You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem

Author:Jonathan Lethem
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307389435
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-15T10:00:00+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not?” said Bedwin.

“It’s stupid.

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