Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [18]
Death requires a new negotiation with memory. Because the story of Wally’s life came to a conclusion, at least those parts of the story in which he would take an active role, the experiences of our past needed to be re-seen, re-viewed. Not exactly for his story to be finished, but in service of the way his life would continue in me, braided with the story of mine. Which is going on, at this moment, on the Red Line, intermingling with the unreadable narratives of my fellow travelers passing through neighborhoods of dull-colored three-deckers into the city center. This is the train, I remember en route, Wally used to take home from work, when we were first together and he worked doing displays for a department store in Quincy, on the South Shore. And then I know where I’m going first, to the Charles Street Station, which is where I used to come to meet him, sometimes, in our first months together.
After the deep tunnels of downtown, the train rumbles up into daylight as it approaches the river, the elevated track passing a strange, narrow brownstone apartment I used to love to daydream about whenever I passed it. What it would be like to live there, days and nights threaded by trains? I think Wally told me he’d looked at an apartment once in that skinny Victorian tower, and considered taking it until—luckily—the train came thundering along just outside the windows, a scheduled thunder to drive any resident mad. Then the doors open on the platform and I’m out and onto the concrete footbridge, and there are the metal stairs down to Charles, the handsome and gentrified street along the foot of Beacon Hill. Suddenly I am feeling Wally’s body descending them, maybe a bit weary after the long day, the crowded train ride home, but glad to see me anyway. I’m in him, a dozen years ago, and I am in myself, on an almost forgotten day when I am leaning against the fence by the sidewalk, dressed up to meet him in—what? overalls, I think, and a scarf and a black umbrella, something a bit too self-conscious, done-up to meet my new lover as he comes home. And I’m in my body, not my twenty-eight-year-old body but my forty-year-old self, watching us both. Fluidity doesn’t seem quite the right word for what time does; if experience were a film, it would be one that doubles back on itself, looping, superimposing, one moment coming to stand beside another, layered over it, though they’re years apart.
A dozen years dispensed with, at least for a little while, I am on the Charles Street we knew. Here Romano’s bakery, where we’d go for coffee and napoleons, layered confections done up like presents in creamy glazes and pipings. Here the realtors with their windows full of photographs of expensive apartments, the upscale grocery with its windows full of perfect food, the florists’ and antique dealers’ windows: promises, everywhere, of the dream of occupying, the hope of home.
I am strangely, buoyantly happy, though there is a ragged edge to it, like the torn spring clouds of late March or early April; it is the sort of joy that might become tears at any moment. It seems to be contagious; people are oddly friendly, emotionally available in a way that doesn’t usually characterize this—or any?—city. At the corner of Charles and Beacon, the Public Garden opens out, wide and inviting in the grand scale of its accomplished trees, severe in its colors (the day’s a dozen shades of gray) but greening, the faint haloes of the outer branches a haze of bud. Here is the pond where the swan boats will soon be doubled beneath the arching footbridge; here the angel on the corner (did she always face in this direction? memory reorients her) whose motto enjoins: Cast thy bread on the waters…
And I know what the joy is.
It wasn’t