Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [34]
He’d be gone for seven months, and it would be longer than that before I saw him again. There were postcards—one of a masked Nepalese demon, all skulls and silk; the other of temples he remembered I longed to see. And, before he left for Bangkok, a letter describing Everest Base Camp and a dream in which I’d appeared. “Now what does this mean?” he offered in orange marker on tattered blue aerogram paper. It was a letter I looked at sometimes, smiling at the rangy script and trying to decipher a section at the bottom obscured by a mysterious bronze stain. Now what does this mean?
While he was in India, my relationship with an actor in the class ahead of me got serious. Bradley Whitford was from Wisconsin and he was irresistible. He would later go on to fame as Josh Lyman in The West Wing. We’d meet between classes on the Juilliard roof, and at night he would ferry me on the handlebars of his bike to his apartment twenty blocks north. Lanky, sweet, and original, he was blessed with a rapier wit, but more lethal to me were his gifts as an actor. I had never gone out with an actor before, and our fights were frequent and passionate, ignited by a shift in mood or a slight. They were also over quickly. After one stormy argument in Sheep’s Meadow, he carved our names in a park bench near Tavern on the Green; and when he played Astrov, or as Orlando, gushed, “But heavenly Rosalind!” I hoped he was thinking of me.
I pushed the drive around the park out of my head. Like the weather that night, it was defined by exception. I decided I had made it up—not the smooth road or the candlelight or the warm night air—those I knew had happened—but the sense that it was something more.
He hadn’t kissed me that night, and I hadn’t asked him upstairs, although we had lingered awkwardly when I got out of his car. We hadn’t crossed the line, but it was there, unspoken. Like the scent of warm rain on pavement.
Falling
They talked some and perhaps dreamed some,
because they were young and
the day was beautiful.
—BRIAN FRIEL
I had known him almost ten years by a June day in 1985. It was a warm Saturday—the kind of day New Yorkers live for. The sky was clear; there was a slight breeze and no trace of the humidity we knew would come. On days like those, you dream, and your step is light on the pavement.
After rehearsal at Robin Saex’s apartment on Christopher Street, John got his bike and walked me, as he usually did, the couple of blocks to the subway at Sheridan Square. Passing the bustle of gay bars and leather shops, we stood for a moment under the hand-painted sign outside McNulty’s as the heady smells of hazelnut and bergamot wafted onto the street. Robin, our director and friend from college, drank the strong vanilla tea they sold there, and now, after four and a half months of sporadic gatherings at her apartment, both John and I were hooked. When rehearsals ended, we’d sometimes stop in the store with the low tin ceilings and the burlap bags of coffee and glass canisters of tea from all over the world.
Since the end of January, we had begun to read through the play every few weeks. Everyone was busy and we met when we could. Because there was no production in the works, it was an open-ended venture—more like playing around, something we did for fun. Robin was directing her own projects, in addition to assisting prominent directors at Circle Rep and the Manhattan Theatre Club. I had finished my third year at Juilliard and was juggling auditions with a pastiche of jobs—paralegal