Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [112]
Samantha’s a great believer in herbs, and she’s started Wally on a formula, too, big green tablets containing ginseng, assorted exotic fungi, and some animal products we’d rather not think much about. The pills smell greenly brackish, and Wally would put up with them more gracefully were it not that he’s supposed to take six or eight of the great big things after each meal. He already takes a raft of prescriptions whose names run together into a Latinate litany that would occupy half this page, so more pills aren’t exactly welcome. I think he just does it for me, till one day he’s fussing, after I’ve made him lunch, about swallowing anything else. I say, Oh, you can do it. And he sighs and says, Okay, if I have to. But as he’s swallowing the fragrant tablets (what does that scent evoke? spoiled hay? a stagnant pond?) one seems to get stuck in his throat, and then he’s quickly swallowing some water to wash it down, then choking on the water.
Then he looks right at me and vomits vigorously, a startling turn of events. As I’ve learned to do, I start to make a joke of it, saying something about Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and soon Wally’s laughing till the tears run down his face, and it takes him a long time to stop laughing long enough to say he’ll never swallow another Chinese herb. And he never does.
Our big green four-poster goes back upstairs, to make room for a hospital bed; the hope is it’ll be easier for Wally to sit up, easier for us all to help him. We’re changing the sheets all the time now, and because it’s become very difficult for him even to shift his weight a little bit in the bed, much less to sit up, it’s hard for us and for him—hard to eat, to look out the window, to be washed and changed.
He moves onto the couch—the first and only time he graces our new one—while I disassemble our bed and clean the room. The medical supply company sends a sweet kid who sets up the new bed, shows me how to work the buttons and crank. It’s semi-electric, which means the head and feet raise and lower by the push of a button, so the patient can control it himself. (Medicaid would prefer to pay for the hand-cranked model, something appropriate to, say, a Victorian orphanage.)
The bedroom looks serene now, orderly, but awfully empty with just the single new institutional bed in it. Arden, frightened by the noise and movement of the thing, won’t go near it. Wally sleeps that night with just Thisbe; I’m in the next room on the couch. The next morning, his anger is strenuous, and he’s more passionate with refusal than I’ve seen him in months; this will not do.
I say, let’s give it a try.
He says, No, I won’t have it, no.
Just for a week?
Silence.
Let’s see if we can’t make it better, and then in a week, if you still don’t like it, back it goes.
He’s grumpy about it, but he agrees: one week. I bring down an iron single bed we’ve had upstairs, for a guest bed, and push it up against the hospital bed’s chrome rails. Two single beds together make quite a gigantic bed, it turns out; there’s barely room enough to walk around the perimeter of the room. But there’s room for all of us in the bed, and Wally discovers, by the next day, that he likes going up and down. It’s far from perfect—he keeps sliding down, when the head of the bed is raised, and when he does he looks like a little boy lost in his parents’ bed—but it helps.
New sheets—patterned in scrollwork and flowers, as far from hospital white as we can get—soften things, and help it feel like home. By now, I know this pattern of accommodation: from the disruptive, cold edges of the new fact, toward the familiar. To make something familiar is to make it bearable. Is that why so many gay men have a tradition of redecorating, of knowing how to make anything look good? Since difficult lives require, in order to make them livable, style?
Wally’s legs point more severely inward, seem to want to cross over one another. They’re slender, the muscles soft,