by Mark Doty
That autumn of our move, 1990, was one long golden extension of summer. We rented a house on the beach, in Provincetown, as far out toward the very tip of Cape Cod as it is possible to live. And because that autumn and winter were one of the mildest in memory, we felt we’d been given a radiant sort of gift, a season out of time, which seems to me now something suspended in amber: Wally and Arden on the beach, wrestling or resting, while I am inside the house, my desk up against the window which looks directly out past them toward Long Point Light, our promontory’s last, haunted outpost. Wally and Arden wading, further and further out, into the long mercurial wash of low tides, the tidal flats shimmering around these two smallest figures, tiny evidence of my love held in the silver expanse of the afternoon.
It was summer again before I saw the old garden in its new incarnation—for an old garden, without its gardener, isn’t the same entity at all, but a new event in the world. I hadn’t realized how much the garden reflected my own obsessive propensities to shape it, how much that shape had to do with some ideal garden held in my head, toward which the raw material of the real space would be trimmed, trained, and cajoled. Chris and Brigid, bless their hearts, were not gardeners—or was it that their garden was aligned toward some other ideal?
Though they took pleasure in the effort, it was clear that they weren’t sure which things were noxious weeds, to be banished, which the perennials I’d introduced and then given years of assistance to. The garden, seen from the street, seemed newly a jungle, an over-the-top efflorescence, consequence of my own overplanting gone mad. I had a visceral, physical response; I wanted to let myself in the gate and weed.
That response was, of course, about my not really having let the garden go. But the garden that was mine, I soon realized, was the interior one, the memory; the external garden had already become something else. What I saw as a particularly invasive, enormous weed might be, to the template of beauty which the new gardeners brought to their creation, the model of lush growth, a welcome wildness. Whatever, it was theirs now.
Until Brigid died, the following winter, in an accident on Route 2, the icy two-lane road she and I used to drive to work every morning. When Wally and I had put the house into Chris’s and Brigid’s hands, it was with a sense of their ongoingness, of the future ahead of them; it was clear they wanted to fill the big space with friends, animals, and, later, children. I was sidestepping a vision of my own future: lonely Vermont winter closing in, Wally sick and needing all the care I can give, no help, the dark little town around us, all the chimneys on its steep hills billowing white smoke and steam into icy and unforgiving air, our street going narrower and darker. Did I think we were sidestepping death, too? Perhaps our leaving when we did made Wally’s life a little longer, I don’t know. Certainly it made the last years brighter ones; I don’t know how we’d have gotten through them without all the help and good company we found.
But I never thought it was Chris who would be widowed in the big house—a place for one person to get lost in, caught in the echoes of his own voice—instead of me. Sometimes I’d catch myself imagining death was determined to sweep someone away from that house, and that we’d somehow leapt out of the way, but that Brigid hadn’t been able to.
The following summer the garden became something else entirely, and any sense of regret or nostalgia I had about it was subsumed into a kind of wonder at how the orders we make vanish so quickly, subsumed. The whole house seemed to go into a kind of accelerated decline; paint peeling, fence pickets snapped, the cream-yellow of the clapboards (a Shaker sort of color, it had seemed to me when we chose it) dirtied with the soot of tired oil furnaces struggling to keep up. The building seemed to express the psychic life it held, as if it were grief’s outer skin.
Chris lived there for a while, then rented out the house, but he eventually found the payments impossible, the burden of the place overwhelming—and so it went back to the bank, to his sorrow and relief. I haven’t seen it now for a long time. I understand that some friends took various perennials from the garden, which is just a shining idea, now. Which, in a way, is what it always was, an idea given not flesh but leaf.
We did not rescue the house, as we’d thought we were doing, those years ago. Oh, we did for a while make it not merely habitable but lovely, maybe more so than it had ever been; even when it was brand new I suspect it was built to be workmen’s housing, and I doubt that love had been lavished upon its details. But the gleam of a loved house lasts only as long as he who loves it can keep polishing, keep occupying. What we did was to make for ourselves, for a while, a dwelling place, a deeply occupied zone in which to encounter and to recapitulate all our dwellings, a house deep enough, ours enough, to dream into. And then time swept us away, and in time took the house itself.
Did it? Perhaps now, repossessed, the place will be cheap enough again for somebody to come along flush and foolish with the sense of possibility, indifferent to the politics of location, with enough hubris to see some shining thing this sow’s ear can become this time. Apartments? Offices, or the flat indignity of a parking lot?
The birds are flitting about in the box alder; in their hurry to nest, have they found another site? The need must push at them, requiring that they try again—a more protected place, this time. Though isn’t it plain that no place is protected?
I enjoy the garden, this spring, but I don’t feel that imperative to shape, perhaps because I see how quickly it blows away, how swiftly occupancy changes. I remember Wally talking, one afternoon in December, at a time when his speech or his ideas weren’t always clear. I was rubbing his feet, which ached with cramps as they turned inward to point toward one another, his legs seeming to wither in front of us. Massage would ease the pains better than anything else, and so I was always at his feet, sometimes for a long time, a peaceful, steadying time to talk. “I wonder how many people,” he said, “had their feet rubbed in this house?” I understood he was talking about how many people had been sick here, really, in our room, how many had died here, in this house’s two hundred years. We knew that for most of this century one family lived here, and raised eleven children, enough people to generate generations of intensity, resonant moments and gestures of the sort that reverberate in a house. Before them, there aren’t any records, but since maybe 1790 people have been holding this house, and being held by it. I felt that Wally was experiencing himself, that moment, as part of that history; he was joining a community. As we did, in fact, when we bought this place, and set to work on it—just in time, as it turned out, to make a home around us for the onslaught. We had just enough time to do the essential things, to make the house feel like ours. This house is actually small enough for me to finish—someday—the projects we started. I love to be here in storms, when the low-slung roof sheds water, and I can feel the gravity of the big beams holding the roof down, as they always have, as perhaps they did when they were part of some ship. We became part of the life of the house, one which seems to stand, to go on. When I was rubbing Wally’s aching feet, did the dead of this house come and stand around him?
At seven this morning—a clear and resonant day, an aura of freshness and possibility around everything—there was a commotion in the roses: the birds, back at work. The nest looks larger, as if they’ve gotten an early start today on reinforcing it, trying to build something capable of withstanding the wind. I’ve been out to look at it, from a distance I disciplined myself to maintain. They’ve anchored it with soil in the bottom, the action of wise engineers.
Contagious persistence: the will to inhabit, to make, out of whatever is offered, a dwelling place.
Dancing
It’s a warm afternoon and I’ve walked to town, with no real purpose in mind other than being out, among people, in the newly strengthening sun. I’ve wandered into the record shop, browsing, and found myself wanting a CD it hadn’t occurred to me to buy, a compilation of Donovan’s greatest hits. I loved Donovan when I was a teenager, his fey exoticism and what seemed
to me the foreign sophistication of his picture on the back of Mellow Yellow in his pale yellow suit—from Carnaby Street? And the sandalwood-and-patchouli glow of A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, the double album from the days when he’d practiced transcendental meditation and decked himself in peacock feathers and gypsy clothes. That was when everyone was making double albums, as if all that expansiveness wouldn’t fit on a single disk. I hadn’t heard his songs in years, and reading the list of titles I had a sort of hankering for them.
Home, I put the new CD on. I’m tidying up the house, going through a pile of mail, and sorting out bills and books. And then Donovan—who sounds almost unbelievably young to me, not fey or worldly now at all, but boyish, untainted by sorrow or the corrosive powers of time—is singing a song I remember on the radio when I was in high school, a sort of stoned Zen calypso called “There Is a Mountain.” I’d bought the forty-five then, and thought the lyrics profound:
First there is a mountain
Then there is no mountain
Then there is
I’ve been moving a little to the music while I worked, stepping around the kitchen in synch with the rhythm, fussing with the pillows on the couch, and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I’ve been holding myself. When was the last time I danced?
Mostly I’ve been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it’s coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolves you entirely, makes it impossible, for a while, to go on. It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there’s a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon. It comes like a seizure, and will not be denied.
This is the first time I’ve been surprised by pleasure, the body’s simple delight at being, after all this, here, still here.
Though I’m watching myself do it, and suddenly feeling self-aware almost makes me stop, I don’t quite. Grief will be back, of course, any moment now. But I also know how lovely and light this music is, how sealed off in its innocence, and how happy my body is, these few minutes, to dance.
A Visit with Bill
Each room along this fluorescent hospital corridor has about it an aura of abandonment. These doors seem as if they should be labeled not with patients’ names but with inscriptions: Shame, Suffering, Neglect, Nobody-Cares-Where-I-Am. These rooms are either starkly brilliant or entirely without light, and the men who live in them—all men here—have in common the absence of context: no personal effects, no clothes, pictures, no flowers, nothing that says, This is who I was. I use the past tense deliberately, since these men are already far along in the process of being erased. This is the AIDS ward of the Ione Shattuck Chronic Care Hospital, a state-run facility for people needing long-term care, a place with the reputation—and feeling—of the end of the road. Half the men here are gay, half IV drug users. There’s a quality in the air that bus terminals have, and the waiting rooms of free clinics and welfare offices, a sense that there’s no place else to go. It’s the ultimate disconnection; our things, our family, our friends, our attachments to life are what expose and externalize identity. Without them, we become these narrowed and diminished faces. How small the body looks like this, with nothing to extend its limits, stripped of intimacy, bathed in the moon-wash of institutional light.
My friend Bill has been here for twenty-three weeks, not because of his lesions, but because of devastating and continuous diarrhea caused by cryptosporidium, an intractable intestinal parasite. Wally had it too, though never to this extent. Nothing cures it, but Wally’s infection was controlled by an antibiotic. For Bill, drug after drug has done nothing, so he’s dehydrated, malnourished, and requires intravenous feeding, though the plastic tube inserted into his chest as a porthole for nourishment and drugs keeps getting infected and causing more problems. His insurance can’t pay for this kind of stay in a regular hospital, where in fact they really don’t want him anyway. This is a kind of maintenance care; this place, the less expensive alternative, seems some precinct of hell. Though the faces of the people behind the nursing station are kind and tired; it’s almost time for the shift change and they look as if they’ve fought a long day’s battle without much success or help. It’s not their fault the place is desolate; they can’t remake the inferno. In some of their faces you can see that they would like to.
I’ve come with Phil, Bill’s lover. We’ve been to a reading in Cambridge together, and we’ve stopped by to deliver some yogurt and a good night kiss from Phil. I haven’t seen either of them for months, though we’ve talked on the phone, and Phil and I have decided to take some time tonight and tomorrow to catch up face-to-face. We’re going to lunch at a museum, letting him relax into a different role for a few hours. I’m bracing myself for I don’t know what as we move down the corridor. This was, in a way, what I dreaded for Wally—his life wrenched out of our hands, into this institutional world where he’d be at their mercy, subject to invasion, unprotectable. My chest tightens as we come toward the end of the hall.
I wait at Bill’s door while Phil goes in first; it’s nearly ten-thirty and he expects Bill to be sound asleep. But in a moment he’s back, brightened. Bill is up and wants to see me, and Phil takes me by the hand and draws me in behind him.
The room’s a revelation. In memory it seems to me that Bill has draped a scarf across the shade of a bedside lamp, as Blanche DuBois would have, to warm the light to something rosy and flattering. Perhaps I’m inventing that; it feels like a room whose glow is filtered through figured silk, anyway. The walls are covered with paintings from Bill’s house, the windowsill thick with flowers and leafy plants, the whole room redolent of warmth and human habitation, an aura—in opposition to the severity of every floodlit room we passed to arrive here—of civility. This might be Bill’s little studio apartment, in the intimate upper floor of some city brownstone; room just for bed, tiny refrigerator, and the non-negotiable requirements of the civil life: flowers, paintings, music.
And here, in splendor, lies Bill. I realize, seeing him, the apprehension I’ve been carrying about not knowing how he’ll look; he’s the first really sick person I’ve seen since Wally died. But seeing his face I’m flooded, suddenly, with relief, with appreciation. Not because he looks well—always a boyish man, he’s become a large child, extremely thin, his head shaved, his lesions darkened against his pale skin, his eyes enormous—but because he is what people are, sometimes, very late in their lives: so fully himself, himself all the way to the edges, the way Rilke described roses as “flush with their own being.”
Bill is beautiful to me in the way that Wally was, not in any ornamental sense of the word, but in the way that all things which are absolutely authentic are beautiful. Is there a luminous threshold where the self becomes irreducible, stripped to the point where all that’s left to see is pure soul, the essence of character? Here, in unfailing self-ness, is no room or energy for anything inessential, for anything less than what counts.
Bill is unmistakably himself now, gracious host even here, charming, playful, somehow plaintive and fetching at once. He’s flat on his back, head propped on a small legion of favorite pillows; across his feet is draped a mint-green chenille bathrobe piped, like a birthday cake, with tendrils, scrolls, and blossoms of more chenille in frosting colors: orchid, lavender, tangerine.
The robe is something Lucy Ricardo might have worn for mornings in Connecticut, the sort of garment which almost invariably carries with it a narrative. Bill discovered it in a Provincetown shop devoted to the pleasures of the bath. There it hung, a magnetic glory charged with the subterranean powers of gender; I am someone’s mother, it seemed to say, in 1957. Both its over-the-top femininity and lavish price meant, of course, he’d leave it there. Wouldn’t he? It was a whim, an indulgence, though a potent—potentially dangerous?—attraction. But he found he couldn’t forget it; it began to occupy a new s
pace in his imagination, or rather to draw to itself the energy and associations of a lifetime’s imaginings. To go back, to buy it, meant to embrace something profoundly, lushly nelly.
(Odd how the words for this sort of thing have about them a quality of Victoriana: nelly, sissy, fairy, fey. There’s something about them of girlishness preserved under glass, a curious kind of delicate, past-prime virginity—as though to give in to that aspect of ourselves is to become someone’s lavender-scented auntie, a specter of rosewater and pressed flowers and scraps of lace. Sometimes it seems to me like the last taboo for gay men, one of the most deeply internalized prohibitions, to allow oneself that swooning, gorgeous silliness; in 1995, weirdly enough, it’s more okay to be a queer than it is to be a sissy.)
The robe—first coveted, then accepted, then treasured—pools across Bill’s knees, its splendid piping the colors of a dissolving petit-four. Old disco lyrics come into my head, unbidden: Someone left the cake out in the rain…The fact that I’ve never known him well—I’ve been more a friend of Phil’s—melts away as we begin to speak; it’s impossible now not to know him. The more we talk the more I begin to feel I’m moving inside of some profound connection, the only one there’s likely to be between us. But enough. It’s the edge of that kind of intimacy I felt with Wally, the aura that surrounded his leave-taking drawing me in, closer and closer into his company, like moving with another person into a very small, warm circle of lamplight, which includes and defines you both. One clear, true instance of really knowing each other, which is becoming indelible even as we speak.
I can feel how large, how essential this moment is as it’s happening; that is what I have come to love about being an adult, to the extent that I can claim that title: that one knows more about how good things are, how much they matter, as they’re happening, that knowledge isn’t necessarily retrospective anymore. When I was younger, I missed so much, failing to be fully present, only recognizing the quality of particular moments and gifts after the fact. Perhaps that’s one thing that being “grown-up” is: to realize in the present the magnitude or grace of what we’re being offered.
