Wild Child and Other Stories

  I didn’t get drunk. That would have been usual, and I didn’t want to be usual. But I did have three beers before I went to the movie and after the movie I felt a vacancy in my lower reaches where lunch should have been and so I stopped at a fast-food place on my way to pick up the baby. They got my order wrong. The employees were glassy-eyed. The manager was nowhere to be seen. And I was thirty-five minutes late for the baby. Still, I’d had my day, and when I got home I fed the baby her Cream of Wheat, opened a beer, put on some music and began chopping garlic and dicing onions with the notion of concocting a marinara sauce for my wife when she got home. Thoughts of the following morning, of Radko and what he might think or expect, never entered my mind. Not yet.

  All was well, the baby in her crib batting at the little figurines in the mobile over her head (the figurines personally welded to the wires by Clover’s hippie mother so that there wasn’t even the faintest possibility the baby could get them lodged in her throat), the sauce bubbling on the stove, the rain tapping at the windows. I heard Clover’s key in the door. And then she was there with her hair kinked from the rain and smelling like everything I’d ever wanted and she was asking me how my day had gone and I said, “Fine, just fine.”

  Then it was morning again and the same scene played itself out—Clover stutter-stepping to the bathroom, the baby mewling, rain whispering under the soundtrack—and I began to calculate all over again. It was Thursday. Two more days to the weekend. If I could make it to the weekend, I was sure that by Monday, Monday at the latest, whatever was wrong with me, this feeling of anger, hopelessness, turmoil, whatever it was, would be gone. Just a break. I just needed a break, that was all. And Radko. The thought of facing him, of the way he would mold the drooping dog-like folds of his Slavic flesh around the suspicion in his eyes while he told me he was docking me a day’s pay and expected me to work overtime to make up for yesterday, was too much to hold on to. Not in bed. Not now. But then the toilet flushed, the baby squalled and the overhead light went on. “It’s six-fifteen,” my wife informed me.

  The evening before, after we’d dined on my marinara sauce with porcini mushrooms and Italian-style turkey sausage over penne pasta, in the interval before she put the baby down for the night, while the dishwasher murmured from the kitchen and we lingered over a second glass of Chianti, she told me she was thinking of changing her name. “What do you mean?” I was more surprised than angry, but I felt the anger come up in me all the same. “My name’s not good enough for you? Like it was my idea to get married in the first place?”

  She had the baby in her lap. The baby was in high spirits, grinning her toothless baby grin and snatching for the wineglass my wife held just out of reach. “You don’t have to get nasty about it. It’s not your name that’s the problem—it’s mine. My first name.”

  “What’s wrong with Clover?” I said, and even as I said it, I knew how stupid I sounded. She was Clover. I could close my eyes and she was Clover, go to Africa and bury myself in mud and she’d still be Clover. Fine. But the name was a hippie affectation of her hippie parents—they were glassblowers, with their own gallery—and it was insipid, I knew that, down deep. They might as well have named her Dandelion or Fescue.

  “I was thinking of changing it to Cloris.” She was watching me, her eyes defiant and insecure at the same time. “Legally.”

  I saw her point—she was a legal secretary, studying to be a lawyer, and Clover just wouldn’t fly on a masthead—but I hated the name, hated the idea. “Sounds like something you clean the toilet with,” I said.

  She shot me a look of hate.

  “With bleach in it,” I said. “With real scrubbing power.”

  But now, though I felt as if I’d been crucified and wanted only to sleep for a week, or till Monday, just till Monday, I sat up before she could lift the baby from the crib and drop her on the bed, and in the next moment I was in the bathroom myself, staring into the mirror. As soon as she left I was going to call Radko. I would tell him the baby was worse, that we’d been in the hospital all night. And if he asked what was wrong with her I wasn’t going to equivocate because equivocation—any kind of uncertainty, a tremor in the voice, a tonal shift, playacting—is the surest lie detector. Leukemia, that was what I was going to tell him. “The baby has leukemia.”

  This time I waited till I was settled into the booth at the diner and the waitress with the shoe-polish hair had got done fussing over me, the light of recognition in her eyes and a maternal smile creasing her lips—I was a regular, two days in a row—before I called in. And when Radko answered, the deepest consonant-battering pall of suspicion lodged somewhere between his glottis and adenoids, I couldn’t help myself. “The baby,” I said, holding it a beat, “the baby . . . 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 e
xactly, 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.

  At some point—it might have been an hour in, two hours, I don’t know—I became aware of the intense gland-clenching aroma of vanilla chai, hot, spiced, blended, the very thing I wanted, caffeine to drive a stake into the boredom. Vanilla chai, available at the coffeehouse down the street, but a real indulgence because of the cost—usually I made do with the acidic black coffee and artificial creamer Radko provided on a stained cart set up against the back wall. I lifted my head to search out the aroma and there was Jeannie, the secretary from the front office, holding a paperboard Venti in one hand and a platter of what turned out to be homemade cannoli in the other. “What?” I said, thinking Radko had sent her to tell me he wanted to see me in his office. But she didn’t say anything for a long excruciating moment, her eyes full, her face white as a mask, and then she shoved the chai into my hand and set the tray down on the desk beside me. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said, and then I felt her hand on my shoulder and she was dipping forward in a typhoon of perfume to plant a lugubrious kiss just beneath my left ear.

  What can I say? I felt bad about the whole business, felt low and despicable, but I cracked the plastic lid and sipped the chai, and as if I weren’t even conscious of what my fingers were doing, I started in on the cannoli, one by one, till the platter was bare. I was just sucking the last of the sugar from my fingertips when Steve Bartholomew, a guy of thirty or so who worked in special effects, a guy I barely knew, came up to me and without a word pressed a tin of butter cookies into my hand. “Hey,” I said, addressing his retreating shoulders, “thanks, man, thanks. It means a lot.” By noon my desk was piled high with foodstuffs—sandwiches, sweets, a dry salami as long as my forearm—and at least a dozen gray-jacketed sympathy cards inscribed by one co-worker or another. I wanted to hide. Wanted to quit. Wanted to go home, tear the phone out of the wall, get into bed and never leave. But I didn’t. I just sat there, trying to work, giving one person after another a zombie smile and my best impression of the thousand-yard stare.

  Just before quitting time, Radko appeared, his face like an old paper bag left out in the rain. He was flanked by Joel Chinowski. I glanced up at them out of wary eyes and in a flash of intuition I realized how much I hated them both, how much I wanted only to jump to my feet like a cornered animal and punch them out, both of them. Radko said nothing. He just stood there gazing down at me and then, after a moment, he pressed one hand to my shoulder in Slavic commiseration, turned and walked away. “Listen, man,” Joel said, shifting his eyes away from mine, “we all wanted to . . . Well, we got together, me and some of the others, and I know it isn’t much, but—”

  I saw now that he was holding a plastic grocery sack in one hand. I knew what was in the sack. I tried to wave it away, but he thrust it at me and I had no choice but to take it. Later, when I got home and the baby was in her high chair smearing her face with Cream of Wheat and I’d slipped the microwave pizza out of its box, I sat down and emptied the contents of the bag on the kitchen table. It was mainly cash, but there were maybe half a dozen checks too. I saw one for twenty-five dollars, another for fifty. The baby made one of those expressions of baby joy, sharp and sudden, as if the impulse had seized her before she could process it. It was five-thirty and the sinking sun was pasted over the windows. I sifted the bills through my hands, tens and twenties, fives—a lot of fives—and surprisingly few singles, thinking how generous my co-workers were, how good a
nd real and giving, but I was grieving all the same, grieving beyond any measure I could ever have imagined or contained. I was in the process of counting the money, thinking I’d give it back—or donate it to some charity—when I heard Clover’s key in the lock and I swept it all back into the bag and tucked that bag in the deep recess under the sink where the water persistently dripped from the crusted-over pipe and the old sponge there smelled of mold.

  The minute my wife left the next morning I called Radko and told him I wasn’t coming in. He didn’t ask for an excuse, but I gave him one anyway. “The funeral,” I said. “It’s at eleven a.m., just family, very private. My wife’s taking it hard.” He made some sort of noise on the other end of the line—a sigh, a belch, the faintest cracking of his knuckles. “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be in tomorrow without fail.”

  And then the day began, but it wasn’t like that first day, not at all. I didn’t feel giddy, didn’t feel liberated or even relieved—all I felt was regret and the cold drop of doom. I deposited the baby at Violeta’s and went straight home to bed, wanting only to clear some space for myself and think things out. There was no way I could return the money—I wasn’t that good an actor—and I couldn’t spend it either, even to make up for the loss of pay. That would have been low, lower than anything I’d ever done in my life. I thought of Clover then, how furious she’d be when she found out my pay had been docked. If it had been docked. There was still a chance Radko would let it slide, given the magnitude of my tragedy, a chance that he was human after all. A good chance.