Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [44]
The play closed two days later. Photographers loitered outside, we got congratulatory telegrams from Friel’s agents at ICM, and there was heated talk of moving the production to a bigger house for a commercial run. “I’ll be guided by you,” he told me privately as we weighed the decision. Before the performance on closing night, we stood for the last time in our costumes in an empty room on the third floor. He gave me a first edition of Synge’s Riders to the Sea, and I gave him Edna O’Brien’s A Fanatic Heart. Books are not always a customary closing gift, but we had both brought them.
At the closing-night party at Fanelli’s on Prince Street, he kissed my shoulders when no one was looking. “Don’t make me wait too long,” he whispered. “Sort things out, but come back to me.” I was leaving for Maine the next day, to a friend’s house on Vinalhaven—a self-imposed exile, without phone or electricity, that I presumed would bring me the resolve to break with the man I’d been with for almost three years and whom I still loved.
It was weeks before I saw John again. I was in rehearsal for a PBS broadcast celebrating Juilliard’s eightieth birthday, and we agreed to meet afterward by the Dante statue near Lincoln Center. When we got off the phone, he ran to an open window, his roommate later told me, and yelled to anyone within earshot, “Christina’s free … the girl I’m going to marry is free!” But I wasn’t; he had kept the vow, and I hadn’t.
All through dinner at the Ginger Man, I waited for the perfect moment to tell him. I watched his face in the candlelight, felt his pleasure at seeing me, laughed at his exploits since I’d seen him—tales of Hyannis and the Vineyard. I’d missed the happiness of being with him—the newness, the edge of ease and tension between us—and I knew that once I told him, that would all change. Greedy, I wanted more of the night. As in a spell self-cast, for hours I made myself forget what I had come to say.
We made our way to the park again, this time far from any path, to the darkened south end. He laid his jacket on the ground and waited for me to sit first. It was just after Labor Day—still green, still warm, with a few precocious leaves skittering about. “It never feels like this,” he said as he held me, his face open. “I should tell you,” I finally began, and wound my way awkwardly through the words I’d rehearsed hours earlier. Something about owing it to the relationship. I left out the part where, a week before, when I’d gotten back from Maine, Brad had fought for me, and that his apartment—an actor’s usual disarray of laundry, scripts, and dust—had sparkled. The worn yellow floor had shone, and he had bought flowers. I left out the part where he’d said, “He’ll leave you. One day he’ll leave you.” And that somewhere deep inside, I was afraid this was true.
I believed I was doing the right thing, but as I spoke, my voice suddenly sounded hollow. What I really wanted, although I didn’t know it, was for John to make me see how wrong I was. To grab me as he had in the play and tell me he couldn’t live without me. Instead, he listened. He was quiet for a while, then gracious. “I’m glad it got this far—at least I got you to the park again.” His face, shadowed by trees, was a cipher, and when I reached for him, he pulled back, leaped up, and ran out of the park. I called out, sure he was just over the hill, but there was no one. Frightened, I grabbed his jacket and found my way through a maze of bushes to the walkway by the drive. At Sixth Avenue, I caught up with him—his arm outstretched for a cab. He looked angry. “There’s nothing more to say,” he said, cutting me off and jumping into the cab I thought he’d hailed for me.
It was well after one a.m., and I was alone on Central Park South, save for a couple of fancy working girls