Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [24]
So I went on to Bellows Falls. In those days, in this little railroad town outside of Brattleboro, there was a gay hotel called the Andrews Inn, an imposing-looking brick building that sat square on Main Street, next to the Oddfellows Hall and a diner called the Miss Bellows Falls. This was very odd; the gay traveler is used to finding his hotels and guest houses out of the way, and—less so these days, but for most of my life, anyway—his bars black-fronted and lacking signs. But the Andrews Inn was centrally located in a town which resembled a set for a Frank Capra movie, and somehow it seemed to work. Restless in my room, early in the evening, I tried to read student poems in preparation for my residency up north. No good; I couldn’t concentrate. I went to the bar downstairs, had a gin and tonic, and tried not to look too much at the two or three others sitting around the bar. Eventually, bored, I went back to my room for another go at the poems, but they hadn’t developed any new nuances in my absence. So I decided I’d take another walk down to the bar, without it ever occurring to me that this decision would change my life. After the fact, we look back at such moments, the thoughtless time before something momentous happens; how odd it seems, not to have known then, when afterward we can hardly imagine ourselves without such knowledge.
A few more people had gathered at the bar and around the tiny dance floor and jukebox. While I stood ordering another gin, I noticed a man who was standing by the dance floor, his back to me. Tall, his hair close-cropped, he was wearing jeans and a blue football jersey with white sleeves. (A jersey I have still, packed in a trunk. Years after it was too small for Wally, it seemed important to keep it, and now it’s a precious thing, if also a terrible one.)
I walked over in his direction, emboldened—because I liked the shape of him—enough to go and stand behind him. When he turned around, as he did in just a moment, he looked directly into my face, his own countenance open and friendly and somehow with hardly any veil across it. What he said was, “Hi.”
This is another classic story, one that’s particularly difficult to tell because the externals of it hold little to distinguish it. In truth I can’t remember much of what we said then, though I remember that we were soon having a wonderful time, and dancing, with an increasing sense of energy and connection. And if in fact I could reproduce here our conversation, I imagine it would be perfectly sweet but also thoroughly banal, on the surface, just like the surface of any such encounter.
All the life of such moments lies in what doesn’t show, in the buzz and sparkling within—or shows not in words much but in the gaze, in the look of a face opening to another, in all the little ways we communicate the fizzy stirrings of attraction, into which both of us were falling more deeply and thoroughly as we talked and danced. An excitement, the pulse-quickening buzz of flirtation, the pleasure of discovering that talk didn’t dispel the mutual attraction but deepened and strengthened it. Then, after I don’t know how long, we decided to go out to the balcony for some air.
We wound up various staircases and back ways to arrive at a broad metal platform on the top of the building, looking out over the backside of the town, a wide span of railroad tracks with a steaming engine, the gleaming black ripple of the river. Wally leaned against a brick wall, and then I took my first real look, my first full look, into his face, into his eyes—which were still tobacco-leaf brown even in the faint light from the lamps by the tracks. I wasn’t prepared for what I’d find there; they were the most unguarded, welcoming eyes I’d ever seen, and his whole countenance seemed alive with delight, as if he felt as much wonder as I did. And what I found myself thinking was, Here you are at last.
Not that it was all that simple. I was headed north for two weeks, then back to New York,