by Mark Doty
Which were not quite bright enough to keep me from being miserable—oh, I was gloriously alive then, in those months of risk and passion, right on the edge, but it was also terribly hard, since I’d entirely rearranged my life (such as it was) to come to a new city, to live with a man I barely knew.
It happened like this. At twenty-eight, I was between lives. (“How many lives,” my friend Lynda wrote in another poem, “have fountained through my own…”) I’d spent most of my twenties in a heterosexual marriage, living in the Midwest. I’d married young, in flight from both my family and a sexual orientation that scared me half to death. In 1971, I’d been a freshman in college when I met Ruth, and I was dazzled and fascinated by her. The fact that I’d never met a self-identified adult gay person was also, of course, a serious shaping factor; I didn’t know, living as I did in a place and time where gay people were hidden, erased, what kind of life I could have. I thought maybe lots of men felt the way I did, and then went ahead and lived the way they were expected to anyway. Maybe if you ignored homosexual desire, it would go away.
Reality, of course, proved opposite. When the marriage ended, I stayed in Des Moines for another year, teaching, catching my breath after this dizzying change, and discovering what it was like to have a boyfriend, to enter into a new planet of activity. At twenty-seven, the divorce final, my temporary teaching job over, I realized I could go anywhere. With six hundred dollars to my name, and the kind of energy that springs from knocking down the closet walls and seeing around one a wide and unknown world of possibility, I put what I owned in the back of my little yellow Chevette and moved East, headed for the myth and actuality of Manhattan.
Young Gay Man Leaves Stultifying Midwest for the Urban World of Romance and Permission: a classic American story, and I won’t retell it here. Suffice to say it was thrilling, though the excitement was mostly about finding out that I could do it, that I had enough nerve and inner resources to land on my feet in a new realm. Though, truthfully, my days didn’t involve very interesting forms of struggle: finding an apartment was the hardest part, as mindless though reasonable work as a typist was everywhere available. I’d work every hour of overtime I could get, typing reports for marketing consultants in a glamorous firm on Park Avenue. I didn’t have the money to buy clothes I needed to wear to work, so I’d go out to a shopping center in New Jersey to use the one credit card I owned—a Sears charge, left over from my days in Iowa—to buy shirts. Of course I told no one.
The practical aspects of the day-to-day—how does one live in this city?—seemed to occupy all my time; New York, on a secretarial pool salary, was more about survival than pleasure.
I was lucky to have a part-time teaching job, in a program for writers in Vermont, a graduate school where students and faculty come together only for two weeks each summer and winter. It wasn’t enough to live on, but it helped, and it meant being able to feel like a writer instead of someone who did other people’s typing. This meant a trip north to Montpelier, and I decided to make the journey into at least something of a vacation, knowing there wouldn’t be many of those for a while. I went briefly to Provincetown, but it was rainy and cold, and I didn’t feel connected to its gay resort culture; I didn’t know how to thread my way in that unfamiliar world. (Strange to think that I walked then, another person, on the streets and beaches that have become, now, the landscape of my daily life.)
So I went on to Bellows Falls. In those days, in this little railroad town outside of Brattleboro, there was a gay hotel called the Andrews Inn, an imposing-looking brick building that sat square on Main Street, next to the Oddfellows Hall and a diner called the Miss Bellows Falls. This was very odd; the gay traveler is used to finding his hotels and guest houses out of the way, and—less so these days, but for most of my life, anyway—his bars black-fronted and lacking signs. But the Andrews Inn was centrally located in a town which resembled a set for a Frank Capra movie, and somehow it seemed to work. Restless in my room, early in the evening, I tried to read student poems in preparation for my residency up north. No good; I couldn’t concentrate. I went to the bar downstairs, had a gin and tonic, and tried not to look too much at the two or three others sitting around the bar. Eventually, bored, I went back to my room for another go at the poems, but they hadn’t developed any new nuances in my absence. So I decided I’d take another walk down to the bar, without it ever occurring to me that this decision would change my life. After the fact, we look back at such moments, the thoughtless time before something momentous happens; how odd it seems, not to have known then, when afterward we can hardly imagine ourselves without such knowledge.
A few more people had gathered at the bar and around the tiny dance floor and jukebox. While I stood ordering another gin, I noticed a man who was standing by the dance floor, his back to me. Tall, his hair close-cropped, he was wearing jeans and a blue football jersey with white sleeves. (A jersey I have still, packed in a trunk. Years after it was too small for Wally, it seemed important to keep it, and now it’s a precious thing, if also a terrible one.)
I walked over in his direction, emboldened—because I liked the shape of him—enough to go and stand behind him. When he turned around, as he did in just a moment, he looked directly into my face, his own countenance open and friendly and somehow with hardly any veil across it. What he said was, “Hi.”
This is another classic story, one that’s particularly difficult to tell because the externals of it hold little to distinguish it. In truth I can’t remember much of what we said then, though I remember that we were soon having a wonderful time, and dancing, with an increasing sense of energy and connection. And if in fact I could reproduce here our conversation, I imagine it would be perfectly sweet but also thoroughly banal, on the surface, just like the surface of any such encounter.
All the life of such moments lies in what doesn’t show, in the buzz and sparkling within—or shows not in words much but in the gaze, in the look of a face opening to another, in all the little ways we communicate the fizzy stirrings of attraction, into which both of us were falling more deeply and thoroughly as we talked and danced. An excitement, the pulse-quickening buzz of flirtation, the pleasure of discovering that talk didn’t dispel the mutual attraction but deepened and strengthened it. Then, after I don’t know how long, we decided to go out to the balcony for some air.
We wound up various staircases and back ways to arrive at a broad metal platform on the top of the building, looking out over the backside of the town, a wide span of railroad tracks with a steaming engine, the gleaming black ripple of the river. Wally leaned against a brick wall, and then I took my first real look, my first full look, into his face, into his eyes—which were still tobacco-leaf brown even in the faint light from the lamps by the tracks. I wasn’t prepared for what I’d find there; they were the most unguarded, welcoming eyes I’d ever seen, and his whole countenance seemed alive with delight, as if he felt as much wonder as I did. And what I found myself thinking was, Here you are at last.
Not that it was all that simple. I was headed north for two weeks, then back to New York, he back to Boston. I had a sort of semi-boyfriend floating out there in the distance to be dealt with somehow, and I’d just gotten to Manhattan and what, exactly, did this glorious night with this stranger mean?
Thus it was a while before we saw each other again, after a breakfast of blueberry pancakes in the hotel restaurant and a long talk standing beside the open trunk of my car. It became clear, in the next few months, that my intuition, looking that first time into Wally’s eyes, wasn’t one to forget, and in a few weeks I was in Boston to see him, and he was in New York. I ended things with the sort-of boyfriend. Wally and I talked on the phone every day, wrote letters, waited for the weekends. Every weekend, back and forth between cities, and then, knowing each other all of three passionate months, we made a decision. He had a more established life in Boston than I had in Manhattan, a job and a world of friends, so why didn’t we try it there together?
> Thinking of this today, it’s hard to imagine making such a choice after three months. What did I know? I was sure of profound pleasure in his body, delight in his playfulness and good spirits, acres of common ground in taste and sensibility and humor—but did I know him well enough to make this leap? I was certain of the dizzying force of that first night’s intuition, a sense of emotional certainty for which I was willing to toss caution and reason out the window.
A very little while later, it was myself I felt like tossing. The day I’d arrived from New York, ready to start a new life, Wally and I were to sign a lease on an apartment, a beautiful place in the South End, on Waltham Street, shot with sunlight, its little balcony looking down onto a courtyard garden. We could afford it; we had a date with the landlord; we were—I thought—ready. On the steps of the building Wally said we had to sit down and talk; he couldn’t go through with it; living together felt premature, too much of a commitment. I felt as if the stairs under me were crumbling; the world took on that peculiar exactitude of appearance it gets when we hear terrible news, so much so that I can remember to this day the nervous filigree of the fire escape across the street, the cracks in the steps’ cement balustrade which I must have kept looking at, fighting back tears, while he talked.
Of course, from any reasonable perspective, he was right, or rather the position he took was one that conventional wisdom would uphold. But I had no use, at that moment, for wise precaution; if wisdom interfered with love, to hell with wisdom. I had given myself over to love.
I had also given up my job and my apartment.
And so I moved into the first-floor studio in Miss K.’s tumble down palazzo on Beacon Street.
A dozen years later, in the vestibule, outside that old transomed door, I feel the whole weight of the past above my head, floor after unoccupied floor of history, mine, others’, the house’s own huge inventory of residents and years. Wally lived upstairs in a larger studio, on the third floor, behind those gloriously carpentered shutters; same building, separate apartments. In truth we couldn’t afford it, and spent virtually all our time in his place anyway, in that room up the sweep of these stairs, which is for me one of memory’s most laden locations, site of longing, pleasure, and despair. That room seems to me almost outside of time; up there it’s always evening, quiet above the city’s din and motion, a lit cube of memory hung in the immensity and safety of the night. A Cavafian room, it has become ancient, dense with meanings, erotic with the residue of passion the space has come to contain. Up there, in darkness and candlelight, firelight, and the warm parchment radiance of the shade, we burnished that room with the motions of bodies which no longer exist: every cell of my body replaced nearly twice over now, every cell of Wally’s body replaced and then burned to ashes. Does that room exist, except in my memory? Well, something does; there is a space there, in the physical world, but that same space has been plucked out of time, become emblem and artifact. It is, in memory, something I have made, like a poem or a vase. Now it lasts. In the room that remains there, in the building on Beacon Street, the plaster ceiling caved in—luckily, when we weren’t home, since hundreds of pounds of plaster fell right into the center of the room, right into the sleigh bed where we—sometimes—slept. (It hurts me now, to think of that bed, of the wood imbued with us, lonely without us, abandoned. Cavafy says of the furniture of one of his remembered rooms: “They must still be around somewhere, those old things.” What poignance that simple line has! Chairs and bed and wardrobe and mirror: the things that reflect lovers, that come to embody their moment.) I don’t imagine, in those declining days, that ceiling was ever fixed; those three big windows full of the rainy light of Back Bay in early spring probably still give onto a room piled with plaster fragments, a ruin.
Of the countless things I remember about that room, most of them nocturnal, radiant, passionate in either joy or misery, there is one diurnal memory of such force and beauty I want to recount it here. It was Christmas, the first one we had together, and we’d decked a small live tree bought from a little city lot on Charles Street in front of the toney grocery, with paper snow, lots of it, so that it resembled something from the forests of New Hampshire or Vermont—not a thing on the thick green branches but heaped and gleaming white.
The weather that December, though, was anything but northern, and Christmas Day itself was brilliant and weirdly balmy. Roasting (for once; the boiler was broken down more often than not), we pried open the windows which had been shut since October, and a warm wind redolent of fresh mud, cleaner than any city air down in the street below, came pouring in, filling our lungs with pleasure. But when the wind suddenly gusted, whipping off the river into the room, our tree’s tiny flakes all rose into the air at once, swirling around the room in the mildest of blizzards. We were englobed, inside the shook heart of a paperweight. Our room, which already felt outside the rush and pour of things, seemed still further set aside in space and time. In memory that snow spins still; our laughter and our wonder in the storm’s interior, lovers suddenly stunned into recognizing how small what’s divided and troubled them has been, how lovely their singular, flake-streaked moment is.
My companion—my Virgil, guiding me into this underworld?—doesn’t offer to take me upstairs, which is fine, somehow. I want to leave, to pull myself away. I tell him I feel as if I’m dreaming, as if I have stepped outside of time, into the house of the past. And he leans over toward me, conspiratorial, and says, “Well, just don’t you plan to come sweeping down those stairs in a big crinoline, honey, because we’ve got enough ghosts in here already.”
With that I thank him and am out the door, onto Beacon Street. I’m walking toward Berkeley and Clarendon, looking at the pouring traffic and the Emerson kids on the sidewalk and the shoppers on the way home from wherever—a world of radiant particulars, in bright late winter light seen through tears. I have never felt so implicated in a story. Until today, I have never felt what I’ve heard other men I know say, that they don’t understand why they’re alive, when so many are gone. I am alive walking down this street in the early March sun and all the men I knew in that house, that stacked repository of time and memory, are dead. Wally and Bobby, David and Doug, others I never even knew. I am here today, in 1994, walking a city street indifferent with its own hurrying life, and I am filled with the presence and weight of their stories. What am I to do with them?
A Shore Walk
Early May, a foggy Sunday. It’s rained all morning and the sky is contemplating further action, which is lucky for us—the two retrievers and I—because it means that the bicycle trail into the dunes, and the marsh along the shore, and the shore itself will be deserted today, when the town’s beginning to fill up with visitors, so we can wander and roam without disturbing anyone or being disturbed by them.
Today we follow the trail only a little ways before a grove of scrubby pines and verdigrised lichens calls me off the path and up onto the sandy slopes. The dogs are always pleased to leave the macadam; they prefer unpaved paths, though they walk in the open dunes with a different kind of poised energy, a different sort of containment, because they are unsure where we’re going next. They both explore and keep close watch on where I am going, since they can anticipate the direction of only a bit of the coming walk.
This landscape yields particularly intense contradictions. Sheer expanses of sand alternate with low thickets of bearberry (Uva-ursi, beautiful name) and shrub. Bleached sand walls of North African proportions loom over hummocks of wild roses. In the deeper pockets between dunes are forests of pine—from tiny brave stunted things, a few cones tenaciously clinging, to cool and shady groves where, in the most sheltered places, the trees have made for themselves a community, the earth between them paved with rusty needles, mosses, and—a month or so from now—lady slippers. Now they’re only gray-green shoots, but here in the sun are newly leafing rugosas, the bronzy, barbaric-looking claw of beach pea unfurling, and the bee-pestered wedding lace of beach plum.
&nbs
p; Now an especially dense grove glows below us, lush in the shreds of the fog, luminous. The needles seem to have a new light about them, a more evident pulse, the life-energy in them quickened. I am drawn down the steep dune side along a little path—deer trail? human?—through the bayberries. The dogs see where we’re headed and hurry to be there first.
This grove feels set apart, its quiet underlined. The distant waves blur here into a kind of low continuous shush, an aspiration. Why is it that places removed from human habitation bring us so swiftly into ourselves? I walk into this village of durable pines—tall ones for this sand terrain, which seems the very definition of “infertile”—and I am immediately thinking of how abstracted I’ve been feeling, how far from myself. Not depressed—I have been operating in the world competently enough, though I’m not trying to do much but get by these days—but distracted. Not focused on what I am experiencing, not quite present with myself.
The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is less immediately available. Grief is too sharp and immediate; maybe it’s the high pitch of the vowel sound, or the monosyllabic impact of the word, as quick a jab as knife or cut.
Sadness is too ephemeral, somehow; it sounds like something that comes and goes, a response to an immediate cause which will pass in a little while as another cause arises to generate a different feeling.
Mourning isn’t bad, but there’s something a little archaic about it. I think of widows keening, striking themselves, clutching at handfuls of dust—dark-swathed years, a closeting of self away from the world, turned inward toward an interior dark. This sounds, for one thing, like more of a removal than the late twentieth century will quite permit. Mourning suggests that nothing else can enter into the mourner’s attention. It doesn’t suggest the weird interpenetration of ongoingness and endings, of this spring’s sprouting life and my continuing sorrow.
