Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [81]
By spring I was doing painting and repairs on my days off from teaching, and though I said I was doing them for us, doing things I wanted to do, I knew on some level I was fixing up the camp in order to let it go; I couldn’t know what sort of change was coming, but so much that had mattered before (my teaching, our houses) now seemed temporary, ephemeral; we were about to be moved along, in the course and current of things. Change was gathering speed, establishing direction.
Refuge (2)
Provincetown, 1990. The universe, God, the essence of benevolence gives us the unmatchable autumn of our lives: brilliant days brimming with warm October light that seem never to end. Our little rented cottage on the edge of what Melville called “the great unbounded” feels itself boundless; our attention’s turned outward from the tiny bayside rooms to the huge horizontals around us, an expanse of harbor and horizon wide as the world. We swim in the bay late into October, and walk the huge pewtery gleam of the tideflats barefoot into November. It seems a long time since either of us has felt this free or this happy. Illness seems far away, living easy. How did we get here?
It seemed effortless, or at least as if our efforts were richly, invisibly assisted; everything conspired to bring us to a brighter, less freighted life. Lynda and David, spending a sabbatical year on the Cape, invited us down for a visit, in February, the off-est of the off-season, a time of the year I’d never seen Provincetown. Weary of the deep snow of Vermont, as well as its icy emotional weather, we found ourselves smitten with the coastal clutter of boarded shops and clapboard houses along the curve of the bay. Our friends had rented a big old drafty place across the street from the water, a former rooming house stocked with more beds than you could count. When it began to snow and snow, keeping us in town another day, we couldn’t have been happier. We ate kale soup just behind the steamed windows of one of the two open cafés. Our angelic waiter (a painter I still know, who’d later come to be a friend) welcomed us, a sort of everyday angel whose task it seemed to bless our meal, our visit, our days in a place that offered a sense of respite. After our dark northern days of adjustment and strength-seeking, this town was like balm.
And so a process of realignment began, so subtle that we almost didn’t know it was happening. One day one of us suggested a trip back to Provincetown for spring break, and April found us in a rambling waterfront apartment in the West End. It was a week of brash new sun, crocus unfurling while the whole town emerged to wash windows, sweep walks, and take in the new light. As we did, walking with Lynda at the cranberry bog on the North Pamet Road, way up into the high, heathered dunes over the beach near Head of the Meadow. I remember one day especially, taking Arden to the beach at Race Point, and curling up together with a thermos of coffee in the shoulder of a dune, ignoring the books and paper we’d brought, dreaming there in that early sun which the skin receives with such gratitude that it seems better than all the rays of summer. The social climate of the town—its ready acceptance of us as a couple, its affirmation of our ordinariness—felt also like a drink of sunlight; dealing with HIV had underlined our sense of isolation, underscored the sense of difference northern New England’s homogeneous culture kept reminding us of anyway.
During the vacation, I had to leave town for a day, on some literary business. It was almost dark when I returned. At the point where the only road into town is suddenly a band of asphalt between two sand dunes,