Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [25]
Thus it was a while before we saw each other again, after a breakfast of blueberry pancakes in the hotel restaurant and a long talk standing beside the open trunk of my car. It became clear, in the next few months, that my intuition, looking that first time into Wally’s eyes, wasn’t one to forget, and in a few weeks I was in Boston to see him, and he was in New York. I ended things with the sort-of boyfriend. Wally and I talked on the phone every day, wrote letters, waited for the weekends. Every weekend, back and forth between cities, and then, knowing each other all of three passionate months, we made a decision. He had a more established life in Boston than I had in Manhattan, a job and a world of friends, so why didn’t we try it there together?
Thinking of this today, it’s hard to imagine making such a choice after three months. What did I know? I was sure of profound pleasure in his body, delight in his playfulness and good spirits, acres of common ground in taste and sensibility and humor—but did I know him well enough to make this leap? I was certain of the dizzying force of that first night’s intuition, a sense of emotional certainty for which I was willing to toss caution and reason out the window.
A very little while later, it was myself I felt like tossing. The day I’d arrived from New York, ready to start a new life, Wally and I were to sign a lease on an apartment, a beautiful place in the South End, on Waltham Street, shot with sunlight, its little balcony looking down onto a courtyard garden. We could afford it; we had a date with the landlord; we were—I thought—ready. On the steps of the building Wally said we had to sit down and talk; he couldn’t go through with it; living together felt premature, too much of a commitment. I felt as if the stairs under me were crumbling; the world took on that peculiar exactitude of appearance it gets when we hear terrible news, so much so that I can remember to this day the nervous filigree of the fire escape across the street, the cracks in the steps’ cement balustrade which I must have kept looking at, fighting back tears, while he talked.
Of course, from any reasonable perspective, he was right, or rather the position he took was one that conventional wisdom would uphold. But I had no use, at that moment, for wise precaution; if wisdom interfered with love, to hell with wisdom. I had given myself over to love.
I had also given up my job and my apartment.
And so I moved into the first-floor studio in Miss K.’s tumble down palazzo on Beacon Street.
A dozen years later, in the vestibule, outside that old transomed door, I feel the whole weight of the past above my head, floor after unoccupied floor of history, mine, others’, the house’s own huge inventory of residents and years. Wally lived upstairs in a larger studio, on the third floor, behind those gloriously carpentered shutters; same building, separate apartments. In truth we couldn’t afford it, and spent virtually all our time in his place anyway, in that room up the sweep of these stairs, which is for me one of memory’s most laden locations, site of longing, pleasure, and despair. That room seems to me almost outside of time; up there it’s always evening, quiet above the city’s din and motion, a lit cube of memory hung in the immensity and safety of the night. A Cavafian room, it has become ancient, dense with meanings, erotic with the residue of passion the space has come to contain. Up there, in darkness and candlelight, firelight, and the warm parchment radiance of the shade, we burnished that room with the motions of bodies which no longer exist: every cell of my body replaced nearly twice over now, every cell of Wally’s body replaced and then burned to ashes. Does that room exist, except in my memory? Well, something does; there is a space there, in the physical world, but that same space has