Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [45]
Because the world was ruined, wasn’t it, and how could its children not be ruined as well?
We loved ruined armor, and Wally and I actually bought her a suit of it, in a way. At an auction, we found a black beaded dress, a tiny slip of transparent chiffon stitched with spirals of black jet beads. The beading was unraveling a bit at the edges, but it was perfect: a sheer black exhalation of sin, jazz, and dissipation, something so tiny and fragile, and so daringly tough, that I couldn’t imagine anyone else wearing it. Beneath her achieved surface, Lynda’s vulnerability was always visible; this is what made her such a wonderful teacher, and such a wonderful friend. It made her empathic, grounded, real. And it allowed us to share a common sense of difference, an odd feeling of being in disguise, of impostorship. Why were people reading our poems, taking workshops to hear us talk about poetry? If people knew who we really were, we used to joke, they’d never listen to us in workshop!
Because we were both kids who’d been in trouble; we both came from households racked with alcohol or chemicals, and we’d both been down close enough to the pavement to believe we could wind up back in some lowlife dive at any minute. Children of difficulty, we recognized in each other certain marks of damage, certain absences of confidence, certain luscious ambitions to be loved or adored, deep convictions of difference. We felt a sense of both being pushed to the margin and choosing that realm of marginality; felt, in other words queer, and our queerness—as poets, as born outsiders—both separated us from the world and energized us. Lynda used to like to say she was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body; this perception wasn’t so much about sexuality as about a whole approach to reality, a position from which one might understand the vulnerability and porosity of the self, the power of its costuming gestures. I knew there were aspects of me Lynda understood through and through; I know either of us could tell without fail what the other would love.
The art we loved was queer art: Hart Crane and Cavafy, Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Joseph Cornell, film noir: lush surfaces spread over difficult, edgy material, art marked by the transubstantiation of pain into style. Art full of anguish and pleasure in the racked beauty of the world, the kind of alloy she loved, and understood: the sort of thing we make when we’re true to the world’s comminglings of gorgeousness and terror.
For ten years Lynda and I would teach together, pull each other through crises of confidence, read all of each other’s poems, cheer each other through readings, edit each other’s manuscripts. She mattered to me greatly as a critic but even more as an inspiration: she worked at her art with a singular intensity, and in each new poem she’d raise the stakes as high as she could, putting everything at risk, pouring herself into her coruscating, elegant texts. So that one had to live up to that, poems had to matter that much.
During those ten years we’d see each other at the regular writers’ conferences where we taught, and visit in between or talk on the phone, and mail would always carry back and forth funny, signifying tokens that each knew the other would love. But despite our closeness there were other edges, the recurrent shadows of drugs and alcohol, which Lynda would try to keep from me, as she tried to conceal the fragility of her sobriety from all her friends. She had a lifetime battle with addictions. Out on the streets at sixteen, she married a Chinese gambler, lived in the Chinatowns of New York and Boston, and launched herself through a long stream of cities in a lurching wild life the recounting of which constituted one of her favorite obsessions and activities. She’d made it through alcohol, heroin, and harrowing hard-luck circumstances that would have left most people in their graves, and wound up in Little Rock, Arkansas, newly sober and determined to write poetry. There she met David, and began a remarkable