Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [33]
He was intrigued by Juilliard. “What do you do there all day?” He’d pulled his chair closer, his knees knocking mine under the table. He was especially curious about acting class. “How is it different from Brown?” he asked. I told him about finding neutral and metal chairs and sense memory.
“Let me get this straight—a roomful of people and everyone’s moaning?”
“Well, not everyone.” I tugged at the garnets around my throat and knotted them through my fingers. “Some are crying. Some are laughing. Some are just sitting there and nothing’s going on.”
“Hmm, emperor’s new clothes. And you, Christina, what do you think about?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Come on.”
“It wouldn’t be a secret then, would it?”
“So?”
“It only works when it’s a secret.”
He started to speak, then thought better of it.
“What?”
“I don’t know. You just seem … happy.”
“I am happy. Tonight, I’m out of my cloister.”
“You’re hardly a nun.” He frowned slightly and leaned back on the heels of the chair. “Maybe a devadasi.”
He had seen Lovesick recently, with Elizabeth McGovern and Dudley Moore, and said I would have been better in the part. He appeared to have given it a great deal of thought, taking it as a personal affront that my agents hadn’t gotten me a meeting with the director. “It’s just timing,” he said. “For you, it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time.” I believed that, too, and we lifted our glasses and toasted each other with the cheap red wine.
Like the prince and the pauper, we might have switched clothes then and there. A part of him could have pushed the glass doors open each morning, dashing past Nora. She’d call him darlin’ and toss him an orange as he raced to the elevators and the third floor, late for speech with Tim or fight class with BH. A part of me was dying to take off, pack on my back and feet dusty with the world, seeing all that he would see. But we were half-grown then, and it was time to choose what defined us. It was enough that night to trade tales, and as we spoke, it occurred to me that I had never sat alone with him in candlelight before.
Outside, a warm wind chased my skirt back, then flung it forward. I wasn’t wearing stockings, and it felt almost balmy.
“Can I give you a lift?”
I was surprised he had his Honda and said so. For a New Yorker, getting around the city by car was uncommon; we had subways and cabs for that. Cars were for tourists and for leaving town on the weekends.
“Yup, my steed’s parked around the corner. I had some repairs done at a garage on West End.” (Years later, he would confess to the lie, saying that he’d brought the car just so he could drive me home, so he could woo me.)
We were both going to the East Side, to the streets we’d roamed as kids, he to his mother’s at 1040, and I to the high-rise on Third Avenue where I lived for two years in the spare room of my father’s office. I’d leave it each morning as though I didn’t exist—corners tucked, surfaces wiped, and any trace of me jammed into a tiny closet with a rickety accordion door.
We went south on Columbus. He didn’t take the transverse at Sixty-fifth Street, the straight but potholed cut through Central Park; he took the long way. There was some plan to ride the lights up Madison, but at Fifty-ninth Street, when we saw that the blue barricades that so often blocked the lower entrance to the park were open, he asked, “Shall we take the Drive?” It was a question to which there was only one answer. The Drive is six miles of meandering road that runs the length of the park, and ever since I was a child, I’ve loved going through at night. The pavement seems smoother, the darkness darker, and there is rarely any traffic in this cool scented heart of the city.
I smiled at him, perhaps because it was all so unexpected, and when the light changed, we pulled in front of a horse carriage and followed a yellow cab onto the curving road. It was October but warm, and we rolled all the windows