She's Come Undone (60 page)

It wasn't a weapon in the bag—or a snow shovel either; it was a boom box. Suddenly, Aretha Franklin was singing “Freeway of Love” and Thayer was up on the porch. They began a father-and-son break dance.

The boy—I couldn't remember his name—whirled and spun and managed gymnastic flips all over the snowy porch without slipping once. Thayer was a disaster, grunting and repeating—over and over—a single graceless maneuver. A miscalculation with one of his clompy work boots sent three of the railing spindles flying off the porch and into the snow.

“Hey!” I protested.

At the end of the song, the boy clicked off the tape and began snapping his fingers.

 

The name's Jemal

And I'm the best

I got fine ladies

Hangin' off my chest

 

“How old are you—twelve?” I said. “Give me a break.”

Thayer had been staring at his son's hand, trying to get his own
finger-snapping to catch up. “Yeah, get to the point, doofus,” he said. He was still panting hard.

 

This here's Thayer

He's sayin' a prayer

You'll be his lady

The deal ain't shady . . .

 

“My term paper is due on Tuesday and . . .”

 

My man here's cool

He ain't no fool

Think about you all day

Make him drool

 

“All right,” I said. “Once. I'll come for dinner once.
After
I get this paper written. And don't forget I'm a vegetarian.”

Thayer smiled goofily and snapped his fingers at me. “Ain't she sweet? She don't eat meat.”

Jemal shook his head. “He got it bad for you, mama. He a mess.”

I started closing the door. “I'm not your mother,” I said, attempting a scowl. “Fix the porch before you go.”

Back at the table, I couldn't stop smiling at my index cards.

*   *   *

I scared Mr. Pucci when I rang his doorbell in the middle of the night. I could read fear in his face—then recognition, curiosity.

“Dolores?” he said.

“I'm sorry it's so late,” I said. “I brought you this.”

He reached out and took the African violet, staring and staring at it, turning it in his hands. Then the leaves and blossoms trembled. When he cried, I folded him up in my arms.

During the first of our night rides together, Mr. Pucci and I were
mostly quiet. I turned the steering wheel with my left hand and held his hand with my right. We played the whale tapes, over and over. They soothed him, he said.

By the end of the second week, we had established a routine that either of us could trigger with a single telephone ring. He waited for me out on his front porch in a lawn chair, bundled up against the cold in his trench coat and tweed cap. The red dot of his burning cigarette was the first thing I'd see. “Hi, pal,” he'd say. Then he'd close the door as quietly as he could and we'd be off.

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 clean 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.'”