She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  Eventually he started talking—not about the way Gary died but about his beautiful singing voice, the loving way he had with plants, his knowledge of travel. I kept going over to his house, driving Mr. Pucci around in the dark, learning who he’d lost.

  In the eighteen years they’d been together, he said, they’d split up only once—in 1982, the year they’d both turned fifty. The separation had lasted just long enough to bring the unknown virus home. Later, they’d worried about the disease, Mr. Pucci said—but for their friends with wilder life-styles, not for themselves. They hadn’t detected anything for over a year, until Gary’s hacking cough refused to go away. “It was amazing, though, Dolores,” he said. “The more ugly his condition got, the more beautiful he became to me.”

  I was afraid to ask Mr. Pucci about his own health, his own future. I didn’t talk much at all. I listened. Listening to his life with Gary was like taking lessons in love.

  * * *

  For my dinner at Thayer’s I wore my black blouse, black pants, and my blue Chinese robe. That afternoon I’d had my hair highlighted.

  “Have fun on your big date, Blondie,” Roberta said.

  “It’s not a big date. It’s a meal. And by the way, this hair wasn’t my idea. The stylist talked me into it.”

  “My mistake. Watch out for them paint fumes.”

  I’d made him and his son chocolate-chip cookies. I got into the Biscayne and put the plate on the passenger’s seat. Halfway there I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. You’re driving toward a mistake, I started to tell myself. Dante seemed sweet at first, too. Dante drove a van. Learn from your mistakes! But my hair distracted me. It had come out nice. I looked pretty good—for me.

  They lived in a duplex just past the caution light on Route Three. “If you get as far as a car graveyard,” he’d said, “you’ve missed us.”

  I inched and spun the Biscayne’s wheels up the steep dirt driveway he’d warned me about, dipping and lurching over the frozen ruts of mud. At the crest, I picked up a little speed, then braked hard just in time to avoid running over a turkey that ran in front of the car. The plate of cookies flew to the floor.

  Just drive away, I advised myself. Instead, I picked up the cookies, brushed them off, and got out. That’s when the turkey started chasing me—across the front yard and up the steps. It cornered me on the porch, lunging and pecking. I threw cookies at it and yelled for Thayer.

  He came out in wet hair and a bathrobe, laughing.

  “Get this goddamned thing away from me,” I said. It took another lunge; I beaned it on the head with a chocolate chip.

  “Some vegetarian,” Thayer laughed. “She won’t hurt you. Will you, Barbara? Besides, you’re early.”

  “I am not. You said six.”

  “I said six thirty. But that’s okay.”

  “You said six. I know you said six.”

  He picked a cookie off the porch floor and bit into it. “Not bad,” he said. “A little stingy on the nuts.” He scooped up the turkey in one arm and held the door open with the other.

  “Jemal’s over at his friend’s house in case you’re wondering,” he called in from the bedroom while he dressed. “This way, I can put all my Playboy moves on you in private.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said.

  From my seat on the couch, I surveyed the way he lived: stacks of paint cans, stacks of newspapers, an open bag of carmel popcorn on the television. A calico cat strolled into the room and stepped daintily into the litter box, staring at me while it squatted.

  “Have any trouble getting here?” Thayer yelled in over the whir of his blow-dryer.

  “No,” I called back. Already, my black pants were covered in cat fur. This is what your life would be like, I told myself. Clutter. Can’t-win vacuuming. Always having to dump the litter box. “Not until I ran into your Welcome Wagon lady, that is.”

  “Who, Barbara? She’s not ours. Just visits, wanders down from the farm up the road.”

  The cat jumped into my lap, circled, flopped down. I scratched its throat and let the purring massage my fingers. The pants were already a lost cause.

  Dinner was stir-fried tofu and vegetables over linguine and a bottle of red wine. Our conversation had gaps.

  “So did you get your eyes tested?” I asked him. During break the week before he’d told me how he was having trouble reading the screen in his word-processing class.

  “Yeah. I need bifocals. I didn’t order any, though. The girl holding up the mirror was snapping her gum. I just kept trying on all these frames and getting more and more confused. It’s weird, you know? One minute you’re this cool young guy with a Camaro and your whole life ahead of you. The next you’re some old farsighted fart sitting across from an ‘optical consultant’ who’s young enough to be your daughter. How’s the food?”

  “Delicious,” I said. It was.

  “You were probably expecting Spaghetti-O’s, right? You’d love getting involved with me, no kidding. I’m full of surprises. Even marinated this tofu stuff in, uh . . . hold on a second.”

  He lumbered into the kitchen in his stocking feet, then reappeared. “Tahini sauce. So it won’t taste so much like Styrofoam.”

  “My ex-husband was a stir-fryer,” I said. “Drove a van, too.”

  “What kind?”

  “Ford.”

  “Mine’s a Volkswagen. How tall was he?”

  “How tall? Five ten and a half, five eleven. Why?”

  “Well, all these coincidences. Just wanted to make sure we weren’t the same person, you know?”

  He washed the dishes and I dried. He beat me at Trivial Pursuit. At the car, I let him kiss me. Once.

  * * *

  After our second dinner together, we took a long walk on the dark back roads near his house and he volunteered his past. He’d met his ex-wife, he said, at her dorm in the early seventies when he was working for a contractor, doing a rewiring job. “I was fresh out of Dogpatch and she was three years older. Introduced me to politics, dope, all that good stuff. I got so into the whole thing, I kind of forgot who my parents were until after we eloped. They wrote me back they just couldn’t recognize a black daughter-in-law or a half-black grandson that got started out of holy wedlock. We were embarrassments, see. How long were you married?”

  “Four years.”

  “I was married nine and a half. If I wasn’t an existentialist, it would be real tempting to keep blaming our divorce on my parents. Or the times. Reaganomics.”

  “Reaganomics?”

  “Here’s what she wrote in the letter she left. She wrote, ‘It’s not that I don’t love you, but that I’ve somehow outgrown you. My life here has become pot-bound and it’s just such an outrageously opportune time for black women with MBAs.’ And it was, too, I guess. She makes sixty-five thou a year. Got Jemal all financed for college. ‘Pot-bound.’ Like she was a spider plant or something.”

  “It must have been hard when she left. What did you do?”

  “Let’s see. First thing I did was whack the shit out of the bathroom wall with a crowbar. Then I Sheetrocked it back up again before Jemal saw it. Memorized the pancake recipe by heart. Learned to iron. Jemal was in parochial school then. Used to get notes from the nuns about his sloppy uniforms . . . After a while we hit our stride, though, old Chilly J and me. Got us some therapy. And we both convinced Claud to drop her custody thing. That’s about the time I started going to night school and became an existentialist. Life’s absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining. Bam! I got into it.”

  “It must be hard, though, raising him by yourself.”

  “Sometimes. Right now we got this running battle about him getting braces. He tells me blacks just don’t wear them—says I’m trying to turn him into a ‘straight-tooth vanilla wafer.’”

  “I went to parochial school,” I said.

  “And you were fat.”

  “And I was fat.”

  “And what else?”

  The night was moonless and cold. A cle
an cold, no wind. “I got raped when I was thirteen years old,” I said.

  He put his arm around me and waited, didn’t speak.

  I started with the night Jack Speight tickled my feet and took him through Ma’s death, Gracewood, Dante, my life with Roberta. I ended with my aching over Mr. Pucci and my aching for a baby.

  At the car, at three A.M., I said, “So now you know enough to go running in the opposite direction.”

  He told me not to flatter myself, that I didn’t scare him half as much as I thought I did. He asked when we could see each other again.

  “Why?”

  “Because the other day I kicked over a whole gallon of latex semi-gloss thinking about you. I’m lonely.”

  “You’ve memorized your ex-wife’s farewell letter,” I said.

  “What letter?” he said. “What ex-wife?”

  * * *

  Mr. Pucci began to talk about the AIDS, the way death had taken over Gary’s life, their life together. By then he had begun inviting me in for herb tea and some of whatever I’d baked for him. His teakettle was the kind that seeped silent steam. Curling-edged snapshots of the two of them were taped all over the kitchen cabinets.

  “Is it any easier now that it’s over?” I asked.

  He looked at me a moment, considering the question. “It isn’t over,” he said. “I still need him so badly—a hundred times a day. The other day I was looking for something in the bedroom closet and got an unexpected whiff of him from one of his sweaters . . .” His face crumpled up but he fought off crying. “The pain is almost physical, sometimes. I missed him so much that day that it gave me a bloody nose—just started bleeding for no reason. Hadn’t had one of those since I was a kid.”

  I took his hand, tracing a vein, my fingers warm from the teacup. “Maybe it’ll be better once you get back to work,” I said. “You’re good at what you do—all those screwed-up kids.”

  He smiled. “I’m not sure I can keep doing it—pump them up with my messages of hope. My belief in their promising futures . . . One night near the end—it was worse at night, for some reason—I got up to check on him. He wasn’t in bed and I got so scared. And then I noticed the floor was cold, the whole house was. The back door was open and I found him out in the yard. Walking in circles around the car . . . And I put my arm around him and led him back inside. ‘What the hell were you doing out there?’ I said. ‘Don’t do that to me ever again.’ I was angry at him; I mean, we lived in fear of his getting a cold or . . . He just sat in the chair, couldn’t stop shivering, even with the blanket around him. He’d been out there in his bare feet, so susceptible, for God knows how long . . . And he looked up and said, clear as day, he said, ‘Nighttime is when it feeds on me, Fab. Listen. You can hear it.’”

  He cried then. Hard, strangled barks and snorts of pain, his face against the table, his arms a frame around his head.

  When he was quieter, I walked down into the living room and over to their jukebox. My finger ran down the choices and I thought about how love was always the thing that did that—smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

  . . . puttin’ rain in my eyes

  tears in my dreams

  and rocks in my heart

  The music made him look up. He stared at her singing. “Billie Holiday,” he said. “AIDS wouldn’t have surprised her, Dolores. ‘Typical,’ she would have said. ‘Par for the course.’”

  That was when I got the strength. “Do you have it?”

  He didn’t answer until the end of the song. Then he smiled. “I’m HIV positive.”

  “That means . . . ?”

  “It means it’s in me, waiting. Deciding if it wants to bloom.”

  * * *

  The third date with Thayer was my idea. I had a plan.

  We had arranged it after class on Thursday. The long winter had cracked that day and a warm breeze had blown all afternoon. People were in shirtsleeves, tossing each other Frisbees in the mud. “I’d like to bring you to the beach on Saturday,” I said. “I’ll get takeout from the restaurant and we can take a long walk. Pick you up around noon.”

  “Orchestrating the whole thing, eh?” he laughed. “I got a date with Arthur Fiedler.”

  But by Saturday, the weather was cold again. Wind blasted along the shore, flinging prickly sand against our faces. The surf sounded mean; the beach was unwalkable.

  I’d parked squarely in the middle of the empty thousand-car parking lot. The food out of the warming box was lukewarm. “You know this song they’re playing?” Thayer asked, nudging his chin toward the radio.

  “It sounds familiar,” I said.

  “‘Life in the Fast Lane.’ The Eagles.” He sang along a little.

  “Yeah. What about it?”

  “First time I heard it, I couldn’t get what they were saying. Thought they were singing ‘Flies in the Vaseline.’”

  I didn’t smile.

  “Yup, that’s us. Life in the fast lane . . . So anyway, you seem a little off today. Something the matter?”

  Looking straight ahead, I made my proposal. Waited.

  “Well,” I said, finally, “I can see by your silence that I’ve made an idiot of myself.” I started the car.

  “Hold on a second, will you? Shut this thing off. I just didn’t see it coming, that’s all. I’ve got to think about it.”

  I cut the engine. “All right,” I said. I got out of the car and walked the perimeter of the parking lot. Walked it a second time, faster. I got back in the car.

  I knew what his answer was from the way he’d consolidated the takeout containers and put all our mess back in the foil bags. “Just do me a favor and forget I mentioned it,” I said. “Just block it out.”

  “The thing is,” he said, “I spent half a year trying to get you to go out with me and then—pow!—just like that, you want me to help you make a baby. I’m not sure you realize how hard it is, raising a kid by yourself. Sure it sounds romantic, but . . .”

  “Oh, bullshit!” I said. “This isn’t some impulsive whim.” I started the car again, gave the engine a few revs.

  “I mean . . . lend you my sperm? Takes a little getting used to.”

  “Just forget it. Really. I’ll take you home.”

  “What’s in it for me?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Free sex. You want popcorn afterward? A bank check?”

  “Don’t be a wiseass,” he said. “I’ve got a right to ask about it. Then there’s Jemal to consider. I mean, do I tell him about this or not? He’d have a brother or sister out there. Half, anyway.”

  “No he won’t. It was a bad idea. Just forget it.”

  “See, I like the idea of giving you something you want so bad. And the sex part—that’s got its appeal, too. But I don’t know. I’m not sure I could do it.”

  “No one’s asking you to.”

  “You’ve got to admit, it’s pretty heavy-duty—fathering a kid you’re not going to raise.”

  “I just wish I kept my mouth shut.”

  He turned on the radio, tapped his fingers against the seat, turned the radio off again. “Okay, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll think about it for a week. If you promise to think about something, too.”

  “What?”

  “Having a baby the regular way. Getting married.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I said. “It wouldn’t work out.”

  He brushed his hand against my wet cheek. I wanted so badly not to be crying.

  “Why not?”

  “It just wouldn’t, that’s all. It never works out. Don’t love me.”

  Flying sand scratched against the car. I blew my nose. I had the sensation we were parked there for the rest of our lives, that we’d erode before we drove away.

  “You’re overheating,” Thayer said.

  “I’m perfectly calm. I just wish I hadn’t even said anything, because now every time—”

  “No, I mean your car’s overheating. Your radiator. We better get going.”
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  “Fine,” I said. “Go.”

  “You’re driving,” he said.

  28

  In October of 1985, I turned thirty-four years old and began to lay awake nights, listening, scared. Of falling ceilings, Roberta falling down the stairs, and of the dominoes that were beginning to fall, inevitably, against Mr. Pucci. That past summer, lesions had begun appearing at the corners of his mouth and his AIDS test had finally said it: the virus was full-blown against him.

  I wanted Thayer’s comfort but wouldn’t let him know. “Look,” I told him when he stopped me in the parking lot at school. “You were right. It wasn’t fair of me to ask.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t still see each other.”

  “For me it does,” I said. “It’s over.”

  Mr. Pucci’s sense of balance was the first thing that betrayed him. In November, a fall down the second-floor stairwell at Easterly High landed him in the hospital for six days.

  While he was there, a medical transcriptionist recognized his name amidst her pile of work. She told the school board that she sympathized with Mr. Pucci and others like him, no matter what their life-style had brought down on them, but that her responsibility as a mother came first. Like it or not, she argued, he was unclean. For all anyone really knew about the disease, he could be infecting her sons—anyone’s children—even with the things he touched at school, the air he breathed. She lost her job for having spoken out. Mr. Pucci chose not to fight for his.

  “They have no right to treat you this way,” I told him. “Don’t be such a saint.”

  But he was already tired, he said, and who knew what his condition would be like in six months? “Besides, I’m just not a battler, Dolores. Fighting the physical side of it is going to be hard enough.”

  He put his and Gary’s place on the market but declined my invitation to come live with Roberta and me. One of his New York friends had extended a similar offer, he said, but once the condo was sold, he planned to move back to Massachusetts to be with his sister’s family. Those nephews he’d kept displayed in the picture cube on his office desk had grown up and begun families. “I’m a great-uncle,” he said. “My sister wants me home.”