Come to the Edge

by Christina Haag

  …

  “Did you always know?” he asked me.

  It was our last night in Palm Beach. The casement windows were open wide, and the moon was on our faces. I lay in his arms watching the shadows on the vaulted ceiling.

  He asked again. “With other people? Did you know how it would end?”

  9½ Weeks had come out that year, and there was a line about it, about knowing the end at the beginning and waiting for it to happen.

  I told him I had. It didn’t keep me from falling; it didn’t keep me from anything. But I had. And when I knew from the start, that made it all the more poignant. Like fighting fate.

  Earlier, he’d kicked the sheet off, and now I pulled it close.

  “Cold?” he asked.

  “No—keep talking.”

  He told me the times he knew it wouldn’t work. When and how. The sadness he felt. The difficulty of parting. “But with you, I can’t imagine how it would end. And I don’t want it to.”

  “Me neither,” I whispered back. It wasn’t a real lie. But earlier that day, as I had walked alone on the beach, I had sensed something I’d never sensed before. It was the distinct impression that I had two lives and I would have to choose.

  As if he knew my thoughts, he began to talk about what he called our lifestyle, choosing each word carefully.

  “My career, you mean?” I said wryly. “I miss you so much when I’m away. I wonder, could I give it up?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want that. That’s not why I’m saying it. It’s part of you.”

  I knew there was more, but we listened to the waves.

  “Only, sometimes—I’m afraid to open up, afraid you’ll go away, and that when you come back, you won’t speak my language anymore.”

  “Never,” I said, my voice quiet and bright because then I knew. “I promise that won’t ever happen.”

  He pulled me closer and took my face in his hands.

  “I love your hair. I love your neck. I love that other people see how much we love each other. I love when they tell me.”

  When we spoke of these things, we were almost shy, as if the feelings might drown us, and at times it was safer for him not to look at me. But not that night. That night he looked in my eyes. That night we spoke of family and marriage, how he never wanted to get divorced and that he believed in what he called his family’s way of family. He wanted that, he said, and it was more important than success. For the first time, I told him, I could see having a child, and in the rain one night, walking home from the theater, I’d imagined a tiny hand in mine. I wasn’t going to tell him; I thought it might make him afraid, but he gathered me in his arms and told me how happy that made him.

  What we were talking about then, although we didn’t use the word, was equilibrium, and I wonder now, more than twenty years later, if the house that knew secrets made us speak. That night, for the first time, I thought I could be both a wife and a lover; and I knew what kind of father he would be. And in that room, I saw myself growing old with him.

  In April, John accepted a summer internship with the Justice Department. Since our time in Washington would overlap, he suggested that I stay on after the play ended. New York and auditions were only a train ride away, and he missed me. I looked at places. There was a small house I loved on the Hill and an elegant but expensive apartment in a Georgetown row house near his cousin Timmy and his wife, Linda, and their new baby. But Myer Feldman, an adviser in his father’s administration and a family friend, had graciously offered us a vacant duplex condo. It was across the river in Rosslyn, one stop north of Arlington on the Blue Line—a high-rise, the kind where you get lost in the corridors and all the doors look the same. Inside, everything was white and glass—pristine white carpet, white baby grand, and a small balcony that overlooked a highway and the Iwo Jima Memorial.

  I pushed against it, but John’s mind was made up. “It’s free!” he argued. But the real enticement, I knew, was behind the building near the parking lot: the Olympic-size pool he’d spotted before we’d even set foot in the apartment.

  On my day off in New York at the end of May, weeks before he moved to Washington, I went to a fortune-teller. I had been there before, and she read the numbers and cards with a green-eyed cat sleeping on her lap.

  “With this one, you’ve had lives,” she said, glancing up to check my face. “The first was happy, then tragic. He lost you near water, and when you died, he never recovered. The next was a great passion. Forbidden. Undiscovered. Powerful families.”

  She’s read her Romeo and Juliet, I surmised, trying not to wrinkle my nose.

  His Venus. My Sun. A Grand Trine and the Sun/Moon midpoint. Challenge would come later. This summer, she continued, the feelings would deepen, but I would discover things about him I wouldn’t like.

  “What things?” I leaned in, the backs of my knees pressed against the frayed fabric of the chair.

  “Minor things. Irritations.”

  …

  On the train back to Washington and a performance that night, I had a red Mead notebook on my lap, and I was thinking about “the things.” Some of his more jocklike friends irked me (if there were too many on a Vineyard weekend, I gravitated toward Caroline and her friends); he didn’t always tell me his plans; he was often late and sometimes messy; and when he lost something, he expected me to find it. But these were slight grievances, and even they had dissipated these past months with the comings and goings and the romance of distance. “I can’t imagine how it would end,” he had said, and I felt that way, too. I was eager for the summer, and yet a part of me wondered whether in living with him, I might lose something.

  The week before, he had told me a story. He’d seen a Karmann Ghia on the street with a For Sale sign in the window and bought it on a whim. He called his mother and Marta to say that he had a surprise and would tell them all about it that weekend in New Jersey. When he drove up, proud in his vintage orange sports car, it was his mother who had a surprise for him.

  “She … got some things out of the safe.” He looked nervous.

  “What things?” I said dimly.

  “Her engagement ring.”

  His mother, he said, wasn’t surprised. She’d expected it, although it had happened quicker than she thought it would. Since his call, she’d been adjusting herself to the idea. Then he began to laugh. Marta, it seemed, anticipating an engagement party, had bought a $1,300 Ungaro dress that couldn’t be returned. Funny, huh? He laughed again, an elbow in my side.

  I opened the notebook. At the top of the page, I had jotted phone numbers, what I’d spent that week, and a line from the play. Yet swear not, lest you be forsworn again. I smiled. On the next page, John had drawn a Picasso face for me to find. All unruly lips and eyes. Beside it, a mushy note. “I kiss your faults,” I scribbled with abandon beside the face, the ink staining my fingers. I closed the notebook and pressed it deep into the bag on the seat beside me and settled into the familiar rhythm of the train.

  It was the end of his first year of law school. Exams were starting, and I wouldn’t see him for fifteen days. Outside the window, the houses turned to woods, and I waited for the dreamy stretch of green that came somewhere before Baltimore. Make time count, Don’t count time, I told myself. But I didn’t. I numbered the days until I would see him again, until we would move into the mammoth white apartment across from the Key Bridge, the one so close to Arlington.

  He remembered things about his father, but those recollections came with the uncertainty as to whether they were his own or someone else’s telling enfolded in his memory. Sometimes, if we were lying in the grass, he’d graze a buttercup against my chin to prove I liked butter. “My father did that,” he’d say. Or he’d whisper nothing in my ear—Pss, Pss, Pss—until I laughed. My father did that. There was his hiding place in the desk; the helicopter’s roar; his father calling him Sam and that making him mad; and nine days before Dallas, the performance of the pipers of the Black Watch on the South
Lawn of the White House. The last memory he knew was his: the drums, the marching, and how he’d squirmed off his father’s lap to get closer.

  There was a park nearby we’d bike to after work. On the way, we’d pass the entrance at Memorial Drive, but we never went in. That summer, while careful of his reticence, I urged him to go. Some mornings, before the heat was too much, he’d run the trails, past the flags and the military graves—it calmed him, he said—but never to where his father was. We visited his cousins in Georgetown and mine in Maryland. He took me to meet Provi, his mother’s personal maid at the White House and someone whom he considered family. So it felt strange to me to be so close and not to go. It was a visit waiting to happen. But he’d put it off or we’d forget. Something would come up. Until the last day. With the Karmann Ghia gassed up for New York and packed to the hilt, and everything else shipped, we stopped for a moment to say a prayer by the flame on the hillside.

  It was to be a grand tour, a trip to end all trips. “We’ve spent weeks sweltering in DC,” he said. “We deserve it!” First, Aspen and white-water rafting on the Colorado River. Then five days in Cora, Wyoming, at his friend John Barlow’s ranch. He had worked there the summer he was seventeen and was anxious for me to see it. And after that—Venice. He’d asked his mother where he should take me. Well, she’d replied, Venice is the most romantic city. Marta, who’d lived there, concurred. We would stay a few days at the Gritti Palace, then a week at the Cipriani.

  There’s an old adage in theater: Plan a vacation, get a job. (In the years since, I’ve found it’s best also to buy the tickets.) And so it was that when we got back to New York a week before the trip, I was cast as Ophelia at Baltimore Centerstage—a great theater, a part I’d longed to play, and Boyd Gaines, a few years shy of the first of his four Tony Awards, as Hamlet. I paused, imagining the Grand Canal, but it was impossible to turn the part down.

  When I called John to tell him, he was disappointed about our trip but excited for me. “I’m proud of you. Come over—we’ll celebrate,” he said. But when I got to his apartment, the lights were out.

  I found him in the back on the small terrace off the bedroom. It was August, but the night was cool. He was smoking a cigarette in one of the metal deck chairs, and his feet were bare. He didn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the bricked backs of the brownstones. Slowly, I knelt beside him. I saw it was not the trip.

  “You will always be leaving me,” he said at last. And I said some things, trying to break the spell. The part—how I wanted it. A month less than Washington. Two train stops closer. Over before you know it.

  His voice didn’t change. “You don’t understand. This is how it will be. You’ll always be leaving me.” I wanted to cajole him from the darkness, lift him from his mood, but I knew it was an old sorrow, one nameless to him, and whatever I said or did would be powerless against it. But I said it anyway. “I’m not leaving you.” And it was then that he looked at me, saw me, and lowered his head to mine.

  In the morning, it was over. We went to the Greek coffee shop on Eighty-sixth Street, where he ate two breakfasts. “I’ll get used to it,” he promised over Belgian waffles and a big plate of scrambled eggs.

  I left the next week, and we fell into the back-and-forth and the drill of the trains. He saw the play twice, the one about the prince who mourns his father; and he liked my mad scene. After the curtain, we kicked around the bars and fish restaurants near Fell’s Point. On an October night, we went to hear an Irish band at the Cat’s Eye. He sang along to “The Black Velvet Band” and “The Skye Boat Song.” His nanny Maud Shaw had taught him when he was little, and he remembered all the words.

  Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing

  Onward, the sailors cry

  Carry the lad that’s born to be king

  Over the sea to Skye.

  Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep,

  Ocean’s a royal bed.

  Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep

  Watch by your weary head.

  On the late-night streets, we walked back to the actors’ housing near North Calvert, and he taught me the songs. By the courthouse steps, deserted and grand, he asked if I would come to Los Angeles with him after his second year of law school. He’d been offered a summer associate position at a firm there. “You don’t have to tell me now, but think about it,” he said, hunched on a step. “And if you won’t come, I’ll stick with one of the firms in the city. I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want us to be apart.”

  A few weeks later, I decided. My agents had an office in L.A., and by spring I was cast in a play at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset Boulevard. That’s one thing about being an actor—you may spoil vacations, but you can also pick up and go.

  Before, in Washington, living together had just happened. This time he asked me, and he had me pick the house. It was by the beach, a clapboard cottage on Thornton Court, with roses in the garden and a low picket fence. I’d finally gotten my driver’s license, and he bought me an old powder blue Buick Skylark Custom with a black interior.

  Santa Monica Airport was close, and that summer he took up flying again. He went up with an instructor most Saturdays and always came back happy. When he was ready to do a solo landing on Catalina Island, he pressed me to come along. A tricky descent, he said, excited—downdrafts and a slim, pitted runway on top of a 1,602-foot mesa.

  “Don’t worry, Puppy,” he said. “The instructor will be there.”

  It was a cloudless LA morning, and he buzzed us around the basin—John in the pilot’s seat, the instructor next to him. They talked over the headphones, pointing to the colored lights on the instrument panel. I was in the back, peering down at the tight squares of neighborhoods snaked through with gray highway. He turned the plane, and soon we were over water. Near a sheer cliff with the runway in sight, the plane began to shake. He was afraid of stalling, but when the instructor reminded him of something, John leveled the wings and the landing was easy.

  Before we flew back, we wandered across the tarmac to the Airport in the Sky Café and celebrated with buffalo burgers. The instructor was pleased, John was elated, and even I, who knew nothing about planes, could tell how well he had done.

  It was in this way I knew he was jealous.

  He was never controlling in the tethering way some men can be, but there’d be a gibe or a tease if I flirted too long at a party or if the calls from a particular matinee idol or ex-flame were too frequent. He didn’t like my screen kisses, no matter how chaste they were, and he’d scold, “Do you have to kiss everyone?” Plays were a different story, perhaps because he knew that world, and the space between audience and proscenium made it palatable.

  There was one exception—an especially torrid clinch in a Naked Angels production of Chelsea Walls, where the theater was tiny, I was in a slip, and the bad-boy actor in question, clad only in boxers, threw me on the bed with Method gusto. Later that night, John refused to speak to me and insisted on walking around the block alone. To cool off, he said. But he never forbade me to do anything. He gave me freedom, and I believed it was because he trusted me.

  In November, after I’d returned to New York from playing Ophelia in Baltimore, we went to a dinner his aunt Jean gave at her town house for Roger Stevens, the veteran theater producer and founding chairman of the Kennedy Center. I was seated next to Jane Alexander, an actress I had always admired. Over the toasts, we spoke of her long-cherished project, a film about Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, which she would both produce and star in. Maximilian Schell, newly signed to play the famed photographer, would direct. And, she added, with palpable excitement, he was flying in next week from Munich. I hadn’t seen his Academy Award–winning performance in Judgment at Nuremberg, but I knew his film Marlene and thought it was genius. After dessert, she handed me her card and said that I bore an uncanny resemblance to Dorothy Norman, Stieglitz’s much younger, married lover and protégée of almost twenty years.

/>   Five days later, I was on my way to meet Jane, the screenwriter, and Maximilian Schell in his rented suite at the Warwick Hotel. I’d been out of drama school a year, and although I’d come close on film and television roles, I had been doing plays since I’d graduated. The script was unfinished, my agents said, so over the weekend I rushed down to the Gotham Book Mart to find a copy of Encounters, Dorothy Norman’s newly published memoir, in an effort to glean what I could.

  At fifty-six, the Viennese-born actor was still handsome—his eyes bright, his thick hair peppered with silver—and the nubby black scarf thrown about his neck gave him the air of an old-time impresario. As I entered the room, he appeared to smolder, impatient perhaps with the long day of meeting young actresses who, he would later confide, were “too American.” I sat in the chair opposite him, and after the initial chitchat and a perfunctory glance at my résumé, he leaned forward.

  “Are you Jewish?” he said, searching my face.

  “No,” I answered, then quickly remembered that Norman was. “But I am a New Yorker. And my friends say I was Jewish in a past life.”

  He frowned. “My friends say I was Peter the Great in a past life, but I’m not. Still … there is something Jewish about you.”

  Instinctively, I knew not to appear cowed by him and began to assume what I imagined were Norman’s qualities: passion and an alluring, penetrating smarts. He loosened up and so did I, and soon he had us laughing with his stories. He didn’t look like Stieglitz, but when he spoke, I could picture the legendary black cape over his shoulders. Finally, Jane rose. It was late, and she had to beat the traffic to her house upstate. “Why don’t you stay,” she suggested, placing a soft hand on my shoulder, and the screenwriter followed her out the door.