Come to the Edge

by Christina Haag

  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?”

  I was lying on the floor, the phone now cradled against my shoulder. The white cord was coiled around my wrist, and the shadows from the traffic made a slide show on the low, laminated ceiling. I knew that, miles away in New York, he had not gotten up from the couch but was leaning forward, his head dropped, his elbows pressed on his knees.

  “Just … don’t get off,” he repeated. “Not yet.”

  When I arrived at the small airport in Weyers Cave, Virginia, he’d been in town for hours, buying supplies and maps and organizing the gear. We were shy with each other at first, puttering about the car. My eyes adjusted; I hadn’t seen him in weeks. In the parking lot of the Super Save, we poured nuts and dried fruit into baggies and transferred the apples, oranges, chocolate, sausage, and hard cheese into food sacks. He opened the trunk and pulled out two boxes of boots he’d bought in New York, unsure of which would fit me better. There were two frame backs, two water bottles, two sleeping bags. By early afternoon, we were on one of the feeder roads that lead to the Skyline Drive. He passed me the map with several trails circled. The higher peaks were farther north, but he thought I would like the one at the bottom best—the less crowded backcountry south of Loft Mountain.

  For three days, there were hawks, streams, mud, and yellow leaves. It was a final gasp of warmth in what had been the longest Indian summer I could remember.

  The last night, we had a fire. It was illegal, but we did it anyway. We were too far for the rangers, too far for anyone to care, and by our tent there was an already blackened circle of stones. My job was to gather twigs, and his was to start the fire and keep it going. We always brought poetry books when we camped to read aloud to each other, and before I left Chicago, he reminded me of that. He packed Seamus Heaney, and I brought Edna St. Vincent Millay, along with the one I always carried, my blue clothbound book of sonnets from the Yale series. I read number 129, the one about lust. I’d discovered it over the summer, and it had become my new favorite.

  The night was clear. We drank Constant Comment spiked with whiskey, and I lay with my head in his lap while he told me stories of the stars. It didn’t matter that I’d heard them before.

  I asked him which of the seasons reminded him of us.

  “The first snow. I don’t know why, though. You?”

  The truth was, it was all of them.

  “The September part of summer,” I said. “When it’s still hot, but you know the next day it might be gone, and the leaves at Gay Head have bits of red in them.”

  He took me by the shoulders and pulled me to him, my hair in the way of his mouth. He brushed it back, and with his hands tangled there, I heard him say he had miss
ed the end of summer with me. I heard him say that he was still mine.

  In the morning, we smelled of smoke. He was up before me and had the water started on the tiny camp stove. He was crouched over what was left of the fire from the night before, stirring the ashes intently with a charred broken stick. When he saw me through the tent flap, he called me a sleepyhead and handed me a mug of tea.

  We didn’t talk about reuniting then, or about any of the things we said we would. Not that day. We packed up the camp after breakfast, and we walked. And when we crossed over the small river, the trail began to veer straight up from the valley.

  I can almost see him now, just above me, scrambling on the granite ledge, pointing out the best handholds, the surest footholds. The sky was overcast when he turned back, and I squinted to look up. He asked what I thought my best and worst qualities were and the same for him. And he wanted to know what three things I loved best about him. “You’re fishing,” I teased. He frowned, but because it was his question, he went first. “Your hands. The place where your collarbone meets your neck. The curve of your hip when you lie on your side. When you read to me at night. And your letters, I love your letters.”

  “That’s more than three.”

  “I know,” he said, and kept climbing.

  They weren’t the things I’d imagined he would say. They were sweeter, more considered. The letters especially surprised me. I’d always written to him, and there were many that year—cajoling, seducing, longing, analyzing, pleading, scolding. Long letters that I’d thought had no effect. He shook his head. I save them, he said. They make me think.

  Right then, I couldn’t go any farther. The new boots he’d bought had given me blisters. He propped me on a flat rock, threw down his pack, dug out the first aid kit, and covered my foot with moleskin and white tape. It’ll last, he said, handing me the canteen. We sat for a while looking over the narrow valley, and when we were ready, he took up my pack as well as his. I watched for a moment as he made it over the crest, the rolled neon sleeping bags bobbing off the metal frames.