Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [100]
I try to imagine what I’d think if I didn’t know these people. How would I read this picture? I’d know they’re lovers, from the fit of their bodies but more from a kind of resemblance in these faces, which is not just of the flesh but of the way shared experience, the psychic stuff held in common, shapes and illuminates the face. I’d know they’ve been down close to the bone in something that taxes all their strength, requires every resource they have. I’d know that, whatever it is, they’re in it together. I’d know they aren’t done yet.
School starts again at the beginning of September. Nervous about leaving Wally those two days a week, I’ve been busy making arrangements—our friend Paul to check in on him every day, the freezer full of quick frozen meals he can just thaw out, pans of lasagna in the fridge.
The caseworker from the Family Care Program insists we install a “Lifeline,” a machine which serves as a kind of instantaneous way of calling for help. It consists of a red button Wally’s supposed to wear around his neck, on a chain.
Pushed, the button sends a signal to a big, ominous-looking box beside the phone, which automatically calls the first on a list of friends and neighbors. If no one answers it phones the second, and so on, and eventually calls an ambulance.
The idea is that Wally might have some sudden crisis, might fall and not be able to reach the phone, though right now that seems to us perfectly remote. His fevers or headaches make him feel listless, washed out, but he’s always been capable of making a phone call, or fixing himself a sandwich. He takes Arden down to the bay in the morning, though slowly; he walks the few blocks downtown, some days, to rent a movie. The caseworker’s alarm feels excessive; perhaps she’s right to be cautious, but we can’t help but feel we’re being pushed. We make a point of saying that we want to emphasize how well Wally is, that we want to behave in accordance with his capacities, as long we’re able. She’s not about to budge, and so we reluctantly accept the thing, and learn to joke about it, even though it’s a symbol of the loss of autonomy. There’s an ad in the newspaper practically every day for a similar product, and it pictures an elderly woman with black lips lying stricken on the rug a few feet from her fancy French phone; the image and its accompanying quote—I’ve fallen and I can’t get up—becomes a kind of silly joke for us. Wally threatens that one day I’ll come home and find him on the floor in a tweedy suit, and stockings with seams, his lips painted black, his nails clawing after that big red button.
I’m holding myself with increasing tension, steeling, bracing. I’m never alone, at home, so my solitude is in the car, and I find myself weeping there, listening to stupid songs on the radio. I fall apart in between places, and then pull myself together to work, pull myself together at home to run the household, take care of the exhausted, fading man on the couch. What can I do but watch? What can I do but sit next to him, and rub his head when he has a headache, and bring him sweet things to eat?
September. I man I knew—a little—is dead. [Reading this journal now, I realize so many people I’ve known have died that I don’t know who this entry refers to.] All our understandings, all our consolations and considerations feel so flimsy. Faced with real loss, they’re paper, flimsy little cut-paper flowers. Name them: A Better Place, Universal Mind, Being—worst, Heaven!
Wally begins to complain about stairways, high places, not the work of climbing