T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

passed.” Another beat. The waitress poured. Radko breathed fumes through the receiver. “Last night. At — at four a.m. There was nothing they could do.”

“Past?” his voice came back at me. “What is this past?”

“The baby’s dead,” I said. “She died.” And then, in my grief, I broke the connection.

I spent the entire day at the movies. The first show was at eleven and I killed time pacing round the parking lot at the mall till they opened the doors, and then I was inside, in the anonymous dark.

Images flashed by on the screen. The sound was amplified to a killing roar. The smell of melted butter hung over everything. When the lights came up I ducked into the men’s room and then slipped into the next theater and the next one after that. I emerged at quarter of four, feeling shaky.

I told myself I was hungry, that was all, but when I wandered into the food court and saw what they had arrayed there, from chapattis to corn dogs to twice-cooked machaca, pretzels and Szechuan eggplant in a sauce of liquid fire, I pushed through the door of a bar instead. It was one of those oversanitized, too-bright, echoing spaces the mall designers, in their wisdom, stuck in the back of their plastic restaurants so that the average moron, accompanying his wife on a shopping expedition, wouldn’t have to kill himself.

There was a basketball game on the three TVs encircling the bar.

The waitresses were teenagers, the bartender had acne. I was the only customer and I knew I had to pick up the baby, that was a given, that was a fact of life, but I ordered a Captain and Coke, just for the smell of it.

I was on my second, or maybe my third, when the place began to fill up and I realized, with a stab of happiness, that this must have been an after-work hangout, with a prescribed happy hour and some sort of comestibles served up gratis on a heated tray. I’d been wrapped up in my grief, a grief that was all for myself, for the fact that I was twenty-six years old and going nowhere, with a baby to take care of and a wife in the process of flogging a law degree and changing her name because she wasn’t who she used to be, and now suddenly I’d come awake. There were women everywhere, women my age and older, leaning into the bar with their earrings swaying, lined up at the door, sitting at tables, legs crossed, feet tapping rhythmically to the canned music. Me? I had to pick up the baby. I checked my watch and saw that I was already late, late for the second day running, but I was hungry all of a sudden and I thought I’d just maybe have a couple of the taquitos everybody else was shoving into their mouths while I finished my drink, and then I’d get in the car, take the back streets to Violeta’s and be home just before my wife and see if we could get another meal out of the marinara sauce. With porcini mushrooms. And turkey sausage.

That was when I felt a pressure on my arm, my left arm, and I lifted my chin to glance over my shoulder into the face of Joel Chinowski, who occupied the bay next to mine at Iron House Productions. At first, I didn’t recognize him — one of those tricks of the mind, the inebriated mind, especially, in which you can’t place people out of context, though you know them absolutely. “Joel,” I said.

He was shaking his head, very slowly, as if he were tolling a bell, as if his eyes were the clappers and his skull the ringing shell of it. He had a big head, huge — he was big all around, one of those people who aren’t obese, or not exactly, but just overgrown to the extent that his clothes seemed inflated, his pants, his jacket, even his socks.

He was wearing a tie — the only one of the seventy-six employees at Iron House to dress in shirt and tie — and it looked like a toy trailing away from his supersized collar. “Shit, man,” he said, squeezing tighter. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” I said, and my head was tolling too. I felt caught out. Felt like the very essence he was naming — like shit, that is.

“We all heard,” he said. He removed his hand from my arm, peered into his palm as if trying to divine what to say next. “It sucks,” he said. “It really sucks.”

“Yeah,” I said.

And then, though his face never changed expression, he seemed to brighten around the eyes for just an instant. “Hey,” he said, “can I buy you a drink? I mean, to drown the sorrow — I mean, that’s what you’re doing, right? And I don’t blame you. Not at all. If it was me…”

He let the thought trail off. There was a girl two stools down from me, her hair pulled up in a long trailing ponytail, and she was wearing a knit jumper over a little black skirt and red leggings. She glanced up at me, two green swimming eyes above a pair of lips pursed at the straw of her drink. “Or maybe,” Joel said, “you’d rather be alone?”

I dragged my eyes away from the girl. “The truth is,” I said, “I mean, I really appreciate it, but like I’m meeting Clover at the — well, the funeral parlor. You know, to make the arrangements? And it’s — I just stopped in for a drink, that’s all.”

“Oh, man”—Joel was practically erupting from his shoes, his face drawn down like a curtain and every blood vessel in his eyes gone to waste—“I understand. I understand completely.”

On the way out the door I flipped open my cell and dialed Violeta to tell her my wife would be picking up the baby tonight because I was working late, and then I left a message to the same effect at my wife’s law office. Then I went looking for a bar where I could find something to eat and maybe one last drink before I went home to lie some more.

……

The next day — Friday — I didn’t even bother to call in, but I was feeling marginally better. I had a mild hangover, my head still clanging dully and my stomach shriveled up around a little nugget of nothing so that after I dropped the baby off I wasn’t able to take anything more than dry toast and black coffee at the diner that was fast becoming my second home, and yet the force of the lie, the enormity of it, was behind me, and here, outside the windows, the sun was shining for the first time in days. I’d been listening to the surf report in the car on the way over — we were getting six-foot swells as a result of the storm — and after breakfast I dug out my wetsuit and my board and let the Pacific roll on under me until I forgot everything in the world but the taste of salt and the smell of the breeze and the weird, strangled cries of the gulls. I was home by three and I vacuumed, washed the dishes, scrubbed the counters. I was twenty minutes early to pick up Xana and while dinner was cooking — meat loaf with boiled potatoes in their skins and asparagus vinaigrette — I took her to the park and listened to her screech with baby joy as I held her in my lap and rocked higher and higher on the swings.

When Clover came home she was too tired to fight and she accepted the meat loaf and the wine I’d picked out as the peace offerings they were and after the baby was asleep we listened to music, smoked a joint and made love in a slow deep plunge that was like paddling out on a wave of flesh for what seemed like hours. We took a drive up the coast on Saturday and on Sunday afternoon we went over to Tank’s for lunch and saw how sad his apartment was with its brick-and-board bookcases, the faded band posters curling away from the walls and the deep-pile rug that was once off-white and was now just plain dirty. In the car on the way home, Clover said she never could understand people who treated their dog as if they’d given birth to it and I shook my head — tolling it, but easily now, thankfully — and said I couldn’t agree more.

I woke on Monday before the alarm went off and I was showered and shaved and in the car before my wife left for work, and when I pulled up in front of the long windowless gray stucco edifice that housed Iron House Productions, I was so early Radko himself hadn’t showed up yet. I took off my watch and stuffed it deep in my pocket, letting the monotony of work drag me down till I was conscious of nothing, not my fingers at the keyboard or the image on the screen or the dialogue I was capturing frame by frozen frame. Log and capture, that was what I was doing, hour, minute, second, frame, transcribing everything that had been shot so the film’s editor could locate what he wanted without going through the soul-crushing drudgery of transcribing it himself.