Heaven's Coast

by Mark Doty

  That night, in the drawing room comedy an event which takes itself so grandly and seriously inevitably is (these are writers, after all, in these formal disguises), we seemed to have entered a Manhattan of another era, a penthoused realm of suite and ballroom, glimmer and sheen. Who’d have thought Lynda would be dead in five months? Who’d have thought, seeing her that night, that she’d survived an awful year?

  Everything had seemed to push her toward a terrible edge. A trip to Poland, with her mother, had awakened a deep sense of ancestry, as the devastation her family had suffered during the Holocaust emerged—a ruination she seemed to take into herself, identifying with the suffering, the encamped, the gassed. She’d come back filled with a sense of historical burden, one that wasn’t in the least abstract or universal but loomingly, frighteningly personal. Her friend Emily—they met in jail, when Lynda, at seventeen, was performing the court-assigned community service of reciting the lyrics to James Brown’s “King Heroin” to her fellow delinquents—was struggling with AIDS, and Lynda couldn’t help but look at her and wonder how, and why, she’d escaped. Wasn’t there something she could do to help Emily and her child? Wally, whom Lynda loved, had begun his long decline. She’d fought her way toward cheerfulness, standing by his bed with her arms full of the sunflowers she’d brought him, and later fallen apart in the kitchen, out of earshot.

  And then, in Chicago, her car was hit head-on by a taxi, the front end crushed, the bones of both her feet broken. Never particularly strong—her health compromised by years of living marginally—the recovery was terrible, and partial, though she spent months in bed, though there was more than one operation. David used to carry her, once she could get out a bit, up and down the four flights of stairs leading to their lakeshore apartment.

  When she was walking, out in the world again after months of physical therapy, she took a job in Boston for a semester. It wasn’t a happy choice: she was still physically frail from the accident’s aftermath and addicted to painkillers. Boston had been a difficult city for her, the location—dreamy and often nightmarish now, in memory—of many of her hardest years, the old days of using and getting by from deal to deal. The details of that fall would only emerge for me later: how she’d been hospitalized, nearly dying from an overdose of the painkillers she’d taken, how a friend coming to collect some clothes for her in the hospital had found her closet full of bottles.

  And yet, that night, in the middle of that season of dissolution, she was entirely present, in focus, strong, sober. How did she do it? Was her show of strength a gift to me?

  In December, she came for a visit; the home health aides who were in the house to help care for Wally insisted she was stoned, but I couldn’t see it. Perhaps I didn’t want to, or perhaps it was simply that my attention was so focused on Wally, in those late dark hours, that I couldn’t see her. Though I could feel that something was off, that her visit was really more about her than about us, as if there was something she needed from us that I couldn’t give. How could I give to anyone, when every bit of me was centered around that hospital bed in what used to be our living room? Every bit of my psyche was involved with surrounding that man as he drifted toward being a child, toward a simple radiant awareness, toward being no one.

  Lynda decided she’d come to Provincetown in the winter, when her teaching gig was up. In part she wanted to take time to write; in part I believe she was avoiding going home, since she was using and didn’t want to confront David and the evidence of her domestic life. And in part she wanted to be near Wally and me, wanted to help us, and didn’t understand she wasn’t in any shape to help anyone. She told me a dream she’d had; in it, she was living in a cottage on the beach, and out on the shore, hunkering around near the wharves and piers, was a huge, hungry rat, bigger than a dog, red-eyed, malevolent. The rat’s my addiction, she said, I’m coming to Provincetown to finally confront the rat.

  Moments after Wally died, Lynda called; I think she knew. I heard her voice on the answering machine in the kitchen, but I didn’t go to it then, lost as I was in the unbelievable hour Wally had filled with himself and then with his absence. She called again from Cambridge the next morning, and after I told her she said she’d drive down later in the day. She arrived, late in the afternoon, drunk.

  I sat on the bed, in the ringing ache and resonance of that room, the room I’d only just been able to enter again, all its evidence of him—glasses, toothbrush, little wooden angel hanging from a thread above his pillow—precious and unbearable.

  And my friend could not see or feel what was happening, could not be with me in the actuality I could barely be in myself, because she was drunk. We talked for a few minutes and then I couldn’t stop the anger, the rising choke of it, and I said, You need to leave, you have to go now, I can’t be with you now. Anger not only that she was unavailable when I most needed help, but that I had to move from that depth of shock and fear and loss into this other feeling, that my energies had to be pulled this way now, of all times, when I had no resources to protect myself.

  Though I did protect myself; did, out of some raw instinct toward self-preservation, push my friend away.

  Is this what death always does, push us toward a kind of brink of reality, so we have to stand face to face with ourselves, all our histories up front, simultaneous, newly intensified? Lynda’s drinking brought back fear and anger at seeing someone I love obscured by booze, and my own desire to run away. Suddenly I had, again, to determine boundaries, create limits in order not to be overwhelmed.

  (Other old issues resurface, too: talking to my father on the phone forces me to look at our distance, the unreality of my life to him, and I feel invisible, unseen. I’m aware again of how the central fact of my life isn’t one which church or state cares to recognize; who sees what has happened to us?)

  Just as I always tried to protect Lynda, I want to spare her still, and her husband, and her family, but I want also the actual dimensions of my friend’s illness, which seemed to deepen its hold, in the weeks after Wally’s death. Suffice to say I’d hear about the pills and prescriptions, about things slipping out of her control, about her going to meetings drunk or high, weeping about Wally in the street.

  I couldn’t see her at all, at first, and so our next meeting was at the memorial service, a week after Wally died. She seemed a fragile surface constructed above an abyss, held together by wires, fragmented, as if her energies were split apart, some fracture setting the self at odds with the self.

  Later, we meet for lunch, but it seems strained, all the old spontaneity gone. She works so hard to convince me she’s taking care of herself that it doesn’t ring true; she doesn’t want to be sober, she wants to seem okay. So there’s an unreality about our talk, and I don’t think she actually hears me. We have that sort of AA conversation in which we each report on our condition, state our problems, but it never feels like a real exchange; it feels as though Lynda’s holding on by the skin of her teeth, desperate to convince herself or me she’s going to be all right. It rankles me, then, that I never really get to tell her the story of Wally’s death, of how it felt; she never really seems to listen.

  What can I do? I’m powerless, everyone’s powerless in the face of her addiction. I encourage a friend in recovery to try to intervene. I try to think how I can see her at all, when I feel completely porous, when I think there’s so little of me and that so fragile. She leaves a note in my mailbox, written on the back of an envelope I have still: Please don’t hold my addictions against me.

  I’m worried about her, but I know Lynda’s a survivor. She’s made it through so much already, lived through such difficulty that, of course, she’ll get through this, though I’ve never seen her spinning so fast, sinking so badly. It’s going to pass, I think, she’s going to hit some bottom and then pull herself up.

  She falls in the shower and cuts her head; Michael gets her to the hospital for stitches, and on the way home she stops at the pharmacy in town which must be one of the few
places in America where you can buy both painkillers and beer. Then Michael and my AA friend succeed in getting her to rehab, so I think that’ll be the turning point: she’ll be back now, in her strength again. But sobriety hasn’t really been her choice; she isn’t ready. She stays a few days and then she’s back as if nothing’s happened.

  I think, What I’ve done for years, when my friends fucked themselves up with chemicals, is guard myself, run away. Do I have to hide from her? How can I take care of myself but also behave responsibly toward someone I love? Rena, Wally’s old therapist, says, It sounds like you’re afraid of her. And I am; I am holding myself together precariously, learning to move through the simple routines I’ve established for myself: walking the dogs, swimming laps at the motel pool, buying food for one. Trying to learn how to stumble through the days without falling, without falling any more than I have to. My head feels like a vacancy; I’m a great broken space which fills alternately with weeping and with nothing. Where is there room for the turbulence of Lynda?

  I hear things are starting to turn, beginning to change: she’s going to meetings, has a sponsor, is admitting that she’s been in bad shape, owning up that things have been out of control.

  So I think about what I want to say, and build up courage to say it. I want to meet and talk, I want to say, I love you and I can’t stand it when you do this to yourself, I have to keep my distance from you now because I don’t have the strength to bear it. Please, go home, go where your support is. I’ll be here for you later, I’ll be connected with you again as soon as I can. So I call and leave a message on her machine that I want to talk. It’s Sunday; I tell her I’ll be home that night and then away for a couple of days; if we don’t talk tonight, let’s talk on Wednesday. She doesn’t return my call that night (later I’ll hear she was out drinking). Monday I’m going to Boston. Tuesday she goes to Boston, too, to see her shrink, and on the way home drives her car—doing what, eighty? eighty-five?—into a tree just past Exit 4.

  Wild arrogance, to imagine there won’t be more to feel because you won’t be able to feel it. To think no more loss can happen because you can’t hold it.

  But the dreadful rears up, enormous, uncontainable, too large to apprehend and yet stubbornly insistent upon being real. I say, I can’t, I won’t, how can I even begin, but the fact towers, dominates the world.

  A single car accident, at high speed on a wet road. A suicide? I don’t think so, not in the sense of a deliberate choice made to end her life, not in the sense of Lynda deciding to die, then and there, or planning it. And yet all her last months seemed a careening out of control, as if the steering wheel had started racing in her hand months before, as if she’d turned then into some skid she couldn’t pull herself out of. How much did it matter, exactly, what she’d intended just then? Her family said she was sober, at the time of the crash, but did that matter exactly either, since that moment was part of a plummeting fall from sobriety—a condition more brittle and precarious for her than I’d ever known? Suddenly everything about the way she’d been living seemed a kind of flirtation with death, a courting of death. Even the poems, beautifully wrought, full of engagement with life, seemed in retrospect full of negotiations with mortality, as if everything she ever wrote was a rehearsal for a suicide note. But she was going to meetings, she was thinking of going home, she was raising the bright flag of some will to live, even if it was wavering, while she stared into the face of her rat.

  But didn’t we feel, everyone who knew her, as if she’d killed herself? Everyone said to me something beginning with If only…

  If only I’d been there, reached out in some way. A suicide spreads responsibility everywhere; everyone tries to respond, somehow, to the brutal gesture. In stunned anger, in horror and grief, the wind knocked out of us, we’re all reacting all day and evening on the phone. Just when I had stopped this, just when I wasn’t telling the story of Wally’s death over and over again, I’m back in that electronic network of friends, students, everyone who knew her in some way wanting to connect with everyone else, touch base, tell a story, speculate (If only…). The phone had become a kind of drug for me in the weeks after Wally died: a source of contact, something to do besides weeping, besides lying in that empty bed, besides walking in the frozen world. Now, again I’m living leaning against the kitchen counter, the phone become a part of my face.

  Do I feel anything besides stunned, a numb disbelief that I’m going to another funeral, in a few days, in Newark, that Lynda’s vanished?

  I feel this rush of compassion for David, who couldn’t have known what was coming, at least not the way I knew what was coming for Wally. David is my age exactly but a few days younger; we are both forty and our lives have broken in half, ground to wrack and powder. Compassion that he had no time to prepare, when I had this long time to look at what was coming. Was it slow? Did it race by me? Is there any way to even approach getting ready? I made the arrangements, found the help, discovered what could allow Wally and me to live as best we could, but what preparation could I make in my heart? Is it good, the knowledge I had? What’s the difference in our grief, our rages, our bouts of numbness (relief, sometimes, from howling pain)?

  I feel this dread of the world, of the impossible processes of loss: my lover and then my best friend gone in the space of two months? The world’s a maw, a grinding machine. Who or what’s to be eaten next? I go to Rena’s, a town away, for dinner, and I become completely obsessed with the candles I’ve left burning on the mantel, those glass-encased prayer candles Catholics light at altars, the sort that burn for days, supposedly seven, though the exact number always seems to vary. One’s been flaming continuously for Wally since he died, some outward token of the flame inside me directed toward him. The dead can see light, my friend Mekeel says. I’ve lit another for Lynda. During dinner I become certain they’re going to get too hot, the glass will crack, the hot wax will pour out, perhaps the wick will not be drowned by the liquid wax and keep burning, so that the hot wax will all catch flame, the mantel and the wood floor beginning to burn. I am sure my house must be burning; I find I don’t care so much about anything in it except the photographs of Wally and the dogs; the fire is going to take my dogs and they are all I have; there is nothing else for me in the world. I call home and discover that the answering machine works, so it can’t have melted, but I still can’t rest until I call my neighbors and have them check the house.

  I am standing in death’s floodplain, I am in the way of a tidal rush of loss. What is reality but a system for carrying people and things away?

  But mostly I feel anger, inadmissible anger which is so big that it almost obscures grief, a dark body between me and the edges of the sorrow I can see but not fully feel. I struggle because I don’t want to admit it, but I am full of rage. Wally did not have a choice, could not through any powers he might muster have changed a stroke of his history, could not rewrite a word of that last nine months’ text of erasure and of disappearance. But Lynda could.

  Couldn’t she? I know addiction’s itself an illness, I know she lived in one long struggle to gain control, to hold herself intact, but how can I help but feel she had a choice? Perhaps not to control the steering wheel, that single night, but to alter the course of the nights and days that led her there, to confront and examine her circumstances in order to live. How vain and self-indulgent self-destructiveness looks in the face of AIDS! The virus in its predatory destruction seems to underline the responsibility of the living; life’s an unlikely miracle, an occasion of strangeness and surprise, and isn’t it appalling to dismiss it, to discard the gift? Isn’t it horrifying, to choose not to live when you can choose?

  Which is not to say that her pain wasn’t real, her struggles the result of deep faultlines that shook her to the very core. My friend must have wrestled so terribly, and who am I to say that her disease was any less relentless than Wally’s? Partly my rage is just anger that she’s left me, too. And partly my rage is at the world, at God, at the b
lind bone-breaking ugly design of things.

  And somewhere underneath all that is the sense of losing the loveliest companion, a sister, a woman I adored, brilliant and accomplished and bright-spirited, my irreplaceable friend.

  In her room in the rented cottage, Michael and I find Lynda’s notebook computer still open on the bed, a few letters and a journal covered in marbled paper I’d given her spread on the comforter. Her new manuscript, in its heavy black thesis binder, on the floor beside the night table. Clothes here and there, but only her usual disorder; it’s the room of someone who’s planning to come back, someone who has no thought of not returning to these books and papers. And hung on a coat hanger, from a doorjamb, the beaded dress, gleaming, translucent, already haunted.