Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [99]
Of course they were the norm, at first. There’d be a bad spell of a few days, and then it would clear, and we’d have a good week, maybe weeks. I have hidden in my heart the recognitions, the knowledge that he was surely failing, each month a little worse.
I knew it, one brilliant day, when I’d ridden my bicycle out to Herring Cove, and gone for a walk by myself along the curve of beach, the barrier arc of dunes that keeps the salt marsh from being swept away. After a long walk, I turned back toward home. Halfway across the marsh, I saw a man and a black dog coming over a cleft in the dunes up ahead, and I was suddenly flooded with delight, thinking Wally had brought Arden and come to meet me. But I knew, as soon as I thought it, that Wally couldn’t manage it anymore, that he couldn’t have driven himself here, and walked across the sand. And my heart sank in me, I think I let out a cry, out loud, knowing I’d never again see the two of them coming down some bright slope together, running toward me.
How did I know? People with AIDS got sick all the time, sick unto death, and then before you knew it there they were pushing a cart around the A&P or exhibiting their paintings or singing at a benefit. The familiar opportunistic infections killed, but there were treatments for them, too. Whatever was happening to Wally didn’t follow any pattern anyone seemed to know, yet it was clear that it was progressive, deepening, that he was steeping in his illness, taking on its color, the way fabric steeps in dye.
At the end of August, Hurricane Bob swept through Provincetown. We had a few days warning; the tourists cleared out, the hardware and drugstores sold out of flashlights and batteries and radios. We battened every hatch we could find.
The morning of the storm was hushed, expectant. When the wind began to blow, it was as if not only the town but the world had exhaled, all at once. A grand horizontal stream of watery air—airy water?—came tearing down our street, rocking but fortunately not tipping over our big box alder tree. Every leaf in town was shredded, windblown, and mixed with saltwater to form a sticky pesto which would, hours later, cover any exposed surface, turning the white New England clapboards a mossy basil green.
About five in the afternoon the wind simply stopped, and the citizens of Provincetown crept out to survey the damage, a tentative examination, at first, which swiftly became a sort of festive promenade. Everybody was out, walking the length of our arterial Commercial Street, exchanging stories, pleased to see one another, responding with wonder to the few real disasters: great trees thrown down, some of them onto the roofs of houses, and the lid of the Surfside Motel (frankly, an eyesore) blown clean away and dumped into Bradford Street. It was the strangest sort of party, and there was something extraordinarily communal about it, and tender; how glad we all were to have survived together, how happy it wasn’t worse.
There’s a photograph a friend took of Wally and me together that late afternoon, a photograph I never saw until after he died (evidence of the past keeps floating up, new ways to see, new prompts and reminders). We’re standing side by side, his left arm linked in my right. I am clean-shaven, and wearing a cotton khaki beret from the army surplus store, a favorite hat; Wally has a little shadow of a beard, and an oversized cotton sweater, one that makes him look boyish, lost in the big warm knit, whose sleeves hang down over his hands. I am smiling; it’s a real smile, and yet it also betrays strain, how much I am trying, how hard I am working to see that things move on. On Wally’s lips a little faint smile floats,