Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [51]
In her room in the rented cottage, Michael and I find Lynda’s notebook computer still open on the bed, a few letters and a journal covered in marbled paper I’d given her spread on the comforter. Her new manuscript, in its heavy black thesis binder, on the floor beside the night table. Clothes here and there, but only her usual disorder; it’s the room of someone who’s planning to come back, someone who has no thought of not returning to these books and papers. And hung on a coat hanger, from a doorjamb, the beaded dress, gleaming, translucent, already haunted.
Lynda’s funeral, in a suburb of Newark, one of a continuous strip of town which is actually many towns, a funeral parlor viewing room where her body’s displayed in an open casket. She doesn’t look much like herself: an austere black dress, a rosary (would she have been appalled, or like the drama?) in her hand, none of the characteristic jewels. Her chest is much too large. I find myself imagining she’d have been pleased to have been given, at last, breasts. I can’t be reverent here; the huge unreality of it, the disjunction between person and event prevents that. And I’m newly a student of how we attend to the body, of our negotiations with the dead. Looking at her makeup, the sorrow of flesh reconstructed and propped in its housing of satin, I am feeling this sense of elemental rightness in the decisions I made about Wally’s body. I am glad that I could hold him when he died, and in the long time after, and that he could leave our house wrapped in something I’d made, and go to the flames naked except for that wrapping, without makeup or artifice. I have the sense that Lynda would actually like more artifice, just not this kind: she’d like a better outfit, a hat, jewels. Her husband and friends are trying, in this regard: David’s put in the coffin her black beret, a pin; people tuck in scraps of poems, flowers, I don’t know what. These things will be burned with her, along with the flocked lavender coffin, but I believe Lynda would like to meet the flames in her dazzling finest, as she always did. Before the casket’s closed, we place inside it the black beaded dress.
David, of course, hasn’t had time to plan any of this, to even think of it, and he’s grateful to Lynda’s family for taking charge. After a couple of sessions of viewing at the funeral home, there’s a service tomorrow, in an inner-city church in Newark. This, I think, is the one detail of the affair she’d have truly approved of; the gray stone church is located in a particularly atomized segment of downtown, surrounded by the rubble of failed urban renewal. The desolation is practically apocalyptic. The sanctuary has been broken into so many times that they seem to have given up on repairing the damage left by vandals; most peculiarly, the corpus on the big crucifix to the right of the altar hangs by one arm.
I’m a pallbearer, along with another gay friend of Lynda’s, as well as David and a friend of his, and Lynda’s father and brother. At the doorway the priest goes to unfold a white cloth over the casket, and I find myself thinking, at last here’s a ritual she’d have approved of, something in good form. But when it’s unfolded it has a big green appliquéd candle in the middle, an acidy lime green. It’s hideous, and my heart sinks while I am trying not to be a heartless aesthete. Through the whole damn service I’m trying not to be an aesthetic snob; I’m trying to think it matters to her family, to reconcile myself with the fact that it seems to have not much to do with the person I knew. But Michael reads one of her poems, and David another, and her brother delivers a eulogy in which I can almost recognize her; of course the person our families know (or claim to) isn’t the one friends would recall. I can tell the ceremony’s good for David, and the family seems strongly present together, holding each other up and David with them, so I am trying to be generous.