She's Come Undone (62 page)

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 mean, 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.”

“Proposing what?”

“You and me. Marriage.”

I looked up, saw the tears in his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Yes.”

H
ave you ever noticed,” Thayer asks me, “that we always take the same chairs when we're in this office? That we never switch seats?”

I give him a quick nod, a half smile. My arms are strapped around myself, straitjacket style. You're not pregnant, I tell myself. But it's a tactic. If I think I'm pregnant, I won't be; if I think I'm not, I'll be surprised. I'm not sure who I'm trying to fool.

“What color is this, anyway?”

“What?”

“These chairs. The curtains.”

“Oh,” I say. “Mauve.”

“They just redid the McDonald's out in Warwick this color. And that dentist's office I renovated. Mauve.” This is one of the patterns of our three-year-old marriage: when we're both nervous, I straitjacket myself and Thayer talks about nothing. “Half the walls I paint these days. It's—what's that word that means something's everywhere?”

“Ubiquitous?”

“Yeah, that's it. Mauve. It's u-frickin'-biquitous.”

“I hate this waiting,” I say. “I wish he'd get here so we'd know.”

He reaches over, rubs tension out of my shoulder. “Take it easy,” he says. “If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, well . . .”

“I think I read somewhere that it's psychological.”

“What is?”

“The way they use mauve. It's got a numbing quality. Dulls your resistance or something. So that you'll buy another Big Mac.”

Dr. Bulanhagui's voice is outside the door; then the door opens, closes with a hushing sound against the carpet. He hangs up his sports coat and puts on his white lab coat, pulling at the sleeves. The manila folder he's carrying has our life in it.

He says it as soon as he sits down. “I'm sorry. The procedure was not successful.”

I don't listen to his explanation of estrogen levels and cell life. Six eggs, six deaths. Everything's mauve: I'm numb.

“Well what about the other ones?” Thayer says. “Those eggs you froze?” His voice is thin with disappointment. Somewhere during our second year of trying, Thayer caught my obsession.