Come to the Edge: A Memoir (21 page)

We had gone into the open sea without consulting anyone who knew the waters, without spray skirts, life jackets, or a bailer. And here we were, surviving, on our way to Treasure Beach with a single paddle and a soggy baseball cap. Fate had smiled on us.

As we passed the high part of the cliff, I looked up. Hawks were circling. I remembered the woman who had jumped to join her lover, the water, and death, and I thought,
No, that is not me. That
will not be me
. I repeated it to myself like a promise I would not betray. But I knew, in some small way, it was. That April morning, whether I admitted it or not, I had followed him every step of the way.

When we pulled into Great Pedro Bay an hour later, I was still shaken. John seemed fine, oblivious. As he pulled the kayak past the fishing skiffs to a fence near some old bikes, he whistled. Unlike me, he had left it all behind and was fully in the present—although he did make me promise not to tell his mother.

“But John, we could have died.”

I was angry and frightened, and I wanted him to know. I wanted him to hold me, to tell me that he was sorry, that it would never happen again, that he had been afraid, too. I wanted him to say something. Something to acknowledge that it was more than just a story or a jam we’d gotten out of. He was puttering around the boat, securing it for the night, and a group of children had gathered to watch. Setting down the rope, he glanced up at me for a moment before returning to his bowline knot.

“Yeah, Chief, but what a way to go.”

H
e gave me a card the first year we were together, a black-and-white drawing of lovers kissing, with the words “Girl’s Eye View/Boy’s Eye View” etched above their heads. The girl’s eyes are open, filled with doubt and excitement and the fevered anticipation of what comes next. In the tangle of her hair are a myriad of thoughts, wishes, and fears. The boy’s eyes are shut; he’s smack in the present. He has only one thought: “Who the hell knows?”

There were things he would say like mantras. They might have been passed along by someone wiser, someone who knew, his uncle, or his mother maybe. He’d say them to remind himself of human nature and the way of the world; that struggle wasn’t always the best path, but sometimes it was; and that whatever Fortune brought, it wasn’t because he thought himself superior. He had faults, like anyone, but never arrogance, never meanness, never snobbery. What he aimed for, and succeeded some days in attaining, was the remarkable equipoise of humility and confidence that is grace.

It goes with the territory, he would say. This applied, I learned, to the small scrutinies he faced daily—to the press, stories true and untrue, to people’s behavior at times glassy-eyed or grasping. To good tables in restaurants, exciting parties, great vacations, velvet ropes parting, and the occasional bump to first class. It also applied, I would learn, to the attentions of other women.

Once we were alone in a room and a girl came in. It was one of the last performances of
Winners
, and we were on the top floor of the Irish Arts Center in the room where we’d meet to run lines before the stage manager called places. That night, we stood close to the brick wall talking, the old floorboards washed in the honeyed push of light before sunset. The girl came in, beautiful in chinos and sneakers. Later, when we asked, no one seemed to know her or how she’d gotten past the lobby. The audience was invitation-only, and it seemed she had talked her way in and snuck up the stairs. With pale, thin hair, she looked like a young Jessica Lange, but there was something in her eyes, tilted and feral, that made her strange. She’d seen his picture in the paper, she said, the skin at her collarbone flushed magenta. And she just had to meet him.

He tried to be polite. When that didn’t work, he kept moving his back to her. But she stood—waiting, circling, rapt—with no acknowledgment that I was there, in the room, not two feet from her. I watched, fascinated. “Excuse me,” he said, with his eyes locked on me as if that would make her go. She touched his hip, and he startled. Her voice was soft. “You have a hole in your pocket. I can sew that for you.” Gently at first, she began to pull at the lining until it became a mission. That’s when he turned. He was angry. He told her to leave—this was a private conversation, he said, and she was being rude.

Before she reached the door, she looked back, and I saw that there was something satisfied about her. And the heat that had begun on her chest had risen like wildfire to her face.

“Can you believe that?” he said after the door closed.

“Do you know her?” I asked.

“Never seen her before in my life.”

So I knew from the start that this happened, that this also went with the territory. But it hardly mattered then. It was the beginning—the time when you’re sure, when you know by the way he looks at you across the room, by the way he stands or says your name, that he is yours.

More than a year later, I asked him to make me a promise. We’d been away for the weekend at a resort, and a girl had followed him around—thrown herself at him, we called it then. She wasn’t a movie star or a model. She was tall and plain, someone I’d known vaguely in grade school. He showed no interest, and I don’t know why it bothered me so much, but it did. There were other things: numbers pressed into his hand whether my head was turned or not, items in gossip columns. Some we’d laugh over; others I wondered about.

After that trip, I knew I didn’t like what it did to me. I didn’t want to be looking over my shoulder, to be always guessing what was true and what wasn’t. I wanted to trust unless there was some reason not to. One afternoon in his kitchen, I asked him to tell me if he was ever unfaithful, if there was ever anyone else. He agreed. He understood, he said, but he wanted me to promise something as well: that if there was ever anyone for me, someone who meant nothing—a tryst—I not tell him. Other girlfriends had, and he didn’t like it.

“You want me
not
to tell you?” I almost laughed, amazed at the difference between us.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t want to know. I know you like me better than anyone, and I wouldn’t want to know. If you cheated, I would take you back.”

On a December night, long after that conversation in the kitchen, he asked for time.

It was after the summer we lived in LA, in the house by the beach with the shutters and the roses. When we returned to New York, John started his last year of law school, and I was cast in
A Matter of Degrees
, an independent film that was being shot in Providence. I played a seductress torn between two men—one dark and brooding, the other adoring—and made a lifelong friend out of Arye Gross, the talented actor who was playing the adoring one. While I was away in Providence, there was a phone call—a slight pulling back, which I attributed to distance. I knew all would be right, as it always was, once we were back in the same city.

Now I was wedged in a corner of the couch in his living room, and he was on the floor at my feet, the glare from the table lamp on his troubled face. His back was curved, his hair shorter than usual, and when he spoke, I thought I’d never seen him look so young. He was happy with me, with us—
the summer had been so happy—
but he wanted to see other people. Not forever. For a time. He knew where we were headed, and that was part of it.

I couldn’t look away from him, and I wanted to, and though the couch was deep and the cushions sank, I tried to sit straight, as if the effort would mean something. I tried to reason, to argue, but when he reached for me, I cried. Was it someone …? He stopped me before I could finish. “No, it’s nothing like that. I love you.” He couldn’t imagine spending his life with anyone else, he confessed tearfully, as though it pained him to say it. And there was a connection in his mind with this time apart—this freedom of months—and the future he said we had.

Every good man goes down fighting
. It was one of the things he said, and I’d never liked it. He would toss it off, breezy and knowing, when a friend got married or a roguish compadre settled down. Or whisper it loudly, as he held me down and tickled me. But that night, he said it the way you’d admit to a secret. Once, under his breath with his head bowed, and then as he looked up at me, his ankles crossed in front of him. I told him I wasn’t going to fight him or trick him or make him do anything. If we got married, it would be because we both wanted to, and he would have to ask me.

I refused to believe it then—that saying of his. And for a long time after. But he was, of course, partly right. Some men, good or otherwise, do go down fighting. They are won without knowing how they’ve been taken.

At this point in the story, it’s best if the girl storms off in a fury or, better yet, takes a lover. I did neither. He had his sayings, and I had mine, and “Love conquers all” was hardwired in me then like catechism.

A gay friend who knew us both suggested that I try the time-honored tradition of getting pregnant. “Don’t be shocked,” he said, smirking. “People do it all the time. He’s crazy about you. He just needs a push.” The fortune-teller pored over his chart. “It’s Neptune,” she said. “Delusion is heavily aspected for some time.”

I confided in a worldly older friend. Though married to her second husband, with a Park Avenue life, she still carried a torch for her first. Years had passed, but she still loved him. “Give him rope,” she advised. “Let him get it out of his system now.” By that time, he’d met Daryl Hannah. By that time, there had been an item in the columns that he had called to refute—something he never did. When I asked him, he was evasive. “We’re just friends. She doesn’t even live here. And anyway, she has a boyfriend.”

Whatever time we had decided on in December, it lasted six weeks. By the end of January, he said he was desperate to see me, and I realized I wasn’t inclined toward sharing. That winter, there were passionate reunions and love letters left on balconies. We fought like we never had, and in ways we were closer. But by spring, confusion returned. I had found things—a bent pair of cat-eye glasses, a Filofax, an earring—and in May, after he graduated, we said once again we would take time apart. We still saw each other, but that’s what we said.

There were distractions. A dreamy actor who took me to French restaurants in the West Fifties and kept his Marlboros tucked in the sleeve of his T-shirt. A musician who saw auras and sent notes with wildflowers pressed in the pages. An older, upbeat Wall Street hotshot who kept saying,
What do you see in him, anyway? He’s not strong enough for you
. And when I was offered a part in a new translation of
The Misanthrope
, one that would take me out of town for four months—first to the La Jolla Playhouse in California and then to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago—I jumped at it. The production, updated to Hollywood, was to be directed by Robert Falls. The set, inspired by a
Vogue
photo shoot at Madonna’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills, would feature gym equipment and a vast closet filled with identical black lace-up boots. Kim Cattrall was cast as the temptress Célimène, and this time I was Éliante, the adoring one.

We met for dinner before I left. I chose a dress, black with small roses and a pencil skirt, that I knew he would remember, and when he whistled up at my balcony, a straw hat in his hand, I smiled. “You look like Huck Finn,” I called down. We were on our way to Café des Artistes but ended up at the All State instead. At dinner, he ran his hand down my back, and closed his eyes. “What are you doing to me,” he murmured. “You still make me melt.” I had changed the outgoing message on my phone machine recently, and when he said it was needlessly provocative, I smiled like a cat. He told me about studying for the bar, “a mother beyond belief,” and that his days and nights were like a monk’s. He wasn’t seeing anyone, he offered.
Why then, were we apart?
I didn’t say this. I blinked. The spell of the evening was too potent.

We walked up Broadway in the soft June rain, we kissed in doorways, and he bought me irises pressed in damp paper.

I took that night with me, one he later called pure pleasure. I took it with me that summer, through phone calls of back-and-forth and misunderstanding and possibility. Through distance, through rumor.

I took it with me, until frayed and worn, it no longer was enough.

“Are you still there?”

Before I answered, I held the phone against my chest, trying not to imagine him where he was—on the white couch in his living room in New York, with his feet braced against the coffee table and all the lights out. I was in Chicago, in a short-term rental on North LaSalle that the Goodman had leased, boxes all around and Levolor blinds open. It was early evening at the beginning of November, and there’d been a strange bout of heat. But when I think of it now, the whole fall had been like that, bright, hot days one after another. The play had just closed, but I’d stayed on. I’d been cast in an independent film that was being shot in Chicago. Arye was in it, too, along with Courtney Cox.

I had seen John sporadically that summer and fall—at the Four Seasons in LA after he took the bar exam, a long weekend at the La Valencia in La Jolla, a smattering of days in New York between the California and Chicago runs, and then, in October, a night at the Drake, when we’d both tried to end things for good but couldn’t.

“I’m here,” I said finally, playing with the phone cord.

He told me I sounded different, distant, but really I had cried all day. And if I sounded distant—if I managed any sangfroid—it was practiced. I’d talked to two friends in New York before he called, and they had coached me: black or white, yes or no, fish or cut bait. On the yellow pad near the phone were words to remind me of what I’d already resolved, what I knew. But it wasn’t only his presence that had a hypnotic effect on me; it was his voice as well.

“Are you still going to California?” he asked warily. After the night at the Drake that had been so painful, I was finally able to risk losing him. I’d flown to New York on my day off, and we met in Battery Park. We walked by the river, and I told him he was free to choose whatever he wanted, but I needed things to change, to move forward. I could no longer be in this limbo; he meant too much to me. And if they didn’t change, if he couldn’t—I was moving to LA when the movie was done.

He’d called that night not to tell me what he’d decided. He wanted me to meet him in Virginia three days later, while the weather was still good, to hike in Shenandoah National Park. He knew I had a break in filming, and he would bring everything, even boots. I just needed to show up. The friends in New York who gave advice would have said he was buying time.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“You can ask me anything.”

“Why do you want to see me?”

“It helps me to see you,” he said slowly. “I don’t know … I think of you. I walk by your old apartment, and I think of you. I can’t imagine you not being here. Or you being here without me. You’re my best friend. I’m closer to you than anyone.”

He pushed a while longer for the trip to the mountains, then changed his tack. “Just promise you’ll sleep on it. You can even decide when you wake up that morning. There’ll be a ticket for you at the airport and I’ll be there regardless. I won’t count on it, but I’ll be glad if you come.”

He knew me well. When pressed, I was stubborn. But if I felt like there was a choice, chances were I would acquiesce. In that way, we were alike.

I told him I would think about it.

“Wait. Don’t get off,” he said.

“What is it?”