Heaven's Coast

by Mark Doty

  An outdoor market, in Bellagio, where a vendor’s constructed a wall of birdcages, just across from a vendor of candy, the sheen of the parakeets and finches mirroring the colors of the sugary treats in their wooden bins: little blue seahorses, apple-green sour balls, a universe of diminutive produce, in marzipan. Wally.

  We couldn’t keep the dead out of the present if we wanted to. They’re nowhere to be found, and firmly here, now. While this is a source of pain, memory’s double-edged sword at once wounds and offers us company, interior companionship which enriches and deepens the dimensions of every day.

  In an Italian erbolario, a fragrance shop full of herbal essences and essential oils, I find a bottle of cologne, a scent called vetiver, one that Wally loved. I lift the tester bottle and spray a cloud of the stuff onto my wrist: the strongest, purest scent of vetiver I’ve ever known, and Wally’s body comes flooding back to me, the scent of his collar, some Boston morning when he’s going to work, tying a dotted pink bow tie. In the cloud of the scent is how young he is, how handsome, something hopeful about the morning, something deeply resonant and sexy in the magnetic pull of his body, his physical and emotional warmth. Gleaming chestnut eyes, like good leather or the lustrous wooden case of a violin. So I buy the bottle, and choose days when I want to feel him, physically, that scent close, intimate as skin.

  Even the word, vetiver, full of him.

  They are a way of being in the present, a way of paying attention, these moments when I think, this is so Wally.

  Or, Wally would love this.

  Times when I suddenly say, Oh, babe, look at that.

  When I say to the open air, to the morning, to the ether, Now what?

  Making

  I found myself, without being able to help it, in a study of my beloved wife’s face, systematically noting the colors.

  When the world shatters, what does a writer do?

  David, after Lynda’s death, writes poem after poem, bracing, fierce, bitter. My friend Patrick, after the death of his lover Chris, goes into the studio and paints ten hours a day; that work, sheer physical concentration, is what he can do.

  The three of us are people who’ve always depended on our work as a means of negotiating difficulty. A vessel for feeling, an arena in which we give shape to emotion and see it reflected back to us. How lucky, not to have the ability to work desert us. Work is our intangible property, one thing that we individually control. One thing that doesn’t disappear.

  This book begins as separate essays, pieces written for collections about AIDS and about religion, written because someone invited me to write them. But soon I was impelled, soon I was writing for myself. Writing, in a way, to save my life, to catch what could be saved of Wally’s life, to make form and struggle toward a shape, to make a story of us that can be both kept and given away. The story’s my truest possession and I burnish and hammer it and wrestle it to make it whole. In return it offers me back to myself, it holds what I cannot, its embrace and memory larger than mine, more permanent.

  Always, always we were becoming a story. But I didn’t understand that fusing my life to the narrative, giving myself to the story’s life, would be what would allow me to live.

  Bitterness

  Gridlock in New York; the President’s in town and his cordon of vehicles has Fifth Avenue closed, so there’s some kind of chain reaction all the way to La Guardia. The taxi driver wants to take an alternate route, so after I agree we wind up on some side street in a particularly beat part of Queens. This would probably help matters except that it seems every other taxi driver in the universe has had the same idea, so that this sad little retail neighborhood with its on-the-skids businesses and wildly graffitied walls is totally choked with yellow taxis, all of them idling and cursing and champing at the bit. Nobody’s moving.

  Which allows me a really good look at the guy on the corner, a middle-aged black man in shabby clothes, too many layers of them for the weather. He’s standing right on the curb, rocking back and forth a little, surveying the air above the cabs, the gridlock, me, and when he speaks, loud as a street preacher, his judgment seems to take in us all.

  “The world,” he says, “is shit.”

  It makes me laugh, as well as scaring me a little—he’s right outside my window. But all he wants to do is pronounce.

  And in fact I know how he feels. Because grief has taught me that bitterness is itself a strange kind of consolation, that clear-eyed, sober bleakness that sees right through the sentiments of consolation, that knows better than all the things that fail to console. Time, for instance; my friend Renate, her husband dead three years, saw the wind rocking the chair on the deck where her husband used to like to sit, and the movement of the empty chair tore her apart; she felt, in fact, that her grief had gotten worse with the passage of time. Is the way that time “heals” us simply that it encourages us to turn away?

  Or memory. People love to say, “Your pain will fade and you will be left with beautiful memories.” But my memories are also a narrative of pain and of diminishment, and that history’s vivid to me, too.

  Sometimes all that would help would be to allow myself to feel ferocious, to feel like a raging fire burning up the false offerings of consolation, burning right at the dark heart of things. We need, sometimes, to consign it all to darkness. We need to look at the world and proclaim it shit.

  Whose ignorant words, says the voice in the whirlwind in Job, smear my design with darkness?

  Ours. Because everything around us races toward disappearance. Our brief moment’s a flash, an arcing flare which itself serves to illuminate the face of death.

  Aren’t we always on the verge of vanishing? Isn’t the whole world nowhere’s coast?

  Sometimes all that helps is a deep, bracing breath of emptiness.

  The Present

  I’m writing in the wild glamour of an early Italian spring, smoke of olive wood drifting up the hill from the grove. This is a world of fragrance: Parma violets, in the shade of the woods, and on days it rains something like eucalyptus, a camphory, resinous scent floating among the trees. Small-cupped yellow narcissus, on the sunny banks. The armoire in my room gives out a deep, contained smell, decade after decade of wools and silks, ancient sachets, long quiet hours when the sun’s poured in through the tall windows and heated the redolent wood till it releases something of itself into the atmosphere.

  Today is the first of March; I’ve come here for a month to work in a grand old villa hundreds of steep cobbled steps up the hill from the village of Bellagio. My room is a buttery Naples yellow, thick walls pierced by two windows and french doors opening on to a balcony. My first day, my first moment alone in the room, I opened the doors and stepped out onto the stone shelf suspended above the steep switchback paths of rosemary and lavender, above the green-black cypresses flinging themselves vertically toward heaven, above the jigsawed rose-tiled roofs of the village, above the softly luminous hazed expanse of the lake and its distant mountains, behind their smoky blue veils—a landscape like the background in a Leonardo.

  How could one not, in that moment, be completely absorbed in the present? What possesses us like the present does, when we give ourselves to it completely?

  And then I realized, on that steep little ledge with its lace of iron railing, that this time I didn’t imagine myself falling, had no desire, now, to jump. There was too much in the world to see, too much I wanted to pour myself into, to encounter and absorb, too much I wanted to do.

  The present begins to hold a possibility, in its thin, luminous edge. It suggests and supports a future.

  I want to know how the story of my life will turn out.

  Dogs

  Dogs, in a way, are the present. Animals are infinitely attentive to now, wholly present with what’s in front of them. Entirely themselves, without compromise or dissembling. Pure directness of being, the soul right in the eyes, brimming to the edges.

  Arden and Beau: heart’s companions, good boys, eager, stead
y, always exactly where they are.

  And what is right in the present, at this moment’s fresh edge, also seems to lead right into the next moment. Last month, with Michael at the animal shelter, I sat in a pen while a dozen puppies climbed over and around us, all eagerness to be just where they were, these dozen new beings come into the world of time, to follow each moment into the next, along the arc that passing through time makes. In those almost identical faces, eyes becoming equal to the light, I couldn’t miss it: desire for the next moment, and the next, one at a time, each entirely attended to.

  Heaven

  Ongoingness, vanishing: the world’s twin poles.

  Each thing disappears; everything goes on.

  The parts pour into nowhere, the whole continues.

  And to be nowhere is to be in heaven, isn’t it, in the boundless, loose from the limits of time and space?

  Isn’t the whole world heaven’s coast?

  Coherence

  In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes an instance of coherence, the way a book of matches appears as a pivotal image a number of times, in very different contexts, in the writer’s life. Delighted, he finds the patterning and coherence of art showing itself in experience, in memory. He writes, “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”

  So we become our stories.

  Driving to school, the autumn after Wally’s death, I was thinking of something Rena had told me; Wally’s therapist had become my friend, the bond between us beginning in our common affection for him, but opening swiftly into affection for each other. In a meditation, she’d seen Wally coming to her on a great white winged horse, a Pegasus.

  So I remembered the blue tattoo of Paolo the nurse, that winged horse that Wally had loved imprinted on a biceps he’d admired.

  And then I remembered something I’d completely forgotten, something Rena didn’t know. Years ago, when Wally and I first met, we had all kinds of endearments for each other, silly little names we liked to play with. The name for him I liked best, Lord knows where I got it, was Skyhorse.

  Wind from my love’s wings: beautiful shape, threading through a life and afterward, making things whole.

  Like Beau and the seals. A year from that first difficult encounter, when he bedeviled the poor sick creature beached high on the edge of the dunes at Race Point, we walked that long fire-road path past the marsh where Wally’s ashes lie. (There—glittering beside those rocks where we stood—fragments of shell? chips of bone? Isn’t that the point, not to know?)

  When we reached the shore he skirted the surf, sniffing at the breaking hemline of foam, and then looking out toward the source of that wild scent he spotted a dozen black heads eyeing him, riding on the crests and troughs of the waves, necks craned up to study the land-creature, brother (cousin?) from the other element. And Beau went into the water, intent, pure purpose. The seals didn’t budge. He floated six feet away from the first of them, head to head, studying. Then with a splash of tail the seal vanished, only to reappear a little farther out among the other heads.

  Beau was, plainly, enchanted. His aim was play; he swam with abandon into the pod, which continued to await him and then dive, the game continuing, all of them moving farther out.

  Until my golden friend was suddenly one of a flock of little heads some ways out from shore, and fear swept over me. How far would he go? Capable of intense passions, utterly single-minded, Beau might simply keep swimming, and what were the currents there? Would he know when he was too tired to go on?

  When I could barely see the heads, the black dots of them indistinguishable from distant floating birds, I panicked, standing in the edge of the water myself and shouting his name.

  I said to the air, Wally, bring him back. And then I couldn’t see any heads at all, not even that single one that had no place beneath the surface of the waves.

  And just as I am praying and thinking I can’t do this, I can’t bear it, I can do it if I have to, don’t make me do it, having said yes he might disappear, my dog might simply walk into the sea and not walk out, I see this sleek little arrow shape coming in my direction, the golden fur dark now with salt water, intent on coming back to me.

  On shore he’s joyous, more than half-possessed. Am I foolish for having been terrified when he’s an embodiment of pure delight, having been out there in the strangest of worlds, swimming for half an hour among a tribe he recognizes, though it tumbles in an alien medium? Well, I love him; I want him with me, and yet there’s something haunting and perfect about this, too. I think of what Jung said someplace, about children acting out the unconscious wishes of their parents; has Beau been swimming in the wild salt waters of my desire, really, out there among the somersaulting forms unfettered by gravity’s constraints?

  Perhaps there isn’t one meaning to make of this story, of the seal’s apparitions and returns, the round of images that a life offers. Maybe only that we aren’t done with seals; the coherence of the story sweeps us up, stitches and braids the parts of a life together in terror and in joy. How much it helps to think that coherence might be given to us, might emerge from things themselves; perhaps our work is to recognize it.

  Mystery

  We don’t know where the dead are. But it’s just as true, finally, that we don’t know where we are. More things in heaven and earth, madam, than even a lifetime of experience in Abalone, Arizona, could avail you of.

  Whatever this being of ours is, in its depth and complexity, we see only a little of it, and that little bit is too much for us, incomprehensible. If we know so little of ourselves, what could we hope to know about the dead?

  In not-knowing, hope resides.

  Sex

  The comfort and actuality of the body is more poignant, underlined, when we know that the body can only comfort so much, that it will not stay. Sex is a way of entering the present, of moving through this moment’s offerings toward the next. Lust as hope: my dick kept me alive.

  And sex is an acknowledgment of the mystery of flesh, its dimensionality and weight. In touch and touch, feeling the limits of the body with our hands, testing its boundaries.

  Aretha Franklin

  This voice says, No matter what, I’m here, I hold up, I carry on. And I am not suffering powerlessly; I take charge of what I can, I claim and shout myself, I hold forth, I hold on, take from me what you will. And the song that I make out of my continuing itself sustains.

  Longing

  No matter what, I want more.

  I’m driving on the Cape, listening to our local community radio station, a volunteer effort that is sometimes charmingly amateurish, sometimes annoying dull, occasionally terrific. Today they’re playing a syndicated gay and lesbian news program, homos all over the world. Here’s a story about newly legalized gay and lesbian marriage in Sweden; at a Stockholm ceremony, couples are exchanging vows, then whooping it up in celebration.

  And before I know what hits me, I’ve burst into tears.

  Now I have all kinds of political positions about this. I am not at all sure I like the institution of marriage—look at the difficult, calcified relationships all around us, the predetermined meanings and associations such a sanctioned union places on a couple—and I don’t really know, intellectually, that I think this heterosexual model’s a good one for gay couples to follow. I turned down an opportunity to edit a book, a compilation of poems and quotations for people to use in commitment ceremonies and the like, because I just wasn’t convinced it was a notion I really supported. Didn’t we gain from having to make up our own rules, renegotiate and understand our own relationships day by day, year by year?

  And yet, hearing these shouts and cheers, my ideas go right out the window. I’m crying because I wish I could have married Wally, because I’ll never be able to now. Rationally I know that a ceremony and a piece of paper don’t change a thing; we wouldn’t have been closer, our connection deeper.

  But I want it any
way, I want more. Isn’t that what we’d want to say of any relationship, I’d have been right there for more, I’d have wanted more?

  Whirlwind

  This is what happened, my last massage with M.

  I was still in pain then, didn’t yet feel I’d begun to heal. (I remember, exactly, the day I knew I had turned the corner. It was weeks later, in a friend’s cottage, on Long Island, a little studio on a cove which curves inward from the Sound. I’d had days of sleep, reading, walking, more sleep, a sense of restoration, unhurriedness, a luxury and liberty of time. Easy days, the dogs wandering in and out. The day I was to leave, getting ready, picking up the place and stowing things in the car, I suddenly noticed that I didn’t hurt. Not with the deep sense of woundedness, the aching fragility way down in the joints. And that knowledge lifted my spirits; I began to feel I had possibilities in front of me again. A few nights later, lying on the sand at Head of the Meadow, a wide Atlantic beach, my head toward a great blond tangle of driftwood, a twisted trunk polished the sheen and hue of moonlight, suddenly I felt so awake, such a sense of freedom of all I could do. How long had it been since I’d felt like that?)

  But that was all in the future still. On M.’s table I am fragile, unmended.

  He begins with a sort of passive yoga, moving my body into various postures for lengthening, stretching out my spine. I feel pleasure in those movements, even though they also hurt a little, frighten me a bit; couldn’t he really hurt me, if I let go too much, or moved the wrong way?

  I guess I can’t be hurt, really, relaxed as I’m becoming, but there’s that fear. Surely part of the stiffness in my back is fear, yes? Afraid to be too fluid, to be carried away.

  I’m thinking about holding on, about Wally’s body. Tension in my arms, resistance. Thinking I didn’t want to let his body go, shouldn’t have let him go.

  M. has me begin a cycle of strange breathing—rapid short inhalations, then holding my breath, expelling it. I do this again and again, the pace increasing, the pitch of my breathing faster, harder, his directions increasingly quick, pointed, intense. And then I hold the breath, and squeeze around it as hard as I can, everything—arms, shoulders, chest, legs, face—everything utterly clenched, as small and tight and singular a point of tension as my body can make, held as long as I can.