Illness is anticipation; illness surrounds us with the vertiginous, the branching paths of what could happen. Our year of spiraling down, the hard stretch from the winter of 1992 until the winter of ’93, is the most difficult time for me to describe. Harder even than Wally’s death, my life’s watershed, toward which all the time before it moved, and all the time after hurries away.
Emily Dickinson, a poet so encyclopedic she can be consulted like an oracle, helps to explain.
Suspense—is Hostiler than Death—
Death—tho’soever Broad,
Is just Death, and cannot increase—
Suspense—does not conclude—
But perishes—to live anew—
But just anew to die—
Annihilation—plated fresh
With Immortality—
Death is “just death, and cannot increase”; there is no further, no still-to-come. Death puts an end to the multiplication of possibility. This has happened, nothing else. Black as this obliterating balm is, it also has in it, after long illness, an element of relief.
There is no relief in long illness, which suspends us in not-knowing. Every case of AIDS is unique; each person has AIDS in his or her own way. We couldn’t know what was coming, we could only hold our breaths as it began, slowly, it seemed then—though so swift now, in retrospect’s compression—to make itself known.
A season of fear, after Bobby, though not always fear expressed. Fear contained, lived through and with, “Hostiler than Death.” It was the time when Wally was most in pain—psychic distress, the terror of uncertainty, the fear of what opened before him. Physical pains began, too—headaches, especially, gripping sieges that would keep him on the couch for days, dosed on horse-pill-sized ibuprofen, then on codeine. Then he’d feel better suddenly, released from the punishing grip at his temples, but tired, pale, erased.
Perhaps this year’s hardest for me to describe because I could hardly bear to look at what was happening, to let myself see it. There was so little I could do. Later, I could at least attend to the countless little needs of a man who couldn’t walk, but now his difficulties, his growing sense of diminishment, were things neither of us seemed able to do a thing about. We both wavered on the edge of depression. These darkening months, what could I be but his witness? And how could I bear that?
That late winter and spring were the season of Wally’s most powerful dreams, which frightened me, with their seeming rehearsal for death, although he’d report them, mornings, with a tone much more like wonder.
In one, at the end of a long tunnel, a great Being stood in the light. The Being himself didn’t really have a gender, Wally said, though you had to call him something. He was of human size, but his arms were full of people, men and women, and somehow they were of human size, too. The proportions were all just right. The people said to Wally, “Come with us, we’re going dancing.”
“And they seemed so glad to be going,” he said, “and so glad to have me join them. But I said, ‘I’m not ready yet.’”
In another dream, Wally watched his own funeral, which was taking place in a church in Rockland, the town where he grew up. His body was dressed, laid out; from the air above, he watched himself, watched his mother and me, wanting to tell us where he was, but removed from us, still, literally above it all.
Another night he traveled to a distant place where a group of men sat a table playing cards. It was a room between heaven and earth, and when one of the men stood up to greet him, Wally realized it was his father, dead these fifteen years. He was so happy, so reassured to see his father again, but the older man said, “It’s not time yet, son. You’ve got to go back home.”
The tone of awe with which Wally’d tell me these dreams was contagious; I couldn’t help but feel it, the sense of dread turning into something else—that sense of adventure, that eagerness with which he’d always greeted the world? And yet I wanted him, too, not to accept. Shouldn’t he struggle to live?
To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of surviving, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to look was also unbearable. And so I’d write, when I could, recording what approached like someone in a slow-moving but unstoppable accident, who must look and look away at once.
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 yet it has enormous power; it sits before us like a mountain, a fact too huge to apprehend. And also strangely after the fact, at the same time: what is this that has been erasing him, a little at a time, if not AIDS?
But AIDS of what sort? Other than the minor annoyance of thrush, none of the familiar OI’s show themselves: no pneumonia, no lesions, no toxoplasmosis, no cmv retinitis. He’s had nothing identifiable but those cottony white patches of fungus in the mouth which a daily dose of some drug prevents. He looks thinner but he’s not wasting away. He just seems increasingly tired, less present, more transparent, as though he were stretched taut over some vacancy within. HIV fatigue? his doctors ask. Viral activity?
Sometimes I’m overcome by waves—no, a continuous molten outpour—of anger, though it’s never directed at what I’m really in a rage about. In the bank, for instance, some petty annoyance or irritating policy sends me into a fury; I’m flushed, my heart’s pounding, I want to pound on the counter. I know the teller can hear my voice shaking with all I’m holding in, though I am also letting out quite enough.
April. Support group. We all had a good week. Andy and Martin have forced pots of bulbs, and they’re blooming, and because Martin feels better, they’ve been to the movies. Saul, blind now, loved feeling the sun on his face, these bright days. Alan held still for his injections, so this time they didn’t hurt him. Jerry made a huge pot of vegetable soup, and Henry cleaned his plate, and asked for seconds, and between them they ate it all, then Henry got up out of his wheelchair and helped to wash the dishes. Wally and I, given a week without fever or headaches, went for the longest walk.
Whatever it is comes and goes, a lost week followed by a brighter one, a flourish of energy. The inability to predict is thus a source of terror and a gift.
May. Wally’s feelings are so contagious, he’s such a restless and unfocused presence in the house, which we’ll really have to deal with somehow, this summer. I’m weary of school, but the time I’ve had going to and from work’s also the only time I’ve had alone. I don’t want to get cranky and tense, I want to stay cool and enjoy our time, but I worry about that being hard when he’s so much at loose ends. The most important thing for me to do may be to make decisions about how I’m going to use my time. We can’t both fly around madly or we’ll go nuts.
Wally’s planned to do windows for the clothing store this summer, a bit of work out of the house that would give him a project every couple of weeks, allowing him to work for just a few hours and rest in between as much as he likes. But the first time, for the Memorial Day windows, retail preparations for the season’s opening weekend, it’s clear what an enormous toll it takes to sketch a plan and gather the props. I drive him and them to the store, he works for a few hours and then comes home to rest, later works a few hours more, and then he’s exhausted for days. He accepts one more offer to do the windows, after this, but then postpones twice, and finally cancels.
In June, Wally goes with a group of men with AIDS to Watershed, a workshop in ceramics in Maine. I’m happy for him to have something new away from home, away from me, with other people; his illness and his depression isolate him. We talk on the phone every night; he loves the landscape there, and likes the workshops and the people he’s with, but tires so easily and deeply, feeling weary to the bone. Long afterward, nearly a year after his death, I’ll find a yellow spiral notebook mixed in among the cookbooks, a little journal he began there and soon abandoned. How it’ll shock me then, the fact of his handwriting, his voice coming through the plain clear print:
June 13, 1992. It’s very hot outside. I worked a little with clay and felt nervous. Nervous that I might do the wrong thing. I know there is no right or wrong. Just do what you feel. There is a part of me that just wants to break free and work. Let it out and not be afraid. I feel safe—but I’m still a little shakey. I’m always thinking, what if? I could turn this around to what if I’m always thinking. It’s not so bad to think. Think about what I’m doing here. How I feel about my surroundings. I would love to just go and lie in the grass. Feel it against my body. Chew some grass. I just had a thought of painting myself black and white like a cow. Peaceful, content. No one pushing me. No one telling me to get in the barn. If they did I would run very fast through the fields. Laughing all the while. I would like to do that for a couple of days. Then maybe I would come home. My dog would come and find me. Lying in the grass afraid to go home. He would lick off my cow disguise. Looking down at myself I see me. The peaceful cow. The peaceful man.
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 fevers, headaches, fatigue. And then there are times when he feels better, wants to go on a walk with me and Arden, or on a shopping trip to Hyannis, or out to lunch. What I can hardly remember now, what I can’t call back up from the strongbox of memory in which I’ve locked it, is the gradual process through which such days or hours or moments of feeling good came to be a surprise.
Of course they were the norm, at first. There’d be a bad spell of a few days, and then it would clear, and we’d have a good week, maybe weeks. I have hidden in my heart the recognitions, the knowledge that he was surely failing, each month a little worse.
I knew it, one brilliant day, when I’d ridden my bicycle out to Herring Cove, and gone for a walk by myself along the curve of beach, the barrier arc of dunes that keeps the salt marsh from being swept away. After a long walk, I turned back toward home. Halfway across the marsh, I saw a man and a black dog coming over a cleft in the dunes up ahead, and I was suddenly flooded with delight, thinking Wally had brought Arden and come to meet me. But I knew, as soon as I thought it, that Wally couldn’t manage it anymore, that he couldn’t have driven himself here, and walked across the sand. And my heart sank in me, I think I let out a cry, out loud, knowing I’d never again see the two of them coming down some bright slope together, running toward me.
How did I know? People with AIDS got sick all the time, sick unto death, and then before you knew it there they were pushing a cart around the A&P or exhibiting their paintings or singing at a benefit. The familiar opportunistic infections killed, but there were treatments for them, too. Whatever was happening to Wally didn’t follow any pattern anyone seemed to know, yet it was clear that it was progressive, deepening, that he was steeping in his illness, taking on its color, the way fabric steeps in dye.
At the end of August, Hurricane Bob swept through Provincetown. We had a few days warning; the tourists cleared out, the hardware and drugstores sold out of flashlights and batteries and radios. We battened every hatch we could find.
The morning of the storm was hushed, expectant. When the wind began to blow, it was as if not only the town but the world had exhaled, all at once. A grand horizontal stream of watery air—airy water?—came tearing down our street, rocking but fortunately not tipping over our big box alder tree. Every leaf in town was shredded, windblown, and mixed with saltwater to form a sticky pesto which would, hours later, cover any exposed surface, turning the white New England clapboards a mossy basil green.
About five in the afternoon the wind simply stopped, and the citizens of Provincetown crept out to survey the damage, a tentative examination, at first, which swiftly became a sort of festive promenade. Everybody was out, walking the length of our arterial Commercial Street, exchanging stories, pleased to see one another, responding with wonder to the few real disasters: great trees thrown down, some of them onto the roofs of houses, and the lid of the Surfside Motel (frankly, an eyesore) blown clean away and dumped into Bradford Street. It was the strangest sort of party, and there was something extraordinarily communal about it, and tender; how glad we all were to have survived together, how happy it wasn’t worse.
There’s a photograph a friend took of Wally and me together that late afternoon, a photograph I never saw until after he died (evidence of the past keeps floating up, new ways to see, new prompts and reminders). We’re standing side by side, his left arm linked in my right. I am clean-shaven, and wearing a cotton khaki beret from the army surplus store, a favorite hat; Wally has a little shadow of a beard, and an oversized cotton sweater, one that makes him look boyish, lost in the big warm knit, whose sleeves hang down over his hands. I am smiling; it’s a real smile, and yet it also betrays strain, how much I am trying, how hard I am working to see that things move on. On Wally’s lips a little faint smile floats, too, but that is not what dominates his face, which looks somewhere away from the camera as if in a kind of reverie. This walk must have been hard for him, much as he wanted to go. But what plays across his face isn’t just this moment but all these months. He looks hollowed out, his cheekbones high, as if he is being consumed. It’s the face of someone who has known a good deal of pain, yet there is some unmistakable tenderness in it, too, some sort of gentle bemusement that seems, impossibly, to coexist with suffering.
I try to imagine what I’d think if I didn’t know these people. How would I read this picture? I’d know they’re lovers, from the fit of their bodies but more from a kind of resemblance in these faces, which is not just of the flesh but of the way shared experience, the psychic stuff held in common, shapes and illuminates the face. I’d know they’ve been down close to the bone in something that taxes all their strength, requires every resource they have. I’d know that, whatever it is, they’re in it together. I’d know they aren’t done yet.
School starts again at the beginning of September. Nervous about leaving Wally those two days a week, I’ve been busy making arrangements—our friend Paul to check in on him every day, the freezer full of quick frozen meals he can just thaw out, pans of lasagna in the fridge.
The caseworker from the Family Care Program insists we install a “Lifeline,” a machine which serves as a kind of instantaneous way of calling for help. It consists of a red button Wally’s supposed to wear around his neck, on a chain.
Pushed, the button sends a signal to a big, ominous-looking box beside the phone, which automatically calls the first on a list of friends and neighbors. If no one answers it phones the second, and so on, and eventually calls an ambulance.
The idea is that Wally might have some sudden crisis, might fall and not be able to reach the phone, though right now that seems to us perfectly remote. His fevers or headaches make him feel listless, washed out, but he’s always been capable of making a phone call, or fixing himself a sandwich. He takes Arden down to the bay in the morning, though slowly; he walks the few blocks downtown, some days, to rent a movie. The caseworker’s alarm feels excessive; perhaps she’s right to be cautious, but we can’t help but feel we’re being pushed. We make a point of saying that we want to emphasize how well Wally is, that we want to behave in accordance with his capacities, as long we’re able. She’s not about to budge, and so we reluctantly accept the thing, and learn to joke about it, even though it’s a symbol of the loss of autonomy. There’s an ad in the newspaper practically every day for a similar product, and it pictures an elderly woman with black lips lying stricken on the rug a few feet from her fancy French phone; the image and its accompanying quote—I’ve fallen and I can’t get up—becomes a kind of silly joke for us. Wally threatens that one day I’ll come home and find him on the floor in a tweedy suit, and stockings with seams, his lips painted black, his nails clawing after that big red button.
I’m holding myself with increasing tension, steeling, bracing. I’m never alone, at home, so my solitude is in the car, and I find myself weeping there, listening to stupid songs on the radio. I fall apart in between places, and then pull myself together to work, pull myself together at home to run the household, take care of the exhausted, fading man on the couch. What can I do but watch? What can I do but sit next to him, and rub his head when he has a headache, and bring him sweet things to eat?
September. I man I knew—a little—is dead. [Reading this journal now, I realize so many people I’ve known have died that I don’t know who this entry refers to.] All our understandings, all our consolations and considerations feel so flimsy. Faced with real loss, they’re paper, flimsy little cut-paper flowers. Name them: A Better Place, Universal Mind, Being—worst, Heaven!
Wally begins to complain about stairways, high places, not the work of climbing them but a feeling of uncertainty about his footing. Especially the stairs at the video store, this one particular flight that’s giving him trouble, because they’re open between each tread, so that you can see between them to the ground below, and it disorients him so that he fears he’s going to fall.
October. This whole landscape’s varnished with death.
He starts a new drug, D4T, another in the same family of antivirals, the same damnable class of drugs that have done nothing at all for him so far (unless, of course, what’s happening now would have happened sooner without them, but why believe that?). Dr. Magnus says there’s a good buzz about this one; people report having lots more energy, a new wave of vital force. And after a week or two there’s a flicker of new strength in Wally, too, and we wonder if he might in some way be mending? If what’s weakening him is just “viral activity,” then an antiviral ought to help. But soon he’s tingling in his fingers and toes, his hand going numb; this drug’s dangerous side effect is also permanent neuropathy, painful nerve damage to the extremities. He seems to feel as tired as ever, and his head hurts even more.
Dream: Wally and I are rehabbing a huge brick factory we’ve bought, gutting lots of it. We climb around on a large, dangerous stairway which is hard to get down, dangerous for Arden, who keeps getting his leash caught. We break for lunch (suddenly with a bunch of people) explaining how we’ll only heat one room, which will have a ceiling, even though the rest of the vast space will be open. It is beautiful—like a nineteenth century brick facade turned inside out, and extremely daunting. But I feel certain that together we can make one warm, enclosed space inside the great ruined structure.
In January, we go to Florida together. I’m teaching, in a two-week program for writers held at a resort on the Panhandle, in the area known as the “Redneck Riviera,” a brilliant strip of astonishingly white sand and water of a mild Caribbean blue, and hotels and golf courses chewing up what must have been a startling, pristine landscape once. In the decorative pool by the resort office, a stunned-looking great blue heron resides; he must be wondering what’s happened to the world he knew.
It’s been touch and go whether Wally will be able to come along; I’m not sure I’ve ever really believed it would happen. But he’s feeling mildly perky, as the date arrives, and eager for a change of scene. The setup is perfect: we have a condo with a kitchen, a bath on the first floor, and the requisite couch, so if he has to spend the whole time lying down, at least it will be on a different couch, watching a different TV.
I teach workshops in the morning, and then come back and pick up Wally in our rented turquoise Mazda, a few shades darker than the sea. We eat lunch—sandwiches I pick up at the Winn Dixie—sitting in the car, watching the pelicans on the beach. Wally never feels well enough to walk out onto that white sand, but he likes going for little drives, finding a place to park and watch a shore so different from our own.
One night I’m to give a poetry reading, and Wally decides to come, his first social outing during our stay. I drive him to the building where the reading will be held, and our friends Roger and Ellen meet him at the door. They haven’t seen him for over a year now, and it’s a shock to me to read in their faces their shock at seeing him. Is it that clear, how changed he is? Later, Roger will tell me, he had to excuse himself from the conversation so that he could go into the bathroom and cry.
I have an awful feeling, on the way home, about the toll it takes on Wally to walk through the airport in Atlanta, to make it to the plane to Boston, as if that walk’s drawing upon reserves of energy he doesn’t have any more—and since there is no reserve, it’s him that’s being drawn upon, disappearing.
My journals repeat, painfully, obsessively; they have one note to strike, helplessness.
January. What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I cannot penetrate. No articulation possible.
No, that isn’t true, people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false—nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.
What am I living on? Someone said the other day, “that old irrepressible—impossible—hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this with optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to be better?
Hope has to do with continuing, that’s all: thin stuff, unprepossessing food which—looked at in this light—seems really neither thin nor plain, but miraculous. What keeps us going? Some native will to live, as much the stuff out of which we’re made as blood or bone?
But many refuse to live, or continue on but refuse to feel, or try to. How do they lose their will? I can imagine, now, where I couldn’t before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one’s strength, until what’s left is tenuous, transparent. I used to think depression wrong—a failure to see, a rejection of the gifts of one’s life, an injustice to the world’s bright possibilities. But I understand better than I did before.
W’s leaving me—already—though who knows how long, to what degree, when—and nothing I can do can even begin to touch that fact. Already he’s starting to make his peace: the dreams, the things he says (“this will be my last trip,” on the way home from Florida) seem to say he’s preparing himself. I’m terrified of being alone—sometimes I think I won’t be anyone without him—and terrified of his suffering, of being unable to be there with what he needs. The whole thing scares me shitless, plain and ugly fact—ugly? Human. Who could be looking at this without fear?
I walk Arden alone, in the chilly, ice-locked woods, on the trails around the ponds. “Here in winter one learns to love austerity,” begins a poem I’m working on, “or else not to love.”
When I call home from school, Wally’s vague and empty-sounding; he seems to have barely enough energy to speak. I’m still going to work a couple of days each week, our friend Paul stopping in every day to visit, run errands, see if there’s anything Wally needs. He’s saying he’s fine, but I can tell he leaves the couch less and less when I’m gone, sleeping there at night, too. He doesn’t trust himself to get up, to climb the stairs; he doesn’t want me to see how shaky he feels, because he wants me to feel all right about going to work.
When I’m home, I help him up the stairs at night, walking right behind him, to support and guide. The steep and narrow little stairway to our bedroom—in these houses they built stairways like ship’s ladders, designed to take up as little space as possible—becomes, this once, an asset: Wally can hold onto the walls, supported by the narrow passageway to bed.
We order a new couch, from the Pottery Barn catalog, since Wally more or less lives on the couch now. Since we can’t go shopping together, we pore over catalogs and compare sizes and slipcovers—the world of fabric and texture, ongoing things, gestures of occupying, furnishing, inhabiting. Gesture of hope, though he’ll never get to use it much. By the time it arrives, in six weeks, the world’s changed unalterably.