Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [21]
He says he was afraid I’d come from Miss K.’s lawyer, or a real estate agency. “Her lawyer,” he explains, “is running everything. But he can’t kick us out, since he’d have to find us apartments in the neighborhood at the same rent. Which don’t exist. So he just doesn’t rent out the apartments as they open up.” And open up they have; out of the ten or so places in the building, only two tenants remain. Where have they all gone? Disappeared, moved away, and mostly, of course, died; this was a house full of gay men, in 1981, and now it’s a house full of no one.
First there was Bobby, Wally’s best friend for years, who lived on the first floor, in an apartment he painted and wallpapered a dozen times just in the years I knew him. He and Wally had been lovers for a short while, as kids, when each had first come to the city; their relationship had simply drifted into a friendship which sustained both men for years. They’d worked together at Laura Ashley, selling cozy sprigged and flowered fabrics and clothes and wallpaper, so they shared a private lexicon of pattern and colors. “R–22,” one would say to the other, and they’d both dissolve into laughter. I was jealous of him, at first, and it took me a while to understand that Bobby simply came with the deal, like a favorite aunt or a big unsightly piece of family furniture. Not that he was unsightly, exactly, but whenever he was around he was a presence, someone to be accounted for: center of attention, storytelling, raconteuring, singing show tunes, not listening much. He was absolutely devoted to Wally and hardly listened to him, a duality which would, eventually, distance them.
After we moved away from Boston, we gradually saw less and less of Bobby, though every Christmas he’d appear with armloads of gifts, mostly things for which we had no use, things people had given to him, or stuff he’d stolen from the stores where he worked. The dishonest streak in Bobby’s character seemed to grow more pronounced as he grew older; he’d give Wally a new watch—something we both knew he himself would never pick out—and weep crocodile tears, moved by this beautiful present he’d chosen especially for his oldest friend. He wanted to give us so much that he’d be indispensable to us, that we would be wildly and forever grateful, that he’d have a permanent home in our lives. Which he already had, though never an entirely easy one.
Though you can grow weirdly fond of those traits in friends you don’t admire, so much do those aspects seem like essential parts of someone. It was impossible to separate Bobby’s dishonesty from his generosity, somehow; his falsehoods were often so touchingly transparent, and the size of the lies seemed allied to the size of his heart. Bobby moved away from the Beacon Street apartment when he found a lover, a man he clearly did not love, another instance of the dishonesty we couldn’t abide. The lover was someone Wally and I detested, but they were together for years, living in a big house in a well-heeled suburb of the city. When Bobby came back from the hospital after his first bout with pneumocystis, the lover told him to pack. Homeless, ill, he tried the patience of his parents and his friends, and lived with us for a hellish month in which we arranged our lives around his suddenly burgeoning needs. In a month he’d made a considerable recovery, and felt well enough to be really impossible. (I still think I hear his ghost sometimes, over my shoulder, when I’m at the stove, complaining about my cooking.)
He wound up living in the YMCA in Cambridge, in Central Square, in a place I can only think of as the end of the road, the very walls and floors redolent of hopelessness. The last time Wally and Bobby saw one another was at Mass General Hospital; both there for tests, they met in the hospital