Come to the Edge

by Christina Haag

  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.

  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.

  At 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.