Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [53]
This is what this whole day is for, the whole process has been leading to this: that the man who is gone and not-gone, is being held up to the light by all these people who loved him or me or us. And they are regarding what was known as Mark-and-Wally; it is the day when people come together to circle around and to acknowledge what we were. I have never felt such a sense of a love being validated, held to the light. And in this way, strangely, it is a hugely happy day for me. How could I not be buoyed by this sense of what Wally and I had been, how lucky we were to have made what we made? Even though his ashes were in their brass box on the table at the front of the room, surrounded by the perfect candles and flowers and the army of black-and-white pictures of Wally as a kid, blown-up photos his brother Jim had brought, even though the day was a confrontation with the fact of death, there was something joyous about it, something inescapably bright.
After the planned speakers, we sang “Amazing Grace,” because everyone knows it, and then the free-for-all speaking started, slowly at first, and then, as such things do, teetering on the edge of anarchy. (Will it be endless? What will this person say next?) When the born-again gay Christian biker who’d gone to elementary school with Wally (before he was driven out of town for offering blow jobs in front of the drugstore) began to sing all the verses of “Precious Lord” a cappella, I began to think that things were seriously out of control. But there was at the same time something wonderful about it, in that it resembled Wally’s life, resembled our lives together: something to be proud of, something lucky and loving, various, capacious, just screwy enough to be alive.
After Lynda’s funeral ended, the coffin was wheeled down the aisle, the hideous green-candled cloth folded again, and we pallbearers lifted the weight of her down the steps, and—a moment which felt like pure horror to me—into the waiting mouth of the hearse. I can see, plainly, David’s hand touching the figured surface of the coffin lid, the rose he laid on top, that last touch. And then the doors were closed, and we moved away.
I caught a ride with some friends to the city, and though I was going to the Upper West Side I had them let me off near Times Square, Lynda territory. Those flashing neon come-ons, the dealers’ bark and hustle, bright and cheap enticements to touch and look and buy: photographs of flesh, signs and banks of rippling lightbulbs that seem somehow both ephemeral and ancient, as if they’d been forever selling that same tawdry dazzle, working that same spell—tattered, but an enchantment still. Lynda wasn’t gone yet; she was walking beside, inside me. The winking, oily world was aflame, everything burnished and troubled by the hurry and harsh loveliness of her transit. People die, but does the slant of light they teach us, their way of looking? It was through Lynda’s eyes that I apprehended all those hopeful pitches and lost chances: her arena of transcendence, that hard-edged and lushly human disaster of a neighborhood. For me, that was my friend’s real funeral, a walk through Times Square inside my head, looking out, at the beloved world—full of harm and trouble, sparkle and ruin—she was leaving.
Crash
My current chiropractor, a literate, charming lesbian who wears tortoiseshell horn-rims and demonstrates a real sophistication about the delicate mysteries of alignment, does her best, then sighs and suggests a massage and rest. The swollen and throbbing muscles of my sacro-lumbar region (I like it being called a region, some part of me as distant and full of mystery as the precincts of the moon) are, clearly, intractable; they are not ready to be adjusted into anything like their proper positions.
And I am miserable. The condition’s chronic, but it’s been in abeyance—perhaps because I’ve had to be strong, able to pick Wally up, in the days when he could still be lifted