Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [30]
I got out of bed, slid a cardigan over my nightgown, and walked barefoot to the window. I unlatched the lock and held the bottom sash up as he stepped through. The cold air rushed in and we stood there eyeing each other like animals.
Then I began to laugh, so hard it hurt. I knew I was making things worse, but I couldn’t stop. John frowned—he didn’t take to being laughed at.
“You look like … a burglar,” I said when I could get the words out, then kept on laughing.
“That’s not very nice, you know.”
“A nineteenth-century burglar. A Dickensian one.”
He gave me a withering look. “That’s a very silly thing to say.”
“Look.” I pointed to his reflection in the window. “Look!”
He turned, and when he saw himself in all his woolen ruffian glory, he pulled the cap off and ran his fingers several times through his hair. With his eyes fixed on the floorboards, he shook his head. He was trying valiantly to keep the corners of his mouth down, but soon he was laughing, too.
“Shh … they’re all asleep.”
“Okay,” he whispered. “I don’t want to be mad. I don’t want us to be mad. But you were a jerk!”
“It’s true, I was,” I said, smiling.
“You were totally wrong!”
“I know. Shh.”
“And childish.”
“Can we be done?”
He said nothing.
“Can you just … please … forgive me?”
He nodded, his face suddenly tender, and reached out to hug me. I stood on my toes. His arms were around me, his face in the crook of my neck, buried. The smell of wool and rain.
We stepped apart.
“Okay?”
“Okay then.”
At the door, he stopped and looked back. I was sitting on the bed, cross-legged, covers around my waist. “You were still a jerk,” he said after a moment, but this time there was a trace of a smile at his lips. I let him have the last word—he liked that—and he closed the door quietly.
After he was gone, I tried to read but couldn’t. I put the book down and shut off the light. Outside, rain had begun. Seven years I’d known him, and I felt closer to him that night than I ever had. There was a kind of intimacy in our silly fight. And risk. He cared enough to show me how he really felt, how I’d disappointed him, how he wanted me to be better than I was. In the dark, I smiled to myself. I’d never imagined that anyone could out-sulk me, but he had. He had won.
I decided on Juilliard not with a coin toss, but with a shuffle of colored cards. My friend had a Rider-Waite tarot deck she kept wrapped in a silk scarf in the bottom drawer of her bureau. On one of those harried nights before graduation, when I was careening between ACT in San Francisco and Juilliard in New York, she made us tea and told me to keep a question in mind as I held the cards. I thought of Juilliard, the tomblike building where I’d gone to ballet school, and of the old Russian dancers who’d flicked our shins into alignment with their long tapered sticks. Then I imagined ACT and the sunlit classrooms where I’d been so happy the summer before. The cards told a different story. Those for ACT were ominous: the Tower, the Devil, crossed Swords. For Juilliard: Pentacles, the Magus, and a Wheel of Fortune well-placed. Only the last one, the Two of Cups reversed, was inauspicious. Lovers will part.
A year later, after I had finished my first year at Juilliard and was living in New York, the cards proved true and my relationship with the French Canadian ended.
The Juilliard School, a conservatory for the performing arts, lies on the northern end of the sixteen-acre tract of concert halls, fountains, and stages that Lincoln Center comprises. Unlike a university, the school’s Dance, Music, and Drama Divisions are separate. Musicians take up most of the building, but in the early eighties, the third floor was the province of the actors on one end, the modern dancers in the middle, and, in its own enclave far to the front, the School of American Ballet, training ground for New York City Ballet. Late afternoons, small girls with book bags in hand and pink tights under street clothes filed by just as I had done years before, their hair already twisted and pinned in place and a