Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [37]
And so we let it go. As well as the grief I felt, abandoning my garden, and the groundedness it stood for, there was a real joy, an energizing quality in moving ahead. We were taking charge of the future, or at least a part of it. The test results had seemed to take the future away from us; letting go of our old life, pouring our energies into getting ourselves to a new place, was a way of wresting a bit of that control back. We all put up with less appealing aspects of the present for the sake of a future we anticipate later on. An HIV diagnosis calls the wisdom of such deferral into question. What were the pleasures we wanted now? How did we want to use our time together?
That autumn of our move, 1990, was one long golden extension of summer. We rented a house on the beach, in Provincetown, as far out toward the very tip of Cape Cod as it is possible to live. And because that autumn and winter were one of the mildest in memory, we felt we’d been given a radiant sort of gift, a season out of time, which seems to me now something suspended in amber: Wally and Arden on the beach, wrestling or resting, while I am inside the house, my desk up against the window which looks directly out past them toward Long Point Light, our promontory’s last, haunted outpost. Wally and Arden wading, further and further out, into the long mercurial wash of low tides, the tidal flats shimmering around these two smallest figures, tiny evidence of my love held in the silver expanse of the afternoon.
It was summer again before I saw the old garden in its new incarnation—for an old garden, without its gardener, isn’t the same entity at all, but a new event in the world. I hadn’t realized how much the garden reflected my own obsessive propensities to shape it, how much that shape had to do with some ideal garden held in my head, toward which the raw material of the real space would be trimmed, trained, and cajoled. Chris and Brigid, bless their hearts, were not gardeners—or was it that their garden was aligned toward some other ideal?
Though they took pleasure in the effort, it was clear that they weren’t sure which things were noxious weeds, to be banished, which the perennials I’d introduced and then given years of assistance to. The garden, seen from the street, seemed newly a jungle, an over-the-top efflorescence, consequence of my own overplanting gone mad. I had a visceral, physical response; I wanted to let myself in the gate and weed.
That response was, of course, about my not really having let the garden go. But the garden that was mine, I soon realized, was the interior one, the memory; the external garden had already become something else. What I saw as a particularly invasive, enormous weed might be, to the template of beauty which the new gardeners brought to their creation, the model of lush growth, a welcome wildness. Whatever, it was theirs now.
Until Brigid died, the following winter, in an accident on Route 2, the icy two-lane road she and I used to drive to work every morning. When Wally and I had put the house into Chris’s and Brigid’s hands, it was with a sense of their ongoingness, of the future ahead of them; it was clear they wanted to fill the big space with friends, animals, and, later, children. I was sidestepping a vision of my own future: lonely Vermont winter closing in, Wally sick and needing all the care I can give, no help, the dark little town around us, all the chimneys on its steep hills billowing white smoke and steam into icy and unforgiving air, our street going narrower and darker. Did I think we were sidestepping death, too? Perhaps our leaving when we did made Wally’s life a little longer, I don’t know. Certainly it made the last years brighter ones; I don’t know how we’d have gotten through them without all the help and good company we found.
But I never thought it was Chris who would be widowed in the big house—a place for one person to get lost in, caught in the echoes of his own voice—instead of