Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  They also very much want to have fun. While we’re chatting, I keep taking little pauses to glance around the room, the unlikeliest assembly of an audience I have ever seen. Behind Paul sits a large woman with unruly black tresses and huge, black, horn-rimmed glasses bound at the corners by tape; she appears to be wearing her bathrobe. Here is an assortment of old queens, wearing clothes they might have saved since the last time they saw the real Judy: slender cardigans, skinny ties, plaid sport coats from another age. A knot of drunken Japanese businessmen, talking furiously, toasting, aglow; three geriatric women, each in a loose beaded top, heads nodding ceaselessly, as if they sat in silence, perpetually saying no to something they could not abide. A young straight couple who seem to have been given someone else’s unwanted tickets.

  All the lights in the room fade to black, and suddenly the little stage blazes: a man in black races up the aisle to the piano and begins a florid overture threaded with phrases from “Over the Rainbow.” Then, beneath big white letters proclaiming JUDY over a curtain of black velvet, appears our star. He’s an energetic little butterball: Judy overweight, on the edge of decline, but still in good concert voice. He’s a forthright belter of a singer, acutely tuned to Garland’s vocal mannerisms, and he launches right into one of the signature songs, stepping back and forth in that funny little movie-musical dance step that Garland just couldn’t seem to stop doing. He’s wearing a black skirt and jacket over a glittery top (just like the ones those three nodding Fates in his audience have on tonight), a short black wig, and, though his pitch wobbles a bit, I have to admit he’s incandescent, especially on the ballads, just the right note of breathy sorrow, a vulnerability breaking open beneath the will to go on.

  First, I forget that he doesn’t look a thing like Judy. Then, as he keeps singing, I forget he’s a man, then I pretty much forget he’s not Judy. Well, he is Judy, isn’t he? In that he’s an embodiment of her image, the continual broadcast streaming out from her vanished, original self, a potent cocktail of stamina and damage, heart and amphetamine. Once, there was one Judy, the broken survivor, then there were thousands, her ghost itself fragmented into a legion of apparitions. Drag has moved far beyond those days; a fierce new crop of drag queens impersonate no one but themselves. But even they seem now a little historical; drag’s moment of cultural visibility has passed. In this late hour, it seems there’s only one Judy again, or at best a few, the rear guard of the drag world, and this one’s singing her heart out to an odd assortment of believers in Midtown on a late Saturday night.

  In James Merrill’s epic vision of the afterlife, the souls of those to whom the living repeatedly turn for instruction or inspiration—Rilke, Jesus, Mohammed—are pale wraiths; they’ve been mined again and again until their essential, illuminating ore is all but exhausted. But here I think JM got it wrong; even the weariest of archetypes is capable of renewal by the force of experience. New circumstances shock them awake; the turn of events refreshes even the most tired of wellsprings. Surely, you’d think Judy Garland—a gay cliché, grown musty as even the notion of “gay” becomes encrusted, itself a cliché—you’d think Miss Garland, as our friend Murray, a seventy-year-old gay man who used to book her tours, always refers to her—Miss Garland should simply be fading away like a faint old radio signal, shouldn’t she?

  But she is alive and well, this evening, and what has brought her hurtling back from the void is the rip in the body of the city, the still-raw wound of “the events of September 11.” (That phrase has become the standard tag for the chaos that broke upon New York, just as the rumbling war machine generates new, interchangeable catch phrases: Infinite Justice, Enduring Freedom.)

  Judy has not been blind to these days. She has a purpose; she wants us to know that the only tolerable response to suffering is persistence. While her demeanor and her voice announce the presence of pain, the songs she chooses refuse to dwell in grief. She ransacks the storehouses of consolation, though in truth her advice all seems to be the same: summon the grit to persist. Smile, though your heart is breaking, she sings, and Lose that long face.

  Then she’s actually singing that song from Carousel—When you walk through a storm / hold your head up high / and don’t be afraid of the dark—a song through whose grander passages our voices used to careen till they wrecked hopelessly on the high notes, back in seventh-grade chorus. She really isn’t bad, though her triumphant moment is Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Here,” a song written after Judy’s death, so that her thrilling final assertion—I’ve been there, and I’m here—seems to ring on many levels at once. Judy is dead and still singing. She has survived the zero, annihilation, and it hasn’t stopped her; therefore, we who took heart once from her supernatural strength, might we not do as she enjoins? The chandelier-women nod; they look to us for acknowledgment; it’s true, isn’t it, we have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off. The waiter arrives with the compulsory second round of drinks.

  Judy sings a song from Valley of the Dolls, “I’ll Plant My Own Tree,” which sends the young straight woman into ecstasy; it is just the moment she’s wanted, and she cries out in delight. Then Judy’s eye is caught by the young woman’s boyfriend. She steps down from the stage to look him over; she wiggles a little with delight. “Oh,” she says, “I have dresses older than you!” Pause. Three beats. “But that’s all right. As long as we’re all here together”—pause, exhalation of air, pause again—“it’s a party!”

  And on she goes, into the introduction to “San Francisco”:

  I never will forget Jeanette MacDonald,

  to think of her it gives me quite a pang.

  I never will forget the way that old Jeanette

  stood there in the ruins and sang…

  Judy, of course, doesn’t stand in the ruins; she is the ruin. In this way she enthralled a generation of gay men, singing her way out of suffering while still bearing the inescapable marks of damage. That was her undeniable, energizing paradox: she could stand before her audience in both transcendence and degradation at once. It was a stance that gay men instinctively understood.

  And now the paradox is taken one step further: Judy’s dead and still singing, her flickering image recedes into the distance but she’s still pouring her heart out, in this dark little room on the western edge of Midtown. And, of course, she isn’t real, merely a phantom, and thus she can say, beneath the words she’s singing, these terrible things: youth fades, beauty passes, what is tender turns dark or dissolves, pleasure fades, the drumbeat suffering of the world drums on, and what is there to trust but that things end?

  But that’s all right, as long as we’re here…

  There is a point where any adult attempt at understanding becomes an absurdity. Eventually, we look at the griefs we’re offered by experience, and there we are: inconsolable, powerless to dispel their weight through rationalization or acceptance. That is what seems to unite every disparate soul in this room, finally: we’re all helpless.

  Once, a young poet said to me, “It’s really too easy to take loss as your subject, isn’t it?”

  I wanted to say, “Yes, dear, and I’ve had so much choice in the matter.” Though I said nothing of the kind.

  In fact, writing about grief has never been any kind of a choice; when I’ve resisted it, the need to articulate has simply insisted all the louder. I have never been able to accept the fact of limit. Though I have had nearly fifty years to think about it—I have now lived longer than Judy did, in her corporeal form!—I am no more reconciled to it than ever. I’m a ruin, too, and I stand here on my small, dark stage with these phrases tumbling out of my mouth. Judy, of course, isn’t reconciled, either, but she has a form into which she pours her grief and exaltation, and so do I.

  In truth, most of us in this room just now seem to have had quite enough of looking loss square in the face, thank you. The women at the next table, who seem to have become our dates, grin, agree, and blaze. Judy says, Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag. Her audience se
ems to accept this instruction when it comes from her, because she herself cannot quite do it, because she is so obviously a wreck through and through. That’s how she gains her credibility. The towers, both public and private, tumble, and she can’t pack up her troubles any more than we can. But she is still here, isn’t she, singing on the cabaret stages of the afterlife?

  I think of old Mr. Arden, trundling his way up the stairs.

  Entr’acte

  A Show

  Arden used to like to climb on a bed and roll on his back, and, for our pleasure and his own, growl and speak and emit whatever range of sounds he could muster. This always delighted us, and we’d rub his belly, or one of us would take hold of his front legs and the other the rear, and we’d say, “Stretch him out, stretch him out!” and pull a little on him to lengthen his spine while he growled and talked some more. We used to call this “putting on a show,” and it seemed to fill Arden with happiness. As if now he could do what we always did, and show us he also could fill the air with sounds.

  Chapter Fourteen

  An early reservation for Thanksgiving dinner is the only one we can get, at the old house near the harbor converted to a fancy restaurant, but it turns out to be just right. At two o’clock, the staff is fresh, the turkey and its roasted and glazed accompaniments perfect, and the desserts so complicated as to silence our conversation and demand full participation. I have cinnamon ice cream with a pear poached in zinfandel and floating on dark chocolate. Time for a walk.

  Arden’s walking well again, not the heedless hurry of the old days but not the awful hobbling of the spring and summer, either. Now he manages a slow stroll along the Beech Forest paths, even a little burst of running at the sight of a bird, or at a turn into a new part of the woods. I am thinking of Beau’s big paws on these same paths all those years; that sound’s still with me, the solid thud of four big paws, the lovely little thunder of him racing ahead. That never exactly leaves. Somehow, memory seems too slight a word, too evanescent; this is almost a physical sensation, the sound of those paws, and it comes allied to the color and heat of him, the smell of warm fur, the kinetic life of a being hardly ever still: what lives in me.

  And just as I’m feeling intensely grateful for that—well, a gratitude commingled with sadness, which certainly is an admixture I can live with, which might, in fact, be a sort of concrete upon which an adult life is built—just as I am thinking of that, on the autumn path, scents and tones of leather, brass, resin, brandy, tobacco, leaf mold, mushrooms, wet bark—I think, Paradise. Then I think, If there’s a heaven and he’s not there, I’m not going.

  And then the corrective voice: The kingdom of heaven is within you.

  Just the other night, at dinner in a restaurant on Eighth Avenue, our friend Marie said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you. Think about that,” she said. “Within YOU.” We’d been talking about September 11, wanting to go to church, and how inadequate any religious institution we could find felt. Marie and Paul both grew up Catholic, and have an inbuilt longing for a community of the spirit, a pattern of ritual. Marie started telling us about a group called The People of the Way, a little gathering of students of early Christianity, who attempt to practice something like the rigorous and humane discipline of the early church. “If you asked THEM if Jesus was God,” she said, “they’d have gone hah!” (Here she made a dismissive face and a big gesture.) “They believed what Jesus said: the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Auden said as soon as Christians stopped believing that, that was it—then we got the Church, hierarchy, mediation, corruption. But before that. Within you.”

  We tried to imagine what would happen if people really believed that.

  A little research on the original New Testament Greek raises more questions than it answers. The first problem is that preposition: you can read it as meaning “within,” “among,” “amid,” or “near at hand.” Then things get more complicated by that last pronoun, which turns out to be a plural version of “you.” English-speakers are always seeking ways to make up for the absence of a second-person plural—y’all, youse, yez, you guys—depending on which part of the country you’re from. Any of which sounds truly dreadful when appended to The Kingdom of Heaven is within…

  And, therefore, you could read the statement as meaning that the heavenly realm resides in the individual spirit, or that it arises in the context of communal exchange. Or, I suppose, both, if you can manage to negotiate both private and collective heavens.

  Night conversation on the train. At night there’s no world out there, or hardly any—just the dark of the window, made darker by the bright overhead lights inside the train. The world narrows down to the overheard conversations of the passengers around me on their cell phones, and the book I’m reading, and then the drifting off that comes after a long day and the rhythmic motion of the train car. I’m slipping back into darkness, then Mr. Beau says, You’ve got to let me go.

  No, not Mr. Beau, who does not, after all, speak, even in death.

  Something else—puppet dog in my internal theater, character in a night-train play?

  He says, Your grief keeps me tied to you.

  I say, I’m doing that?

  He says, I want to run with the other dogs, and swim with the seals!

  I say, But how would I let you go?

  He says, Cry over me until you’re through.

  I say, But then you’ll be gone?

  No, he says, but I’ll be different.

  Long pause.

  I’ll be there, he says, anywhere in the world you are. But you’ve got years to go.

  I say, Then I’ll see you again? But then already I’m not letting him go, am I?

  Let’s say heaven is only available through the individual imagination. No external route, no way for anyone to bring you there. Grace might descend, in its odd, circuitous routes: we are visited by joy, seem to be given a poem or a song, something we encounter fills us to the rim of the self. Those things point the way, but who lives in that heightened awareness? And if we could, would despair be defeated? Balanced, at least? Of course, there must be sorrow in heaven, but can paradise contain the hopelessness of despair, is heaven that much of a paradox?

  My country forebears thought of heaven as a place devoid of tension, without conflict. But they lived hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth lives, after all; my mother’s father scraped together fifty cents a week, for decades, so that when he died he could have a decent funeral. His wife cut up her one good dress to make a shroud for a daughter. There was never enough. No wonder they’d figure heaven as a place of plenty, all needs met, eternal completion and praise.

  But I can’t imagine anything that far removed from the rest of the universe; isn’t every place permeated by tension, the play of opposites, the yoked, irresolvable contradictions? And if the kingdom of heaven is within us, then that means that what is within us must fit into the kingdom of heaven, doesn’t it?

  Despair, then, isn’t a place we leave—some kind of psychic location we pull into, look around, then pull out of again, relieved not to have to live there. It’s more like a dimension of the self, which, once opened, is part of us forever; a pole within, a spot of darkness, deeply magnetic (God abandoning a dimension of Himself?). Without it, might we just float away, unable to feel the darkness and suffering of the world? The adult self requires balance; if we don’t internalize some of the terrible gravity around us, we might as well not have been here at all. One sees people like that, untouched, perpetually young faces who seem merely to have floated through life (forgive me, spirit of empathy, for my rush to judgment, but certain airbrushed Chelsea boys come to mind). They are inevitably beautiful at first glance, and less so on developing acquaintance, not enough of life has entered them to transform and solidify their characters.

  I’ll take a ruin over a brand-spanking-new tract home any day; real beauty is always marked by the passage of time; it dwells in time; its loveliness increases as the workings of age and the mysteries of continuing e
nhance it; even Grecian urns, those brides of quietness, are more beautiful because of their small cracks, the mellowing of their paint, the fine and subtle darkening of the stone.

  I think we have to let a part of us be abandoned by God.

  But gaining any measure of control over the degree of darkness in the self is a damnably hard thing; too much and we’re weighed down, missing a sense of the world’s brightness; a bit more and we’re unable not just to see but to act, immobilized by that muffling, heavy overcoat, worn winter and spring alike, which will not allow us to breathe, will not allow us to see and be seen.

  So what pulls us back, what keeps the balance?

  At the Cézanne show: consummate, weighted fruits, their physical heft made out of green, or red, coexist with skulls, smoking candles. Not one or the other. The skull’s just as solidly, deftly there as every other element of the scene, the bone given the same exacting attention as any apple or pear—attention rendered in the paint, in exact strokes, placed, just so, in a quick gesture won with the eye’s long attention.