Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [114]
Is lust a form of hope?
In the last months of Wally’s life, he seemed to experience a reflowering of desire. It was a curious thing, a kind of sex-in-the-head, to borrow D. H. Lawrence’s phrase. Wally’s body, he’d lament (though only for a moment, before he’d go back to the characteristic smile and laughter), was long past cooperating. The last time he and I’d had sex was over a year before, in the autumn of ’92. Even then, though his body accepted mine against him, I could tell it was something that was over for him. Hard to say, now, whether his impotence was a matter of depression or tension, or whether an early effect of PML was to sever the connections between genitals and brain. Even the thought of sex seemed to vanish for a while, to go underground.
I’d long since taken to quick, congenial encounters to relieve the pressure—the sort of erotic adventures that Wally and I used to enjoy together, when the need for sexual variety had presented itself, as it usually does, for gay couples who stay together for years. Well, I suppose such needs present themselves to all couples, but gay men have different traditions for negotiating these waters. We’d learned over time to relax about sex, and to know the difference between our commitment to each other and casual, playful sex outside the relationship.
The current of Wally’s erotic life had slowed, been dammed.
But in those last months, desire made itself quite visible once again—the underground stream rising, as it were, from a trickle to a roar.
My friend Richard—a poet and novelist in town for the year, on leave from the university where he teaches—would come once a week to sit with Wally for an hour or two, usually while I was away at school, an opportunity for different company and chat. Wally loved these visits, because Richard was a fountain of gossip, good stuff, the specifics about various men and what they liked to do and with whom. Richard’s been through this before, and he understands being with the ill in a way that only experience teaches; he knows how people at the furthest extremes of life crave the daily, the little news, the everyday meat of the world. (Sometimes my friends would apologize to me for talking about their problems, saying that what occupied them seemed trivial next to what I was experiencing. But I wanted to hear the sound of everyday talk, the chatter and questioning and considerations of ongoingness. I was living in the essential.)
So Richard understood that Wally wanted to hear all about his friends, and Wally would ask questions, and also ask about people passing by on the street whom they could see from the bedroom window. In this way, Wally found out about Daniel and Jack, handsome men in the neighborhood who were friends of Richard’s.
These two became important elements of Wally’s fantasy life, a set of uncensored longings and imaginings which tumbled out all during the day. Expressions of lust might be followed by a kind of sweet sigh which seemed the mark of a schoolgirl crush. “Do you think,” he’d say, “he could like a man with useless legs?”
Sometimes I’d feel a little threatened, weirdly displaced, but only for a moment; looking at this compromised, inexhaustibly sweet man, who could be upset? What he was saying wasn’t about us, but about a kind of nostalgia for all his life, for desire, the ties by which the body threads us to the world. The one time I lost my temper, in all that long last year, had to do with flirtation. I had been racing around making arrangements to be out of town for a couple of days; I’d won a literary award which was to be presented in Los Angeles, and I was going to the ceremony. Wally had been thinking about his earrings, which he’d taken out a year before, for a CAT scan, and never replaced. And he was thinking specifically of Paolo, due that day for a visit. A half an hour before I had to catch a plane, he announced that