Come to the Edge: A Memoir (11 page)

“W
hat’s your favorite New York memory?” he asked. We’d met at noon on the steps of his old school under the guise that I would help him find a present for his sister. And now, hours later, we had walked in circles all over the Upper West Side. It was four days before Christmas, and the city was crammed with tourists and shoppers. The tree sellers were out in full force, drinking steamy coffee at their makeshift stands, and the sky was clear, although the news called for snow.

It had been more than four months since the play had closed, since he’d kissed me by the McDonnells’ horse barn, and we’d seen each other only a handful of times.

We searched that afternoon in small artisan shops I knew on Amsterdam Avenue. In one, with room for only a handful of patrons, dull light flooded the floor-to-ceiling windows, and every crevice was packed with pillows and textiles, mohair coats, sheepskin jackets, and imported leather bags. “Gold or silver?” he said, studying a tray of earrings in one of the cases. Before I could answer, he held one to my cheek—a small silver hand with a coral bead. He kept it there, cold teasing my skin, and leaned back to assess it. “I say silver. Like the moon.” He bought a different pair for his sister and, months later, would give me the wrapped box with the silver hands.

When we stopped for lunch, he told me he was applying to law school, something that his family had encouraged and he had waffled about over the summer. Now, though not exactly thrilled or even certain of his future as a lawyer, he had decided. After hot chocolate, he asked about the play I was doing at Juilliard—one that was closing that night—how my love life was, if there were still problems, if I was happy. It was territory we had covered before.

On an August night during the run of the play, we’d gone to Central Park. To talk, we’d said. It was a perfect night. The punishing humidity of July was gone, and there were stars in the city sky. He carried a paper sack with a couple of beers he’d bought at a corner store on Columbus, and as he walked, they chimed against each other. By the Ramble, he took my hand, and we walked off the path toward the lake. There was a large outcropping there, and we climbed it. I wore wedged espadrilles, and so I wouldn’t fall, he led me over the pocked ridges to the farthest spot.

We sat for hours by the water on the big rock near the Ramble. Our own world, he said. And under a moon no longer blue—as it had been the week before by the horse barn in New Jersey—but quartered, words we had long held tumbled out. How he felt, how I did. Our lips bruised from kissing, we promised we would be together, but not, I told him, before we ended the relationships we were in. When we left the park with the night half over, clouds had begun to blanket the sky and everything seemed simple.

The play closed two days later. Photographers loitered outside, we got congratulatory telegrams from Friel’s agents at ICM, and there was heated talk of moving the production to a bigger house for a commercial run. “I’ll be guided by you,” he told me privately as we weighed the decision. Before the performance on closing night, we stood for the last time in our costumes in an empty room on the third floor. He gave me a first edition of Synge’s
Riders to the Sea
, and I gave him Edna O’Brien’s
A Fanatic Heart
. Books are not always a customary closing gift, but we had both brought them.

At the closing-night party at Fanelli’s on Prince Street, he kissed my shoulders when no one was looking. “Don’t make me wait too long,” he whispered. “Sort things out, but come back to me.” I was leaving for Maine the next day, to a friend’s house on Vinalhaven—a self-imposed exile, without phone or electricity, that I presumed would bring me the resolve to break with the man I’d been with for almost three years and whom I still loved.

It was weeks before I saw John again. I was in rehearsal for a PBS broadcast celebrating Juilliard’s eightieth birthday, and we agreed to meet afterward by the Dante statue near Lincoln Center. When we got off the phone, he ran to an open window, his roommate later told me, and yelled to anyone within earshot, “Christina’s free … the girl I’m going to marry is free!” But I wasn’t; he had kept the vow, and I hadn’t.

All through dinner at the Ginger Man, I waited for the perfect moment to tell him. I watched his face in the candlelight, felt his pleasure at seeing me, laughed at his exploits since I’d seen him—tales of Hyannis and the Vineyard. I’d missed the happiness of being with him—the newness, the edge of ease and tension between us—and I knew that once I told him, that would all change. Greedy, I wanted more of the night. As in a spell self-cast, for hours I made myself forget what I had come to say.

We made our way to the park again, this time far from any path, to the darkened south end. He laid his jacket on the ground and waited for me to sit first. It was just after Labor Day—still green, still warm, with a few precocious leaves skittering about. “It never feels like this,” he said as he held me, his face open. “I should tell you,” I finally began, and wound my way awkwardly through the words I’d rehearsed hours earlier. Something about owing it to the relationship. I left out the part where, a week before, when I’d gotten back from Maine, Brad had fought for me, and that his apartment—an actor’s usual disarray of laundry, scripts, and dust—had sparkled. The worn yellow floor had shone, and he had bought flowers. I left out the part where he’d said, “He’ll leave you. One day he’ll leave you.” And that somewhere deep inside, I was afraid this was true.

I believed I was doing the right thing, but as I spoke, my voice suddenly sounded hollow. What I really wanted, although I didn’t know it, was for John to make me see how wrong I was. To grab me as he had in the play and tell me he couldn’t live without me. Instead, he listened. He was quiet for a while, then gracious. “I’m glad it got this far—at least I got you to the park again.” His face, shadowed by trees, was a cipher, and when I reached for him, he pulled back, leaped up, and ran out of the park. I called out, sure he was just over the hill, but there was no one. Frightened, I grabbed his jacket and found my way through a maze of bushes to the walkway by the drive. At Sixth Avenue, I caught up with him—his arm outstretched for a cab. He looked angry. “There’s nothing more to say,” he said, cutting me off and jumping into the cab I thought he’d hailed for me.

It was well after one a.m., and I was alone on Central Park South, save for a couple of fancy working girls who slouched across the street and traded cigarettes. It had happened so quickly, and there was so much I hadn’t said, but I watched the taillights travel up to Columbus Circle and disappear north onto Broadway.

A few weeks later, I heard that he’d gotten back with his girlfriend. In October, we met with Robin at the P & G bar on Amsterdam to look at pictures from the play. She gave us each an orange plastic flip-book of three-by-fives, and we went over the contact sheet with a magnifying glass, circling the others we liked in red pencil. When she left to use the pay phone, I asked him how he was. It was good things had worked out as they had, he answered coolly, fixing his eyes on the ceiling, the bar, the door—anything but my face—until Robin returned.

I buried myself in work: a leading role at school that fall and the PBS
Live from Lincoln Center
broadcast, in which, somewhat prematurely, I was cast as Blanche DuBois seducing the paperboy. Slipping into someone else’s skin had always been a saving grace for me, and it was then. Some days I succeeded in not thinking about him at all.

One day, I got a note from the head of the Drama Division asking to see me in his office. A summons, though not uncommon, was cause for trepidation. Michael Langham was an exacting director and a brilliant mind. During World War II, as a lieutenant with the Gordon Highlanders, he’d been captured near the Maginot Line and had spent five years in POW camps. There with the approval of the German guards (and fellow prisoners as actors) he had begun to direct plays. For many years, he’d served as the artistic director at the Stratford Festival in Canada, and later at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and his innovative productions of Shakespeare were renowned. Now in his mid-sixties, with a shock of silver hair, he was still dashing and often wore pink cashmere, as he did on that day.

His door was open. I knocked anyway.

“Come in.” I heard the clipped, familiar voice from inside. “Close the door behind you.”

I sat across from him in the low-ceilinged room, its walls lined with framed costume sketches and the wide desk between us. His eyes, sharp with thought, were a deep, changeable blue.

“So, what’s wrong with you, my dear?” he began, dispensing with small talk.

I’d lost weight in the past month, and I mentioned the cold I couldn’t shake.

“That’s not what I meant.” He was impatient. His eyes hadn’t left me, and he flexed his fingers under his chin. “You’re distracted. I saw your last performance. You had glow but not enough glitter.” As he spoke, I let my eyes wander up the curved cable pattern on the arm of his sweater. “I’ve spoken with your teachers. It’s apparent on the stage.”

I closed my eyes, mortified.
Not just Michael—the whole faculty
. I saw them seated around a long, oval table discussing my personal life. The year before, I’d been let in on a secret. Two students in the class ahead had broken into the office one night and read the files, recounting that the notes on each of us included not just missed classes and lazy consonants but who was with whom and in what extracurriculars they indulged.

“Do you drink?”

I shook my head.

“Do you do drugs?”

“Well, I—”

“Are you addicted?”

“No,” I said quickly. Michael had been sober for years, but there were rumors of his indiscretions. One in particular, with a red-haired actress in Minneapolis, that had almost ended his marriage.

“Still, it’s something.” He got up and moved around the desk, his hands clasped tight behind his back, his head proceeding slightly in front of his body. “I believe it’s love,” he concluded with some distaste, as if I were an awkward bit of staging to be solved. “You’re addicted. I believe you’re in love with love!”

I burst into tears and began to apologize.

Michael handed me a handkerchief from his pocket. He didn’t require details, and for that I was grateful. It was about the work. He patted me lightly on the back and told me to take care of things. “We have great hopes for you,” he said before I reached the door. I turned and saw that his face had softened. There was a rim of red wetness around his jeweled eyes, a sort of kindness.

At the end of November, I got an invitation to John’s annual birthday bash, this time at a club in Midtown. It was a curt, breezy note, something about losing my address. You can, of course, bring a date, he wrote. I went alone, and when I saw him through the crowd, laughing easily, surrounded by friends, I knew he had moved on. And I was sure of something else—I had made a huge mistake that night in the park. It had taken me that long to know. As I left the party, there were flurries in the night air, but they melted before they hit the pavement. I wondered if everything that had happened that summer had meant nothing, if it had just been a mirage of the play, a trick of the theater.

A smaller voice said,
Wait
.

Then in December, I ran into him at a Christmas party in the East Twenties. He’d come with his girlfriend, and I was meeting Brad later, but at some point, we found ourselves in a corner of the kitchen, and the steely awkwardness that had been there all fall had vanished. We flirted. The light in the room was bright and we weren’t alone, but it felt as if we were. And before I left, he asked if I would meet him the next day. He needed help picking out a gift for his sister.

“Favorite memory?” I repeated the question.

After lunch, we wandered all afternoon near the planetarium, past the stores on Columbus and then down to Lincoln Center. Now we were on Broadway again—walking each other back and forth between Seventy-ninth Street, where my bike was locked, and Eighty-sixth, where his apartment was. It was after four and we kept putting off saying goodbye. As we walked, our breath came out in short white puffs.

My hands were cold; I’d forgotten gloves and he offered his. Stitched brown leather and fuzzy on the inside.

“Favorite now … or of all time?” I put the gloves on. Even with space at the fingers, they were warm. I kept one for myself and handed him back the other.

“Childhood. The best one.”

I closed my eyes, and I was there. Running up the steps in a cherry velvet dress during intermission at
The Nutcracker
to touch the beaded metal curtain that hung by the tall windows across from the bar. I’d turned my back and pretend to look out on the giant courtyard. Careful at first, I’d make the beads sway—the weight on my fingers a pleasure—but when I saw, balconies below, that the curtain rippled into a full-on spin, I’d get bolder, my touch now a jangle, until a guard or my mother would stop me. It was as much a part of the tradition as the Sugar Plum Fairy or the Christmas tree that grew.

Sunday dinners with my kindergarten best friend at a Chinese restaurant on Third Avenue. Wide round tables at half-moon booths, a fountain of magic rainbow-colored water at the entrance, and uniformed waiters who’d load up our Shirley Temples with maraschinos. We’d gnaw the stems and line them at our plates like twigs. Halfway through dinner and bored of our parents, we’d slide off the shiny vinyl banquettes to whisper secrets under the table. The starched tablecloth—a cave entrance—and our mothers’ legs poised, even in the darkness.

And skating at Rockefeller Center—always cold, always shadowy—but the music and hot chocolate were better than at Wollman Rink. Plus they had rental skates that didn’t make your ankles buckle.

“Well, Madam?” he persisted. Under our boots as we walked, the crunch of salt and ice.

“The World’s Fair,” I answered. “I’m almost five, and my mother’s in a beige suit and heels, very pregnant. I remember going with my father up to the highest deck of the observation tower—the one that’s still there and looks like a spaceship. We went in one of the small exposed elevators that rode up an outside track, but my mother stayed below. I held my father’s hand, and the whole time I could see her, but she got smaller and smaller. And when we reached the top, I could see the tip of the city over the trees, and my father leaned down and said he was proud of me. Then we went on It’s a Small World After All, and I got to sit between them in those little boats.”