Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [37]
“Yes, that was fun,” I said. I was not the kind of girl who found tramping fifty blocks—or anything even remotely athletic—fun, but it had been.
He turned back to me. “Well … see you next week,” he said, brushing his lips against my cheek, and before I could climb the steps of the bus that had come too soon, he had gotten on his bike and was gone.
From the window, I watched as he weaved through the traffic. With my forehead to the glass, I followed the swerves and the zigzags until I lost sight of him.
Why is my heart beating so fast? Why am I so happy? And why, in God’s name, did I walk so far? Well, maybe I do have a little crush on him, but I can handle it, I can enjoy it. It’s just a feeling, that’s all. Nothing has to happen. Nothing will happen. He’s my friend, and we’ve known each other so long. If anything were going to happen, it would have happened already. And anyway, he couldn’t possibly feel the same way about me.
Thoughts rushed in—fear and pleasure at once. I talked them down as I rode north on Central Park West to my boyfriend’s apartment, a ground-floor studio with bars on the windows and light from an airshaft. I thought I was safe.
No matter how many times you fall in love, it always comes at you sideways. It always catches you by surprise.
After more than twenty years, it’s strange to read my script of Winners. With the highlighted chunks and dog-eared pages and penciled-in stage directions, it could have been any script from that time in my life. But this one I saved. This one made it through the years and the many apartments and the shuffling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York and all the places in between, the constant shifting that makes up the vagabond life of an actor. For a time, I kept it with other scripts, old photographs, opening-night cards, cast lists, and telegrams in a wooden chest that had belonged to my great-great-grandmother on my father’s side.
Ann Dargan had come from county Cork during the great famine, a spinster alone on a sailing ship with all her belongings in the humble chest. On the ship, she met a man from the north with two small girls and a wife. The wife died of fever, as many did on those voyages, and before they reached the Port of New York, Ann married this stranger called McIntosh. They moved to the hills of western Pennsylvania—green hills that looked much like the ones they’d left. They farmed the land that was pocked with stones and raised the girls and had five more children of their own, one of them my great-grandmother. I liked the story, and I kept the chest.
The papers were in no particular order, and I found the script buried at the bottom under an old tax return. The binding had split, and the last quarter of the play was missing. But I knew how it ended.
Winners is a play about first love, and although we were young when we performed it, this wasn’t the first time for either of us. I had just turned twenty-five; John was months shy of it. But we weren’t that much older than Friel’s characters, and like them, we’d grown up together. We also shared their traits. I could be studious and overly serious, like Joe. I sulked when I was hurt, like Mag, and talked a blue streak when nervous. John had Mag’s impulsiveness and love of a colorful tale. And he smoked the odd cigarette now and then. Like Joe, he could tease and joke himself out of any fight. He would explode in anger and strong words, but soon it would be over and forgotten for him, and he’d be baffled if you didn’t feel that way, too. And much like Joe, he had a vulnerability, which was at times difficult for him to express—a kind of loneliness and a sense of being separate no matter who else was around. Because he loved people and had a wealth of friends, this wasn’t always apparent, but I suspect that anyone who knew him well saw it, and loved him for it.
One of my favorite parts of