I can still see it. Bright gold in blue water.
Classes began at nine in the morning, and rehearsals were usually from six to ten at night, but one particular autumn evening, I was free. John was meeting me at an Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue—a crowded place I knew, with a narrow aisle and tables pushed close, each done up in a shiny checkered cloth. It was cheap with great lighting: an actor’s hangout, where ten bucks got you a salad, the house red, and a huge plate of pasta. Candles in Chianti bottles covered with layers of red and green wax lit the room.
John had graduated from Brown in the spring. He’d spent the summer diving in the waters off Cape Cod in search of a pirate ship that had wrecked on the shoals near Wellfleet. He would soon head off to India to study at the University of Delhi and travel the country on a research stint in rural development. It was an invaluable opportunity, he said, to have distance from home, friends, family, and country, and he was excited to live in a place where everything from government to food to sex was considered in a completely different manner. At his going-away bash the week before, while we were dancing, he’d stowed the long strand of diamond-cut garnets my mother had given me in his pocket so it wouldn’t break, and I’d left without it. We had arranged to meet so that he could give it back, but also to say goodbye.
I spotted him from the street. He was sitting at one of the tables near the window, lost in thought, and when I walked in, he stood up and gave me a bear hug. The scent of his jacket was familiar and exotic.
“Lest we forget,” he said as we opened our menus. He dug deep, fished out the garnet necklace, and deposited it in my hand. The stones flashed in the light, a curl of blood red, and I looped the strand twice around my neck. I was no longer a vegetarian, and when I ordered the Bolognese, he raised an eyebrow and muttered something under his breath about a woman’s prerogative.
“What’s up with that?” he said.
“What do you mean?
“Uh … meat. Last I recall, you—”
“Oh, that. I’ve changed,” I said lightly. “I’m allowed.”
“So, no broken crockery?” he teased.
“Not tonight—if you’re lucky.”
“Touché, Miss Haag. Touché.”
We drank wine and laughed and spoke of his plans and mine. He fiddled with the candle, chipping at the wax until it fell in red flakes on the map-of-Italy place mat. He wanted to go to Sri Lanka and Nepal. And he planned to meet up with Professor Barnhill, who was on a sabbatical year in India. His mother might visit, he said, and Sally would come for part of the trip. Along with his studies, he’d climb mountains, hit the beaches, and go to theater festivals.
“What about the temples? Will you see the temples?”
His eyes narrowed, as if to say, It’s India—there are temples everywhere.
I began to describe the erotic carvings at Konark and Khajuraho I’d seen in books. I was fascinated that sexuality could be emblazoned on a place of worship. I thought of those stone women, robust and fecund. They were nothing like the slender, salmon-robed Madonna of my childhood who stood watch outside the Sacred Heart chapel. Her motto was patience, not pleasure, and the stars above her head were a coat of arms.
“Yeah, I’m sure I’ll go there.” He’d moved up the candle, his thumb pressing the soft part near the flame. He began to talk of tiger parks—he wanted to see the tigers. From his pocket, he pulled out two white pills and downed them with wine. “With these babies, I’ll be able to drink well water!” He handed me one. Acidophilus, he said. When taken in advance, they would forestall any intestinal misery.
He was intrigued by Juilliard. “What do you do there all day?” He’d pulled his chair closer, his knees knocking mine under the table. He was especially curious about acting class. “How is it different from Brown?” he asked. I told him about finding neutral and metal chairs and sense memory.
“Let me get this straight—a roomful of people and everyone’s moaning?”
“Well, not everyone.” I tugged at the garnets around my throat and knotted them through my fingers. “Some are crying. Some are laughing. Some are just sitting there and nothing’s going on.”
“Hmm, emperor’s new clothes. And you, Christina, what do you think about?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Come on.”
“It wouldn’t be a secret then, would it?”
“So?”
“It only works when it’s a secret.”
He started to speak, then thought better of it.
“What?”
“I don’t know. You just seem … happy.”
“I am happy. Tonight, I’m out of my cloister.”
“You’re hardly a nun.” He frowned slightly and leaned back on the heels of the chair. “Maybe a devadasi.”
He had seen Lovesick recently, with Elizabeth McGovern and Dudley Moore, and said I would have been better in the part. He appeared to have given it a great deal of thought, taking it as a personal affront that my agents hadn’t gotten me a meeting with the director. “It’s just timing,” he said. “For you, it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time.” I believed that, too, and we lifted our glasses and toasted each other with the cheap red wine.
Like the prince and the pauper, we might have switched clothes then and there. A part of him could have pushed the glass doors open each morning, dashing past Nora. She’d call him darlin’ and toss him an orange as he raced to the elevators and the third floor, late for speech with Tim or fight class with BH. A part of me was dying to take off, pack on my back and feet dusty with the world, seeing all that he would see. But we were half-grown then, and it was time to choose what defined us. It was enough that night to trade tales, and as we spoke, it occurred to me that I had never sat alone with him in candlelight before.
Outside, a warm wind chased my skirt back, then flung it forward. I wasn’t wearing stockings, and it felt almost balmy.
“Can I give you a lift?”
I was surprised he had his Honda and said so. For a New Yorker, getting around the city by car was uncommon; we had subways and cabs for that. Cars were for tourists and for leaving town on the weekends.
“Yup, my steed’s parked around the corner. I had some repairs done at a garage on West End.” (Years later, he would confess to the lie, saying that he’d brought the car just so he could drive me home, so he could woo me.)
We were both going to the East Side, to the streets we’d roamed as kids, he to his mother’s at 1040, and I to the high-rise on Third Avenue where I lived for two years in the spare room of my father’s office. I’d leave it each morning as though I didn’t exist—corners tucked, surfaces wiped, and any trace of me jammed into a tiny closet with a rickety accordion door.
We went south on Columbus. He didn’t take the transverse at Sixty-fifth Street, the straight but potholed cut through Central Park; he took the long way. There was some plan to ride the lights up Madison, but at Fifty-ninth Street, when we saw that the blue barricades that so often blocked the lower entrance to the park were open, he asked, “Shall we take the Drive?” It was a question to which there was only one answer. The Drive is six miles of meandering road that runs the length of the park, and ever since I was a child, I’ve loved going through at night. The pavement seems smoother, the darkness darker, and there is rarely any traffic in this cool scented heart of the city.
I smiled at him, perhaps because it was all so unexpected, and when the light changed, we pulled in front of a horse carriage and followed a yellow cab onto the curving road. It was October but warm, and we rolled all the windows down and turned the radio up. My legs were bare, too close to his hand on the stick shift. He drove fast, and I leaned back in the seat, letting my fingers trail the air outside. It would rain later; you could feel it. We took the loop around the park three times that night—up to 110th Street and back down near the Plaza where we’d started—before he turned east on Seventy-second Street to take me home. Each time he as
ked, “Once more?” Each time I said, “Yes, again.” The wine had worn off, but the air and speed were intoxicants, and I was drunk somehow.
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 myster
y 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.
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