Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [92]
Whatever questions we had, we had a friend to take care of first. In a hurry, we converted our unfinished guest room—used as a storeroom then—into livable space. We covered the bare studs of the walls with fabric, stretching the warming and concealing yardage over them and attaching it with Wally’s staple gun. Window dressers are great for making almost anything look better. A futon and frame filled most of the room—which was fine, since Bobby slept most of the day.
And, we soon discovered, ate and complained for the rest. What illness seemed to bring out in him was the soul of one who’s felt deprived, who’s never really gotten his rightful share, and so must fuss and whine, blame and rail. Of course he felt awful, of course the world didn’t make much sense to him, and he must have felt that all he could control was what he ate—or didn’t. And yet such understanding has its limits. People can’t help it if they act more like themselves when they’re ill, for better or for worse—but those who take care of them can’t help how they feel, either.
With Bobby I experienced the most intense and peculiar combination of annoyance and pity. Food became the arena of combat. Since Wally was basically useless in the kitchen except for peeling and chopping and opening packages, it was Bobby and I head to head. He wanted mother food, comfort food, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, liver and onions, puddings and custards and vegetables boiled to bland innocuousness. My cooking tends toward salads and grilled chicken and crisp vegetables; I’ve never made gravy in my life. And I was also cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option. I did try to please, but the matter of oatmeal just about put me over the edge; Bobby wanted his prepared in a precisely undercooked fashion, with just the right proportions of milk and sugar. He’d remonstrate about my failures in a tone I wouldn’t accept from anybody. Though as soon as I’d feel myself flood with anger, I’d look at this ancient, withered forty-five-year-old man, his diminished body failing, and wonder how I could forget what I was dealing with. How could I set my temper aside?
Curiously, I was better at it than Wally was. I think because my friendship with Bobby didn’t go anywhere nearly as deep—was in fact, becoming attenuated, was more these days like a kind of discipline of compassion I was practicing. This was a fellow human being who needed help—not particularly a person I liked very much—and in some funny way that made it easier.
Not for Wally. One of the things I loved about him, after all, was that the boundaries between him and anyone or anything he loved weren’t very strong ones. Permeable, emotionally available, things entered right into him. I could see his patience wearing thin, his good humor taxed. He looked forward to going to work, and worried what he’d do when the store closed for the season. Upstairs, in bed, we’d talk as quietly as possible about how we’d get through this, about how we might handle the next day. That was one thing I always loved about us, one of any couple’s ordinary pleasures: intimate time, after no matter what, to talk through anything and nothing, to find reassurance, sustenance, at least company in the face of whatever. What talk is better than talk in bed?
The annoyance we felt was replaced, all too soon, by something deeper—wonder and fear, because Bobby as we knew him began to disappear, his consciousness slipping to some different plane of perception. He’d say, when I brought him tea, “There’s something wrong with this quilt. These boxes won’t hold still.” Patterns seemed to trouble him, to move and shift, just in the morning at first, and then at any time he was resting. He’d call me into his room to tell me about it. At the breakfast table one morning he seemed agitated, close to desperate. “You guys have got to tell me something,” he said. “You’ve got to tell me