Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [43]
“It’s heady stuff. Very intense being with you like this each night.” It was an offering, a way into new territory, and when I stayed quiet, sure and unsure of his meaning, deciding whether to dodge, play dumb, or lunge headlong, he kept on. “I don’t mean in a bad way. I just—”
“Oh, yes,” I began, astonished by my duplicity. “Friel is amazing!” And I continued to rattle on breathlessly about the magnificence of playwrights and the transcendence of the theater, before I turned to climb the steps of the brownstone, leaving him to his journey alone across the bridge to Manhattan.
A week after the play closed, the motorbike was stolen, and in September the police found it abandoned in a field somewhere on Staten Island. I mourned the idea of the shiny new machine, but John seemed indifferent. He decided not to claim it. “Anyhow, they’re dangerous,” he said. “A good thing it’s out of my hands.” And the following spring, when we were together and I no longer retreated up brownstone steps away from him, the motorcycle, whether it was red like I remember or not, became part of the story we told each other. “I didn’t care that it was stolen,” he would announce. “I bought it to woo you, and it was worth every penny.” He said this, whether it was true or not, always adding, “I can’t believe I took you all the way to Brooklyn, and you didn’t even invite me up for a glass of water!”
“What’s your favorite New York memory?” he asked. We’d met at noon on the steps of his old school under the guise that I would help him find a present for his sister. And now, hours later, we had walked in circles all over the Upper West Side. It was four days before Christmas, and the city was crammed with tourists and shoppers. The tree sellers were out in full force, drinking steamy coffee at their makeshift stands, and the sky was clear, although the news called for snow.
It had been more than four months since the play had closed, since he’d kissed me by the McDonnells’ horse barn, and we’d seen each other only a handful of times.
We searched that afternoon in small artisan shops I knew on Amsterdam Avenue. In one, with room for only a handful of patrons, dull light flooded the floor-to-ceiling windows, and every crevice was packed with pillows and textiles, mohair coats, sheepskin jackets, and imported leather bags. “Gold or silver?” he said, studying a tray of earrings in one of the cases. Before I could answer, he held one to my cheek—a small silver hand with a coral bead. He kept it there, cold teasing my skin, and leaned back to assess it. “I say silver. Like the moon.” He bought a different pair for his sister and, months later, would give me the wrapped box with the silver hands.
When we stopped for lunch, he told me he was applying to law school, something that his family had encouraged and he had waffled about over the summer. Now, though not exactly thrilled or even certain of his future as a lawyer, he had decided. After hot chocolate, he asked about the play I was doing at Juilliard—one that was closing that night—how my love life was, if there were still problems, if I was happy. It was territory we had covered before.
On an August night during the run of the play, we’d gone to Central Park. To talk, we’d said. It was a perfect night. The punishing humidity of July was gone, and there were stars in the city sky. He carried a paper sack with a couple of beers he’d bought at a corner store on Columbus, and as he walked, they chimed against each other. By the Ramble, he took my hand, and we walked off the path toward the lake. There was a large outcropping there, and we climbed it. I wore wedged espadrilles, and so I wouldn’t fall, he led me over the pocked ridges to the farthest spot.
We sat for hours by the water on the big rock near the Ramble. Our own world, he said. And under a moon no longer blue—as it had been the week before by the horse barn in New Jersey—but quartered, words we had long held