She's Come Undone

by Wally Lamb

  That year, I got to know his sister, Annette, and the nephews and their wives, and his circle of gay friends—Steve and Dennis, Ron and Robert (who also had the virus), Lefty from New York. In the hospital solarium, over coffee, over the phone—we formed a network, exchanging news about experimental drugs and observations about how, from week to week, he looked and felt. The gay men all fell in love with Roberta, encouraging her foul mouth and begging her for stories about the tattoo parlor and her stormy love life. “My fellas” Roberta called them. They brought her perfume, dirty jokebooks, off-the-wall costume jewelry. The attention revived her. Whenever she knew they were coming over to the house, she insisted on getting out of her bathrobe and putting on her wig. “Make me beautiful for my fellas, now,” she’d say as I applied lipstick to her pouting lips.

  The hospital discharged Mr. Pucci on the Friday night before his birthday. Both he and Roberta had had a good week. We drove to his house with a birthday cake and a pot of spaghetti sauce. Lefty was in for the weekend and Annette was there; the party fell together spontaneously. Lefty and I were ordered back to the house for Roberta’s old records. Back at Mr. Pucci’s, we loaded the jukebox with polka music and Roberta was the Princess again, introducing the tunes, shouting encouragement to Dennis and Ted and Lefty as they pranced and hooted through one wild polka after another, reeling in circles around the sunken living room. Mr. Pucci, Annette, and I sat on the sidelines, laughing and clapping.

  “Well,” Roberta said, in the car on the way home. “We had ourselves a party tonight. Didn’t we?”

  “You were wonderful,” I said.

  “I was,” she agreed, cackling softly. “I still got it in me.”

  * * *

  After several months on the market, the condo still hadn’t sold. Mr. Pucci looked more tired and pale to me, and some days, in the middle of a visit, he’d turn weepy or bitter. He was anxious, he said, to pay off some of his hospital bills. He didn’t feel right about moving to his sister’s until he’d sold his and Gary’s home—until that was finished business.

  One morning, delayed at the store, I arrived late to take him to his doctor’s appointment. I got to the house at the same time as the taxi he’d called. “You took your own sweet time getting here,” he told me, then walked toward the cab. “Must be nice to have all the time in the world.”

  That evening he apologized, over and over, sobbing into the phone.

  “Forget it. It’s no big deal. What did the doctor say?”

  “I have to go for more tests. He thinks the blurriness might be CMV.”

  “The eye infection?”

  “Yeah. I might be going blind.”

  * * *

  On the Saturday morning of the real-estate woman’s open house, I went to pick him up; I was driving him up to his sister’s for the weekend.

  “He’s somewhere around here,” the agent said. She was fiddling with a huge coffee maker. Pastries and brochures were stacked on the table.

  I found him in the bedroom, wet-eyed, clutching a handful of the kitchen cabinet snapshots of him and Gary. Their framed living room poster—Nureyev in mid-leap—was propped against the bed.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “She just overwhelmed me for a minute, the way she started taking things off the walls and out of the bookshelves. ‘If they smell gay, they’ll think AIDS,’ she said. ‘And if they think AIDS, then we’re dead.’”

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Yeah, okay. Slide this thing under the bed first, will you?”

  As I helped him out the front door, the woman’s high heels clicked after us. “I hope I didn’t offend you, Fabian,” she said.

  “His name is Fabio.”

  “Fabio—sorry. These open houses make me a nervous wreck. But business is business; we don’t want to turn off Mr. and Mrs. America.”

  “That’s all right,” he mumbled.

  “Hey, hold on a minute. Before you two go . . .” She disappeared around the corner and came back with the insides of the coffee maker—a wide basket mounted on a long metal tube. “Anyone know what I’m supposed to do with this?”

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Why don’t you shove it up your ass?”

  We were in the car and onto the turnpike before he broke the silence with a belly laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” I said.

  “You! You sounded like your old self back there.”

  “Yeah, well, I let her out occasionally. She’s on call for the truly deserving.”

  He reached for me. “My pal,” he whispered. “I love you, Dolores.”

  It was the first time I cried in front of him. I was laughing and crying, both—so hard I had to pull over. The two of us, parked crooked in the breakdown lane with the emergency blinker on, laughing and crying like fools. “I love you, too,” was the first thing I was able to say.

  * * *

  “Oh, man,” Thayer said. “I love you.”

  We were naked together in the water bed. I was rereading The Old Man and the Sea for my new class, American Lit, underlining the parts I suspected were symbolic. Thayer was just staring at me, smiling goofily.

  “Don’t get sentimental,” I said, without looking up from the page. “You just enjoy the sex.”

  “This isn’t sex, it’s science. We’re practically doing it with white lab coats on.”

  “You’re not a scientist,” I said. “You’re a hurricane at sea.”

  “Yeah, well, you should talk. Or was that scientific groaning?”

  It was our third try. Well, our fourth, really, but the second time in August had had more to do with a heat wave and some beers than my monthly ovulation. This was our third crack at procreating.

  “You know what let’s do?” Thayer said. “Let’s just get married.”

  I looked up from my reading. “You agreed to no strings. That covers chains, too. What time did you say we had to pick them up?”

  “Them” was Roberta and Jemal. This was their third bus trip to the jai-alai arena in Newport; Jemal wheeled Roberta’s chair and she made his bets. Against all odds, they’d become friends.

  “Five-thirty. Chilly’s going to call from the bus station.” He free-fell back down on the water bed and smiled up at his ceiling job.

  “God, I do good work,” he said. “I’d say I’m more of an artist than a drywall man, wouldn’t you?”

  “A bullshit artist maybe.”

  His hand on my breast was as big as a catcher’s mitt; his palm was rough and ragged but the touch was gentle.

  “So what do you think?” he said.

  “What do I think about what?”

  “Think any little fishies are swimming upstream and jumpin’ in the old gene pool?”

  I reached down and jabbed his butt with the corner of my paperback.

  “Maybe we should give it another shot. You know, a backup.”

  “Thayer,” I said. “I’ve read the same paragraph eleven times now. I have a test on this book Wednesday night.”

  He rolled to the side of the bed and climbed out. Hopping around on one foot, he pulled on his underwear. “No shit, you’d love being married to me. We’d have a blast. I’m nothing like D.D.”

  Which was short for Dante the Dork. In the three months we’d been procreating, Thayer had tried hard to shrink Dante for me, turn him into a kind of cartoon.

  “Yup,” he said, “that’s my best advice. Marry me while you got the chance. I’m a good catch.”

  I waved The Old Man and the Sea at him. “Good catches are a mixed blessing,” I said.

  “Because, to tell you the truth, this arrangement we got is starting to get a little weird for me. Eating away at my existential soul.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw him pull his pants on, yank his T-shirt over his head. I was underlining my book. “Uh-huh,” I said.

  He clapped his hands together. “Hey, Dolores! I’m serious.”

  I looked up. He was.

  “I m
ean, I’ve been sleeping shitty. I get up in the middle of the night missing you. You know, needing you—more than just once a month. More than just for sex . . . And then I start thinking to myself, Well, what if she’s just using you? Or what if one of these times it does take and we do make this kid? Where does that leave me, Dolores? I mean, shit, it boils down to an irresponsible act on my part when you get down to it.”

  “But you told me . . . You came over to this house and said—”

  “Yeah, but the thing is, I love little babies. If we make one, I know I’m going to want to hold it. Play with its little fingers. Be its dad.”

  I got off the bed and grabbed my bathrobe. “Okay, fine,” I said. “We won’t do it anymore.”

  “What—? I can’t tell you how I feel without you getting pissed off?”

  “Of course you can tell me how you feel. I just wish you’d let me know before . . .”

  “Why can’t we just get married and make a baby like everyone else does? What are you so afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Look!” I said. “My father used to beat up my mother! I had a husband who put me through the meat grinder and now one of my best friends has AIDS! I just don’t believe in happily-ever-after. It’s a crock of shit!”

  “I know it’s a crock of shit. I ain’t offering you happily-ever-after. I’m offering you . . . happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit.”

  I clamped my hands over my ears. “Stop it! My whole life still hurts!” It came out as a scream.

  When he spoke, his voice was soft again. “This wouldn’t be your marriage to him. This would be our marriage—yours and mine.”

  “And Jemal and Roberta’s,” I said. “And a baby’s. You’re not being realistic.”

  “So what is realistic? Screwing me once a month with the thermometer in your mouth?”

  I started making up the bed, snapping the sheets. “Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. It was a mistake and now it’s over.”

  “Meaning what? What’s over?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “Don’t I at least get a response? What the hell’s happening here?”

  I still didn’t answer.

  “All right,” he said. “Great. Time for me to rock’n’roll.” His keys twirled around his finger. “I’ll drop Roberta off. Have a good life.”

  * * *

  For the next two weeks, Roberta stared at me, sucking angrily at her cigarettes. “You look like death warmed over,” she said. “Call him.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him,” I said. “Mind your own business.”

  Convinced I was pregnant, I bought a home test kit and set it up in the attic, tiptoed up the stairs the next morning with my jar of urine. The results were less reliable during the initial weeks, the box admitted. It was probably a hundred degrees up in that attic. A thousand factors could have made the test negative. That night in a dream, I gave birth to an Amazon daughter and woke up laughing, positive I was pregnant. Then I reached down in the dark and felt it: the blood, sticky between my legs.

  * * *

  “They don’t want to discharge him,” Mr. Pucci’s sister told me over the phone. “He’s been asking for you.”

  “How is he?”

  She told me he’d been listless all that week and that the fungus growing inside his mouth made it harder and harder for him to swallow. To her, the coughing sounded deeper, too. “I know you’re busy. Come if you can,” she said.

  I bought Mr. Pucci a big, lacy valentine and was on my way. It was my sixth trip to West Springfield in the half year since he’d moved there.

  Actually, I wasn’t that busy anymore. I’d put my college classes on hold and resigned from the takeout delivery business. Allyson and Shiva were living upstairs in the Speights’ old apartment. We’d put together an arrangement: instead of paying rent, Allyson helped me with Roberta and let me borrow Shiva when I needed to. I baby-sat on the nights she had classes. He was a placid, smiling little boy. We were trying to keep him television- and sugar-free.

  Allyson saw Thayer at school; he kept telling her to say hi to me. “If it helps,” she said, “his new girlfriend looks like a ferret.”

  “What do you mean ‘if it helps’? What do I care what she looks like?”

  * * *

  I could tell he was dying—knew as soon as I saw him why Annette had called. I tacked the valentine to his corkboard and rearranged his cocoon of blankets. Though the effort was visible, he insisted he wanted to talk.

  About me.

  “At least see the guy,” he urged. “Clear the air.”

  “Roberta’s been bothering you about all this, hasn’t she? With all you’re going through, you shouldn’t have to—”

  “Marry the guy,” he said.

  “You don’t understand. It’s not as simple as that.”

  “Why isn’t it? What’s so complicated about it?”

  “It’s freezing out today. The windchill factor’s below zero.”

  “I know I’m being pushy, pal . . . I just don’t have the luxury of waiting to see how it all comes out.”

  “Here,” I said. “Drink some of your juice. I’m putting the straw to your lips.”

  “Don’t fight me, Dolores, okay?” he said. “I’m tired and I have something to say and . . . you’re making it harder.” His eyes looked out at nothing as he spoke. The chart said his weight was ninety-three pounds.

  People had always amazed him, he began, but they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists.

  “. . . And yet,” he whispered. “The janitor at school—remember him? Mr. Feeney?—he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then, when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers . . .”

  What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions—the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks.

  I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both—Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with a surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me.

  “The irony,” he said, “. . . is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me now than it’s ever been before. What’s that line? ‘Was blind but now I see . . . ’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought . . . said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed-up phone message. . . . That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness—that’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid. It’s more like . . .” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened.

  “I’ll give
you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.”

  * * *

  The storage company delivered the jukebox six months after his death, on a sunless afternoon in November 1987. The accompanying note read: “For my pal.”

  At the back of my bedroom closet, on a high shelf, I found what I’d gone looking for: my old 45s. On the stairway landing on the way back down, I stopped and studied the old familiar faces: Uncle Eddie, Ma and Geneva, Grandma on her wedding day. I stood the longest before the small framed remnant of Ma’s flying-leg painting, then reached out to touch it: wingtip and sky. I passed my fingers lightly against the surface.

  I filled the jukebox with the old records. Then I plugged it in and sat in the darkening room, bathed in the machine’s purple glow.

  Thayer came when I called him. He was wearing his new eyeglasses, wire-rim bifocals. Something about the way he looked jarred me. I couldn’t stop staring.

  “They make me look old, don’t they?” he said. “Be honest.”

  “They make you look cute. Play me a song.”

  “What should I play?” he said. “Nothing’s marked.”

  “Play anything.”

  He punched at the keys. Looking both at the glass and through it, we saw ourselves and, beneath ourselves, the player gliding, searching.

  “Take love . . .” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Hold me.”

  With my head against his chest, my eyelids closed against his sweatshirt, I saw him. Recognized him. Part man, part whale.

  “I made a picture of you once,” I said. “Years ago, way before I ever even knew you. Your wire rims and everything.”

  “You did?”

  “On my Etch-a-Sketch. A psychic told me to draw what would make me happy and I drew you. Memorized you before I shook you free.”

  He pressed me closer to him. “So what’s that mean?” he said.

  “It means I love you. I’m proposing.”