Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [98]
I’d thought I wanted some time to myself, but by the end of the first day I don’t know what to do with it; I’m out of focus, tense, unable to relax and enter into anything. I ride my bike, work in the garden, try to read, and give it up, ride my bike around the trails again. I feel restless and pointless the whole five days.
On the way home from the workshop, the cardboard box full of things Wally’s made rides in the AIDS Support Group’s van, down on the step just behind the sliding door, and when the door’s opened the box tumbles out and most of his work is smashed. He says he doesn’t mind, really, that what’s mattered has been the process of entering into the work, into himself. But there’s something sad about it still, as he explains to me each broken piece of clay, showing me the way the fragments fit together.
August. I have this feeling that there’s a word behind my life I can’t quite say, a word that’s pulling at everything, a word that’s keeping me from writing because it’s just too hard to say it. What word?
My friend Jerry walks by and says, How are you? and I say I’m tired and he says yes, he’s tired too, because Henry’s sick. Not that Jerry’s working so hard taking care of him, but just that the knowledge makes him tired. That’s what it’s like, the knowledge underneath everything, the rock-ledge of the knowledge, the soil on top of it so thin nothing grows, or almost nothing—a few green words, lanky stems, not quite connecting, not finding strong nourishment or sun.
We take a little trip to Vermont together. A college for which I work sometimes has loaned us an empty house on the edge of a beautiful meadow, a place in which one can walk and walk and never come to the end. It’s decked, August, in Queen Anne’s lace and cow vetch, daisies and turk’s-cap lilies. Wally hasn’t been back since we left, and he’s excited to see the old territory again, the world we left, and we’re planning to take Arden back to the old railroad tracks, in search of Shadow, the pit bull he used to wrestle with when he was a puppy.
We talk on the way about how it’ll be to look at a familiar place from a new, more distant vantage point. But we don’t calculate just how hard on Wally the drive will be. Once we arrive, the most time he’s spent in a car in months, he’s entirely exhausted; we fix a bed for him on the couch, in front of the TV, and I walk Arden in the endless meadow—brilliant jewelweed, butter-and-eggs, drunken humming in the clover—and bring us sandwiches from the Grand Union, take-out pizza, pastries and coffee from the new French bakery that opened after we left town.
August. Grim day in support group. Martin on the way out, with hospice care; Alan blind in one eye, Henry not recognizing people, also very much on the way out. It’s so painful to hear; and makes home feel more grim—and I’m having a hard time not letting W’s recent sickness sink my spirits. I want to be able to be with him well, but I’m restless and uncomfortable, I guess just because it’s hard for me to face it. Easier to keep moving, doing things—that way I can stay up, cheerful, not look at the sadness so much. I want to be cheerful for him, but I also don’t want to deny things or act like my father here—so the best thing I can do is try to be present, be right there when I’m there.
On the couch: low-grade