Heaven's Coast

by Mark Doty

  A dozen years dispensed with, at least for a little while, I am on the Charles Street we knew. Here Romano’s bakery, where we’d go for coffee and napoleons, layered confections done up like presents in creamy glazes and pipings. Here the realtors with their windows full of photographs of expensive apartments, the upscale grocery with its windows full of perfect food, the florists’ and antique dealers’ windows: promises, everywhere, of the dream of occupying, the hope of home.

  I am strangely, buoyantly happy, though there is a ragged edge to it, like the torn spring clouds of late March or early April; it is the sort of joy that might become tears at any moment. It seems to be contagious; people are oddly friendly, emotionally available in a way that doesn’t usually characterize this—or any?—city. At the corner of Charles and Beacon, the Public Garden opens out, wide and inviting in the grand scale of its accomplished trees, severe in its colors (the day’s a dozen shades of gray) but greening, the faint haloes of the outer branches a haze of bud. Here is the pond where the swan boats will soon be doubled beneath the arching footbridge; here the angel on the corner (did she always face in this direction? memory reorients her) whose motto enjoins: Cast thy bread on the waters…

  And I know what the joy is.

  It wasn’t that I’d ever stopped loving him. But the years had shifted things, as years must, adjusting the focus. Twelve years is time for a river to try a variety of positions, to adjust itself and settle and adjust again, defining the channel in which it flows. After an initial year and a half of fireworks and jealousy and consuming passion—far too volatile to sustain—our union modulated, happily, into something more durable, the beginning of a long, comfortable time of partnership. That is the movement, I guess, from being “in love” to living in love, which is quite another thing. Still with its intensities, its pleasures and depths, but marked also by trust and elasticity, the kind of relaxation which allows a couple to be both profoundly engaged with one another and turned outward, involved in the life that surrounds them.

  In the years before Wally’s death, our life together came to center around his illness, and whatever questions or issues might have arisen between us, whatever evolutions might have occurred in the normal course of a relationship, were simply covered over or set aside, obscured by the reality of a more pressing condition. That, I think, is one of the real tragedies of illness; you cannot know the life you might have had. Epidemic forces us to multiply this loss a thousandfold, a hundred thousandfold: had AIDS not appeared among us, what lives, what works would we have had?

  After Wally died I realized there was a new quality in my feeling for him, something that didn’t have anything to do with taking care of him. It was, in fact, not something new, but the reemergence of an original feeling, from years before: I was falling in love with him again.

  I am taking a walk with my lover, in the place that was ours, which is imbued with that early intensity, where dramas of passion and sexual obsession were played out, dramas of doubt in ourselves and in one another, dramas of jealousy. It’s ironic, since he spent the last nine months of his life in bed or in a wheelchair, that now we can walk together, now that he’s dead. Beacon Street, Berkeley, what Robert Lowell called “hardly passionate Marlborough Street” and my friend Lynda would later revise to “harshly passionate Marlborough Street.” No other landscape, in the history of neighborhoods in which we lived, can hold quite the resonance that this one does, perhaps because no other is quite so far away, and no other’s yet become so emblematic and so completely interiorized, the city surface transformed into the surface of dream. There is a wonderful little poem of Cavafy’s, “In the Same Space,” as heartbreakingly plain and direct a poem about memory as I can imagine:

  The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:

  I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details.

  And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.

  Cavafy’s Alexandrian neighborhood is remade within the perceiver through the transfiguring power of long inhabitation. But that which we leave behind is transfigured in us, too; my city’s a location of memory and desire, and I can plot in this neighborhood points of rapture and longing and wonder. Here a corner where a particular magnolia, in flower, tattooed the sidewalk, and us, with the shadows of its blooms, the street lamp glowing through them tinting our passage beneath to a warm flesh tone. Here the portico of a church—little private space—we’d duck inside to kiss, happy transgression. Here the marquee of the old theater—since then become a big house-wares shop, and now a fancy bookstore—where we emerged one winter night into an enormous snowstorm, which completely buried us both in big wet flakes while we fought all the way home. What we were arguing about? I have no idea, but I remember the wet snow breaking against Wally’s red down vest, my wet shoes, my misery; it was still those early days when one thinks each fight means it’s over, that it’s all been a mistake.

  Here the doorway at the Butera School of Art, where a homeless woman whose life I always used to try to imagine lived, huddled in many scarves and hats, a shopping bag filled with…what? No more school of art now; looks like it’s become condos. And no homeless woman, at least not today; did I think I’d see her here, twelve years later, when half the people I knew who had roofs over their heads are gone? Across the street, in one of these buildings, was the office where Anne Sexton’s psychiatrist had been; I used to like to imagine her coming here for sessions, then walking, afterward, on the Esplanade, along the river. Here, a mailbox a tall, broadly built black man claimed for his own. He used to dress in black plastic trash bags, in inclement weather, and he’d use a pushbroom to clean his piece of sidewalk, the space around the mailbox he claimed as his. He seemed to own nothing but the pushbroom.

  And here is the doorway of the building where we lived: 115 Beacon Street. It looks—well, untouched, except perhaps the double doors’ black paint peels a bit more, the windows of the bay fronting the sidewalk (once they were my windows!) grimy and unrevealing, sealed as they are with heavy venetian blinds.

  I’ve brought along a camera. I’m standing at the foot of the steps, trying to get the entryway framed just right in the lens, when a dark shape enters the frame—the back of a man in a black coat forging brusquely into my view. He doesn’t look back as he says, “Don’t photograph me going in here.”

  I tell him I won’t. “I used to live here,” I explain, “years ago.”

  He hesitates a moment, deciding whether or not to talk to me, and then turns, halfway up the steps, so I can look up into his face. “You know,” he says, “the old girl’s in a nursing home now. She’s a hundred and two.”

  The “old girl” is Miss K., the landlady, already ancient and close to senile when we’d known her a dozen years before. Her father bought a string of Beacon Street brownstones in the Depression, elegant bow-fronted rowhouses, which had fallen, over fifty years, into various states of disrepair, as their condominiumed neighbors were polished till they shone. She lived in the front room of one of the apartment houses, a bay-windowed parlor stuffed with her father’s immense Renaissancerevival furniture, a virtual warehouse of Chinese porcelain: blue and white ginger jars, umbrella stands, big tureens and platters swimming with carp and chrysanthemums and clouds. She slept on a grayed cot in the corner, and sat at a little worktable in her housecoat receiving rents and writing receipts. The huge mahogany armoires and china cabinets—with their carved profiles of Dante and Beatrice, their claws and beaks and garlands of fruit—blocked the windows, absorbing the light, so she’d sit beside a scholarly little lamp which illuminated nothing much besides her account books. She was quarrelsome, suspicious, and easily confused. She ran her houses like the rooming houses of another era, collecting rents by the week, but by those days she had a hard time knowing who was who and who lived where. Her tenants—whose boyfriends came and went, who shifted between apartments in new co
nfigurations of friendship and romance—didn’t help matters much. And because she was losing both her sharpness and her eyesight, people began to cheat her, bringing back the same rent receipt again and again with the dates changed to show her they’d already paid. And carrying and selling off the heavy Victorian stuff that furnished the apartments, replacing it with things found on the street. Wally said that Miss K. still had an attic, in the brownstone of which she herself was dowager empress, stuffed with princely beds and sideboards, unwieldy configurations of walnut and marble, sphinx-headed and brass-footed extravagances—useless now, in days of diminishing rooms, when what used to be a dining room or a second-floor parlor was someone’s whole apartment.

  The man I’m talking to is in his sixties somewhere, I guess, with a slightly furtive quality that begins to relax as we talk. I explain that I lived on the first floor, alone, and then on the third-floor front (I can see the beautiful built-in shutters we lived behind, up above my head, closed over windows which seem to me now almost legendary) with Wally. I explain that Wally died in January, that I’m back to see the old places, and by confiding in this man I open a conversation.

  He says he was afraid I’d come from Miss K.’s lawyer, or a real estate agency. “Her lawyer,” he explains, “is running everything. But he can’t kick us out, since he’d have to find us apartments in the neighborhood at the same rent. Which don’t exist. So he just doesn’t rent out the apartments as they open up.” And open up they have; out of the ten or so places in the building, only two tenants remain. Where have they all gone? Disappeared, moved away, and mostly, of course, died; this was a house full of gay men, in 1981, and now it’s a house full of no one.

  First there was Bobby, Wally’s best friend for years, who lived on the first floor, in an apartment he painted and wallpapered a dozen times just in the years I knew him. He and Wally had been lovers for a short while, as kids, when each had first come to the city; their relationship had simply drifted into a friendship which sustained both men for years. They’d worked together at Laura Ashley, selling cozy sprigged and flowered fabrics and clothes and wallpaper, so they shared a private lexicon of pattern and colors. “R–22,” one would say to the other, and they’d both dissolve into laughter. I was jealous of him, at first, and it took me a while to understand that Bobby simply came with the deal, like a favorite aunt or a big unsightly piece of family furniture. Not that he was unsightly, exactly, but whenever he was around he was a presence, someone to be accounted for: center of attention, storytelling, raconteuring, singing show tunes, not listening much. He was absolutely devoted to Wally and hardly listened to him, a duality which would, eventually, distance them.

  After we moved away from Boston, we gradually saw less and less of Bobby, though every Christmas he’d appear with armloads of gifts, mostly things for which we had no use, things people had given to him, or stuff he’d stolen from the stores where he worked. The dishonest streak in Bobby’s character seemed to grow more pronounced as he grew older; he’d give Wally a new watch—something we both knew he himself would never pick out—and weep crocodile tears, moved by this beautiful present he’d chosen especially for his oldest friend. He wanted to give us so much that he’d be indispensable to us, that we would be wildly and forever grateful, that he’d have a permanent home in our lives. Which he already had, though never an entirely easy one.

  Though you can grow weirdly fond of those traits in friends you don’t admire, so much do those aspects seem like essential parts of someone. It was impossible to separate Bobby’s dishonesty from his generosity, somehow; his falsehoods were often so touchingly transparent, and the size of the lies seemed allied to the size of his heart. Bobby moved away from the Beacon Street apartment when he found a lover, a man he clearly did not love, another instance of the dishonesty we couldn’t abide. The lover was someone Wally and I detested, but they were together for years, living in a big house in a well-heeled suburb of the city. When Bobby came back from the hospital after his first bout with pneumocystis, the lover told him to pack. Homeless, ill, he tried the patience of his parents and his friends, and lived with us for a hellish month in which we arranged our lives around his suddenly burgeoning needs. In a month he’d made a considerable recovery, and felt well enough to be really impossible. (I still think I hear his ghost sometimes, over my shoulder, when I’m at the stove, complaining about my cooking.)

  He wound up living in the YMCA in Cambridge, in Central Square, in a place I can only think of as the end of the road, the very walls and floors redolent of hopelessness. The last time Wally and Bobby saw one another was at Mass General Hospital; both there for tests, they met in the hospital lobby. Wally couldn’t walk well; Bobby couldn’t see well; without the energy to go for lunch, they sat in the waiting room and talked, two men in their forties who might as well have been seventy. At the end of the visit, Bobby asked Wally for cab fare; he accepted the ten that Wally offered and then ducked out of sight down the hospital steps, heading for the train, not the taxi stand, so that he could use nine of the ten for other things—a final moment, in Wally’s eyes, of dissembling, fully in character.

  The fellow I’m talking to on the stairs had moved into a basement apartment while Bobby was still upstairs pursuing a life of continual redecoration. Less guarded now, he starts to tell me about himself. He’s a retired antique dealer, he says, with a knowing look. He lives downstairs, in what was once the kitchen of the great house, its big iron stove still filling one entire wall; it was the apartment where Doug lived once, with Wally’s brother Jimmy. Doug, who moved away to San Francisco, was the first person I knew to die of AIDS, the first from the building to vanish.

  “Did you know David?” my new friend asks. I did. David and Bobby had been boyfriends for a while, and used to sing together at a rather fusty neighborhood bar called Napoleon’s, a piano bar wrapped in red-flocked wallpaper where it was not uncommon for the patrons to wear suits. Since the men there were mostly of a certain age, Bobby could enjoy feeling youthful there, and his singing and stories made him a social star.

  “Is David still here?” I ask.

  “Oh no.” Then a lowering of the voice, a confidential angling of the head. “Rumor has it that he has a terrible disease.”

  I wince, internally; I hate the covering up, the notion of AIDS as shameful or unspeakable. But I remember this man’s age, imagine years of the closet; it’s not up to me to tell him how to deal with the epidemic. I ask if he knows where David is now.

  “There was a terrific storm one evening,” he says, “and we found water pouring down the steps”—the great marble stair that winds down the spine of the building—“and it was pouring out from under his door, because his windows were all open in the rain. We had to break in—we thought he was dead in there—but he was gone. Just the windows open and the rain pouring in. Then we heard he’s in a hospice somewhere.”

  I’m remembering David’s old apartment, big paper fans—red?—spread out on his marble fireplace, and his red face lit up with cocktails and show tunes and the ambient glow of Napoleon’s ruby wallpaper. David and Bobby, both of them out of work, watching TV in their bathrobes at eleven in the morning.

  Before I can think what to say, my new friend says, “You can come in if you like.”

  He opens the heavy black doors with his key, and suddenly I am almost overcome by a sense of wonder and strangeness. It is as if he were opening the gates of a tomb, some ancient place, little disturbed, still containing the artifacts left with the dead.

  It’s dark in the big vestibule, under a dusty chandelier. The building might as well have been sealed a thousand years, only a wraithlike tenant or two slipping in and out because they have somehow retained the magical property of moving back and forth between realms. A sideboard upon which Bobby used to lay out everyone’s mail is still here, its dark varnish gleaming Victorian in the gray light, but now there’s only one yellow envelope waiting there, someone’s electric bill. The black and white
marble floor is dirty, the staircase stained where rainwater from David’s abandoned windows streamed in. And here’s the door to the studio where I lived when I first met Wally, my little white room—probably once where the parson used to wait to be received—mostly occupied by an enormous mirror-topped fireplace. A room in which I was mostly occupied with love; in memory, in that room, I am always waiting for Wally to come home from work. Or I’ve been away to teach, and I come home to find the room decked for my homecoming—candles and streamers and shiny letters of metallic foil hung on a wire across the room saying—what? HAPPY BIRTHDAY, probably, I can’t recall. I was twenty-eight, and this was my first great passionate love as a gay man, my first headlong risky adventurous union with somebody my own age, for whom this love was as risky and new and full of promise and threat as it was for me. I’d staked everything to be with Wally—given up my job and apartment in New York (admittedly a dumb job and an unpleasant apartment) and landed myself in Boston, living downstairs from him, not much money, no job but temp work, my eyes huge with stars.