Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [41]
Bill is beautiful to me in the way that Wally was, not in any ornamental sense of the word, but in the way that all things which are absolutely authentic are beautiful. Is there a luminous threshold where the self becomes irreducible, stripped to the point where all that’s left to see is pure soul, the essence of character? Here, in unfailing self-ness, is no room or energy for anything inessential, for anything less than what counts.
Bill is unmistakably himself now, gracious host even here, charming, playful, somehow plaintive and fetching at once. He’s flat on his back, head propped on a small legion of favorite pillows; across his feet is draped a mint-green chenille bathrobe piped, like a birthday cake, with tendrils, scrolls, and blossoms of more chenille in frosting colors: orchid, lavender, tangerine.
The robe is something Lucy Ricardo might have worn for mornings in Connecticut, the sort of garment which almost invariably carries with it a narrative. Bill discovered it in a Provincetown shop devoted to the pleasures of the bath. There it hung, a magnetic glory charged with the subterranean powers of gender; I am someone’s mother, it seemed to say, in 1957. Both its over-the-top femininity and lavish price meant, of course, he’d leave it there. Wouldn’t he? It was a whim, an indulgence, though a potent—potentially dangerous?—attraction. But he found he couldn’t forget it; it began to occupy a new space in his imagination, or rather to draw to itself the energy and associations of a lifetime’s imaginings. To go back, to buy it, meant to embrace something profoundly, lushly nelly.
(Odd how the words for this sort of thing have about them a quality of Victoriana: nelly, sissy, fairy, fey. There’s something about them of girlishness preserved under glass, a curious kind of delicate, past-prime virginity—as though to give in to that aspect of ourselves is to become someone’s lavender-scented auntie, a specter of rosewater and pressed flowers and scraps of lace. Sometimes it seems to me like the last taboo for gay men, one of the most deeply internalized prohibitions, to allow oneself that swooning, gorgeous silliness; in 1995, weirdly enough, it’s more okay to be a queer than it is to be a sissy.)
The robe—first coveted, then accepted, then treasured—pools across Bill’s knees, its splendid piping the colors of a dissolving petit-four. Old disco lyrics come into my head, unbidden: Someone left the cake out in the rain…The fact that I’ve never known him well—I’ve been more a friend of Phil’s—melts away as we begin to speak; it’s impossible now not to know him. The more we talk the more I begin to feel I’m moving inside of some profound connection, the only one there’s likely to be between us. But enough. It’s the edge of that kind of intimacy I felt with Wally, the aura that surrounded his leave-taking drawing me in, closer and closer into his company, like moving with another person into a very small, warm circle of lamplight, which includes and defines you both. One clear, true instance of really knowing each other, which is becoming indelible even as we speak.
I can feel how large, how essential this moment is as it’s happening; that is what I have come to love about being an adult, to the extent that I can claim that title: that one knows more about how good things are, how much they matter, as they’re happening, that knowledge isn’t necessarily retrospective anymore. When I was younger, I missed so much, failing to be fully present, only recognizing the quality of particular moments and gifts after the fact. Perhaps that’s one thing that being “grown-up” is: to realize in the present the magnitude or grace of what we’re being offered.
Bill wants to hear, first, about Wally’s dying. I sit beside him with my hand resting on his, which moves from his side onto his delicate chest, so that soon my hand is resting just above his heart. Phil sits at the foot of the bed and doesn’t say much; our