Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [117]
“You bitch,” I say, but he is too weak to answer.
Someone in the nursing community complains about Darren living with us—a violation, he thinks, of professional boundaries, even though we’d asked for approval first from the powers-that-be, even though we’d agreed that Darren wouldn’t be scheduled as Wally’s home health aide anymore, he’d just be involved with us as roommate and friend. After meetings and phone calls galore, Darren’s fired for his “lack of boundaries.” This seems to mean he has too much compassion.
But what’s a difficult circumstance for him becomes, for us, a gift. He gets a part-time job selling lottery tickets in a convenience store, to earn a living, but there never even seems to be a question as to what he’ll do next, which is to help Wally and me through. And so I have a place to turn with questions, someone to talk to, someone who’s seen all this before.
December. That face. If it were possible for a face to shrug, it would look like this. A “that’s-just-me-what-can-I-do” face, one I’ve seen W make for years, but which has fallen away. I don’t even realize he’s stopped making that face till suddenly it’s back. Now it means here I am, helpless, immobile, my mind slipping, but what can I do, what can any of us do about it?
I tell Lynda that I’m starting to feel I can’t remember what Wally was like before he was sick; it seems so long now that I can’t visualize the old face, hear the old voice. So she gives me a beautiful Italian photograph album, bound in marbleized paper, and I begin to go through our old pictures and make an album, reaching all the way back to right after we met. With a Polaroid someone gave us ages ago which we’ve hardly ever used I start making new pictures, too, putting the best of them into the elegant book with those old-fashioned photo corners. The book’s a record and testament; I don’t realize, then, how important it will be in a month, how people coming to the house the week before Wally’s service will focus on it, use it as a departure point for stories, memories.
Wally begins to have trouble finding the words he wants. We’re lying in bed talking about something and he says, “Oh, I’m going to mush my mouse.” Then he looks puzzled. “Mush my mouse? Oh, what’s happening to me!” Though it’s said more in amusement than in frustration, more in wonder than in fear.
More and more, he seems to me like someone who’s had a stroke—the trouble with language, his head leaning, one side of his mouth turning downward.
Our friends Michael and Thelma, from Vermont, send a Christmas package, its best gift a big bag of mulling spices for cider. I make mugs of warm spiced cider for Wally all day, and feed him with a spoon. He says, “This is so good.” It feels to me as if he doesn’t just mean the cider; he means the whole experience, the fact of comfort and of pleasure. When did this happen, that he can’t control his own hands enough to eat? And suddenly he seems unable to manipulate the buttons on his remote control; he’s always saying it doesn’t work, the channels won’t change. Of course it’s his fingers that won’t function, though soon he’s tired of TV anyway, and prefers silence.
Michael and Thelma have sent, too, a little wooden angel, from Indonesia, designed so that she’s looking down onto whatever she floats above. I hang it from the chrome trapeze which dangles above Wally’s bed; Paolo had thought it would be good for him, to practice pulling himself up, but by the time it’s arrived Wally’s not likely to do chin-ups. He adores the wooden angel, and tells me how he loves how she watches him.
That face. The pure self which looks out to the world, essence of Wally drinking it in, being here, with me and with Arden and Beau and Thisbe. Self-consciousness, doubt, circumstances, even history stripped away, he’s that awareness, that quality which is most essentially Wally. Its characteristics are wonder and humor, delight in things, a