Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [109]
I travel to a distant city for a reading. My sponsors have housed me in a fancy hotel, and I have the night to myself, up in my room on the eleventh floor. I go out for a walk, have a little supper, and then back in the room I open the sliding glass doors and step out onto the balcony. Suddenly I find myself utterly terrified by the height, the cars and people and strip of beach below; I can’t stop seeing myself plummeting, thinking what it would be like to fall head over heels, tumbling all the way down until the moment of impact with the hotel driveway.
I back into the room, sit down beside the glass-topped desk, with its phone and blotter and stationery. I grip onto the arms of the bergère chair, as if I’m fighting a gravitational pull toward the balcony, the lure of the eleven stories. I break out into a sweat. Is that what I want, to die?
But I have a dying man to take care of, I have a life resting almost entirely on my shoulders.
Or is it that my life already feels like that plummeting free fall?
I can’t think of anyone to call and say, I feel like throwing myself from the hotel window.
Or, I feel like I’ve been falling from a hotel window for months.
I force myself to bed, and in a while into lucky, obliterating sleep. I have work to do, the next day, which almost blocks out the memory of the balcony view.
And once I’m home, I can place the experience, that terrible pull, in firm brackets. I have so much to do here, now; I have this sweet, needy man, this illuminated face—and in fact when I’m with him I don’t think so much about the state of my life.
Darren’s move into the house goes perfectly smoothly. If asked, a few months before, we’d have said we’d never have been able to deal with all those people coming in and out of the house, all that disruption of our privacy. In the same way, we’d have thought it a burden and a distraction to have a roommate, like having a continual houseguest, but it’s not that way at all. And there’s an unexpected benefit, for me—another person around who isn’t sick, someone else to talk to, someone to confirm or question my perceptions. Company, support. We talk in the kitchen, often, while Wally’s asleep. Darren helps me to chart a course, to have a sense of ongoingness. He helps me to feel it isn’t me who’s dying.
There’s only a bit of confusion, which seems in retrospect about displacement, about fear and anger at losing control. Darren has a pair of faded jeans, 501’s with rips at the knees and thighs, and they look exactly like a pair of jeans Wally used to have—ones we gave, I think, to the thrift shop. In any case, I can’t find them, and Wally’s convinced for days that Darren’s stolen his pants. He’s insistent, troubled. I tell you, he says, he’s taking right over.
September. At school—just talked to W on the phone and most of the conversation was about his various minor complaints about Darren: not taking Arden out, running too much water, not getting the light switch all the way off, all whining and exasperation. I couldn’t help feeling a flare of anger at him (we do all this for you and this is how you react!)—as well as worried because we desperately need Darren around. I don’t know what we’d do if W rejects him now.
And beneath these feelings is sadness—at seeing W getting smaller and meaner—I understand, I guess. It’s inevitable—how could he be in bed all day every day, in the same room and not get ugly? Doesn’t seem able to focus on reading, not much in the way of energy for conversation to mediate the boredom—it’s just TV, food, me, home health aides, volunteers. How can he stand any more of any of us?
Wally’s legs twist inward, aching feet pointing toward one another, muscles stiff. The home health aides and I all rub his feet; he relaxes, with his feet massaged, eases back into his familiar, lighter moods.
Every other