Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [115]
I’m doing last minute things, trying to make sure Darren has everything he needs, that the home health aide and volunteer schedule is set. I’m a little nervous, and already dressed, and I’ve never liked putting in earrings, and they’ve been out so long I’m afraid the holes have closed, and the last thing I want to do is deal with blood and alcohol.
Wally says, Oh just shut up and put in my earrings.
And I find myself furious. Without even thinking about it I’m saying, Will you please just think about my needs for once, what you need always comes first…
As if he could help it, as if what I needed could have much of any reality for him, as if he could see past the bed, the room, the round of his visitors, the little opera of wishing. Before I even get the words out of my mouth I’m ashamed, and though it’s nine o’clock in the morning I feel tired and sad.
Darren takes care of things, inserting the earrings, getting me into the taxi to the airport. I call from Boston, and Wally and I have the sweetest talk.
Flirtations continue to occupy his daydreams. Darren helps him write a note, to Daniel, inviting him over for a visit. Richard, I’m sure, explains the context of the out-of-the-blue note. Sometimes I feel embarrassed at this outbreak of lust, my lover’s unapologetic interest in practically everybody. Sometimes it makes me sadder, this autumnal flowering of love for bodies, the longing for beauty. And other times I see it in perspective, a way that a man who’s always loved the world continues to do so. One day Richard and Wally are watching MTV, and there’s a particularly awful video whose intention, like lots of late adolescent heavy metal imagery, is to romance death, to borrow the intensity or charge of the conventional imagery of darkness and mortality. In this particular video, a distraught woman is walking around a cemetery in a shredded black dress, singing.
At Wally’s memorial service, Richard will tell the story about how Wally eyed the woman on the screen and said, “Girl, take off that graveyard gown.”
Which was, in part, what his little flirtations were: a refusal to mourn.
In November, I give a poetry reading at an arts center in our neighborhood, an evening with a special sort of shine to it because I’ve been nominated for a literary prize and the evening feels like a celebration. Wally very much wants to come, though he’s also nervous to be in a group, in a public setting. He sits at the end of the aisle, in his shiny wheelchair, next to Darren, and he hears just one poem before he wets his pants and needs to leave, but it doesn’t matter. The important thing has happened: he’s come to see me, he’s been a part of things.
Just after Thanksgiving is Wally’s birthday, and I plan a surprise party. I’m afraid it would be too much to have everyone come at once, that he wouldn’t be able to enjoy it. So I invite his family to come first, earlier in the day, and then friends to drop in during several hours in the afternoon. Wally loves the attention, seeing his mother and some of his brothers and sisters, and even gets up in his wheelchair to sit in the living room for twenty minutes before he feels he has to go back to bed. We crank up the hospital bed and he receives friends and home health aides who drop in, even Daniel and Jack, who bring him presents which delight him no end. Our friend Polly brings a beautiful little painting she’s done of Arden with a ball, and Wally especially appreciates the way she’s included Arden’s genitals in the picture. By seven in the evening, his bed and bedside table full of candy and cards and little presents, he’s exhausted, and happy. We’re lying quietly in bed when suddenly he realizes it was a surprise party; he hadn’t thought to be surprised. There’s something infinitely affecting in his after-the-fact surprise, his gratitude. He’s had such a good time today we decide we’ll have a Christmas party.
But in the two weeks between that bright day and the party we’ve planned much changes.
Some changes are for the