Free Wild Child by T. C. Boyle Page B

it?” he said. “Really? You’re not shitting me, right?” In the next moment he went down on his heels and thrust his hand through the slats of the fence to pat the ground as if it were the striped hide of the animal itself.
    She looked down at the top of his head, the hair matted and poorly-cut, his bald spot spinning in a whorl of its own, galactic, a whole cosmos there. She didn’t bother to answer.
    Todd barely fit the bed, which occupied its own snug little cubbyhole off the wall of the master bedroom, and twice, in his passion, he sat up abruptly and cracked his head on the low-slung ceiling, and she had to laugh, lying there naked beneath him, because he was so earnest, so eager in his application. But he was tender too, and patient with her—it had been a long time, too long, and she’d almost forgotten what a man could make her feel like, a man other than Robert, a stranger with a new body, new hands and tongue and groin. New rhythm. New smell. Robert had smelled of his mother, of the sad damp house he’d grown up in, carpet slippers and menthol, the old dog and the mold under the kitchen sink and the saccharine spice of the aftershave he tried to cover it all up with. Todd’s smell was different, fresher somehow, as if he’d just come back from a roll in the snow, but there was something else too, something darker and denser, and she held him a long while, her face pressed to the back of his head, before she understood what it was: the lingering scent of the fur hat that was lying now on the couch in the other room. She thought of that and then she was gone, deep in her coma, the whole world closing down on her cubbyhole in the wall.
    He left her a note on the kitchen table. She saw it there when she got up for work, the windows dark and the heater ticking away like a Geiger counter. His hand was free-flowing, shapely, and that pleased her, the care that went into it, what it said about him as an individual. The words were pretty special too. He said that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met in his life and that he was going to take her out to breakfast in the morning, make it a date, if that was all right with her, and he signed his full name, Todd Jefferson Gray, and wrote out his address and phone number beneath it.
    Next morning, when her shift was over, she walked across the snow-scabbed lot to her car, her spirits rising with every step. She never doubted he’d be there, not for a minute, but she couldn’t help craning her neck to sweep the lot, expecting him to emerge from one car or another, tall and quick-striding, his smile widening. As it was, she didn’t notice him until she was nearly on him—he wasn’t in a car; he didn’t have a car. He was standing just beyond the front bumper of her Saturn with a solemn look on his face, rooted to the ground like one of the trees that rose up behind him in a black tangle. When she was right there, right at the door of the car with the keys in her hand and he still hadn’t moved, she felt confused.
    “Todd?” she heard herself say. “Is everything all right?”
    He smiled then and swept the fur hat from his head with a mock bow. “I believe we have a date, don’t we?” he said, and without waiting for an answer he moved forward to hold the door for her before sliding into the passenger’s seat.
    At the diner—already busy with the Sunday-morning church crowd—they ordered two large orange juices, which Todd discreetly reinforced with vodka from the bottle he produced from the inside pocket of his parka. She drained the first one all the way to the bottom before she lit her first cigarette of the day and ordered another. Only then did she look at the menu.
    “Go on,” Todd told her, “it’s on me. Order anything you want.
    Have a steak, anything. Steak and eggs—”
    She was feeling the vodka, the way it seemed to contract her insides and take the lingering chill out of her fingers and toes. She took another sip of her