by Mark Doty
Time to mark every anniversary; each week, at first, I can hardly bear Saturday night. Each month, the twenty-second looms on the calendar, its pair of two’s like black bent-necked swans. I think, Can it be a month? How can it be two?
Time to revisit our old cities, to walk hours every day in the dunes, to begin the work of telling which this book is.
Time to stumble awkwardly back toward the world—into mistakes, failed stabs at single life. Which is not to say there was not respite, in other bodies, the refuge and affirmation of skin and touch, what could give comfort and pleasure, in a world where bodies gave such grief, where bodies disappeared.
Time to fall, as whatever it was that had carried me slowly faded, and I found myself firmly on earth, in my body, in my own singular life, into my own illness—of the spine or of the soul. Were they one and the same? Chiropractic, yoga, exercise, rest, acupuncture, massage—everything seemed to help a little, nothing to help enough. A ruptured disk, a rupture of reality? I wouldn’t need to draw a distinction, I guess, except that I had to do something; and there were days I could barely walk.
Early one summer morning, taking Arden and Beau on the footpath around the forest pond, I hurt so badly, so sharply and insistently, that I can’t stand up any longer. Pain shoots down my left leg with a wild, fierce insistence. I lie down on the sandy path, and find myself saying aloud, to no one, Wally’s old line: “Now what?”
Patience, slow and careful movements, days of lying in bed and reading, venturing out for treatments. I buy a secondhand laptop computer so I can write in bed, and by August I’m stirring again. I’m a bit delicate but, dosed on anti-inflammatories and visiting a physical therapist two or three times a week, I’m functioning.
I go to New Hampshire to give a poetry reading at a beautiful old meetinghouse in the country. I read a poem there about a neighbor of mine who used to take his elderly springer spaniel for walks in a sort of rope harness he’d made, since the poor old creature used to lie down for a rest and then be unable to lift himself again on his wobbly legs. My neighbor would hoist Charley, by means of the harness, and eventually the walk was more a human endeavor than a canine one, though it seemed to make both parties happy.
An old friend, Nancy, has come to the reading, and we talk about all that’s been happening for both of us, and of course she notices how stiff and careful I am in my movements, and asks about my back. Later, she sends this letter:
Dear Mark,
It was such a joy to see you and hear you read again. Your poems do me good, as though each color, fin and animal pelt had been ground into a homeopathic mash and spooned into my system. Please feel welcome to stay with David and me any time you’re in this area—it’s quiet.
As I was falling asleep last night, the image of your neighbor lifting his dog in the harness gave me a crazy idea.
You’ve carried Wally for so long, your back may not realize that earth and sky now carry the weight. I visualized Wally on the floor beside his bed, and you bending over him, buckling on a harness and leash. You stand, and slowly lift him on his hands and knees and then higher, until he’s dangling like a little dog. At first you think he’ll be much too heavy to lift from this awkward angle, and he’s worried, too, but it turns out you can manage just using the muscles in your arms. He’s light, so light that his bones must be hollow, his flesh consecrated bread. You practice raising and lowering him (the harness might need a little adjusting) and then you’re ready for some fun. Wally loves the feeling of swinging in the air; he stretches out his arms and legs like a child playing Superman. You go outside and swing him in circles, until his eyes are parallel with yours again, his weight counterbalancing yours, making you both weightless. Effortless play, your back straight—you’re both encouraged to try some yo-yo tricks, swirling and arcing—somehow Wally’s soaring body has freed you from gravity so that you’re flying too, the leash connecting you. If you feel frightened, you know you can always climb on Wally’s back; this is his element. He can hold you.
Love,
Nancy
And I do feel, really, that the part of me that resides in the world Wally inhabits now, outside the boundaries of time and space, can soar. It’s here on earth I’m having trouble.
And it is time, increasingly, to be on earth. I return to teaching, at the beginning of September, at the end of what seems a long period of inwardness. Driving to school, the first day, I almost turn in the other direction. It’s been so long since I turned outward, directing the activities of others, putting my energy into meeting people, leading a group. I’m not sure I still can; have my resources been drained away, every ounce of me taxed?
Work turns out to be, in fact, fine, and welcome. There are times I feel I’m translating, in my head, from one language to another; I’ve become a citizen of grief’s country, and now I find I don’t always easily speak the old tongue I used to know so well. Some days I don’t feel I have the strength or attention to be a good teacher, and sometimes I think I’m just going through the motions, though if the students notice this, bless them, they don’t say so. The best days are affirming, energetic; I like climbing to something outside myself. Teaching poetry feels interior and external at once, personal and yet outer-directed, social yet real.
Working again means I have health insurance, so I go for a CAT scan to give my doctor a better look at my back. The radiologist, who’d usually just write a report, calls in some alarm, saying if ever he’s seen the scans of a patient who needs a neurosurgeon, I’m him. It’s the first time the diagnosis is firmly pronounced: ruptured disk.
But I am, strangely, feeling better, despite the grim picture and the definite terms; the sciatica that left me prone on the path a month or two before seems to be receding, gradually, though I dimly recognize that I’ve also gotten used to a draining level of pain. I make an appointment for a consultation with a neurosurgeon, though I feel relieved that it takes a couple of months to even get to see him. Meanwhile, more acupuncture, more massage.
And I turn myself, for the first time since Wally’s death, resolutely outward: teaching, readings, travel, a schedule so full that I hardly know where I am, or when, and somewhere along the way I realize I’ve done it on purpose, that what I wanted was a break from my inner life.
Of course we carry ourselves with us everywhere, no matter what, but working and travel and busyness can make for a very effective drug, a temporary screen. All through the fall, I keep myself swirling, staying on the road.
Whenever I stay in hotel rooms on upper floors, I keep my distance from the windows.
Before I know it I am driving to the clinic outside of Boston where the neurosurgeon will make a pronouncement about my future. I sit in the waiting room, my palms sweating, gripping the envelope containing the mysterious black-and-white films of my CAT-scanned sacrum. I’ve looked at them in the car on the way, holding up to the light big sheets of negatives, each one bearing groups of circular images of vertebrae, like inscrutable old magic lantern slides.
I am trying very hard not to be terrified. When the doctor taps my knee with his rubber-tipped hammer, there’s real and immediate reflex, where three months before my lifeless leg had merely remained still, the reactive nerve pinched off by the rupture in my spine. And looking at the CAT scan and at me, the doctor pronounces me a terrible candidate for surgery, since I am obviously healing myself.
Ironing a shirt, I find myself thinking of Lynda, of a late winter day—how many, three, four years ago? She’s staying in a little waterfront apartment in the West End where she’s come to write, and visits us every day. Wally is tired, already, his long days of resting on the folding couch begun, and Lynda and I’ve gone to town for an afternoon walk, and to see what stores are open. Not many, but the reliable oriental imports store is lit and occupied, as it almost always is, and inside we find that the owner’s just received a shipment of kimonos, bales of old ones bought in bulk in Japan. They’ve been dry cleaned but neither pressed nor sorted,
and they lie in great heaps of wrinkled, richly textured silk. Here are sleeves of oyster and pearl and smoke, linings patterned with flurries of chrysanthemums or undulations of watery swirls. Laughing at the bounty, overcome by the crumpled luxury, we’re trying on robe after robe, playing with things we never would (or could) wear: gossamer sleeves like white moths or frail ghosts, costumes for a Japanese Midsummer Night’s Dream, tousled fields of sheen the color of hayfields. The owner—who seems himself to enjoy our pleasure in his tumble of wares—gives us a deal, and eventually we settle on three: a short deep blue for Lynda, lined with a secretive orange splendor of flowers; a long scholarly gray for me, severe, slightly pearly, meditative; a rough raw silk for Wally, its thickly textured green weave the color of day-old clippings clinging to lawn mower blades.
Our afternoon, home in the kitchen, is a festival of ironing, of steam and surprise as wrinkles fall away and the drape and soft shine of the fabric reveal themselves. It’s raining out and the windows steam up, the room warmed by our work and the heat of our coffee. All three of us are chatting and ironing and happy, wrapping ourselves in our new old robes, thinking of the mulberry leaves spun by silkworms to this unlikely filament, of the endless labor of unwinding the cocoons, of the subtlety and strength of the colors the densely woven stuff is dyed, of our own collaboration, as ironers, in the restoration of beauty. The steam and the rain on the kitchen’s new french doors make us feel safe, domestic, inside some familiar childhood place of warmth and good company.
This memory has about it an aura of intimacy, of an achieved, common warmth—something like what Michael Anania has called, describing the process of reading, “a calm exchange of privacies.” It has the time-out-of-time sheen of happiness to it, subtle but unmistakable as the surface of those silks.
So much about Lynda is coming back to me now, as if my subsiding anger made room for the larger sense of who she was to reassert itself. How richly my friend made a life for herself; how much I enjoyed her company. She’d manage to be intimate and vulnerable, jazzy and alive, trashy and fun and then achingly and sharply smart, a more incisive thinker than anyone I knew. She was like the elegant, complicated surfaces of her poems: wrought to vibrant life, almost jeweled, no matter how difficult the experiences they described.
That tension between form and content was Lynda, in a way—all her glamour’s sly or gorgeous gestures lovely because we could see through them to the difficulty and pain they managed both to conceal and to acknowledge.
Ruined armor.
One more memory: Wally and I have just moved to Provincetown, and Lynda’s come to visit. We’ve planned to take her to a drag show, knowing she’ll love the illusionists’ repertoire of sequins and sentiment, glitz and irony. And since we’ve decided to sport her out on the town, we both dress in black leather, our hair slicked back, and each of us takes one of her arms, so that she—a deconstructed flapper, in fringe and toque, jet beads and crystal earrings—has a man on either arm like some Broadway ingenue.
The drag show’s wonderful; because it’s a late autumn night, few people in town, it’s been moved to a small room in the front of the hotel/bar where it’s held, and we’re right beside the stage where Tish de Williams does her signature lip-synch of “You’ve Come a Long Way from St. Louis.” We’re greeted, dished, and flirted with by a succession of drags, including a tall black man in a sparkling gown and big Diahann Carroll wig who winds up in my lap (how hard those muscles, what an unexpected weight). The performer asks me what I do for work, and when I say, simplifying things, that I’m an English teacher, the whole place goes up with laughter, the tension between my faux-manly surface and my bookish self revealed.
Lynda is greeted with great regard by the “hostess,” who asks, “How are you tonight, sister? Where you from?” It takes me a minute to get it that the reason my friend’s getting this extra attention is because the queen on stage thinks she’s a man. I’m not sure at first Lynda knows this, or how she’ll feel about it—will she be hurt, insulted, to have her gender called into question? I hope not; it’s the drag queen’s perennial message, after all: we’re all self-made here.
And then I realize Lynda’s utterly delighted, in a sort of heaven: between the two of us, also in disguise as butch men, she is being seen as “in drag” too. And, of course, she is: my unforgettable friend is utterly happy, in her finery, wearing her vocabulary of style and gesture, wearing herself.
I’ve come to New York to teach a writing workshop for HIV-positive men. Around the seminar table, these eager faces, men leaning forward because they have so much to say. I find myself wanting to sit with each one alone, to hear each story, to find a way to help the narrative of each of these lives make it onto the page.
The next day, in a midtown restaurant, I’m having lunch with R., a new friend. Our professional relationship’s almost immediately become a friendship. He’s telling me about his boyfriend, how L.’s T-cells have just slipped below the signifying two-hundred mark, into the zone of greater risk. He says this almost casually, as if placing the information on the table beside everything else we’ve been talking about. And it occurs to me that this is how we deal with terror now; it’s so much a part of the daily fabric that we treat it as such, one more fact in a jostling crowd of actualities. R. and I don’t even have the conversation about how little the numbers mean, so familiar has that exchange become. We talk instead about our ways of being sick: how tough-minded R. goes on no matter what, smoking and drinking black coffee through whatever, how L., who whines and takes to his bed for days with a sore throat, is not a good candidate for illness. We talk about the way some people make good use of disability benefits, while others find the weight of an AIDS diagnosis crushing, paralyzed by the acronym’s bitter weight. I say I think Wally was wounded by the term, by all it seemed to spell for him. I say I don’t know that this makes any difference at all in terms of how long one lives, or the course of the illness. But I am sure that how one responds to the “word” AIDS—the numbing blow to the head that diagnosis is, its awful feel of finality—has a great deal to do with the quality of one’s life.
And that’s when R. casually tells me that, despite his bad habits, his T-cell count remains high anyway; he hasn’t seemed to drink or smoke himself out of a single one. The mysterious little things have, in fact, multiplied fruitfully since he abandoned a brief self-punishing bout of macrobiotics.
I feel like the floor of the restaurant has just slid open. But I don’t show it, or at least I don’t think I do. R.’s placed his disclosure on the table beside what he’s said about L., beside the gossip and business of our lunch. To express sorrow or surprise would somehow seem impolite, would seem to underline the gravity of their situation in a way that won’t do. This dangerous field of contingency, shiny with threat, is where we live now. It’s 1994; of course we’re in this condition.
It’s later, after we’ve parted, after my walk through the park, sun gilding the benches and those who rest or sleep there, kids practicing violent or accomplished descents of the slopes on skates, the sparking narrative of casual cruising going on all around, story of possibility and of flirtation I love—it’s after all that, back in my hotel room, that it hits me.
Maybe, yes, R. and L. will be fine, maybe the men in the workshop will be all right; the old optimistic line, San Francisco, 1989, plays in my head, HIV is not a death sentence, and who knows how any individual will fare, who can predict it. But I’ve seen too much, I’ve lived the long corrosive descent, and now I want to moan or cry it out, from the depth of my stomach, I want to double over and push the grief out of me, for R. and L. and the circle of radiant or uncertain faces around that table last night, hopeful, disenchanted, sorrowing, exhausted, still quick with potential. The epidemic opens out and out, endlessly consuming my generation and the one before and the one after me, immense bitter wave, the floor beneath us pulling back, pulling away, a huge gap opening beneath whatever seemed momentarily solid, downward pull, d
izzying absence: multiply, endlessly, these human faces.
I can’t stop thinking of a line of graffiti in Chicago, spray-painted on a lakeshore wall at the end of Lynda’s block:
“Does a snowflake in an avalanche feel responsible?”
Of course it doesn’t; of course I do. Not responsible for the avalanche, but to it, responsible in its wake.
My neighbor’s abusing his dog. Not an outright beating, but a kind of nattering, relentless cruelty that must be making the little spotted beagle crazy. It’s making me crazy just to listen. Every time the dog makes a yip or bark, the man yells at her.
Soon she’s out in the yard, tied to a post, but when she lets out a woof at a passing car or dog he’s at the door chastising her. She doesn’t seem to be able to stop herself, even though she seems to know what’s coming and modulates her barks to little yips I can barely hear.
But her master can hear them, and he comes running out of the house, grabs hold of her collar, and leads her into the back of his four-wheel drive, where her wire cage is waiting. It’s a hot day, and it must be steamy inside that black vehicle, but he locks her in the crate. From my front windows I see her fur gleaming in the shady interior, her pink tongue hanging long and loose.
I’m trying not to look, trying to stay away, but I keep going to the window to check on the dog, who still feels like yipping when something interesting passes by. Then the owner comes flying out of the house, the screen door slamming behind him, and he goes to the back of the car and starts to shake the cage.
Something in me snaps then; I don’t even think about what I’m doing as I run out of the house and out to the garden, and shout across the fence, “I’m not going to stand by and watch you treat that dog that way! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
I don’t even know what else I say; it’s an outpouring of defense for the animal and condemnation of the man, who stands there and sputters and says something lame like “She’s fine.”
