Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [96]
Though I carried it with me everywhere, ready to use, all that year I’d fill only one small notebook.
February. When I’m at home I’m with W so constantly, we are face to face together in the terrible dynamic of him getting weaker, more limited, and it’s hard for me to remain intact, feel like myself. I don’t have much of a sense of my own borders—and that’s not so bad (it’s an asset, in some ways, and a given anyway), as long as I do what I need to do myself—walking alone, writing, sinking down into myself enough so that I am not always being in relation. But I don’t want to pull back psychically too far, either—it’s the right balance that’s so hard.
Wally begins to live on the couch. It’s a cot, really, a folding wooden Victorian contraption with beautiful lines, for which Wally’d made pads and pillows long ago. It is surprisingly comfortable, if slightly shaky, and long enough to let either of us sprawl our whole long lengths, though it seems ages since I’ve lain there myself. It is Wally’s place in the world—the two living room windows looking out to the garden and, over our picket fence, the life of the street. And when the view wearies, he can turn to the big blue-painted cabinet holding the TV.
Arden’s beginning to expect less from Wally. He looks to me for trips to the bay or the woods. Wrestling together used to be their joyous, daily occupation. Arden sleeps on the floor by the couch, Wally’s hand drifting down over his back, tangling in the black curls.
Spring’s coming. I am trying to write a poem which won’t come right. In it, I imagine watching a flowering tree, in early spring, trying to see the gradual process through which it bursts into flower, into fever. How does it happen, the hard sheen of the bark opening to admit such transformation? I try to imagine what it would be like to really see that moment of change.
And I’m trying to write a poem about Wally on the couch. I try to write it as a villanelle, an obsessive form which repeats whole lines; my watching him, sitting beside him, taking his temperature has about it a quality of ceaseless repetition. One repeated line I try is “an absence the size of you.”
“How could I prepare,” I ask, “for an absence the size of you?”
“An absence the size of you,” I write, “sprawled on the couch…”
“The future,” I write, “is an absence the size of you.”
My poem stalls, fails.
Wally’s T-cell count is falling. Dr. Magnus has said all along that Wally can have an AIDS diagnosis written down if he wants. If he does, he’s Medicaid-eligible, can be a client of the Provincetown AIDS Support Group, and we can receive a supplementary income through something called the Family Care Program, which will, in effect, pay me a bit each month to care for him at home. And he’ll receive disability benefits, and not have to work again—not that he’s been working anyway, but he has received unemployment during the winter, which has helped us through these months and will soon run out. (One real advantage to living in Provincetown, for people with AIDS, is that the epidemic has hit so hard here, for so many years, that people have figured out appropriate systems to help those in need; the maze of the available systems of social welfare has long since been threaded through, the options and procedures made clear. Elsewhere, understanding all of this can be a full-time job.)
Helpful benefits, but a very powerful word to accept.
Suddenly there’s no decision to be made. His T-cell count falls to below two hundred, just as the CDC officially changes its guidelines. Weird, to think that people someplace draw the boundaries of a disease, define its parameters. Now they have said that having fewer than two hundred T-cells constitutes a firm diagnosis, so Wally officially has AIDS.
We try to say it’s just a word. Not even that, an acronym, cipher of letters. And, of course, it’s anything but a surprise. And