Come to the Edge: A Memoir (10 page)

When I reread the play many years later, other things came back: how he stressed a particular word, how he sang a song about kisses, how effortless he was. And that I laughed. Laughter onstage is often harder to come up with than tears, especially when you’ve heard the joke a thousand times in rehearsals. No matter how gifted the teller is, spontaneity fades, and it can sound forced. But with John it was easy. I needed only to listen.

What makes this a powerful play—and what I’ve left out until now—is the knowledge almost from the beginning that in a few hours, Mag and Joe will drown in the shallow waters of Lough Gorm, a lake east of their town. Friel uses two narrators, a man and a woman, who function like a Greek chorus. In our production, they sat on stools at either end of the stage with bound scripts in their hands. Although the deaths are never solved, the narrators interrupt the dialogue with facts—about weather, topography, and sociological, medical, and family histories. They describe, in excruciating detail, the lack of wind, low water levels, an abandoned boat, search parties, sightings in Liverpool and Waterford, airport and border closings, search parties called off, and bundles of clothing washed ashore. Then the bodies found facedown in twenty-seven inches of water, the inquest, the coroner’s reports, the requiem Mass, and the large turnout.

The final image of the play is of Mag and Joe laughing, hands joined, running down the hill at Ardnageeha on a June day to begin their lives together.

At twenty-five, I found the irony poignant, romantic, even affirming.
Carpe diem; life is fleeting
, it said to me. But fourteen years later, when I heard the words on the news—search party, clothing found, autopsy (along with the endless facts about water depths, haze, and flight plans) they were familiar to me. Words that the heart does not understand, words you keep reading in hopes that they will help you to fathom what you cannot.

During the summer of 1999, the country was gripped by a massive heat wave. The East Coast was the hardest hit—blackouts in New York City, roads buckling in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and in Rhode Island, a spate of temperatures not seen since 1895. In western Massachusetts, it was cooler, but only by degrees. Drought had singed the once verdant lawns that July, and a dull persistent haze blanketed everything.

It had been years since I’d seen him—not from ill will, but our lives had gone in different directions. Still, when I learned he had gotten married, I was devastated. It was early on a Sunday morning almost three years before, and I was wandering through Penn Station waiting to board a train when I saw the headline. We had broken up at the end of 1990, but for a year or so after that, we would meet and there was the sense of possibility in the air. By the time I stood at the kiosk at Penn Station, I no longer felt this. Yet he remained in my heart, and seeing the photograph was like a small death, a vivid punctuation of an end that had already taken place.

For the last two years, I’d been living and working in Los Angeles. I’d also fallen in love with someone, an actor, and was visiting him that July at a theater in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I hadn’t thought about John in a long time, but two days before his death, I did. The actor’s family would be arriving the next day, and I would meet them for the first time. But in a sunlit aisle in a supermarket in Lee, I stopped the cart, looked up, and for a moment almost violent in its clarity, it was as though he were with me.

On Saturday, July 17, a friend called early and woke me. She’d heard about the missing plane on the radio, and didn’t want me to find out that way. As she reported what she knew, I crumpled to the kitchen floor, my back pressed on cabinet knobs. I held the phone against my chest, and when I stopped crying, she spoke. “But it
is
John. He’s come out of things like this before.”

I remember little of that day, only the heat. The actor’s family shielded me from news reports, steered me from televisions, and tried to keep me busy, their helplessness etched on their kind, embarrassed faces.

I keep searching for a word I once knew, or perhaps imagined. It’s to hold two opposing beliefs at once, fully and without judgment; to know that both are true. Like
ambivalence
, but without its reticence. That day, when I received my friend’s call, I knew in my heart that he was gone. There would be no rescue. And I also knew that this was not possible. In my mind, I kept seeing the purple shadows of the small, uninhabited islands off Martha’s Vineyard, ones I had been to with him years before. Surely, they would be found there. Surely, they would be rescued. And like everyone else, I waited.

The next morning when the light was still gray, I got up and drove for hours alone on the back roads of Otis, New Marlborough, and Tyringham. I drove fast, careless with myself. As in a dream, lush white fog covered the hills and wrapped itself around the young birch trees. I blinked to see the road. Things forgotten, tucked away and put to bed, tumbled by across the glass as if they were present. A glance, a touch. The way he said my name and woke me in the morning. Spaghetti he made with soy sauce and butter. Leaping on the benches outside the Museum of Natural History. Candles flickering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he insisted I see for the first time at night, his hand guiding mine over names of cold stone. Another night—skating over black ice. My back against his chest, his arms holding me up; cold on our faces and the sound of the blades. Black trees, black below, black sky. The brush of blue satin against his tuxedoed leg. And the adventures—dangers that fate had tipped in our favor. Once safe, they became the stories we told. But now, pulled over by the side of a country road, I remembered the terror I had felt.

By eight thirty, the heat was full on, and I stopped at a coffee shop in Lenox.
Coffee
, I thought.
The paper. Do things that are normal
.

Outside by the steps, the sun glinted off the newspaper stand. And I saw, on the front page of every national and local paper, the headline, the wedding photograph. I stood for a long time, never making it past the steps. In the thickness of shock, I tried to puzzle out why this was in bold print, why this was news, why this was public. I hadn’t understood until then that it was real. And that he would be mourned deeply by people who had never met him but whose lives he had touched all the same.

Plane debris had begun to wash ashore on Philbin Beach near Gay Head by Saturday afternoon. On Tuesday, at a depth of 116 feet, the fuselage was spotted several miles northwest of Nomans Land, the island you could see from his mother’s beach. News broadcasts began to play the biographical montages mixed with grainy long-lens footage of the house in Hyannis Port, the wide green lawn, and the white tent for the family wedding that had now been canceled. On Wednesday, after the bodies were found, I took the train to New York to attend a memorial service that Friday—not the one filled with dignitaries and family members, with a reception in the Sacred Heart ballroom, but one arranged by his friends Jeff Gradinger and Pat Manocchia and held at La Palestra, an upscale gym he frequented near Café des Artistes.

When I walked in, I felt welcomed, even though I hadn’t seen many of the people in years. Some of his cousins, including Timmy Shriver and Anthony Radziwill, had come directly from the earlier service. I embraced Anthony. He was weeks from the end of his fight with cancer. I hadn’t seen him since his wedding in 1994, when he had spun his bride around the dance floor and everyone had applauded. Now he was fragile, his weight resting on a cane. “I’m all cried out,” he said quietly when we spoke of the events of the past week. “There’s nothing left.”

When I looked across the crowded room, I saw disparate groups—lawyers, bankers, journalists, musicians, artists; friends from grade school, law school, boarding school, and Brown—the many tribes that John had knit together. There was anger, grief, and disbelief in that room, but also a celebration of the friend we’d lost.

People stood up to speak. Some attempted humor. Others told of exploits, athletics, bravery. I read a poem he’d once read to me, one his mother loved. But it was Christiane, our Benefit Street roommate, whose words comforted the most. They still do. “He was an ordinary boy in extraordinary circumstances,” she said, her voice unwavering. “And he lived his life with grace.”

After it was over, I went back to my apartment in the West Village, and for the first time in days, I wept. Then I went to the old chest. In it, I found a slim volume of Gray’s
Elegy
. I brushed the dust from the sepia cover. My grandmother had given it to me when I was eleven, but I’d never read it. When I was young, I had no interest in graveyards or dead youths, “to Fortune and to Fame unknown.” On the first page, in her careful schoolteacher’s hand, she’d inscribed it
FOR TINA WHO LIKES POETRY
. I turned one of the thread-bound pages, and a newspaper clipping, one she must have tucked there long ago, fluttered to the floor. Now yellowed, as fragile as a bee’s wing, it was an artist’s rendering of a commemorative stamp from the mid-1960s, a drawing of a three-year-old boy saluting a casket.

Deeper in the trunk, I found my copy of
Winners
, and I opened it.

A
t the end of July, a week and a half before the play opened, John bought a red motorcycle. Bullet red with clean lines. There had been no hint of it in the weeks since rehearsals had relocated to the Irish Arts Center, so when he rode up that evening, it was a surprise. “At least it’s not a Corvette,” he quipped. We teased him, but really everyone was thrilled. It was a welcome distraction from the nerves before opening, and after rehearsal we stood on the sidewalk and he took turns giving us rides.

Robin got on first. She was tiny and settled in tight. Then Denise, the stage manager. She didn’t want to, but John coaxed her. After that, Santina, the lighting designer, who’d also gone to Brown. They were good friends, and she’d directed him in two of his best performances there,
Short Eyes
and
In the Boom Boom Room
. Next, Phelim, a lanky, red-haired boy with cowboy legs as long as the bike. He grinned when he got on board, and when they came trundling down the block, he pitched his legs out to the side and we all laughed.

I hung back, talking to Toni, the assistant stage manager. We stood by a chain-link fence that bordered the abandoned lot near the theater, a three-story converted carriage house on the north side of Fifty-first Street. It was late, but I could feel the afternoon’s swelter on the bottoms of my sandals. I could smell the river a block and a half away.

I’d changed out of my rehearsal clothes—a short blue skirt and a red cardigan. It was 1985, the Madonna/
Like a Virgin
era. I eschewed the leggings, the bleached hair, and the ubiquitous skinny rubber bracelets, but sported a slinky black dress I’d gotten cheap at a street fair, a wide leather belt low on my hips, and a bronze-colored cuff on my arm. The cuff was a remnant of a costume from some Shakespeare play I’d been in, and I’d taken it as a totem. My hair was loose and long and out of the clip that turned me into seventeen-year-old Mag Enright.

The play had been going well since rehearsals had moved from Robin’s apartment. John sometimes complained about the stepped-up hours (he insisted on having weekends off and won), but he always showed up after work ready to go. We’d had one squabble. It was over the word
God
, a matter of where the pitch lay in the mouth and if and how the lips were rounded. It was slight, but I corrected him and we argued. For days, neither of us would back down. I knew I was right. After all, the year before, while John had been exploring India and Thailand, I had been learning all manner of dialects—from Afrikaans to Cockney to Czech—and could transpose them into IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. I’d also spent hours studying a tape labeled “Donegal native speakers,” compiled and given to me by Tim Monich, the speech teacher at Juilliard. Finally, Nye Heron, the artistic director of the Irish Arts Center and a native Dubliner, was brought in to settle the matter. He would set John straight. But as it turned out, I was wrong. My version, Nye said, was correct—for a county or two over. But John had it down to the township. Humbled, I took pains from then on to say it exactly as he did, and I was grateful when he didn’t gloat. His ear, the gift of any actor, was superb, and at least in the matter of
God
, it had trumped mine.

In rehearsal clothes, we tumbled and wrestled on the small stage. There was ease, banter, and trust, and he’d lean against me when Robin gave notes. But over the past week, once we were alone and in street clothes, something was different between us. There was a seriousness, a glance too long, and, for me, the awareness always of where he was in the room. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and I fought it.

“Hey,” he called out from the bike. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

That night home was Brooklyn, the walk-up I shared with another actress on the outskirts of Park Slope. Not over-the-bridge Brooklyn, but eight miles as the crow flies and forty minutes on the D train—if it was running express. And that summer, it never was.

A trek to one of the outer boroughs didn’t concern him. He flicked his wrist and the engine growled. “Hop on,” he said. I pressed my sandal onto the rubber-wrapped metal foot peg and slid on the back of the bike, pulling at the slithery fabric of my dress. “Hang tight,” he said as he revved the engine once more.

My hands—where to put them. Certain they’d give me away, I tried the silver hitch behind me on the saddle. No good; I’d fall. As they fluttered forward, I thought,
He will know if I hold him. He will know by my touch
. It was as though I had no memory of the hour before. Earlier, in the theater, we’d begun to rehearse the kiss at the end of the play, the one we’d always marked or skipped over, a long kiss during the narrator’s speech about death and drowning. Robin wanted it passionate, extending well beyond what the script called for, and as we knelt on the itchy stage grass facing each other, she told him to grab me and he did.

On the bike, I touched his back lightly, then placed my hands at the sides of his torso. We waved goodbye to Robin and Santina and the crew, and took off down Eleventh Avenue, past the warehouses and tire shops.

A few blocks later, he turned right toward the river. At the stoplight, his legs dropped, decisive, to either side of the bike. He reached back, grabbed my arms, and placed them firmly around his chest, pressing twice so they’d stay put. And then, as quick as air, we swerved into the fast lane of the West Side Highway. If we hadn’t—if the light had been a little longer or he’d hesitated, taking time perhaps to adjust the mirror or run his fingers through his hair—he would have heard a sharp intake of breath before I gave over and let myself sink into his back. Before I surrendered. Then I knew. It wasn’t my hands that were telltale; it was my heart, pounding against the thin white cotton shirt he wore that night. I tried to slow it down, to slow my breath.
He’ll know, he’ll know how you feel
. It didn’t occur to me that he already did.

I knew that if we spoke of it, everything would change. It was like a dream. And you know that if you tumble forward into it, there will be no way back.

It was late, but the traffic was heavy. He dodged the taxis and potholes, and I held on, my knees wedged against his. Near the FDR Drive, he took the long, lean ramp up to the Brooklyn Bridge. The railings and cables were lit for the night. The sky was velvet. No stars. And the city moon, days from being full for the second time that month, scattered itself over the oily current of the East River like a soothsayer bestowing gifts. The wind flapped his shirt back, the cotton silk on my skin. I closed my eyes. And somewhere on the bridge, I rested my head against him and listened to the hum of the night.

When we hit the Brooklyn side, I directed him from Adams to Flatbush. We passed Borough Hall and Junior’s Deli (still open, bustling and bright), the shuttered storefronts, and the Beaux Arts façade of the Academy of Music. And when I saw the domed clock tower where Atlantic meets Flatbush, I knew it was almost over. I wanted to keep going, to take him farther into Brooklyn, all the way to Brighton and the sea.

“Here,” I said at Fourth Avenue. “Turn.”

Union Street was wide and empty, and I pointed to a brownstone identical to many on the block. He parked the bike, and I slid off, dizzy from the speed, my eyes dry, my hair tangled. We stood close but apart, under the glow of a streetlamp, and he began to rock the toe of his sneaker against the curb.

“This is where you live.”

“It is. I feel like I have sea legs.” My face was warm, and I realized that if I said anything else, it wouldn’t make sense.

But he nodded; it had been a long ride. Then I saw him look up to the door of the brownstone.

“I had a thought,” he said. “What if we leave for Peapack on Thursday night after rehearsal instead of Friday morning. You know … spend the night, have the whole day?”

On Friday, the crew would be in the theater, and we were going to New Jersey to rehearse on the hill near his mother’s house.

“I thought I’d check with you before floating it by Robin,” he continued. “Whatever you think …”

I fiddled with the bronze cuff, twisting it on my wrist. He watched.

“I think it’s a great idea,” I said slowly. “Are there horses there?”

“Yeah … there’re horses.” He looked at me as if he was trying to recall something. He’d stopped fooling with his sneaker and we were still.

“So how do you feel?” I asked. “About the play?” Although it wouldn’t be reviewed and the setting was humble, it was a big deal. His New York debut and mine, and though we didn’t know it, his swan song.

Although he’d mentioned that many of his cousins would be at the opening, as well as his mother’s friend Mr. Tempelsman, and this made him happy, I knew his mother wouldn’t be there, and neither would his sister. “They’re on the Vineyard.” I was quiet when he told me. Were the rumors true? Did his mother disapprove? But he quickly brushed it off. It was better this way, he said. If they came, it would only cause a fuss.

“How do you feel?” I asked again.

I imagined him not as he was, standing before me by a skinny tree on Union Street, but in his costume: the wool cap and leather satchel, and the striped schoolboy tie askew on the collar of his wrinkled button-down. It was hard to make John look nerdy, but onstage, in our play, he did. He’d perfected the hangdog look, and in a blue blazer sizes too small, he stooped.

He was looking up at the tree, his lips pursed. “I feel good. I feel okay. I mean, I’m nervous—with you I’m fine.” He nodded, as if trying to convince himself. “But that speech I have about Kerrigan shooting the cows, sometimes I blank. Even though I say the words, I’m out of the scene.”

I smiled. He was wonderful in the role. “Listen,” I said. “I’m going to tell you something an acting teacher once told me. If you’re in trouble—don’t just keep going. Stop, take a breath, and look into my eyes. It will ground you. It may feel like it’s forever, but it’s not, it’s just a moment. And you’ll remember. I promise. You’ll know where you are.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding again. “I’ll try. But same for you. Deal?”

“Deal.”

I reached out my hand and he took it. Our eyes locked. I wanted to hold him, to be back on the bike, but when my hand slipped down again, we were no longer smiling and he spoke so low I could barely hear him.

“It’s heady stuff. Very intense being with you like this each night.” It was an offering, a way into new territory, and when I stayed quiet, sure and unsure of his meaning, deciding whether to dodge, play dumb, or lunge headlong, he kept on. “I don’t mean in a bad way. I just—”

“Oh, yes,” I began, astonished by my duplicity. “Friel is amazing!” And I continued to rattle on breathlessly about the magnificence of playwrights and the transcendence of the theater, before I turned to climb the steps of the brownstone, leaving him to his journey alone across the bridge to Manhattan.

A week after the play closed, the motorbike was stolen, and in September the police found it abandoned in a field somewhere on Staten Island. I mourned the idea of the shiny new machine, but John seemed indifferent. He decided not to claim it. “Anyhow, they’re dangerous,” he said. “A good thing it’s out of my hands.” And the following spring, when we were together and I no longer retreated up brownstone steps away from him, the motorcycle, whether it was red like I remember or not, became part of the story we told each other. “I didn’t care that it was stolen,” he would announce. “I bought it to woo you, and it was worth every penny.” He said this, whether it was true or not, always adding, “I can’t believe I took you all the way to Brooklyn, and you didn’t even invite me up for a glass of water!”