Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [46]
At the end of November, I got an invitation to John’s annual birthday bash, this time at a club in Midtown. It was a curt, breezy note, something about losing my address. You can, of course, bring a date, he wrote. I went alone, and when I saw him through the crowd, laughing easily, surrounded by friends, I knew he had moved on. And I was sure of something else—I had made a huge mistake that night in the park. It had taken me that long to know. As I left the party, there were flurries in the night air, but they melted before they hit the pavement. I wondered if everything that had happened that summer had meant nothing, if it had just been a mirage of the play, a trick of the theater.
A smaller voice said, Wait.
Then in December, I ran into him at a Christmas party in the East Twenties. He’d come with his girlfriend, and I was meeting Brad later, but at some point, we found ourselves in a corner of the kitchen, and the steely awkwardness that had been there all fall had vanished. We flirted. The light in the room was bright and we weren’t alone, but it felt as if we were. And before I left, he asked if I would meet him the next day. He needed help picking out a gift for his sister.
“Favorite memory?” I repeated the question.
After lunch, we wandered all afternoon near the planetarium, past the stores on Columbus and then down to Lincoln Center. Now we were on Broadway again—walking each other back and forth between Seventy-ninth Street, where my bike was locked, and Eighty-sixth, where his apartment was. It was after four and we kept putting off saying goodbye. As we walked, our breath came out in short white puffs.
My hands were cold; I’d forgotten gloves and he offered his. Stitched brown leather and fuzzy on the inside.
“Favorite now … or of all time?” I put the gloves on. Even with space at the fingers, they were warm. I kept one for myself and handed him back the other.
“Childhood. The best one.”
I closed my eyes, and I was there. Running up the steps in a cherry velvet dress during intermission at The Nutcracker to touch the beaded metal curtain that hung by the tall windows across from the bar. I’d turned my back and pretend to look out on the giant courtyard. Careful at first, I’d make the beads sway—the weight on my fingers a pleasure—but when I saw, balconies below, that the curtain rippled into a full-on spin, I’d get bolder, my touch now a jangle, until a guard or my mother would stop me. It was as much a part of the tradition as the Sugar Plum Fairy or the Christmas tree that grew.
Sunday dinners with my kindergarten best friend at a Chinese restaurant on Third Avenue. Wide round tables at half-moon booths, a fountain of magic rainbow-colored water at the entrance, and uniformed waiters who’d load up our Shirley Temples with maraschinos. We’d gnaw the stems and line them at our plates like twigs. Halfway through dinner and bored of our parents, we’d slide off the shiny vinyl banquettes to whisper secrets under the table. The starched tablecloth—a cave entrance—and our mothers’ legs poised, even in the darkness.
And skating at Rockefeller Center—always cold, always shadowy—but the music and hot chocolate were better than at Wollman Rink. Plus they had rental skates that didn’t make your ankles buckle.
“Well, Madam?” he persisted. Under our boots as we walked, the crunch of salt and ice.
“The World’s Fair,” I answered. “I’m almost five, and my mother’s in a beige suit and heels, very pregnant. I remember going with my father up to the highest deck of the observation tower—the one that’s still there and looks like a spaceship. We went in one of the small exposed elevators that rode up an outside track, but my mother stayed below. I held my father’s hand, and the whole time I could see her, but she got smaller and smaller. And when we reached the top, I could see the tip of the city over the trees, and my father leaned down and said he was proud of me. Then we went on It’s a Small World After All, and I got to