Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [40]
When I looked across the crowded room, I saw disparate groups—lawyers, bankers, journalists, musicians, artists; friends from grade school, law school, boarding school, and Brown—the many tribes that John had knit together. There was anger, grief, and disbelief in that room, but also a celebration of the friend we’d lost.
People stood up to speak. Some attempted humor. Others told of exploits, athletics, bravery. I read a poem he’d once read to me, one his mother loved. But it was Christiane, our Benefit Street roommate, whose words comforted the most. They still do. “He was an ordinary boy in extraordinary circumstances,” she said, her voice unwavering. “And he lived his life with grace.”
After it was over, I went back to my apartment in the West Village, and for the first time in days, I wept. Then I went to the old chest. In it, I found a slim volume of Gray’s Elegy. I brushed the dust from the sepia cover. My grandmother had given it to me when I was eleven, but I’d never read it. When I was young, I had no interest in graveyards or dead youths, “to Fortune and to Fame unknown.” On the first page, in her careful schoolteacher’s hand, she’d inscribed it FOR TINA WHO LIKES POETRY. I turned one of the thread-bound pages, and a newspaper clipping, one she must have tucked there long ago, fluttered to the floor. Now yellowed, as fragile as a bee’s wing, it was an artist’s rendering of a commemorative stamp from the mid-1960s, a drawing of a three-year-old boy saluting a casket.
Deeper in the trunk, I found my copy of Winners, and I opened it.
At the end of July, a week and a half before the play opened, John bought a red motorcycle. Bullet red with clean lines. There had been no hint of it in the weeks since rehearsals had relocated to the Irish Arts Center, so when he rode up that evening, it was a surprise. “At least it’s not a Corvette,” he quipped. We teased him, but really everyone was thrilled. It was a welcome distraction from the nerves before opening, and after rehearsal we stood on the sidewalk and he took turns giving us rides.
Robin got on first. She was tiny and settled in tight. Then Denise, the stage manager. She didn’t want to, but John coaxed her. After that, Santina, the lighting designer, who’d also gone to Brown. They were good friends, and she’d directed him in two of his best performances there, Short Eyes and In the Boom Boom Room. Next, Phelim, a lanky, red-haired boy with cowboy legs as long as the bike. He grinned when he got on board, and when they came trundling down the block, he pitched his legs out to the side and we all laughed.
I hung back, talking to Toni, the assistant stage manager. We stood by a chain-link fence that bordered the abandoned lot near the theater, a three-story converted carriage house on the north side of Fifty-first Street. It was late, but I could feel the afternoon’s swelter on the bottoms of my sandals. I could smell the river a block and a half away.
I’d changed out of my rehearsal clothes—a short blue skirt and a red cardigan. It was 1985, the Madonna/Like a Virgin era. I eschewed the leggings, the bleached hair, and the ubiquitous skinny rubber bracelets, but sported a slinky black dress I’d gotten cheap at a street fair, a wide leather belt low on my hips, and a bronze-colored cuff on my arm. The cuff was a remnant of a costume from some Shakespeare play I’d been in, and I’d taken it as a totem. My hair was loose and long and out of the clip that turned me into seventeen-year-old Mag Enright.
The play had been going well since rehearsals had moved from Robin’s apartment. John sometimes complained about the stepped-up hours (he insisted on having weekends off and won), but he always