She's Come Undone (61 page)

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.”

“Fine,” I said. “Go.”

“You're driving,” he said.

I
n 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.”

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.”