You Don't Love Me Yet Read online

  “You can drink if you want,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

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

  “Please, yes.”

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

  “Yes.”

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

  “Please do it now.”

  “Promise.”

  “Why?”

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

  “I promise.”

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

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

  “Uhnn.”

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

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

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

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

  “Shhh. I won’t.”

  “I’m—”

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

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

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

  “That was the funny one,” he said.

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

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

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

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

  “The funny one was the big one.”

  “You can have your own names.”

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

  “Another another.”

  “Yes.”

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

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

  “Yes?”

  “Who is this a secret from?”

  “Nobody, really. Not on my end.”

  “Oh.”

  “You?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

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

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

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

  “More whiskey.”

  “You haven’t finished the last one.”

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

  “More bed, more music, more night.”

  “Room service, bring me a room.”

  “Exactly.”

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

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

  “Yes.”

  “Lie back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now pick up the telephone.”

  “Who am I calling?”

  “Someone you shouldn’t.”

  “Who’s that?”

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

  “The maybe person?”

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

  She looked at him horrified, delighted.

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

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

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

  “I’ll make noise.”

  “You’ll control yourself.”

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

  “Sure, but dial the phone.”

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

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

  “Saying what?” she panted.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Now you,” she breathed.

  “Now me what?”

&nb
sp; “Now you on the phone. Now I do you.”

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

  “I thought everyone did.”

  “Everyone except me.”

  “I’m not drunk.”

  “Your eyes are x’s.”

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

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

  “Coffee?”

  She made him out, a mass diffusing the glare.

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

  “It’s pushing afternoon.”

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

  “Here.”

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

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

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

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

  “What’s strange about my car?”

  “It bumps into things.”

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

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Drive me home in my strange little car.”

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

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

  “Maybe they’re owned by Disney.”

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

  “Blue label?”

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

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

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

  “I thought we were going to your apartment.”

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

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

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

  Above Hyperion Boulevard, the band’s guitarist sat cross-legged on his carpet, bathed in blue light, his mouth open, as his videocassette recorder slow-motioned through a passage in Human Desire, a bar scene, Glenn Ford tussling with a drunken Broderick Crawford over Gloria Grahame. The guitarist seemed uninterested in the performances, instead drew nearer to the screen, trying to decipher the words written on signs pinned to the walls of the bar, which at the level of resolution of his television was impossible. The guitarist picked his nose with a curled forefinger and squinted closer. His other hand absent-mindedly cradled his crotch. The blue figures on-screen swam forward, captives of slow motion.

  On Effie Street the band’s singer stood wielding a knife at his kitchen counter. He still wore his T-shirt and underwear, the costume he’d decided to wear to bed since an intrusion into his house the night before last. He’d slept late after lying awake until dawn, having been woken by his phone ringing at some odd hour. The singer chopped a bundle of unrinsed kale into a careless salad. The Los Angeles Times lay across his counter, a copy pilfered from the doormat of the singer’s neighbor across the hall. He’d scoured the City section for an article which he’d hoped to see but which hadn’t appeared. Its absence dismayed him. The remaining sections were unread. Though it wouldn’t have been difficult for the singer to refold the paper and return it to the doormat, it was instead destined to be thrown over his bathroom tile, to absorb certain spillings and stainings. As he switched from the kale to a mass of celery, the singer mused on the voice-mail message he’d listened to at dawn, the baby-talk song with its strangely accurate, if mocking, encapsulation of his dilemma. The singer felt lonely. He decided to take his next chance to entrust the band’s bass player with his secret. After all, she already knew it.

  On Hollywood Boulevard, in pale afternoon light bent through tweed curtains, the band’s bass player drew herself, panting, from the still-trembling body of her lover, who lay with his head tipped over the foot of the bed. His hands, which had encircled her, palms nudging her breasts, now fell to his own thighs. His blotched penis draped in an arc to his stomach. There were no robes here. No music. They’d poured from the new bottle into plastic cups, which sat in a spilled pool of whiskey on the side table, beside the telephone. The bottle was half empty
, but the bass player didn’t feel drunk anymore. She undoubled her knees and stretched her feet to cradle his ribs. Leaning back, her sweaty shoulders sealed like a decal to the headboard. The motor inn was a perfectly tawdry arena. If possible she’d have her car and apartment destroyed by remote control, and begin again from here. It was as if the hotel rooms they’d inhabited were the telephone line they’d dwelled in earlier, now expanded to contain the whole of Los Angeles.

  She felt like a marine creature, a pilot fish, a dipper or darter around the perimeter of some animal greater and slower than herself. Or possibly not an animal but a planet, a distant body. The complainer seemed remote not only in space but in time, the progression of his hair, dark to white, a horizon of years. As though she crawled toward him across some time-lapse vastness, a desert or ocean floor which bloomed and declined before her eyes. Every darting movement she made, her whole lithe, slippery course across his body, the seeking effort of her mouth and hands, was an attempt to close this margin between them. But with no apparent malice or guile he’d shunted away, as though their exact proximity was polar, regulated by magnetic force.

  She’d heard herself laughing and producing other noises which had no simple name, but hadn’t spoken sentences in hours. Language had come out of the complainer, though. As before, when he’d muttered in his sleep. The same words, she was certain of it now.

  “Carl?” Her own voice shocked her, restored her modesty slightly.

  “Yes?”

  “When you were coming did you say ‘pour love on the broken places,’ or was I just imagining it?”

  “I said that, yes.” He propped on his elbows.

  “Over and over again under your breath.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I just needed something to say.”

  She began to see that all of what she felt, the strange abject yearning that had grown inside her through this journey to nowhere conducted across the two hotel beds, across this night turned to afternoon, might have a name. If he could say the word, why couldn’t she? He’d asked her to keep it a secret, though, and she would. Her tenderness and awe, the risk of love, would be kept secret between her and herself.