by Mark Doty
Bill wants to hear, first, about Wally’s dying. I sit beside him with my hand resting on his, which moves from his side onto his delicate chest, so that soon my hand is resting just above his heart. Phil sits at the foot of the bed and doesn’t say much; our witness, Bill’s protector, is letting us have this time. I can tell it feels good to him, to sit quietly, to rest on the side of the bed, listening to someone else talk with Bill, in some interaction which is without threat, which asks nothing of either of them.
I tell Bill everything. About the ease of it, the awe and mystery, and Bill listens carefully, closing his eyes sometimes as if to listen more closely, sometimes opening them wide as if to take more of the story into himself. I try not to leave anything out; I can tell what he wants from me is completeness, any sense I can give of actuality, any guesses this eyewitness to last things may have made. I have feelings, experience, intuition more than I have knowledge in any conventional sense—but isn’t that part of what being with dying teaches us, different sorts of knowing?
Then Phil’s lying across Bill’s feet, resting on the soft green chenille, as though he’s fallen asleep there, dreaming. I understand, the way he holds him, what Phil has done. It’s him who’s made this room what it is, who has protected a space for Bill in which he can continue—so fully, and so fully supported—to be himself. My friend Jean, in whose safe blue bedroom I will fall apart, a month from now, wrote a poem that ends
And me,
I got what I wanted.
I died with my life around me.
Isn’t that what any of us would ask for, to be fully in our lives as we leave them, to have been ourselves all the way first? This is the gift that Phil’s love is giving to Bill. In the absolute endangerment of illness, here is safety. In the face of reduction, identity. In the face of indignity, respect. In the face of erasure, here is intimacy, the sustaining of context which preserves the self.
It’s as if Bill floats, sweet boy, talking now about his plans for his funeral—only white flowers, his music, but what color lining for his casket?—and the carefully orchestrated party he intends for Phil to throw afterward. He drifts in the space Phil’s attention has created, easy there, despite it all, an odd and heartbreaking ease.
I know what the price of this is for Phil—the exhaustion, the continuous focus on another, the postponement of one’s own needs, but it’s also clear to me how much he wants to give this to Bill; it doesn’t even seem a choice, exactly, just what there is to be done. Phil can’t see himself the depth and magnitude of the gift; he is so far inside it he has no means of measure.
Bill is having the best time, talking away, and suddenly he’s starving, and eats two turkey-on-white-bread sandwiches and two little packages of salty pretzels, more than he’s put away in weeks. We’ll learn, the next day, that he’ll throw it all up in the night, but it doesn’t matter; he’s hungry and happy in the moment. A vital pulse gleams through all his pleasures, his plans, his careful posthumous hosting of his friends.
What I’m seeing is the kindest and sweetest mirror of the last of my life with Wally, and so rather than returning me to difficulty and pain, the visit is somehow restorative, bracingly genuine, consoling. Where could it be clearer, here in the heart of abandonment, what love achieves?
A Black Beaded Dress
This is how it happens: I’m driving back from Boston with Phil, in that happily intimate space the interior of a car is, at night, with a friend, a chance for extended conversation interrupted only by a stop for gas or coffee. When have we ever had a chance to talk like this, not at a party or a reading or in the hurry of a chance encounter on the street?
I’m talking about what it’s like for me, with Wally three months gone; Phil’s talking about how he imagines it will be for him, how he doesn’t want to imagine it but has to, needs to, in order to have some sense of a tenable future. For each of us there’s so much in what the other says that we recognize, and what an aid and comfort that simple fact is: somebody else feels or has felt like me. We’re entirely encompassed in our conversation when we come upon a detour; the highway’s been closed, south of Plymouth, and just beyond the makeshift wooden barriers and orange pylons are the flashing red and blue lights of a squadron of emergency vehicles. The bright, alarming row of them conceal whatever they surround, and I have that brief thought one always has, coming upon an accident, Is this someone I know? But we’re a long ways from home, and I dismiss the notion, and along the dark wooded detour which takes us away from the smear of disaster we continue our quiet and encompassing conversation.
In the morning the news comes early, my roommate rushing in from morning coffee, out of breath, shaken, saying someone from town’s died, a woman, a poet, someone in the Program: is it my friend Lynda? An accident, in Plymouth. I call the police in town who tell me to call the police there and I do, and they’re hesitant to tell me anything until I tell them Lynda’s name, tell them I’m a friend, tell them I need to know, and they tell me she’s died, in a single-car accident, that she must have died immediately, the tree she’d smashed into pushed through the roof of the old white Saab she’d bought after her last accident, a car she wanted because it would be solid and safe.
In memory, all that morning I’m standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter because I can’t quite stand up; sometimes I’m sitting at the blue table but all the time I am talking, talking on the phone: to friends and students of Lynda’s and of mine, to her husband David’s answering machine, to her parents, to the people who have to know. I realize that Michael, her roommate, my friend, doesn’t know yet—but he’s at work, serving breakfast in a restaurant down the block, and I don’t want to tell him there. I plan that I’ll meet him at the door of the restaurant, when he gets off, so that he can hear this from me, but I don’t count on the radio playing in the dining room; Lynda’s death is reported on the morning news while Michael’s serving someone a plate of eggs. So I’m standing in the kitchen when he comes racing around the corner of the house to the door, stumbling, weeping, dissolved in terror and in pity.
Michael weeping uncontrollably in my arms: terrible mirror of myself, three months ago but also in the days since. I cry almost every day, still, though it subsides a little faster, though I don’t go back so much to this raw, stricken place of unbearable new grief. And I can’t go there now, not exactly, though Michael can. He’s twenty-five and no one close to him has ever died before; he can’t stop shaking. But it’s not as if I know something more than he does about death, not as if I have some sort of wisdom extracted from experience. I’m stricken and horrified and half-numb, and though I’d like it to be otherwise the truth is that I am full of confusion, because my grief is so inextricable from my fury and my fear, conflicting feelings tumbling together like the slap of wave on wave.
After Lynda died I thought I’d never write about her; I was too full of anger, raw and startled and afraid. Of what? It was fear for myself, I guess; how would I hold on through another death? And how could I face the bitter sense that she’d tossed her own life away, with all her extraordinary gifts, that she’s spun out of control in a long skid she could have prevented?
She’d said to a mutual friend, reflecting on her own self-destructive behavior, Well, at least if I die, think of the beautiful elegies my friends will write for me. I couldn’t bear that; I couldn’t abide that romanticizing of harm, that weird combination of self-aggrandizement and willful disregard of the gift of one’s own life.
And I was afraid too that to try to write about her was to admit chaos, to describe an emotional complexity that would utterly elude and confound me. I knew what I felt about Wally; it might be a great reservoir of pain, an overpowering sense of loss and of awe, but those feelings were clear, as transparent to me as new tide pouring over the marsh grasses. About Lynda’s death I had no such clarity.
The last time I saw her she was drunk. The middle of the day; she’d been to an AA meeting; I was to meet her outside the church
and together we’d walk to a restaurant to meet David, who was in town for a few days. She’s weaving a little as she emerges from the church basement. She’s wearing a little black dress, a ragged black coat and beret, leaning on her ebony cane, and as soon as I see her I know she’s not all right. But I try to deny it, and take her arm; I try to say to myself, Well, maybe she’s just upset, things have been so hard. Our friendship’s been strained and compromised these months; we are being very cautious with one another. I don’t trust her, she is trying terribly hard to please me, to make a good impression. She takes my arm and we walk to the restaurant together, the Post Office Café, a greasy but basically likable place that’s open all year round, as not many places here are, and there’s David at a table waiting for us. His face falls when he looks at her and sees the shape she’s in; his look says Why am I here? and then almost immediately What’s to be made of this? which is what the faces of those long used to living with alcoholics almost always say: How will we get through this one? Lunch is strained and sad and Lynda’s bitchy and out of focus; he’s come all this way to see her and she’s not only not home but is ugly and sniping. All three of us are just making small talk to try to live through an hour. My friend, whom I’ve loved for years, my adventurer, wonderful poet, survivor, heroine, role model, flash girl, paragon of style and endurance—well, I find I just don’t like her at all.
How can I reclaim her?
It’s 1984, more or less, and I am dancing with a woman in a red cocktail dress, a dashing little number with a large, elegant, and somewhat daffy bow tied at the back of its dropped shoulders. We’ve met at a writers’ conference where we’re both teaching; she’s here with her soon-to-be husband, and we’re drawn together into a fast, immediate friendship fired by a complex set of bonds we’ll be years in getting to know. She’s tiny, fiercely glamorous in a kid-playing-dress-up way; she’s angular, her firm nose casting a sharp shadow, her high cheekbones rouged. We tango, we glide, we conquer the dance floor like born show-queens—more interesting, more endearing because neither of us really knows these dances. We know how to make things look right, understand the playful and delicate work appearances are.
What launches and sparks any friendship is a mysterious alchemy, of course; how often friends predict we’ll adore so-and-so, and put us together at parties only to find that so-and-so and us chat politely until conversation fizzles like a wet fuse. Who can say what makes two people forge a sudden, surprising link?
Though certainly I can say what deepened it. We shared a sensibility, so much so that I can’t help but think of Lynda now as almost a way of seeing, a stance, an aesthetic. (Is that one thing the dead do for us, become a set of codes, an approach to describing the world?) So many things will always speak of Lynda, be redolent of her.
Specifically?
A certain sartorial intersection of glamour and trash, a louche but lovely address at which reside faux leopard anything, cloches, art deco jewelry, silk scarves worn as head wraps, tiny black dresses worn with a black leather jacket. Lynda looked wonderful, and she loved looking unlike anyone else; she wanted her unlikeness to be seen and appreciated. Her style, as her body fell apart over time, through back pains and car accident, became more and more the sort she admired, a panache which triumphed over difficulty without exactly concealing it: she adored Frida Kahlo, Marianne Faithfull, Lotte Lenya, women made more beautiful by a certain broken quality about them, by the acknowledgment of that quality. Thus she loved drag queens not just for their tawdry glamour but also for the way that their illusion was always ultimately doomed to fail. The artifice of making oneself be whomever one liked always revealed the reality beneath, and therein lay both its failure and a good part of its charm. She was a lover of appearances, of performance, of bravura, of failed but honorable gestures toward beauty.
Because the world was ruined, wasn’t it, and how could its children not be ruined as well?
We loved ruined armor, and Wally and I actually bought her a suit of it, in a way. At an auction, we found a black beaded dress, a tiny slip of transparent chiffon stitched with spirals of black jet beads. The beading was unraveling a bit at the edges, but it was perfect: a sheer black exhalation of sin, jazz, and dissipation, something so tiny and fragile, and so daringly tough, that I couldn’t imagine anyone else wearing it. Beneath her achieved surface, Lynda’s vulnerability was always visible; this is what made her such a wonderful teacher, and such a wonderful friend. It made her empathic, grounded, real. And it allowed us to share a common sense of difference, an odd feeling of being in disguise, of impostorship. Why were people reading our poems, taking workshops to hear us talk about poetry? If people knew who we really were, we used to joke, they’d never listen to us in workshop!
Because we were both kids who’d been in trouble; we both came from households racked with alcohol or chemicals, and we’d both been down close enough to the pavement to believe we could wind up back in some lowlife dive at any minute. Children of difficulty, we recognized in each other certain marks of damage, certain absences of confidence, certain luscious ambitions to be loved or adored, deep convictions of difference. We felt a sense of both being pushed to the margin and choosing that realm of marginality; felt, in other words queer, and our queerness—as poets, as born outsiders—both separated us from the world and energized us. Lynda used to like to say she was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body; this perception wasn’t so much about sexuality as about a whole approach to reality, a position from which one might understand the vulnerability and porosity of the self, the power of its costuming gestures. I knew there were aspects of me Lynda understood through and through; I know either of us could tell without fail what the other would love.
The art we loved was queer art: Hart Crane and Cavafy, Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Joseph Cornell, film noir: lush surfaces spread over difficult, edgy material, art marked by the transubstantiation of pain into style. Art full of anguish and pleasure in the racked beauty of the world, the kind of alloy she loved, and understood: the sort of thing we make when we’re true to the world’s comminglings of gorgeousness and terror.
For ten years Lynda and I would teach together, pull each other through crises of confidence, read all of each other’s poems, cheer each other through readings, edit each other’s manuscripts. She mattered to me greatly as a critic but even more as an inspiration: she worked at her art with a singular intensity, and in each new poem she’d raise the stakes as high as she could, putting everything at risk, pouring herself into her coruscating, elegant texts. So that one had to live up to that, poems had to matter that much.
During those ten years we’d see each other at the regular writers’ conferences where we taught, and visit in between or talk on the phone, and mail would always carry back and forth funny, signifying tokens that each knew the other would love. But despite our closeness there were other edges, the recurrent shadows of drugs and alcohol, which Lynda would try to keep from me, as she tried to conceal the fragility of her sobriety from all her friends. She had a lifetime battle with addictions. Out on the streets at sixteen, she married a Chinese gambler, lived in the Chinatowns of New York and Boston, and launched herself through a long stream of cities in a lurching wild life the recounting of which constituted one of her favorite obsessions and activities. She’d made it through alcohol, heroin, and harrowing hard-luck circumstances that would have left most people in their graves, and wound up in Little Rock, Arkansas, newly sober and determined to write poetry. There she met David, and began a remarkable career as a poet and teacher, hammering out an unmistakable poetic voice, winning prizes for each of the two books she published during her lifetime. Becoming, over the years, a larger, deeper person, with a great range of sympathies, with humor and insight, with a kind of palpable distinctness of being that says I am entirely myself, and no one’s like me.
But the struggle with addictions didn’t end, though she didn’t want her friends to see that. I didn’t know, at first, about the sli
ps; she’d enlist friends to protect her. A certain quality of charm—manipulative, to a degree?—would convince each friend that no one understood him the way Lynda did. And each friend would be eager to protect her apparent fragility. What little I knew I kept to myself. After she died it turned out that many people had bits and pieces of her story, and we were all holding them back from each other, as if we alone were the keepers of the sad knowledge, and not to admit what we knew was somehow to spare her.
But there’d be weeks when she wasn’t available on the phone, and David would be vague about where she was, and times when I’d hear her back had gone out once too often to be quite convincing. Odd bits of disjunction or disinformation. And then one summer, on the last night of the writers’ conference, she stood in front of me with a group of celebrating students, a champagne bottle in her hand, her face transformed, glazed, not hers. I was terrified, not least because her face reminded me of my mother’s: an alcoholic whose visage was shattered, distorted as if one looked at her through alcohol, a film of troubling liquid.
Over the years, increasingly, more slips, things unraveling. But she’d try, always, to keep that part of her life removed from mine—as if she knew how much it would trouble me, knowing the turmoil in my own history, knowing that, incapable of dealing with addiction, I’d run away.
I never saw so clearly how she’d worked to protect me as I did on our last happy night together, the last time she seemed to me entirely herself. We’d come to New York, the autumn before Wally died; I’d been nominated for a literary prize, and I needed someone with me for moral support at the tense ceremonies and hoopla that accompanied the event, an Oscar-type celebration where the awards were announced. There was no question of Wally traveling by then; he couldn’t walk, and barely understood when I explained the details of the proceedings, though his pride in me was evident, his insistence that I should win. (I tried to explain that I wouldn’t, that for a young poet to be nominated was prize enough, but he wasn’t interested in the subtleties.) So my date and I arrived at the Plaza; I helped her from the taxi in my tux and shiny patent leather shoes, and she was never more splendid: the black beaded dress resplendent, all its loose traceries of jet stitched back onto the voile, rhinestones on her black cloche, an ebony cane. She was radiant, playful, funny, enthralled with the weirdness of the night, simultaneously laughing at and delighting in its glamour. We were bad kids together, impostors; what were we doing here, in this gilt ballroom stuffed with enough black wool and satin to wrap the hotel itself, enough champagne to fill the fountains in the Park?
