Come to the Edge: A Memoir (9 page)

He’d be gone for seven months, and it would be longer than that before I saw him again. There were postcards—one of a masked Nepalese demon, all skulls and silk; the other of temples he remembered I longed to see. And, before he left for Bangkok, a letter describing Everest Base Camp and a dream in which I’d appeared. “Now what does this mean?” he offered in orange marker on tattered blue aerogram paper. It was a letter I looked at sometimes, smiling at the rangy script and trying to decipher a section at the bottom obscured by a mysterious bronze stain.
Now what does this mean?

While he was in India, my relationship with an actor in the class ahead of me got serious. Bradley Whitford was from Wisconsin and he was irresistible. He would later go on to fame as Josh Lyman in
The West Wing
. We’d meet between classes on the Juilliard roof, and at night he would ferry me on the handlebars of his bike to his apartment twenty blocks north. Lanky, sweet, and original, he was blessed with a rapier wit, but more lethal to me were his gifts as an actor. I had never gone out with an actor before, and our fights were frequent and passionate, ignited by a shift in mood or a slight. They were also over quickly. After one stormy argument in Sheep’s Meadow, he carved our names in a park bench near Tavern on the Green; and when he played Astrov, or as Orlando, gushed, “But heavenly Rosalind!” I hoped he was thinking of me.

I pushed the drive around the park out of my head. Like the weather that night, it was defined by exception. I decided I had made it up—not the smooth road or the candlelight or the warm night air—those I knew had happened—but the sense that it was something more.

He hadn’t kissed me that night, and I hadn’t asked him upstairs, although we had lingered awkwardly when I got out of his car. We hadn’t crossed the line, but it was there, unspoken. Like the scent of warm rain on pavement.

Falling

They talked some and perhaps dreamed some,
because they were young and
the day was beautiful.

—
BRIAN FRIEL

I
had known him almost ten years by a June day in 1985. It was a warm Saturday—the kind of day New Yorkers live for. The sky was clear; there was a slight breeze and no trace of the humidity we knew would come. On days like those, you dream, and your step is light on the pavement.

After rehearsal at Robin Saex’s apartment on Christopher Street, John got his bike and walked me, as he usually did, the couple of blocks to the subway at Sheridan Square. Passing the bustle of gay bars and leather shops, we stood for a moment under the hand-painted sign outside McNulty’s as the heady smells of hazelnut and bergamot wafted onto the street. Robin, our director and friend from college, drank the strong vanilla tea they sold there, and now, after four and a half months of sporadic gatherings at her apartment, both John and I were hooked. When rehearsals ended, we’d sometimes stop in the store with the low tin ceilings and the burlap bags of coffee and glass canisters of tea from all over the world.

Since the end of January, we had begun to read through the play every few weeks. Everyone was busy and we met when we could. Because there was no production in the works, it was an open-ended venture—more like playing around, something we did for fun. Robin was directing her own projects, in addition to assisting prominent directors at Circle Rep and the Manhattan Theatre Club. I had finished my third year at Juilliard and was juggling auditions with a pastiche of jobs—paralegal work, catering, and coat checking—to pay the bills. John was busy, too. He was working for the City of New York in the Office of Economic Development. He was also weighing whether or not to apply to law school that fall.

For me, these meetings were a relief from the rigidity of Juilliard. Legend has it that Robin Williams, an alumnus, called it boot camp, and on many days that’s what it felt like. For John, they were a way to hold on to his love of the theater. Robin Saex knew that he missed acting. Although he had majored in history at Brown, he’d appeared in plays there with authors as varied as Shakespeare, Pinero, Rabe, and O’Casey. She sensed that we would work well together and often spoke of finding the right vehicle. The play she found was
Winners
. It was a perfect fit.

Brian Friel is one of Ireland’s most prominent playwrights. He was born in Omagh, county Tyrone, in 1929 but grew up in Derry. His more notable plays include
Philadelphia, Here I Come!; Translations;
and
Dancing at Lughnasa
, which would receive the Tony for Best Play in 1992. In 1980, along with actor Stephen Rea, he had co-founded Field Day, a theater company and literary movement that sought to redefine Irish cultural identity. He also happened to be one of my favorite playwrights. At twenty, while traveling through Dublin, I had attended the opening night of
Faith Healer
at the Abbey Theatre, and when, by chance, I was introduced to him, without thinking I bowed slightly. It was as if I’d met a rock star.

Winners
had premiered at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1967 before coming to Broadway. It’s really one part of a two-part play,
Lovers: Winners and Losers. Losers
is about a middle-aged couple married for many years, but
Winners
is about young love. It’s often performed on its own, as we did in our production.

Maggie Enright and Joseph Brennan are seventeen and seventeen and a half, respectively, and Catholic. It’s a warm day in June, a Saturday, and they are studying for final exams on Ardnageeha, the hill above their town. Mag is “intelligent but scattered” and Joe dreams of becoming a math teacher. They’re to be married in three weeks because Mag is pregnant. As they look out over Ballymore, they fight, they sleep, they laugh, and they tease; they profess their love and talk about the future.

When we reached the subway stop at Sheridan Square, John suggested that we enjoy the day. He would walk me to Fourteenth Street, and I could get the subway there. Usually we parted here. He’d get on his bike, and I would head to Brooklyn, where I’d moved the month before, or to my boyfriend’s on the Upper West Side. But today we got ice cream. He ordered a pistachio double scoop, and I got coffee swirl. As the woman at the register handed him his change, she seemed suddenly flummoxed.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“John.”

“John what?”

“Haag. John Haag.”

“Spell it,” she insisted, her eyes narrowing.

“H-a-a-g.”

“You positive? You related to the General?”

He told her he was a Democrat, and we made for the door.

“Wait!” she cried out, trying to enlist me. “Do you know who he looks like? I mean, who does he look like if you didn’t know him?”

“Richard Gere,” I deadpanned. “Definitely Richard Gere.”

“Oh no, he looks like John-John!”

Outside in the sun, we laughed. “You need a persona,” I said, as he moved to unlock the heavy chains that bound his bike to a nearby street sign. He handed me his cone and nodded. When he turned his back I thought,
He has to do this all the time
. I must have known it in the years before, but the worlds of high school and college had been cocoons of a sort and it was only there, by the newsstand at Sheridan Square, that I grasped that life, in the smallest of ways, even getting ice cream, was very different for him.

“You may be right about that,” he said, taking his cone back, the bike balanced with one hand. “But Richard Gere … I’m way better-looking.” He winked, then bit into his pistachio.

“How’s yours?” he asked as we walked.

“Yum,” I said. “Perfection.”

“Mine tastes a little funny. Smell it.”

We stopped, and he held out his cone. As I leaned in, he took the chance to dab my nose with green. “Hey!” I said, looking up. He was thrilled that I had fallen for his trick, one that had been played on him by countless cousins when he was young. I brushed the ice cream from my nose, and we continued up Seventh Avenue, passing cafés and secondhand shops and looking in windows. We talked about our grandfathers. He told me that Joe Kennedy had prized mystery in a woman, and I smiled, imagining myself a siren. I told him that my Irish grandfather had been a rancher who had moonlighted as a Prohibition bootlegger and kept stills in Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota. He liked that. “We have something in common,” he said. “Word is mine was, too.” Larger territory, I suggested slyly.

My grandmother had died that May near the Nebraska homestead where my mother had been born. I’d gone back for the funeral. I told him about the land that seemed to stretch forever, land that was as wide and as rolling as the sea. I described the shock of its beauty—how you knew it in the roller-coaster dips of the dirt country roads and the burnt-yellow fields broken only by barbed wire, cattle, and a windmill here and there; by the massive snowdrifts in winter; and, in spring, by the lilac shelterbelts, some twelve feet high, planted during the Dust Bowl to keep the soil down. He stopped for a moment and with surprising urgency said, “You know the heartland. You don’t understand how lucky you are.”

I remember being struck by the phrase, its quaintness, and realizing that I didn’t know him as well as I had thought. I was sure I saw something in his eyes then, a yearning for a kind of life he had missed, for spaciousness. But when I look back now, I think of the black-and-white photographs of his father and his uncle Bobby, shirtsleeves rolled up, receiving hands reaching to them from the crowds, the faces weeping, smiling, believing. I think of the weight of those images and imagine that the call of service might have been there for him—was always there for him—even as he walked the city on a warm spring day with a girl he had known for years.

By Fourteenth Street, we had finished our ice cream. He asked if I wanted to keep going, and for no reason, we cut over to Sixth Avenue. The incidental music to our production was all early Beatles—
Rubber Soul
and
Help!
—and as we walked, we sang, mangling lyrics to “I’m Looking Through You” and “Ticket to Ride.” We left the Village, with its kaleidoscope of lanes and avenues, and the buildings grew higher and the streets quieter. In 1985, that span of blocks had not yet been gentrified. Bed Bath & Beyond, Filene’s, Burlington Coat Factory, and the crowds they engendered were a thing of the future. On that day in June, the streets were ours, and the city looked new. At the Twenty-third Street stop, he didn’t leap on his bike and I didn’t say goodbye. We didn’t even think about it.

Earlier, during rehearsal, Robin had informed us that she’d found the right venue for the play. We’d be performing it in early August in a seventy-five-seat black box theater at the Irish Arts Center, a nonprofit cultural institution in Hell’s Kitchen. There would be six performances for an invitation-only audience. John didn’t want any publicity and Robin had ended an association with another theater when an item was leaked to Page Six. We were both excited about the news and discussed it as we walked north. It meant that in July, we would begin rehearsing five nights a week.

We passed through Herald Square—lines converging and the noise and color of traffic—and kept on going, through the Garment District and past the Broadway theaters. Finally, we found ourselves at Columbus Circle, flushed and fifty blocks from where we’d started. The sun was going down behind the Coliseum. I looked up past the monument of the famed explorer that stands in the center of the circle and took in the fact that we had not stopped talking for the entire walk. Now, at Merchants’ Gate, the southwestern entrance to Central Park, we were quiet.

It had gotten cooler, and I braced my arms around my waist while we waited for the uptown bus. “That was fun,” I heard him say, but his voice was somber. We looked away from each other and into the roundabout of cabs.

“Yes, that was fun,” I said. I was not the kind of girl who found tramping fifty blocks—or anything even remotely athletic—fun, but it had been.

He turned back to me. “Well … see you next week,” he said, brushing his lips against my cheek, and before I could climb the steps of the bus that had come too soon, he had gotten on his bike and was gone.

From the window, I watched as he weaved through the traffic. With my forehead to the glass, I followed the swerves and the zigzags until I lost sight of him.

Why is my heart beating so fast? Why am I so happy? And why, in God’s name, did I walk so far? Well, maybe I do have a little crush on him, but I can handle it, I can enjoy it. It’s just a feeling, that’s all. Nothing has to happen. Nothing will happen. He’s my friend, and we’ve known each other so long. If anything were going to happen, it would have happened already. And anyway, he couldn’t possibly feel the same way about me
.

Thoughts rushed in—fear and pleasure at once. I talked them down as I rode north on Central Park West to my boyfriend’s apartment, a ground-floor studio with bars on the windows and light from an airshaft. I thought I was safe.

No matter how many times you fall in love, it always comes at you sideways. It always catches you by surprise.

After more than twenty years, it’s strange to read my script of
Winners
. With the highlighted chunks and dog-eared pages and penciled-in stage directions, it could have been any script from that time in my life. But this one I saved. This one made it through the years and the many apartments and the shuffling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York and all the places in between, the constant shifting that makes up the vagabond life of an actor. For a time, I kept it with other scripts, old photographs, opening-night cards, cast lists, and telegrams in a wooden chest that had belonged to my great-great-grandmother on my father’s side.

Ann Dargan had come from county Cork during the great famine, a spinster alone on a sailing ship with all her belongings in the humble chest. On the ship, she met a man from the north with two small girls and a wife. The wife died of fever, as many did on those voyages, and before they reached the Port of New York, Ann married this stranger called McIntosh. They moved to the hills of western Pennsylvania—green hills that looked much like the ones they’d left. They farmed the land that was pocked with stones and raised the girls and had five more children of their own, one of them my great-grandmother. I liked the story, and I kept the chest.

The papers were in no particular order, and I found the script buried at the bottom under an old tax return. The binding had split, and the last quarter of the play was missing. But I knew how it ended.

Winners
is a play about first love, and although we were young when we performed it, this wasn’t the first time for either of us. I had just turned twenty-five; John was months shy of it. But we weren’t that much older than Friel’s characters, and like them, we’d grown up together. We also shared their traits. I could be studious and overly serious, like Joe. I sulked when I was hurt, like Mag, and talked a blue streak when nervous. John had Mag’s impulsiveness and love of a colorful tale. And he smoked the odd cigarette now and then. Like Joe, he could tease and joke himself out of any fight. He would explode in anger and strong words, but soon it would be over and forgotten for him, and he’d be baffled if you didn’t feel that way, too. And much like Joe, he had a vulnerability, which was at times difficult for him to express—a kind of loneliness and a sense of being separate no matter who else was around. Because he loved people and had a wealth of friends, this wasn’t always apparent, but I suspect that anyone who knew him well saw it, and loved him for it.

One of my favorite parts of the play is when Joe tells Mag how he feels about her. Throughout the morning, he has teased, scolded, and ignored her, but when he is certain she’s asleep, he leans over and gently brushes the hair from her face. Then, covering her with his jacket, he reveals his heart. He tells her he’s crazy for her and vows to be true. I remember that summer lying on the fake grass of the small raked stage for his three-page monologue, the stage lights hot on my face. As I feigned sleep and his words washed over me, there was delight in the secret knowledge, the tender mix where make-believe and reality—lives onstage and off—had begun to meet.