Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [22]
The fellow I’m talking to on the stairs had moved into a basement apartment while Bobby was still upstairs pursuing a life of continual redecoration. Less guarded now, he starts to tell me about himself. He’s a retired antique dealer, he says, with a knowing look. He lives downstairs, in what was once the kitchen of the great house, its big iron stove still filling one entire wall; it was the apartment where Doug lived once, with Wally’s brother Jimmy. Doug, who moved away to San Francisco, was the first person I knew to die of AIDS, the first from the building to vanish.
“Did you know David?” my new friend asks. I did. David and Bobby had been boyfriends for a while, and used to sing together at a rather fusty neighborhood bar called Napoleon’s, a piano bar wrapped in red-flocked wallpaper where it was not uncommon for the patrons to wear suits. Since the men there were mostly of a certain age, Bobby could enjoy feeling youthful there, and his singing and stories made him a social star.
“Is David still here?” I ask.
“Oh no.” Then a lowering of the voice, a confidential angling of the head. “Rumor has it that he has a terrible disease.”
I wince, internally; I hate the covering up, the notion of AIDS as shameful or unspeakable. But I remember this man’s age, imagine years of the closet; it’s not up to me to tell him how to deal with the epidemic. I ask if he knows where David is now.
“There was a terrific storm one evening,” he says, “and we found water pouring down the steps”—the great marble stair that winds down the spine of the building—“and it was pouring out from under his door, because his windows were all open in the rain. We had to break in—we thought he was dead in there—but he was gone. Just the windows open and the rain pouring in. Then we heard he’s in a hospice somewhere.”
I’m remembering David’s old apartment, big paper fans—red?—spread out on his marble fireplace, and his red face lit up with cocktails and show tunes and the ambient glow of Napoleon’s ruby wallpaper. David and Bobby, both of them out of work, watching TV in their bathrobes at eleven in the morning.
Before I can think what to say, my new friend says, “You can come in if you like.”
He opens the heavy black doors with his key, and suddenly I am almost overcome by a sense of wonder and strangeness. It is as if he were opening the gates of a tomb, some ancient place, little disturbed, still containing the artifacts left with the dead.
It’s dark in the big vestibule, under a dusty chandelier. The building might as well have been sealed a thousand years, only a wraithlike tenant or two slipping in and out because they have somehow retained the magical property of moving back and forth between realms. A sideboard upon which Bobby used to lay out everyone’s mail is still here, its dark varnish gleaming Victorian in the gray light, but now there’s only one yellow envelope waiting there, someone’s electric bill. The black and white marble floor is dirty, the staircase stained where rainwater from David’s abandoned windows streamed in. And here’s the door to the studio where I lived when I first met Wally, my little white room—probably once where the parson used to wait to be received—mostly occupied by an enormous mirror-topped fireplace. A room in which I was mostly occupied with love; in memory, in that room, I am always waiting for Wally to come home from work. Or I’ve been away to teach, and I come home to find the room decked for my homecoming—candles and streamers and shiny letters of metallic foil hung on a wire across the room saying