Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [46]
But the struggle with addictions didn’t end, though she didn’t want her friends to see that. I didn’t know, at first, about the slips; she’d enlist friends to protect her. A certain quality of charm—manipulative, to a degree?—would convince each friend that no one understood him the way Lynda did. And each friend would be eager to protect her apparent fragility. What little I knew I kept to myself. After she died it turned out that many people had bits and pieces of her story, and we were all holding them back from each other, as if we alone were the keepers of the sad knowledge, and not to admit what we knew was somehow to spare her.
But there’d be weeks when she wasn’t available on the phone, and David would be vague about where she was, and times when I’d hear her back had gone out once too often to be quite convincing. Odd bits of disjunction or disinformation. And then one summer, on the last night of the writers’ conference, she stood in front of me with a group of celebrating students, a champagne bottle in her hand, her face transformed, glazed, not hers. I was terrified, not least because her face reminded me of my mother’s: an alcoholic whose visage was shattered, distorted as if one looked at her through alcohol, a film of troubling liquid.
Over the years, increasingly, more slips, things unraveling. But she’d try, always, to keep that part of her life removed from mine—as if she knew how much it would trouble me, knowing the turmoil in my own history, knowing that, incapable of dealing with addiction, I’d run away.
I never saw so clearly how she’d worked to protect me as I did on our last happy night together, the last time she seemed to me entirely herself. We’d come to New York, the autumn before Wally died; I’d been nominated for a literary prize, and I needed someone with me for moral support at the tense ceremonies and hoopla that accompanied the event, an Oscar-type celebration where the awards were announced. There was no question of Wally traveling by then; he couldn’t walk, and barely understood when I explained the details of the proceedings, though his pride in me was evident, his insistence that I should win. (I tried to explain that I wouldn’t, that for a young poet to be nominated was prize enough, but he wasn’t interested in the subtleties.) So my date and I arrived at the Plaza; I helped her from the taxi in my tux and shiny patent leather shoes, and she was never more splendid: the black beaded dress resplendent, all its loose traceries of jet stitched back onto the voile, rhinestones on her black cloche, an ebony cane. She was radiant, playful, funny, enthralled with the weirdness of the night, simultaneously laughing at and delighting in its glamour. We were bad kids together, impostors; what were we doing here, in this gilt ballroom stuffed with enough black wool and satin to wrap the hotel itself, enough champagne to fill the fountains in the Park?
That night, in the drawing room comedy an event which takes itself so grandly and seriously inevitably is (these are writers, after all, in these formal disguises), we seemed to have entered a Manhattan of another era, a penthoused realm of suite and ballroom, glimmer and sheen. Who’d have thought Lynda would be dead in five months? Who’d have thought, seeing her that night, that she’d survived an awful year?
Everything had seemed to push her toward a terrible edge. A trip to Poland, with her mother, had awakened a deep sense of ancestry, as the devastation her family had suffered during the Holocaust emerged—a ruination she seemed to take into herself, identifying with the suffering, the encamped, the gassed. She’d come back filled with a sense of historical burden, one that wasn’t in