Free You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem

we haven’t gotten off on the wrong foot. I guess you’re ticked you were waiting upstairs while I was down here the whole time. I’d chalk it up to my compulsive need to disappoint.” He took her by the elbow, enfolding her in his billowy body, and opened the passenger door of her car, which now stood running in the driveway. Lucinda felt a giddy paroxysm of relief as her grievance dissolved. The complainer was recognizably himself. That was all she required.
    The complainer ushered her into the seat, then stepped around the car and slid in at the wheel, groping for the lever to slide the seat back to make room for his legs and his fantastically large sneakers under her dashboard, loudly crumpling paper refuse behind the seat. He dismissed the valet, his former opponent, with a cheery wave. Then turned her car from the hotel’s driveway onto Sixth Street, into downtown’s empty canyons, his brow consternated as he peered past his knuckles, through the windshield. Hesitant to stare, Lucinda instead tasted with her whole body his significant displacement of the car’s atmosphere, the rustle of his aura. He was clumsy and beautiful and absolutely real.
    On a stepped pavilion a smudged man maneuvered a shopping cart to the lip of a vast inhuman fountain, alone amid sentinel buildings. He might have been the first mortal figure to cross that plain, a Thoreau approaching his Walden. In the passenger seat, waiting to know their destination, Lucinda felt encompassed by an oceanic tenderness that bloomed beyond the space of her car to cover the far solitary bum and his cart.
    “Everybody’s got wheels,” she said.
    “Sorry, I just left mine at home.”
    “That’s not what I meant,” she said, too dreamy to explain.
    “I don’t like to drive anyplace I can walk,” he said, squinting at the street before them. “I know that outlook’s a rarity in this burg. Still, you learn things at ground level. Don’t get me wrong, though, I love my car. My car is my friend.”
    Lucinda labored to breathe, as though he’d robbed her car of its spare oxygen, inhaled it all himself. His shaggy gray hair and shoulders seemed to balloon toward her. Tiny rivulets flowed along her ribs and the backs of her knees. On the barren roadway, streetlamps illuminated the Datsun’s interior in slow-flickering bands. Under cover of a flare of dark Lucinda placed herself against him, rubbed her chin on his arm through the thin, and slightly damp, cloth of his shirt.
    “I’m not nervous, but then again I’m not not nervous,” he said, without turning. “I find I actually don’t want to disappoint you.”
    “You don’t.”
    “Or be disappointed.”
    At the block’s end, freeway on-ramp in sight, the complainer leaned her Datsun to the left, pointed it at the darkened curb at the foot of another tower, and rolled it to, then over, the curb. The car’s nose bonked into a metal cable box on the sidewalk, producing a grinding noise. The complainer turned the key in the ignition, killing the engine. They perched there, tilted across the curb, facing the wounded cable box through the windshield.
    “If your car’s hurt I’ll pay for any damages.”
    “I’m sure it’s fine.” Lucinda slanted her knees, drawing herself across the gearshift. The two of them lurched together, jaws fitting bonily in place, his imperfectly shaved upper lip chafing hers. He pawed the small of her back, fingers soft and huge like a pastry bear claw. She encouraged him, touched arms and shoulders through his flimsy shirt. The windows fogged, the Datsun’s interior massing with exhaled steam. The car might explode, she thought, as she tugged free to consider him.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Carlton. Carl.”
    “Lucinda.”
    “Lucinda the complaint girl.”
    “Carlton Complainer.”
    “Say Carl.”
    She said it into his mouth. His hands tangled in her clothes, his clubby fingertips working beneath her brassiere to bridge her ribs, as though measuring her