being so understanding about the songs.”

“They’re your songs, Bedwin.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Never speak of it again.”

“Okay. See you later.”

“Sure, see you later, except honestly you probably won’t, if I get the drift of things.”

“Honestly, I expect that’s true.”

“Hold on a second and I’ll go down in the elevator with you. This place actually depresses me a little bit right now, I don’t want to be alone here.”

They were gone. Silence reigned, the impossible morning restored to her alone. She crept from behind the curtain. Her clothes had been collected and ruined in the tall chrome garbage pail, layered into a compost of char and bacon grease, eggshells, coffee grounds, rinds of squeezed oranges and bloated, soaking limes. If she retrieved the clothes she’d be wearing breakfast. She didn’t want them anyway, they’d been polluted by hate as much as by garbage. To fetch them would confess that she’d been concealed, that she’d heard what she’d heard. She wormed one hand in and found the pocket of her jeans, seized her keys and a few balled dollars. Her forearm emerged speckled with oil-dark grounds, which she swept back into the mass.

She wouldn’t wear his clothes for a thousand reasons. Too huge for her, she’d be garbed in the costume of a hobo clown. Better go naked to her car than that. She thought of stripping the green curtain from his bed, sweeping her way to the elevator and out draped royally in velvet. But no souvenirs, not today. There was just one thing in this place that no longer belonged to the complainer, besides herself. Falmouth’s drawings, the record of the band’s rehearsals. She undraped the enormous pad’s pages from where they lay across the pinball machine, rolled them into a neat tube which she pinned beneath her armpits. The cone of pages made a rigid dress planing from ribs to knees, a child’s drawing come to life. Falmouth would have been proud. Barefoot, clutching keys, elbows pinned to ribs, she managed an exit garbed in the cone, down the elevator alone, out into the vacant glare of morning. Nobody saw her wriggle into her Datsun, half nude. The drawings went into the backseat. Falmouth’s charcoal, never set with any fixative, had impressed a faint record of the in-most of the drawings on her moist hips and belly, a hieroglyphic procession of smudged figures. She rubbed these off easily, raising a slight pinkness on her flesh, then drove home, eyes set straight ahead on the freeway, oblivious to gawkers, bare of clothing, drawings, or any other thing she’d ever imagined could conceal her.