You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem

never do. Distant wheeling spotlights grazed the sky west of Koreatown. Here, far-twinkling stars were visible, five or six of them at least. The Aparty’s invitees massed at a rehabbed industrial building on Olympic Boulevard, whose freight elevator served as the undistinguished entrance to Jules Harvey’s loft. They spilled into the street, arriving in bunches, a pedestrian explosion excited by the unlike-liness of itself. Lucinda saw faces she recognized. Mildred Zeno, the painter, Matthew’s previous ex. They had something in common now, Lucinda supposed, like former opponents traded to the same team. Gillian Unger, Lucinda’s old cohort at the Coffee Chairs. Perhaps she still labored there, beneath the espresso steam. Meade Everdark, columnist for the Echo Park Annoyance , leaned his elbow on the roof of a parked Jeep, gesturing with animation as he proved some point to the passengers inside. Clay Howl and Richard Abneg, guitarist and drummer of the Rain Injuries, stood swapping heavy looks with someone who might be Bruce Wagner. John Huck offered a cigarette to Maud Winchester. Denied early entrance by Falmouth’s rigid concept, they inaugurated festivities curbside instead, and gabbling and smoking scanned the crowd for their friends. They swapped earphones to sample one another’s dance mixes, broke out bottles or joints they’d secreted on their persons, having rightly feared a dryish occasion upstairs. The steward from Ixnay produced stem glasses and stood doling red wine to a queue of art-school ingenues.
    Falmouth’s interns sighted the band members and shooed Apartygoers aside to open a path to the elevator’s doors, two paint-blistered steel portals studded with rusty bolts. One intern rapped at the doors and they parted to reveal a wizened Asian man in a porkpie hat and suspenders, manipulating a brass-handled wheel with one hand while gripping a smoldering cigarette and a folded-over Korean newspaper in the other. He arched an eyebrow, grunted, and seized Lucinda’s amp, brandishing his newspaper like a flyswatter to brush the curious throng back from the doors. The band followed him inside.
    “Mr. Oo doesn’t speak English but he knows Korean kung fu,” Jules Harvey explained, bowing to usher them from the elevator at the seventh floor, the top. Harvey wore a forest-green three-piece suit with a zipper in place of its buttons. He still wore his Tigers cap and high-top sneakers, and gaped like a turkey through his frames. “I’m positive he could slay you with that newspaper.” The tiny man had grabbed the amplifier and bass and now soldiered across the vast empty space of the loft toward the distant riser. There, Matthew sat alone in a small grove of their equipment, behind Denise’s kit, tapping his fingers on her snare. The riser was unexpectedly high, and their unoccupied microphones and monitors looked persuasively professional from this angle, rescued from their rehearsal space.
    The floor was a plain of polished wood, scattered with pillars, the ceiling a barren lid pressing low overhead, decorated with track lighting and a dingy, unlit mirror ball. The triangular loft formed a funnel pointing to the riser where the band would play, or mime playing. The prospects of the crowd downstairs fitting itself obediently inside seemed, to Lucinda, poor. Even if they could all squeeze up through the chute of the elevator, what chance they’d fall in line with Falmouth’s commands? The interns scurried off now, presumably to find their leader. Lucinda, with Denise and Bedwin, followed. Crossing the open dance floor Lucinda felt exposed, a cat in a cathedral.
    Jules Harvey scurried beside her, hands joined behind his back. “There isn’t anything to be concerned about,” he mused in his soft voice. “If we begin late it shouldn’t compromise the underlying premise in any important sense.”
    “I wasn’t concerned,” said Lucinda. “We’re ready whenever you like.”
    “I was thinking