Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [102]
No, that isn’t true, people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false—nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.
What am I living on? Someone said the other day, “that old irrepressible—impossible—hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this with optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to be better?
Hope has to do with continuing, that’s all: thin stuff, unprepossessing food which—looked at in this light—seems really neither thin nor plain, but miraculous. What keeps us going? Some native will to live, as much the stuff out of which we’re made as blood or bone?
But many refuse to live, or continue on but refuse to feel, or try to. How do they lose their will? I can imagine, now, where I couldn’t before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one’s strength, until what’s left is tenuous, transparent. I used to think depression wrong—a failure to see, a rejection of the gifts of one’s life, an injustice to the world’s bright possibilities. But I understand better than I did before.
W’s leaving me—already—though who knows how long, to what degree, when—and nothing I can do can even begin to touch that fact. Already he’s starting to make his peace: the dreams, the things he says (“this will be my last trip,” on the way home from Florida) seem to say he’s preparing himself. I’m terrified of being alone—sometimes I think I won’t be anyone without him—and terrified of his suffering, of being unable to be there with what he needs. The whole thing scares me shitless, plain and ugly fact—ugly? Human. Who could be looking at this without fear?
I walk Arden alone, in the chilly, ice-locked woods, on the trails around the ponds. “Here in winter one learns to love austerity,” begins a poem I’m working on, “or else not to love.”
When I call home from school, Wally’s vague and empty-sounding; he seems to have barely enough energy to speak. I’m still going to work a couple of days each week, our friend Paul stopping in every day to visit, run errands, see if there’s anything Wally needs. He’s saying he’s fine, but I can tell he leaves the couch less and less when I’m gone, sleeping there at night, too. He doesn’t trust himself to get up, to climb the stairs; he doesn’t want me to see how shaky he feels, because he wants me to feel all right about going to work.
When I’m home, I help him up the stairs at night, walking right behind him, to support and guide. The steep and narrow little stairway to our bedroom—in these houses they built stairways like ship’s ladders, designed to take up as little space as possible—becomes, this once, an asset: Wally can hold onto the walls, supported by the narrow passageway to bed.
We order a new couch, from the Pottery Barn catalog, since Wally more or less lives on the couch now. Since we can’t go shopping together, we pore over catalogs and compare sizes and slipcovers—the world of fabric and texture, ongoing things, gestures of occupying, furnishing, inhabiting. Gesture of hope, though he’ll never get to use it much. By the time it arrives, in six weeks, the world’s changed unalterably.
Accommodation
The call comes one morning at school, as I’ve known it will. It’s a couple of days before spring break. I’ve spent the night in the pleasantly austere little faculty house, and when I get to my office at ten, balancing a briefcase in one hand and a large cup of coffee in the other, the red light on my answering machine is flashing. I’ve eyed that light with dread these two years, each time hoping the messages will be students, business, colleagues. The few times the telephone’s rung at night in the faculty house I’ve practically jumped out of