This is how it happens: I’m driving back from Boston with Phil, in that happily intimate space the interior of a car is, at night, with a friend, a chance for extended conversation interrupted only by a stop for gas or coffee. When have we ever had a chance to talk like this, not at a party or a reading or in the hurry of a chance encounter on the street?
I’m talking about what it’s like for me, with Wally three months gone; Phil’s talking about how he imagines it will be for him, how he doesn’t want to imagine it but has to, needs to, in order to have some sense of a tenable future. For each of us there’s so much in what the other says that we recognize, and what an aid and comfort that simple fact is: somebody else feels or has felt like me. We’re entirely encompassed in our conversation when we come upon a detour; the highway’s been closed, south of Plymouth, and just beyond the makeshift wooden barriers and orange pylons are the flashing red and blue lights of a squadron of emergency vehicles. The bright, alarming row of them conceal whatever they surround, and I have that brief thought one always has, coming upon an accident, Is this someone I know? But we’re a long ways from home, and I dismiss the notion, and along the dark wooded detour which takes us away from the smear of disaster we continue our quiet and encompassing conversation.
In the morning the news comes early, my roommate rushing in from morning coffee, out of breath, shaken, saying someone from town’s died, a woman, a poet, someone in the Program: is it my friend Lynda? An accident, in Plymouth. I call the police in town who tell me to call the police there and I do, and they’re hesitant to tell me anything until I tell them Lynda’s name, tell them I’m a friend, tell them I need to know, and they tell me she’s died, in a single-car accident, that she must have died immediately, the tree she’d smashed into pushed through the roof of the old white Saab she’d bought after her last accident, a car she wanted because it would be solid and safe.
In memory, all that morning I’m standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter because I can’t quite stand up; sometimes I’m sitting at the blue table but all the time I am talking, talking on the phone: to friends and students of Lynda’s and of mine, to her husband David’s answering machine, to her parents, to the people who have to know. I realize that Michael, her roommate, my friend, doesn’t know yet—but he’s at work, serving breakfast in a restaurant down the block, and I don’t want to tell him there. I plan that I’ll meet him at the door of the restaurant, when he gets off, so that he can hear this from me, but I don’t count on the radio playing in the dining room; Lynda’s death is reported on the morning news while Michael’s serving someone a plate of eggs. So I’m standing in the kitchen when he comes racing around the corner of the house to the door, stumbling, weeping, dissolved in terror and in pity.
Michael weeping uncontrollably in my arms: terrible mirror of myself, three months ago but also in the days since. I cry almost every day, still, though it subsides a little faster, though I don’t go back so much to this raw, stricken place of unbearable new grief. And I can’t go there now, not exactly, though Michael can. He’s twenty-five and no one close to him has ever died before; he can’t stop shaking. But it’s not as if I know something more than he does about death, not as if I have some sort of wisdom extracted from experience. I’m stricken and horrified and half-numb, and though I’d like it to be otherwise the truth is that I am full of confusion, because my grief is so inextricable from my fury and my fear, conflicting feelings tumbling together like the slap of wave on wave.
After Lynda died I thought I’d never write about her; I was too full of anger, raw and startled and afraid. Of what? It was fear for myself, I guess; how would I hold on through another death? And how could I face the bitter sense that she’d tossed her own life away, with all her extraordinary gifts, that she’s spun out of control in a long skid she could have prevented?
She’d said to a mutual friend, reflecting on her own self-destructive behavior, Well, at least if I die, think of the beautiful elegies my friends will write for me. I couldn’t bear that; I couldn’t abide that romanticizing of harm, that weird combination of self-aggrandizement and willful disregard of the gift of one’s own life.
And I was afraid too that to try to write about her was to admit chaos, to describe an emotional complexity that would utterly elude and confound me. I knew what I felt about Wally; it might be a great reservoir of pain, an overpowering sense of loss and of awe, but those feelings were clear, as transparent to me as new tide pouring over the marsh grasses. About Lynda’s death I had no such clarity.
The last time I saw her she was drunk. The middle of the day; she’d been to an AA meeting; I was to meet her outside the church and together we’d walk to a restaurant to meet David, who was in town for a few days. She’s weaving a little as she emerges from the church basement. She’s wearing a little black dress, a ragged black coat and beret, leaning on her ebony cane, and as soon as I see her I know she’s not all right. But I try to deny it, and take her arm; I try to say to myself, Well, maybe she’s just upset, things have been so hard. Our friendship’s been strained and compromised these months; we are being very cautious with one another. I don’t trust her, she is trying terribly hard to please me, to make a good impression. She takes my arm and we walk to the restaurant together, the Post Office Café, a greasy but basically likable place that’s open all year round, as not many places here are, and there’s David at a table waiting for us. His face falls when he looks at her and sees the shape she’s in; his look says Why am I here? and then almost immediately What’s to be made of this? which is what the faces of those long used to living with alcoholics almost always say: How will we get through this one? Lunch is strained and sad and Lynda’s bitchy and out of focus; he’s come all this way to see her and she’s not only not home but is ugly and sniping. All three of us are just making small talk to try to live through an hour. My friend, whom I’ve loved for years, my adventurer, wonderful poet, survivor, heroine, role model, flash girl, paragon of style and endurance—well, I find I just don’t like her at all.
How can I reclaim her?
It’s 1984, more or less, and I am dancing with a woman in a red cocktail dress, a dashing little number with a large, elegant, and somewhat daffy bow tied at the back of its dropped shoulders. We’ve met at a writers’ conference where we’re both teaching; she’s here with her soon-to-be husband, and we’re drawn together into a fast, immediate friendship fired by a complex set of bonds we’ll be years in getting to know. She’s tiny, fiercely glamorous in a kid-playing-dress-up way; she’s angular, her firm nose casting a sharp shadow, her high cheekbones rouged. We tango, we glide, we conquer the dance floor like born show-queens—more interesting, more endearing because neither of us really knows these dances. We know how to make things look right, understand the playful and delicate work appearances are.
What launches and sparks any friendship is a mysterious alchemy, of course; how often friends predict we’ll adore so-and-so, and put us together at parties only to find that so-and-so and us chat politely until conversation fizzles like a wet fuse. Who can say what makes two people forge a sudden, surprising link?
Though certainly I can say what deepened it. We shared a sensibility, so much so that I can’t help but think of Lynda now as almost a way of seeing, a stance, an aesthetic. (Is that one thing the dead do for us, become a set of codes, an approach to describing the world?) So many things will always speak of Lynda, be redolent of her.
Specifically?
A certain sartorial intersection of glamour and trash, a louche but lovely address at which reside faux leopard anything, cloches, art deco jewelry, silk scarves worn as head wraps, tiny black dresses worn with a black leather jacket. Lynda looked wonderful, and she loved looking unlike anyone else; she wanted her unlikeness to be seen and appreciated. Her style, as her body fell apart over time, through back pains and car accident, became more and more the sort she admired, a panache which triumphed over difficulty without exactly concealing it: she adored Frida Kahlo, Marianne Faithfull, Lotte Lenya, women made more beautiful by a certain broken quality about them, by the acknowledgment of that quality. Thus she loved drag queens not just for their tawdry glamour but also for the way that their illusion was always ultimately doomed to fail. The artifice of making oneself be whomever one liked always revealed the reality beneath, and therein lay both its failure and a good part of its charm. She was a lover of appearances, of performance, of bravura, of failed but honorable gestures toward beauty.
Because the world was ruined, wasn’t it, and how could its children not be ruined as well?
We loved ruined armor, and Wally and I actually bought her a suit of it, in a way. At an auction, we found a black beaded dress, a tiny slip of transparent chiffon stitched with spirals of black jet beads. The beading was unraveling a bit at the edges, but it was perfect: a sheer black exhalation of sin, jazz, and dissipation, something so tiny and fragile, and so daringly tough, that I couldn’t imagine anyone else wearing it. Beneath her achieved surface, Lynda’s vulnerability was always visible; this is what made her such a wonderful teacher, and such a wonderful friend. It made her empathic, grounded, real. And it allowed us to share a common sense of difference, an odd feeling of being in disguise, of impostorship. Why were people reading our poems, taking workshops to hear us talk about poetry? If people knew who we really were, we used to joke, they’d never listen to us in workshop!
Because we were both kids who’d been in trouble; we both came from households racked with alcohol or chemicals, and we’d both been down close enough to the pavement to believe we could wind up back in some lowlife dive at any minute. Children of difficulty, we recognized in each other certain marks of damage, certain absences of confidence, certain luscious ambitions to be loved or adored, deep convictions of difference. We felt a sense of both being pushed to the margin and choosing that realm of marginality; felt, in other words queer, and our queerness—as poets, as born outsiders—both separated us from the world and energized us. Lynda used to like to say she was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body; this perception wasn’t so much about sexuality as about a whole approach to reality, a position from which one might understand the vulnerability and porosity of the self, the power of its costuming gestures. I knew there were aspects of me Lynda understood through and through; I know either of us could tell without fail what the other would love.
The art we loved was queer art: Hart Crane and Cavafy, Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Joseph Cornell, film noir: lush surfaces spread over difficult, edgy material, art marked by the transubstantiation of pain into style. Art full of anguish and pleasure in the racked beauty of the world, the kind of alloy she loved, and understood: the sort of thing we make when we’re true to the world’s comminglings of gorgeousness and terror.
For ten years Lynda and I would teach together, pull each other through crises of confidence, read all of each other’s poems, cheer each other through readings, edit each other’s manuscripts. She mattered to me greatly as a critic but even more as an inspiration: she worked at her art with a singular intensity, and in each new poem she’d raise the stakes as high as she could, putting everything at risk, pouring herself into her coruscating, elegant texts. So that one had to live up to that, poems had to matter that much.
During those ten years we’d see each other at the regular writers’ conferences where we taught, and visit in between or talk on the phone, and mail would always carry back and forth funny, signifying tokens that each knew the other would love. But despite our closeness there were other edges, the recurrent shadows of drugs and alcohol, which Lynda would try to keep from me, as she tried to conceal the fragility of her sobriety from all her friends. She had a lifetime battle with addictions. Out on the streets at sixteen, she married a Chinese gambler, lived in the Chinatowns of New York and Boston, and launched herself through a long stream of cities in a lurching wild life the recounting of which constituted one of her favorite obsessions and activities. She’d made it through alcohol, heroin, and harrowing hard-luck circumstances that would have left most people in their graves, and wound up in Little Rock, Arkansas, newly sober and determined to write poetry. There she met David, and began a remarkable career as a poet and teacher, hammering out an unmistakable poetic voice, winning prizes for each of the two books she published during her lifetime. Becoming, over the years, a larger, deeper person, with a great range of sympathies, with humor and insight, with a kind of palpable distinctness of being that says I am entirely myself, and no one’s like me.
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 the least abstract or universal but loomingly, frighteningly personal. Her friend Emily—they met in jail, when Lynda, at seventeen, was performing the court-assigned community service of reciting the lyrics to James Brown’s “King Heroin” to her fellow delinquents—was struggling with AIDS, and Lynda couldn’t help but look at her and wonder how, and why, she’d escaped. Wasn’t there something she could do to help Emily and her child? Wally, whom Lynda loved, had begun his long decline. She’d fought her way toward cheerfulness, standing by his bed with her arms full of the sunflowers she’d brought him, and later fallen apart in the kitchen, out of earshot.
And then, in Chicago, her car was hit head-on by a taxi, the front end crushed, the bones of both her feet broken. Never particularly strong—her health compromised by years of living marginally—the recovery was terrible, and partial, though she spent months in bed, though there was more than one operation. David used to carry her, once she could get out a bit, up and down the four flights of stairs leading to their lakeshore apartment.
When she was walking, out in the world again after months of physical therapy, she took a job in Boston for a semester. It wasn’t a happy choice: she was still physically frail from the accident’s aftermath and addicted to painkillers. Boston had been a difficult city for her, the location—dreamy and often nightmarish now, in memory—of many of her hardest years, the old days of using and getting by from deal to deal. The details of that fall would only emerge for me later: how she’d been hospitalized, nearly dying from an overdose of the painkillers she’d taken, how a friend coming to collect some clothes for her in the hospital had found her closet full of bottles.
And yet, that night, in the middle of that season of dissolution, she was entirely present, in focus, strong, sober. How did she do it? Was her show of strength a gift to me?
In December, she came for a visit; the home health aides who were in the house to help care for Wally insisted she was stoned, but I couldn’t see it. Perhaps I didn’t want to, or perhaps it was simply that my attention was so focused on Wally, in those late dark hours, that I couldn’t see her. Though I could feel that something was off, that her visit was really more about her than about us, as if there was something she needed from us that I couldn’t give. How could I give to anyone, when every bit of me was centered around that hospital bed in what used to be our living room? Every bit of my psyche was involved with surrounding that man as he drifted toward being a child, toward a simple radiant awareness, toward being no one.
Lynda decided she’d come to Provincetown in the winter, when her teaching gig was up. In part she wanted to take time to write; in part I believe she was avoiding going home, since she was using and didn’t want to confront David and the evidence of her domestic life. And in part she wanted to be near Wally and me, wanted to help us, and didn’t understand she wasn’t in any shape to help anyone. She told me a dream she’d had; in it, she was living in a cottage on the beach, and out on the shore, hunkering around near the wharves and piers, was a huge, hungry rat, bigger than a dog, red-eyed, malevolent. The rat’s my addiction, she said, I’m coming to Provincetown to finally confront the rat.
Moments after Wally died, Lynda called; I think she knew. I heard her voice on the answering machine in the kitchen, but I didn’t go to it then, lost as I was in the unbelievable hour Wally had filled with himself and then with his absence. She called again from Cambridge the next morning, and after I told her she said she’d drive down later in the day. She arrived, late in the afternoon, drunk.
I sat on the bed, in the ringing ache and resonance of that room, the room I’d only just been able to enter again, all its evidence of him—glasses, toothbrush, little wooden angel hanging from a thread above his pillow—precious and unbearable.
And my friend could not see or feel what was happening, could not be with me in the actuality I could barely be in myself, because she was drunk. We talked for a few minutes and then I couldn’t stop the anger, the rising choke of it, and I said, You need to leave, you have to go now, I can’t be with you now. Anger not only that she was unavailable when I most needed help, but that I had to move from that depth of shock and fear and loss into this other feeling, that my energies had to be pulled this way now, of all times, when I had no resources to protect myself.
Though I did protect myself; did, out of some raw instinct toward self-preservation, push my friend away.
Is this what death always does, push us toward a kind of brink of reality, so we have to stand face to face with ourselves, all our histories up front, simultaneous, newly intensified? Lynda’s drinking brought back fear and anger at seeing someone I love obscured by booze, and my own desire to run away. Suddenly I had, again, to determine boundaries, create limits in order not to be overwhelmed.
(Other old issues resurface, too: talking to my father on the phone forces me to look at our distance, the unreality of my life to him, and I feel invisible, unseen. I’m aware again of how the central fact of my life isn’t one which church or state cares to recognize; who sees what has happened to us?)
Just as I always tried to protect Lynda, I want to spare her still, and her husband, and her family, but I want also the actual dimensions of my friend’s illness, which seemed to deepen its hold, in the weeks after Wally’s death. Suffice to say I’d hear about the pills and prescriptions, about things slipping out of her control, about her going to meetings drunk or high, weeping about Wally in the street.
I couldn’t see her at all, at first, and so our next meeting was at the memorial service, a week after Wally died. She seemed a fragile surface constructed above an abyss, held together by wires, fragmented, as if her energies were split apart, some fracture setting the self at odds with the self.
Later, we meet for lunch, but it seems strained, all the old spontaneity gone. She works so hard to convince me she’s taking care of herself that it doesn’t ring true; she doesn’t want to be sober, she wants to seem okay. So there’s an unreality about our talk, and I don’t think she actually hears me. We have that sort of AA conversation in which we each report on our condition, state our problems, but it never feels like a real exchange; it feels as though Lynda’s holding on by the skin of her teeth, desperate to convince herself or me she’s going to be all right. It rankles me, then, that I never really get to tell her the story of Wally’s death, of how it felt; she never really seems to listen.
What can I do? I’m powerless, everyone’s powerless in the face of her addiction. I encourage a friend in recovery to try to intervene. I try to think how I can see her at all, when I feel completely porous, when I think there’s so little of me and that so fragile. She leaves a note in my mailbox, written on the back of an envelope I have still: Please don’t hold my addictions against me.
I’m worried about her, but I know Lynda’s a survivor. She’s made it through so much already, lived through such difficulty that, of course, she’ll get through this, though I’ve never seen her spinning so fast, sinking so badly. It’s going to pass, I think, she’s going to hit some bottom and then pull herself up.
She falls in the shower and cuts her head; Michael gets her to the hospital for stitches, and on the way home she stops at the pharmacy in town which must be one of the few places in America where you can buy both painkillers and beer. Then Michael and my AA friend succeed in getting her to rehab, so I think that’ll be the turning point: she’ll be back now, in her strength again. But sobriety hasn’t really been her choice; she isn’t ready. She stays a few days and then she’s back as if nothing’s happened.
I think, What I’ve done for years, when my friends fucked themselves up with chemicals, is guard myself, run away. Do I have to hide from her? How can I take care of myself but also behave responsibly toward someone I love? Rena, Wally’s old therapist, says, It sounds like you’re afraid of her. And I am; I am holding myself together precariously, learning to move through the simple routines I’ve established for myself: walking the dogs, swimming laps at the motel pool, buying food for one. Trying to learn how to stumble through the days without falling, without falling any more than I have to. My head feels like a vacancy; I’m a great broken space which fills alternately with weeping and with nothing. Where is there room for the turbulence of Lynda?
I hear things are starting to turn, beginning to change: she’s going to meetings, has a sponsor, is admitting that she’s been in bad shape, owning up that things have been out of control.
So I think about what I want to say, and build up courage to say it. I want to meet and talk, I want to say, I love you and I can’t stand it when you do this to yourself, I have to keep my distance from you now because I don’t have the strength to bear it. Please, go home, go where your support is. I’ll be here for you later, I’ll be connected with you again as soon as I can. So I call and leave a message on her machine that I want to talk. It’s Sunday; I tell her I’ll be home that night and then away for a couple of days; if we don’t talk tonight, let’s talk on Wednesday. She doesn’t return my call that night (later I’ll hear she was out drinking). Monday I’m going to Boston. Tuesday she goes to Boston, too, to see her shrink, and on the way home drives her car—doing what, eighty? eighty-five?—into a tree just past Exit 4.
Wild arrogance, to imagine there won’t be more to feel because you won’t be able to feel it. To think no more loss can happen because you can’t hold it.
But the dreadful rears up, enormous, uncontainable, too large to apprehend and yet stubbornly insistent upon being real. I say, I can’t, I won’t, how can I even begin, but the fact towers, dominates the world.
A single car accident, at high speed on a wet road. A suicide? I don’t think so, not in the sense of a deliberate choice made to end her life, not in the sense of Lynda deciding to die, then and there, or planning it. And yet all her last months seemed a careening out of control, as if the steering wheel had started racing in her hand months before, as if she’d turned then into some skid she couldn’t pull herself out of. How much did it matter, exactly, what she’d intended just then? Her family said she was sober, at the time of the crash, but did that matter exactly either, since that moment was part of a plummeting fall from sobriety—a condition more brittle and precarious for her than I’d ever known? Suddenly everything about the way she’d been living seemed a kind of flirtation with death, a courting of death. Even the poems, beautifully wrought, full of engagement with life, seemed in retrospect full of negotiations with mortality, as if everything she ever wrote was a rehearsal for a suicide note. But she was going to meetings, she was thinking of going home, she was raising the bright flag of some will to live, even if it was wavering, while she stared into the face of her rat.
But didn’t we feel, everyone who knew her, as if she’d killed herself? Everyone said to me something beginning with If only…
If only I’d been there, reached out in some way. A suicide spreads responsibility everywhere; everyone tries to respond, somehow, to the brutal gesture. In stunned anger, in horror and grief, the wind knocked out of us, we’re all reacting all day and evening on the phone. Just when I had stopped this, just when I wasn’t telling the story of Wally’s death over and over again, I’m back in that electronic network of friends, students, everyone who knew her in some way wanting to connect with everyone else, touch base, tell a story, speculate (If only…). The phone had become a kind of drug for me in the weeks after Wally died: a source of contact, something to do besides weeping, besides lying in that empty bed, besides walking in the frozen world. Now, again I’m living leaning against the kitchen counter, the phone become a part of my face.
Do I feel anything besides stunned, a numb disbelief that I’m going to another funeral, in a few days, in Newark, that Lynda’s vanished?
I feel this rush of compassion for David, who couldn’t have known what was coming, at least not the way I knew what was coming for Wally. David is my age exactly but a few days younger; we are both forty and our lives have broken in half, ground to wrack and powder. Compassion that he had no time to prepare, when I had this long time to look at what was coming. Was it slow? Did it race by me? Is there any way to even approach getting ready? I made the arrangements, found the help, discovered what could allow Wally and me to live as best we could, but what preparation could I make in my heart? Is it good, the knowledge I had? What’s the difference in our grief, our rages, our bouts of numbness (relief, sometimes, from howling pain)?
I feel this dread of the world, of the impossible processes of loss: my lover and then my best friend gone in the space of two months? The world’s a maw, a grinding machine. Who or what’s to be eaten next? I go to Rena’s, a town away, for dinner, and I become completely obsessed with the candles I’ve left burning on the mantel, those glass-encased prayer candles Catholics light at altars, the sort that burn for days, supposedly seven, though the exact number always seems to vary. One’s been flaming continuously for Wally since he died, some outward token of the flame inside me directed toward him. The dead can see light, my friend Mekeel says. I’ve lit another for Lynda. During dinner I become certain they’re going to get too hot, the glass will crack, the hot wax will pour out, perhaps the wick will not be drowned by the liquid wax and keep burning, so that the hot wax will all catch flame, the mantel and the wood floor beginning to burn. I am sure my house must be burning; I find I don’t care so much about anything in it except the photographs of Wally and the dogs; the fire is going to take my dogs and they are all I have; there is nothing else for me in the world. I call home and discover that the answering machine works, so it can’t have melted, but I still can’t rest until I call my neighbors and have them check the house.
I am standing in death’s floodplain, I am in the way of a tidal rush of loss. What is reality but a system for carrying people and things away?
But mostly I feel anger, inadmissible anger which is so big that it almost obscures grief, a dark body between me and the edges of the sorrow I can see but not fully feel. I struggle because I don’t want to admit it, but I am full of rage. Wally did not have a choice, could not through any powers he might muster have changed a stroke of his history, could not rewrite a word of that last nine months’ text of erasure and of disappearance. But Lynda could.
Couldn’t she? I know addiction’s itself an illness, I know she lived in one long struggle to gain control, to hold herself intact, but how can I help but feel she had a choice? Perhaps not to control the steering wheel, that single night, but to alter the course of the nights and days that led her there, to confront and examine her circumstances in order to live. How vain and self-indulgent self-destructiveness looks in the face of AIDS! The virus in its predatory destruction seems to underline the responsibility of the living; life’s an unlikely miracle, an occasion of strangeness and surprise, and isn’t it appalling to dismiss it, to discard the gift? Isn’t it horrifying, to choose not to live when you can choose?
Which is not to say that her pain wasn’t real, her struggles the result of deep faultlines that shook her to the very core. My friend must have wrestled so terribly, and who am I to say that her disease was any less relentless than Wally’s? Partly my rage is just anger that she’s left me, too. And partly my rage is at the world, at God, at the blind bone-breaking ugly design of things.
And somewhere underneath all that is the sense of losing the loveliest companion, a sister, a woman I adored, brilliant and accomplished and bright-spirited, my irreplaceable friend.
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. But the fact is I hate it: I hate that my friend who is gone is not recognizable in these gestures, is barely reflected here.
I do not say this to criticize Lynda’s family; when it comes to memorial services, I think gay people have a real advantage over their straight counterparts. We don’t have a big tradition looming over us; most of us don’t have much in the way of a church we can feel comfortable with, and for an awful lot of us what the family wishes just isn’t at the center of things. And so ritual occasions, not hidebound by church or tradition, tend to look a lot like the person they celebrate and mourn. And we have a hell of a lot of practice, too, these fifteen years of epidemic.
I wanted Wally’s service to suit him; he’d taken no interest in it whatsoever, specifying only that he wanted to be cremated, so it was up to me. Without a funeral, it seemed essential—both for me and for his family—to have some event soon after his death that seemed real, signifying, grave. We reserved space in the Unitarian church—complain about it I do, but it’s beautiful, and welcoming—and in the space of a week I had cards printed with a photograph of Wally playing with our cat Thisbe on them, and his name and dates, and a bit of a poem of Rilke’s, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
I’d opened the book and there the lines were, from an elegy I’d always loved; they insisted upon themselves. Later I’d think, do I believe this? Just once? Certainly just once this way, this unrepeatable constellation of circumstances, the kaleidoscope shifted this one delicate way. Once, in this body, and gone.
During that week there were obituaries to write and publish, and the minister to meet with, and matters of music and flowers and candles, and programs—and what was going to happen, what would the program say? And food for later. In the worst hour of my life, at my most exhausted and terrified and shellshocked, suddenly I am planning a huge gathering for an unknown number of people, and inviting them all to my house afterward for food and talk. The weirdness of it is the wisdom of it: in the darkest hour, give a party.
Some people plan to speak: Wally’s brothers Mark and Jim, Rena, our friends Richard and Kathryn. And then there’ll be a time for anyone who wants to to get up—and a little singing, a little music. It’s a huge project, and it’s astonishing how much is contributed by how many people, how seemingly effortlessly all this work flows together. Effortless to me, perhaps, because I am floating along on the goodwill and work of so many friends who are showing up and cleaning the house, shopping, cooking, taking care of the details. I’m half aware of being grateful that I can make lists, can think about the things I have to do to be ready for Saturday, can worry about the parts of the whole. I can spend an inordinate amount of time buying candles, getting exactly the right shape and color and number. Feeling keeps leaking through, spilling out, washing me away a dozen times a day, two dozen. But I have this to come back to, to grasp onto, this world of tasks.
And when it happens it’s magic. It’s been the snowiest, iciest January in the history of the planet but suddenly the day’s sunny, perfect, like April, benevolent sun on the U.U.’s clapboard and steeple. Later Michael will say what he remembers best is the sunlight cascading into the sanctuary through high windows. Because the ice is gone Wally’s older relatives can come, can negotiate the steps and walks. The church with its soft gray walls painted in trompe l’oeil columns, its pews with their little medallions carved from whale’s teeth, is full of people. As the planned speakers talk—an outpouring for Wally, testament both to him and to us as a couple—I have this extraordinary sense of being seen.
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.