by Mark Doty
In such a climate, of course, queer people have felt at home. How kind this atmosphere seemed to us, and how deeply gratifying to be able to do many of the things that heterosexual couples do without reservation every day: to touch one’s lover on the street, for instance, without considering consequences. To shop together for groceries or talk intimately in a café without self-consciousness. I didn’t realize, until time in Provincetown allowed me to begin to set such self-awareness aside, how watched I’d felt those five years in Vermont, how singled out, not allowed to forget my difference. I was perfectly willing to be out, in that little Northern town, and a part of me enjoyed being a crusader. But no one wants to live like that constantly; it takes an enormous amount of energy to watch oneself, to be watched all the time. Provincetown allowed us alternately to celebrate our difference and to forget it, and both opportunities were welcome.
One day, walking home on the beach from the center of town, we heard sudden footsteps behind us. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that two men were approaching us very quickly, walking with a kind of deliberation that didn’t suggest strolling. I felt myself tighten, tension stiffening my neck and shoulders, my body bracing itself as the speeding footsteps came right up behind us. I turned around swiftly, and there were the two men who’d been bearing down on us, just a few feet away—holding hands. First I laughed. And then I realized how much fear I carried, how much learned apprehension was held in my body, a guardedness my environment no longer warranted. How much of their emotional, intellectual, physical energies are gay people required to sink into such cautions? How much of ourselves do we lose, in our necessary defensiveness?
So I’d returned, an unknowing family envoy after nearly four hundred years, to a point of origin. I read histories of the Plymouth Colony. Wally and I spent Thanksgiving wandering through the replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor; strangely bright in its colors, staffed by actors imitating Puritans and sailors, it remained a replica. We even visited Plymouth Plantation, a sort of “living history” park where the staff spend their days in character in seventeenth-century costume, discussing seventeenth-century matters in their reproduction village and producing, at least in us, a weirdly discomforting effect. Most disquieting of all was the “Indian village” beyond the fences of the Pilgrim settlement, where the descendants of native peoples cooked over open fires and played with a deerskin ball, enduring questions and flashbulbs and looking irremediably sad. I felt no closer to my distant ancestor, gained no firmer sense of who he might have been. I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor from the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind there, a wind that had picked up speed and vigor and the scent of salt and freedom from its Atlantic crossing. Until it was too cold and raw to stay out any longer, I’d study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the Milky Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they’d been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation’s slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November’s chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called “unfettered leewardings,” here at the end of the world.
Time had bent back, doubled upon itself; my search for refuge mirrored the voyage of my ancestor, who sought at least an economic refuge if not the spiritual one of his fellow passengers. This doubling came to stand, for me, for the kind of duality which is this town’s particular character.
There is first the sheer matter of elements. The narrowness of the Cape at its last dwindling spur means that we are almost completely surrounded by water; the sun comes up over the bay, and sets over the open sea. Provincetown feels like an island, but we are part of the mainland, albeit tenuously. Any shore is a meeting place of continuous activity, of constant negotiation between earth and water, relations shifting by the hour and season. What is land at noon may be sea at three.
Add to this irresolvable dialogue the enormous expanse of sky, whose business is always and everywhere more visible here, where there is so much more of it than in inland landscapes, and the result is a constant, alchemical process of change. This shape-shifting makes the forms and aspects of things mercurial, inconstant—as if this conjunction of elements, life on the boundary, made things themselves restless. We are a border town between worlds, and one of them is perhaps our last wilderness, that sun-hammered, fog-claimed expanse which remains—at least from here on the shore—unknowable, impenetrable.
We are a sort of border town, too, an Alexandria, in that here a mélange of cultures mingle, interlock, and remain separate at once: straight and gay year-rounders, summer people, tourists mixing in a fascinating spectrum of relationships between gender, orientation and identity, a range of possibilities that makes the world seem a broader place. In this zone what is expected is difference, surprise.
A sole example, of the endless ones possible: one warm autumn morning, a group of women gathered at the sidewalk café for brunch, then walked through town with a banner reading “DRAG DYKES.” They were lesbians dressed “as women,” complete with lipstick and wigs, faux leopard miniskirts and veiled hats. What seemed extraordinary to me were the tourists who were taking their pictures, a group of older visitors fresh off the fall foliage tour bus. The peculiarity of photographing women dressed as women seemed lost on them; one of the “cross-dressers” was patiently explaining to an elderly woman just who they were and what they were up to, though she didn’t seem to be getting very far. The ironies of the situation made me say—as I have so many times, even after five years in Provincetown—“Where else?” It’s something many of us here ask, affectionately, when the town yet again demonstrates its ability to surprise us.
What would my Pilgrim forefather make of all this? It’s too easy to suppose that he would find in the town which has evolved upon his wooded shore a kind of Babylon. He was himself an outsider, an opportunist who found in the Puritans’ voyage an opportunity to construct a life with larger boundaries than London must have offered a young man of no means or social standing. Provincetown’s pleasure-based economy—we live on the sale of consumables, from silk shirts to grilled tuna to soft ice cream—may well have appalled the Puritans, but then they were highly interested in selling the bounty of the New World to an eager market back home. Most of us were reacquainted, each Thanksgiving, with imagery of a sober piety, but it’s a quaint historical fiction to suppose them a united group with a certain faith in a particular ideology. They were, in fact, contentious and embattled, both in a threatening England and an even more uncertain America. We have more in common with their tremendous doubts, with their fear in the face of an unknown future, than with whatever certainties they may have claimed.
Storms, on the North Atlantic coast, are Shakespearean.
They move in like vast states of mind, and seem allied with moral forces, conjured by enchanters whose aim is to confound and instruct. One autumn Nor’easter of Hollywood magnitude filled the air with so much wind-blown water that it hardly seemed air at all, but rather as if the atmosphere had become a new sort of medium, making those of us unlucky enough to be out in it quite like fish out of water. In the morning, a wrecked houseboat lay on its side on the beach like a stranded whale.
The houseboat had been the only craft of its sort in the harbor, and for good reason; a simple room constructed atop a boat, square and unhappy on the water, it did not seem a seaworthy craft. Unballasted, its boxy shape made it a plaything for any wind, turning and turning in the slightest breeze. I couldn’t imagine anyone living aboard.
Cast up, it was ungainly, elephantine, its green bottom painted with big red lines which resembled ideograms, oddly serene, like a huge Buddhist billboard. The storm tore away part of one wall, as if determined to crack open the unwelcome and unwieldy house.
Just down th
e shore, a dinghy which belonged to our neighbor, the Italian restaurateur, had also been beached, its cheery red and white centered in a bed of blackened seaweed as if it were the centerpiece of an antipasto. Its green interior (Franco had painted it in imitation of the flag of his mother country) was filled with water, and seemed a sort of marvelous aquarium: above a drift of sand sculpted by ripples, a clutch of sea lettuce floated. Dozens of minnows darted, confused by their sudden containment in this smaller, watery globe. Their world was suddenly green and diminished; they could circumnavigate their entire sea in seconds.
The storm cracked open and upended the containing house, and constructed a new house a hundred yards away, one that contained life more gracefully than the houseboat ever did. House became boat became wreckage, open to tides and fish; boat became the fishes’ temporary house. So the world’s order is constantly open to revision. The day’s lesson was delivered with wit and surprise, as if the sea delighted in nothing more than contradiction and metaphor.
This is the sort of pleasure which makes me want to live here forever. There are few ways to make a decent living here, and urban centers which offer more opportunities are hours away. There is no movie theater, in the off season, and even in season there’s no place to buy a computer ribbon. Town government is, to be polite, antediluvian, a complex, inbred system of rivalries and affiliations, Florentine in its complexity. Every season we must endure the deluge of hordes of tourists, and our own attempts to sell them all the T-shirts and lobster dinners they can consume. We exhaust ourselves in the process, and they exhaust us further, and we become increasingly rude and exasperated by the crowds, uneasily so, since we know how much we depend upon them. No one has fun in August. One can wait in line to buy a stamp, and negotiate a maze of pedestrians, bicycles, and cars rivaling Singapore to get from one end of town to the other.
There are substantially good reasons not to live here, and just when they descend on me in force, something—be it the low call of Long Point Light perched at the tip of the harbor like the Pharos of Alexandria, or the sight of a pair of teenage boys comfortably holding hands downtown, perhaps for the first time in their lives, reminds me why it’s worth it. We’re face to face with a raft of contradictions, both natural and cultural. Here, at land’s end, in the superb setting of this landscape, our gems are the rich possibilities of human love, human pleasures, the splendid diversity and sameness of our longings. It is a place worthy of pilgrimage, where the elements arrange, as they conjoin, small tableaux of miracle and reversal.
Accident
But as the season turns, darkening into a late but raw winter, so do we. Our golden autumn’s gone gray and severe. Our neighborhood, out at the end of town, is empty save for us, the windows of summer houses shuttered tight. The dry canes of the climbing roses rattle, and wind whistles in the wires in the masts of the moored catamarans, a chilly singing. Wally’s mood shifts. He’d planned, these months when he wasn’t working (no shops which could use his skills would be open till April), to paint and sketch, maybe to continue doing some writing, but what he does is walk, whole days of dog-walking, and when I come home from my two days of teaching each week there’s a heaviness and darkness in him, even though I know he’s glad to see me. It feels as if his life is a weight he has to lift, to carry, and he doesn’t quite seem to have the strength. The days I’m away the weight seems to become heavier; free of the distraction of company, he sinks further into himself, into uncertainty, into depression.
And then one morning early in January Wally’s walking Arden, on the way home from the lush wrack and tumble of the salt marsh. They’re crossing a lawn which is separated from the road by a tall hedge when Arden spies a rabbit, object of wonder and delight, and bolts unstoppably after it, right through the hedge and into the road. Wally, left on the other side, hears the sickening screech of brakes, and then, worse, the sound of a body being struck, and then a cry—pain, confusion, terror? He runs to the road. The car has stopped, but Arden isn’t there; Wally looks up to see him racing away down Commercial Street, toward town, and though Wally runs after him shouting Arden’s name till he thinks his heart will burst, the dog can’t hear him. There’s nothing for him but panic’s imperative, nothing but flight.
The driver of the car and his passenger, two kind and concerned men, drive Wally around the neighborhood, stopping to ask people if they’ve seen a dog. Someone says they thought they saw a black dog racing up Franklin Street—in the direction of the dunes and woods, a refuge, but only if Arden also crossed the town’s busiest streets.
No sign of him.
Soon Wally’s calling me at my office; only one other time, two years later, will a telephone call be so terrifying. There are great huge silences between words, when he cannot still his sobs enough to continue.
“Babe…” Long silence, the intake of Wally’s breath. I’m thinking, My God, what’s happened?
“Arden…got hit…by a…car.”
Slowly, my questions get the rest of the story out. I think it’s probably a good sign that Arden could run, and has; at least he was able to, though we’re both terrified that he’s injured internally, that he’s hiding somewhere, in pain, where we can’t get to him. And I’m frightened by this wild panic in Wally’s voice, which is somehow like nothing I’ve heard before, more desperate, more empty, as if the bottom has fallen out of the world.
It takes me six hours to get home. During this time, Wally’s combed the streets, calling till he’s hoarse. No luck. He’s also called his friend Bobby, who’s driven down from Boston; always wanting to please, to make himself indispensable, Bobby shows up all excited saying he’s found Arden, who’s waiting out in the car. Wally rushes out, but the dog in the front seat is someone else’s black pooch, who was perfectly happy to jump into Bobby’s station wagon. Later, Wally will tell me how his knees buckled when he saw that it wasn’t our dog. Bobby wasn’t a stranger to Arden; what was he thinking? Was he so desperate to help that he’d pick up any black dog? Certainly he could behave thoughtlessly, but I think now he must have picked up on that panic in Wally’s voice, that nearly unbearable note of pain. I would have done anything to salve that, too, but confronting the wrong dog only made Wally’s spirits sink more deeply. Bobby has to go home, just after I return, and I’m glad.
We comb the town again, hoping that a new voice might reach Arden; if he’s hiding, panicked or wounded, can I draw him out? We call the police and the radio station and make signs to post all over town: at the A&P, the post office, the café bulletin board. Arden’s not a dog who’s been out in the world on his own. With Wally or me since he was a puppy, carried home in our laps from the animal shelter, he’s bound to us by deep ties, and though he likes exploring, he’s never evidenced the least desire to wander around without us. He is in relation to us; that’s his life.
And though I am frantic with worry for him myself, what I hear in Wally’s voice, what shows in his face, is some panic and terror more primal than mine, a pain that seems to go all the way to the root of him. We drive through the parking lot at Herring Cove Beach, a place we often walk, thinking perhaps he might have run there. A town eccentric—a former therapist, I’ve heard, who’s become a vision of Father Christmas in his long white hair and beard, who dresses all in white and walks with a tall walking stick—is crossing the parking lot, and when we pull up beside him Wally rolls down the window and says, “Have you seen my dog?” It’s the voice of a terrified little boy, helpless, utterly alone.
Back home, having accomplished nothing, we’re looking down into the rough January water of the bay churning against the breakwater stones. “Where is he?” Wally demands, as if I or anyone could answer, “Where is he?”
Our descent seemed a long, imperceptible downward glide, but I can see now there were indeed precipitous drops, moments when we stepped down to a new level, a greater depth.
Arden’s accident was such a moment. In Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls there’s a weird
and chilling scene when thunder shatters a glass of water on a bedside table; it is, somehow, the beginning of the speaker’s misfortune, the physical manifestation of his illness beginning. A glass shatters and a room goes dark; nothing is ever the same again.
What opened in Wally then was a depth of vulnerability and despair like nothing I’d ever seen in him before. It was about the real loss—was it?—of Arden, of course, but it was more than that, too, Arden and Wally both struck, everything out of his control, everything veering into his life, unstoppable, an event from which he couldn’t be rescued. We didn’t know where Arden was or how badly he might be hurt—did we know where Wally was, or how much he’d been harmed?
We tried to sleep that night, and did, fitfully. I remember walking the beach at five, a bleary dawn, whistling and calling. Late in the morning, the phone rang. Some neighbors, down for the weekend, had gone to town for breakfast, because it was a warm and sunny morning. Reading the bulletin board in front of the café, they’d recognized Arden’s name and description. Then, walking homeward, in front of the bank, Arden appeared, walking—with a rather confused and tentative look, they thought—in the same direction they were going.
