by Mark Doty
Then he remembers bubble gum. We buy it by the box, and he keeps adding a fresh piece to what he’s already chewing, until it all seems too much work to chew and I have to ask him if he’d like to stop—he looks weary, chewing so much gum.
Then he gets a hankering for licorice, the English kind, multicolored, striped, fancy little pieces of candy which resemble tiny pillbox hats or art deco buildings, little Guggenheim museums or Miami Beach hotels. They’re beautiful. I find them and Hot Tamales in the sheets, down in the crack between the bed frame and the mattress, under the white metal drawers by Wally’s bed, the nightstand that’s become a repository of equipment: thermometer, bedpan, toilet paper, wipes, urinal, moisturizer, drugs, Chinese herbs, remote control.
The Chinese herbs come from our acupuncturist, Samantha. We’re trying acupuncture at the suggestion of our friend Billy, who feels he’s really been helped, that his energy level and overall health have improved.
Samantha comes to the house once a week, and treats us both: tiny stainless needles to boost Wally’s immune system, calm his spirit, and clear his head. I get my spirit-calming points, at the very top of the ears, done too, as well as other points to boost my energy level and strengthen my lower back. I’ve started taking an herbal formula, too, for energy and strength, since I’ve been feeling twinges, the muscles near the base of my spine starting to ache and complain.
Acupuncture always makes me feel terrifically relaxed; a twenty-minute session is like an hour’s nap. Wally claims it does nothing for him, but during his treatment he always falls asleep, and usually stays in a deep, peaceful nap for a couple of hours.
Samantha’s a great believer in herbs, and she’s started Wally on a formula, too, big green tablets containing ginseng, assorted exotic fungi, and some animal products we’d rather not think much about. The pills smell greenly brackish, and Wally would put up with them more gracefully were it not that he’s supposed to take six or eight of the great big things after each meal. He already takes a raft of prescriptions whose names run together into a Latinate litany that would occupy half this page, so more pills aren’t exactly welcome. I think he just does it for me, till one day he’s fussing, after I’ve made him lunch, about swallowing anything else. I say, Oh, you can do it. And he sighs and says, Okay, if I have to. But as he’s swallowing the fragrant tablets (what does that scent evoke? spoiled hay? a stagnant pond?) one seems to get stuck in his throat, and then he’s quickly swallowing some water to wash it down, then choking on the water.
Then he looks right at me and vomits vigorously, a startling turn of events. As I’ve learned to do, I start to make a joke of it, saying something about Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and soon Wally’s laughing till the tears run down his face, and it takes him a long time to stop laughing long enough to say he’ll never swallow another Chinese herb. And he never does.
Our big green four-poster goes back upstairs, to make room for a hospital bed; the hope is it’ll be easier for Wally to sit up, easier for us all to help him. We’re changing the sheets all the time now, and because it’s become very difficult for him even to shift his weight a little bit in the bed, much less to sit up, it’s hard for us and for him—hard to eat, to look out the window, to be washed and changed.
He moves onto the couch—the first and only time he graces our new one—while I disassemble our bed and clean the room. The medical supply company sends a sweet kid who sets up the new bed, shows me how to work the buttons and crank. It’s semi-electric, which means the head and feet raise and lower by the push of a button, so the patient can control it himself. (Medicaid would prefer to pay for the hand-cranked model, something appropriate to, say, a Victorian orphanage.)
The bedroom looks serene now, orderly, but awfully empty with just the single new institutional bed in it. Arden, frightened by the noise and movement of the thing, won’t go near it. Wally sleeps that night with just Thisbe; I’m in the next room on the couch. The next morning, his anger is strenuous, and he’s more passionate with refusal than I’ve seen him in months; this will not do.
I say, let’s give it a try.
He says, No, I won’t have it, no.
Just for a week?
Silence.
Let’s see if we can’t make it better, and then in a week, if you still don’t like it, back it goes.
He’s grumpy about it, but he agrees: one week. I bring down an iron single bed we’ve had upstairs, for a guest bed, and push it up against the hospital bed’s chrome rails. Two single beds together make quite a gigantic bed, it turns out; there’s barely room enough to walk around the perimeter of the room. But there’s room for all of us in the bed, and Wally discovers, by the next day, that he likes going up and down. It’s far from perfect—he keeps sliding down, when the head of the bed is raised, and when he does he looks like a little boy lost in his parents’ bed—but it helps.
New sheets—patterned in scrollwork and flowers, as far from hospital white as we can get—soften things, and help it feel like home. By now, I know this pattern of accommodation: from the disruptive, cold edges of the new fact, toward the familiar. To make something familiar is to make it bearable. Is that why so many gay men have a tradition of redecorating, of knowing how to make anything look good? Since difficult lives require, in order to make them livable, style?
Wally’s legs point more severely inward, seem to want to cross over one another. They’re slender, the muscles soft, atrophied. All his body from the waist down seems more inert, so that it’s really impossible for him to use his portable toilet anymore (so hard to transfer him onto its seat, so hard for him to sit up) or for him to be helped onto the padded bench in the shower. It’s a strain, to try to lift him, and makes me afraid for him, too, the way his legs seem to drift off to the left, his head to the right. It’s harder and harder to straighten out his neck; stiffness is setting in. I rub the muscles to help them relax, but it seems to move back into that angle.
One night when I’m sound asleep there’s an enormous crash. I sit straight up in bed and look around and see that Wally’s gone. In my groggy, startled confusion I can’t think what’s happened, but when I jump up there he is, on the floor beside his bed. His legs have drifted, as they do, off to the left, and he’s been unable to stop himself from simply sliding onto the floor. He’s not, thank God, hurt—is, of course, laughing, but this time I can’t laugh with him. I can’t lift him. Darren’s out for the night, and here I am with this helpless, inert man on the floor, and I can’t do a thing but get a pillow under his head. I think what to do, and come up with nothing. We talk about it. Wally, bless his heart, says it’s not so bad, being on the floor till morning.
In a while, slowly, we get him more-or-less sitting up, then rest like that for a while, me propping his back so he’ll stay upright. Then, his arms around my neck, my legs bent, I try to lift, but his weight nearly strangles me. We try again in a minute, his arms locked around my shoulders. And while he says Oh, oh and I see blinding white light that seems to begin at the base of my spine I haul him straight up off the floor and onto the edge of the bed, and he falls back into it, and I fall next to him.
W’s voice smaller on the other end of the phone—this connection, tender—his narration recognizing just one room and the slice of neighborhood held in his view.
I am so grateful he’s not in the hospital. I’m so angry there’s nothing for his doctors to do, and yet I’m glad too that they can’t hurt him, that he’s here, at home, in a room that feels like us, full of animals and his own food and his own music and his own TV.
November. You’ve seen waves breaking, at the end of their long travelling—it’s as if he were breaking inward, foaming into himself, a tide turning back toward its origin.
I look at him sometimes, just taking in his face, the way he smiles back at me, the way he takes in my attention, unquestioning, loving. The way he says, as he always has, Now what…a sign that means, What are we doing next? Where do we go from here?
&nb
sp; Wally’s primary nurse, Paolo, means well, but he’s not a subtle man. There are things about him I don’t like: he wants to be very important to his patients, but he doesn’t really know them, though he thinks he does. He isn’t really paying attention. But Wally adores him, and flirts with him outrageously, admiring the tuft of hair that pokes up at his collar, his thick mustache. All fall, when he’s felt well enough (and, in fact, he always seems to summon some energy from somewhere when he knows that Paolo’s coming), Wally has subtly teased him, turning his serious remarks to jokes, subverting the conversation by turning it to sex in a way that I find hilarious and charming. Paolo only gets the grossest of the innuendo; I love to watch Wally lead him, play with him, and occasionally come forward with startlingly direct questions. Wally is particularly enamored with Paolo’s tattoo, an image of Pegasus, the horse’s wings just unfolding across Paolo’s biceps, his hooves visible, warm days, beneath his T-shirt sleeve. Wally likes to find ways to get Paolo to bend over him, so that the patient can look closely at the nurse’s tattoo.
It makes me think, now, of a man I’d meet six months after Wally’s death, when I visited a writing workshop in New York for men with AIDS. He had watched his own lover die, had come close to death himself, and in the space of a year had endured the deaths of most of his friends. He and I were talking, during a break, about the persistence of desire, about still wanting, no matter what. He said, “It was my dick that kept me alive.”
Is lust a form of hope?
In the last months of Wally’s life, he seemed to experience a reflowering of desire. It was a curious thing, a kind of sex-in-the-head, to borrow D. H. Lawrence’s phrase. Wally’s body, he’d lament (though only for a moment, before he’d go back to the characteristic smile and laughter), was long past cooperating. The last time he and I’d had sex was over a year before, in the autumn of ’92. Even then, though his body accepted mine against him, I could tell it was something that was over for him. Hard to say, now, whether his impotence was a matter of depression or tension, or whether an early effect of PML was to sever the connections between genitals and brain. Even the thought of sex seemed to vanish for a while, to go underground.
I’d long since taken to quick, congenial encounters to relieve the pressure—the sort of erotic adventures that Wally and I used to enjoy together, when the need for sexual variety had presented itself, as it usually does, for gay couples who stay together for years. Well, I suppose such needs present themselves to all couples, but gay men have different traditions for negotiating these waters. We’d learned over time to relax about sex, and to know the difference between our commitment to each other and casual, playful sex outside the relationship.
The current of Wally’s erotic life had slowed, been dammed.
But in those last months, desire made itself quite visible once again—the underground stream rising, as it were, from a trickle to a roar.
My friend Richard—a poet and novelist in town for the year, on leave from the university where he teaches—would come once a week to sit with Wally for an hour or two, usually while I was away at school, an opportunity for different company and chat. Wally loved these visits, because Richard was a fountain of gossip, good stuff, the specifics about various men and what they liked to do and with whom. Richard’s been through this before, and he understands being with the ill in a way that only experience teaches; he knows how people at the furthest extremes of life crave the daily, the little news, the everyday meat of the world. (Sometimes my friends would apologize to me for talking about their problems, saying that what occupied them seemed trivial next to what I was experiencing. But I wanted to hear the sound of everyday talk, the chatter and questioning and considerations of ongoingness. I was living in the essential.)
So Richard understood that Wally wanted to hear all about his friends, and Wally would ask questions, and also ask about people passing by on the street whom they could see from the bedroom window. In this way, Wally found out about Daniel and Jack, handsome men in the neighborhood who were friends of Richard’s.
These two became important elements of Wally’s fantasy life, a set of uncensored longings and imaginings which tumbled out all during the day. Expressions of lust might be followed by a kind of sweet sigh which seemed the mark of a schoolgirl crush. “Do you think,” he’d say, “he could like a man with useless legs?”
Sometimes I’d feel a little threatened, weirdly displaced, but only for a moment; looking at this compromised, inexhaustibly sweet man, who could be upset? What he was saying wasn’t about us, but about a kind of nostalgia for all his life, for desire, the ties by which the body threads us to the world. The one time I lost my temper, in all that long last year, had to do with flirtation. I had been racing around making arrangements to be out of town for a couple of days; I’d won a literary award which was to be presented in Los Angeles, and I was going to the ceremony. Wally had been thinking about his earrings, which he’d taken out a year before, for a CAT scan, and never replaced. And he was thinking specifically of Paolo, due that day for a visit. A half an hour before I had to catch a plane, he announced that he wanted his earrings in, wanted me to put them in.
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 better. School ends for me, the poetry workshop I’ve been teaching brought to a close, not a moment too soon—I’m needed at home, and ready to be there.
And there is a whole new presence in the house. We’d made the decision to adopt a cocker spaniel about to become an orphan of the epidemic, but his owners decided at the last minute they couldn’t go through with it. Wally has been imagining a new dog that would, unlike the dignified Arden, lick his face. He’s imagined the cocker spaniel, small presence, might sleep close to him. Disappointed, Wally sent me to the shelter, and I fell in love with a youngish golden retriever, Beau. The first time I met him he seemed awfully docile, thoughtful; later I learned he was recovering from anesthesia at the time. On my second visit, we went out to the run together and he leaned his golden weight against me, trusting. He wasn’t exactly small, but he did lick, and there was something in the way he let his body relax against me that banished all doubt: this dog was for us.
