Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [19]
In the years before Wally’s death, our life together came to center around his illness, and whatever questions or issues might have arisen between us, whatever evolutions might have occurred in the normal course of a relationship, were simply covered over or set aside, obscured by the reality of a more pressing condition. That, I think, is one of the real tragedies of illness; you cannot know the life you might have had. Epidemic forces us to multiply this loss a thousandfold, a hundred thousandfold: had AIDS not appeared among us, what lives, what works would we have had?
After Wally died I realized there was a new quality in my feeling for him, something that didn’t have anything to do with taking care of him. It was, in fact, not something new, but the reemergence of an original feeling, from years before: I was falling in love with him again.
I am taking a walk with my lover, in the place that was ours, which is imbued with that early intensity, where dramas of passion and sexual obsession were played out, dramas of doubt in ourselves and in one another, dramas of jealousy. It’s ironic, since he spent the last nine months of his life in bed or in a wheelchair, that now we can walk together, now that he’s dead. Beacon Street, Berkeley, what Robert Lowell called “hardly passionate Marlborough Street” and my friend Lynda would later revise to “harshly passionate Marlborough Street.” No other landscape, in the history of neighborhoods in which we lived, can hold quite the resonance that this one does, perhaps because no other is quite so far away, and no other’s yet become so emblematic and so completely interiorized, the city surface transformed into the surface of dream. There is a wonderful little poem of Cavafy’s, “In the Same Space,” as heartbreakingly plain and direct a poem about memory as I can imagine:
The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.
Cavafy’s Alexandrian neighborhood is remade within the perceiver through the transfiguring power of long inhabitation. But that which we leave behind is transfigured in us, too; my city’s a location of memory and desire, and I can plot in this neighborhood points of rapture and longing and wonder. Here a corner where a particular magnolia, in flower, tattooed the sidewalk, and us, with the shadows of its blooms, the street lamp glowing through them tinting our passage beneath to a warm flesh tone. Here the portico of a church—little private space—we’d duck inside to kiss, happy transgression. Here the marquee of the old theater—since then become a big house-wares shop, and now a fancy bookstore—where we emerged one winter night into an enormous snowstorm, which completely buried us both in big wet flakes while we fought all the way home. What we were arguing about? I have no idea, but I remember the wet snow breaking against Wally’s red down vest, my wet shoes, my misery; it was still those early days when one thinks each fight means it’s over, that it’s all been a mistake.
Here the doorway at the Butera School of Art, where a homeless woman