Come to the Edge

by Christina Haag

  That is what I love, I will think later, remembering you with both our packs easy on your shoulders. That and the animal way you move on rocks. Your arm around me as we sleep. When you point to the constant stars—Orion, your favorite: hero and hunter. That you ask me this question. And that the mystery of the cord that ties us—even through this last year, through pain and heartache and the attentions of a beautiful woman—remains, whatever we choose when we leave this trail.

  It is what I would say to him now.

  On the drive to the airport and our flights in opposite directions, I asked him about Daryl, if it was over. He didn’t answer right away. His eyes were on the country road, his hands on the wheel of the white convertible he’d rented for the weekend. It had been a fantasy, he said, a way to deal with his fears of commitment. “She took on the fears of us.” He’d begun therapy a few months before, and it had changed the way he spoke. “I was enamored, but not any longer.”

  I both believed and doubted him. We had decided nothing in the Blue Ridge wilderness, but at the gate, before my flight to Chicago, we agreed to keep talking.

  The film wrapped two weeks later. I went to LA but didn’t stay long, and when I returned to New York, John took me to a benefit at the Plaza. We left early, and as we stood outside on the red-carpeted landing, the fog was so dense, we thought a cloud had descended on Fifth Avenue. He loosened his tie and slipped his tuxedo jacket over my bare shoulders, and I held the silk gown to one side as we walked. By the Saint-Gaudens statue, a row of hansom cabs waited. “Let’s do it,” he said. I was glad to see him happy. He’d found out he’d failed the bar exam weeks before, and the effects were defeating. With the press, he showed his game face, but alone he had cried in my arms.

  He took my hand, and we ran across Central Park South to choose the horse we liked best. When the carriage entered the park, it was quiet, and the fog rolled beside us. It wasn’t cold, but we huddled, cocooned under thick wool blankets. A sliver of moon, and all around, familiar shadows of the old limestone buildings that framed the park, the shapes and turrets we’d known since childhood.

  He spoke first. He was intrigued by the way the last year and the time apart might have changed us. Our relationship would be different and, he believed, stronger. His voice sounded sad, but he said that he wasn’t.

  “Few people are so lucky to have what we do. I have a lot of hope.”

  I had hope too. My trust was frayed, but I had hope.

  “Can you forgive me?” His head fell so that it rested on mine, the weight I’d longed for somehow painful, and we passed that way through the dark trees. “This is the first time …”

  I waited, listening to hooves on pavement, listening to his breath.

  “Yes,” I began.

  “It’s the first time I thought I might lose you.”

  Before Christmas, on our way to stay with friends in Vermont, we drove upstate and looked at land near Albany. It hadn’t snowed, but the ground crunched under our feet without give. What did I think, he asked, while the real estate agent waited in the car.

  I hadn’t wanted to go, I think now, because I knew what “land in Albany” meant. That he was thinking about it somewhere down the line, a life I feared might subsume me. I thought of his cousins’ wives, one in particular. She was ten years older than I was, smart and elegant, and although I didn’t know her well, she had always been kind to me. It was nothing she said, but her face held such sadness, even as she smiled. Like a memory of pleasure but no longer.

  Before we left, he told the agent no. He agreed it wasn’t right. And he asked me then, in that cold field toward the beginning of a new year, whether I could see myself living up here someday, and whether I thought I’d always be an actress.

  I said yes to both.

  We’re in a field in New Jersey not far from his mother’s house. We wear jackets and the sun is out. October bright. That night, we’ll have a fire. At the far end of the field, there’s a bank of trees near a brook, and the leaves are a shudder of pale gold. I’m on Frank, and he’s on the new horse, the black one, and as he leans down to pat the glossy neck, I think how gentle he can be.

  We’ve warmed them up and take one quick canter around the ring. I rub my thumb along the rein. I know what comes next. It’s what he’s thinking of, has been all along. As we drove and talked of other things. In the stable with the saddles and the leads. And without question, once the barn door opens.

  I see it in his face, a certain widening of the eyes. The way his jaw gets tight but he could be smiling. He’s thinking of the feeling—the flying flat-out run across the field. The feeling where your heart beats against your throat and you know you are alive.

  I’m thinking of it, too. How I’ll dig my heels down this time, knot my fingers halfway up the mane if I’m afraid. How I’ll hold the horse close like a lover. I won’t think about the rest: the pocket holes that pit the field, a slip, a break, a twig. That I’m an average rider at best. I’ll keep my eyes burrowed on those trees ahead and pray I hold my seat. I’ll find the part in me like him that craves the rush of speed.

  I don’t know why it is, but I feel safe. It may be because he believes in me. Or the way I know we’ll laugh when we reach the other side. Out of breath, relieved, sated. And after a break, when the horses are ready, we’ll go again. Each time, it will be easier, faster. Longer. Until I say no. I can always say no. He won’t go without me. He’s told me this, and I believe him.

  There’s something in this jeweled day. A thrill. A grace. That I am with him before the leaves fall. That we share this like a secret, this pushing back at fear, at death, on the backs of his mother’s horses.

  He turns to me and waits. I shorten the rein. I smell the dry earth, the leather.

  “Ready?” he says. He’s certain.

  I look across at the trees and see how close they really are.

  Ending

  If we do not burn

  How will these shadows turn to light?

  —NAZIM HIKMET

  On a November night, when the tops of the trees were bare, John came home from dinner with his mother. It was the time of the year he called “difficult.” I met him by the door of his apartment where I had been waiting, and undid the chain in the brass lock. He was quiet, troubled by something. We sat on the couch in the living room, and he said that that night they had spoken of his father. In the course of the meal, his mother told him that if his father were to come back to her now, she wondered if she might say no. Hesitating, as she had, he showed me. He held up his hand, palm pressed out, and with his eyes closed, he began to shake his head slowly.

  When he did this, I saw her in him. Her eyes, her mouth, her long neck, her tender, wise face clouded. I knew the weight he felt hearing this—I held my father’s secrets—but the strength required for her to lift her hand, that I did not know. It was something I could only imagine. I did not know then that there are those you love no matter how much they hurt you, no matter how many years have passed since you felt them in the morning. I did not know how long it took to get over such a love, and that even when you did, when you loved again, you would always carry a sliver of it in your stitched-together heart. I did not know that you could love them in death, and that if one day they returned to you in a dream or half sleep, you might hold up your hand as she had done, because life and time had changed you.

  Timing is the short answer. There was no single fight, no dramatic flourish, no black and white of tabloid scribes. We ended the way things do with most people when it’s long and complicated, when there’s love and desire and much that works and some that doesn’t. We ended slowly.

  Romances, like stories, have endings. In a restaurant overlooking Mulholland, a legendary but reformed lothario once told me that marriage is an ongoing conversation, but romance is something different altogether. “It’s from the French word for story,” he said, “and by definition it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” And if this were a story and I had to choose
a dénouement, just one, it would be a night in early December 1990.

  As the elevator inched its way to the top floor of a redbrick building on Hudson Street, one of two on that block with a crowned cornice, I rehearsed what I would say. John was waiting for me in the loft he’d moved to six months before. We both knew there would be a fight. He was better in an argument than I, but tonight, armed with facts, I would not back down. My anger was rare, but when ignited, it was the smoldering Old Testament sort—of I am right and you are wrong and I have ocular proof. That night, it felt like strength. The truth was more fragile; I could no longer continue as we were. We’d reunited the year before to see if things would move forward, but they hadn’t. We hadn’t. He’d warned me long ago never to give him an ultimatum, as they didn’t work with him, but in October I had.

  I can’t remember now what it was that had set me off that night. It could have been any number of things—a phone number, a postcard left out, rumors of him with a raven-haired beauty, to which he responded, She’s just a stupid model. Or the specter of Daryl, once receded, now hovering.

  Or it could simply have been the wearing distance that had grown between us. I no longer remember, and it no longer matters. But what is burned in my mind is his face as the elevator door slid wide and how seeing him, I was instantly disarmed. It was a face not of fight, deception, or denial. It was a boy’s face, open and marked by sorrow.

  Still, I began my list of grievances. To each, he replied, “You’re right.” And when I had no more words, he murmured, “It’s bigger than this. Don’t be afraid.” But I was.

  He took me in his arms and carried me up the slotted pine steps, like a bride over a threshold, to his bedroom. The room upstairs was dark, save for the silver city falling through a tall window. The loft was a sublet. Some of the trappings in the room were his—the masks he’d collected, a valet stand, a lap desk with a secret compartment I’d given him one Christmas, his father’s padded rocker, a carved Indonesian sylph with wings and a painted smile. But others were foreign, heavy with someone else’s stories, someone else’s desires.

  He sat on the bed, and I went to the bench under the skylight. I knew if I sat close to him, I would not hear what he was going to say—the nearness of scent and skin would make words and understanding impossible and I wanted to hear him. I placed my hands on the lacquered wood on either side of me, and he reached for the lamp on the table beside his bed. As he turned the knob, I saw that his face had changed.

  In the half-light, his head down, he spoke of trials and tests, of soldiers, Green Berets, Greek legends, and failure. Sometimes he wept. There were things he had to tell me, things that only now had become clear to him. He confessed that he was not a man yet; maybe in a different time, one of warriors and rituals, he would have been. The words pained him. “I haven’t gone through the fire,” he kept saying. “It’s like I haven’t gone through the fire.”

  On another night, I would have bolstered him, held him, convinced him otherwise, believed that anything was possible, but that night, I stayed on the wooden bench and I listened.

  “How can I reach out my hand to you? How can I ask you to join my life when I don’t know what it is yet?” he cried. “You’re lucky, you have a calling. You know what your life is.”

  “You don’t want to be a lawyer?” He had started working for the Manhattan district attorney’s office that fall, but as soon as I said it, I knew how foolish the words sounded. Of course, he didn’t. Torts and voir dire were antithetical to his natural gifts. But he’d worked hard, and because he had, I’d assumed it was what he wanted, for a time at least.

  He began to speak about the theater with such tender loss—grief even—as if it were a paramour he would always carry a torch for, one he could not part with but would never fully possess. I’d known his passion and his talent for acting. I had stood on a stage with him and looked into his eyes. But until that night, I hadn’t fully known his regret.

  “If that’s what you want, you can do it. Just decide. You’re a wonderful actor—you can do anything you want.” I still believed that.

  “No, I can’t,” he said, wincing slightly.

  I didn’t ask, but I knew by the way he spoke that it was not his mother, as the papers so often opined, that stood between him and an actor’s life. It was the knowledge that deep within, no matter how much he loved it, it was not his path to follow, something Professor Barnhill had intuited long ago.

  We talked about politics and, as he had at other times, he called it the family business. Was that what he wanted? I reminded him of the associates and friends, true or otherwise, who waited in the wings for him to say the word. He knew this but lowered his head. “I haven’t done anything yet to earn it. I need to know what I believe.”

  The room had darkened, and the city was almost quiet, only the odd car rumbling up Hudson Street like a wave rolling. I moved to the bed and sat close to him.

  “I’ve only told three people in my life that I loved them,” he confessed. “You, Sally, my sister.”

  “And your mother.”

  “Yes, my mother.”

  He stroked my face. “You’re my compass,” he whispered, the lamplight hitting him golden from behind.

  Compass? But he was the fearless one, the one who knew the seas and trails.

  “You’ve always been my compass,” he said, as if I should have known. “I’ll be lost without you. I think of the time ahead and it’s like a desert.”

  I said nothing. I closed my eyes and held him. He had imagined it, this desert, but I hadn’t. I couldn’t.

  I stayed with him that night, and in the morning when I asked, he agreed not to call me for a while. We both needed time to think.

  Four months earlier, we had sat on the steps of one of the row houses on East Tenth Street, across from St. Mark’s Church. It was hot that July, and we’d just had Indian food. John was studying for the bar for the third time, and I’d finished a run of All’s Well That Ends Well. In the spring, he’d decided to move downtown to Tribeca, and when I returned from Los Angeles, where I was doing a movie of the week, we looked at lofts with his real estate agent. We had decided to live together, but then, when he didn’t pass the bar for the second time, he asked if we could hold off. “It’s important. It’s for our future,” he’d said. I knew his anxiety about passing was not the entire reason, but I didn’t push it. I relished my freedom almost as much as he did, and like all romantics, I wanted “Will you marry me?” to come freely.

  In front of the iron gates of the old stone church, sweat on the backs of our knees, he told me he never wanted to get divorced. For him, that would be the biggest failure, and if it ever came to that, he’d go off to the mountains alone for a spell. I told him I had realized something, too, that summer. Although there were marriages where infidelity was understood, even agreed to, and many of them worked, I knew it was not something I could do, no matter how much I loved him, and I wanted him to know this.

  “I don’t want that either.”

  “You don’t? Then what happens?”

  He was staring at my hands.

  “I don’t know … It’s like I fall off the wagon.”

  Before Christmas, we met at my apartment to exchange gifts. We’d spoken but hadn’t seen each other since the night at his loft. I wore a short navy kilt with black tights and high boots, the fashion then, but when I caught my reflection in the glass, I looked like a child. I promised myself that, no matter what, while he was here I would not cry. The reality of what we’d spoken about was beginning to define itself. I’d arranged a time to get my things from his apartment, I’d returned his key, and tonight he would give me mine. I’d asked him to have an item placed in the columns after Christmas saying that we’d split up and, if he could, not to be photographed with anyone for a month. One month, I thought, would be enough. I was trying to figure out how to move on, but in my heart, I hadn’t. And when I heard his steps heavy on the stairs, I couldn’t wait until he wa
lked through the door.

  I’d bought him mother-of-pearl cuff links, a painted kite from Chinatown, and a Dalvey pocket compass. I was uncertain about the last gift, weighted as it was with meaning, but I wrapped it anyway. He gave me a down comforter and diamond drop earrings. “One a necessity, the other most certainly an ornament,” he said. With the gifts, there was a card with a photograph of a forlorn dog on the front. He asked me not to read it until he left. In the firelight, colored paper all around, he suddenly grew tearful, and it surprised him. “I’ve missed you … Why aren’t you crying, Puppy? You’re always the one to cry.”

  Before he left, he handed me a shiny yellow box with a grosgrain ribbon and a tiny gift card. “Dear, Darling Christina—All my Love, Jackie,” it said. Inside was a cream chiffon scarf, edged in black, as sheer as could be. I took it out of the tissue and draped it over my shoulders.

  At the door, he stopped, then turned back. His voice was soft.

  “I’m the boss of you always.”

  “Not true.” I was trying to smile.

  “No one will ever love you as I have.” He got the words out and stood there a moment, then closed the door and slipped out into the night.

  After he left, I opened the card. “Christina Christina Christina Christina I miss the name—I’ve started notes to you many times that could have burned holes through wood.” Before I reached the end, I fell apart.

  That’s the thing about timing. It has nothing to do with love.

  That January, the film about Stieglitz and O’Keeffe was finally happening. My part was smaller, but I was excited. No longer a feature, An American Place would air on PBS’s American Playhouse, with Christopher Plummer as Stieglitz and Jane Alexander’s husband, Ed Sherin, directing. In the interim, I discovered that Dorothy Norman was still alive and through friends was able to meet her. Oddly, I had grown up around the corner from her modern town house and had passed it on my way to school each morning. Glancing up at the strange, glass-block windows, I’d always wondered what it would be like to be on the inside looking out.