Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [134]
Bill was wise, to make decisions about those things he wanted to give his friends. And there’s something deeply affecting about this gift, across the divide between worlds; here I am, walking back from Phil’s car down Commercial Street, carrying in my arms this cheerful package presented to me across the widest gulf in the world. Unbridgeable gap, and yet it’s bridged all the time, as gifts pour back to us from the dead: objects full of evocative memory, like the contents of this box, Bill’s two-handled blue-and-white Wedgwood cream soup cups, just the thing for serious entertaining, and of course he knew I’d treasure them.
Things fill up with us, they carry across time their human store.
And then gestures. Phrases. Ways of seeing the world. Moments so entirely full of the presence of someone gone; an image, an event, the sudden recognition of a quality essentially, unmistakably theirs.
The china cups, mementos of a time when people actually required something distinct in which to serve cream soups, relic of a sort of gentility, a pleasure in providing a kind of perfection for guests. Bill.
Walking in the evening, along the shore of an Italian lake, under a row of pollarded trees, still bare in the early spring, the line of old iron street lamps curving along the balustrade, glazed in the mist and doubled on the still surface of the water, I think Lynda.
In a shop window, in Milan, the most exquisite food I’ve ever seen, far too beautiful for anyone to eat, a perfection of aspics and gleaming patés, canapés, and little delights resembling not real flowers but glass ones, the gorgeous artifices of Venetian chandeliers: a heaven of display. Wally.
A girl in a blue carnival dress, yards of it, and a snowy mask, with softly luminous, silvery pigeons perching on her shoulders and arms. Wally.
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;