Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [61]
I laughed as they tussled. Finally, he elbowed Anthony out. “Sorry, Prince, find your own girl. I’m stealing her away.”
His hand was warm on my back. “Where’ve you been all this time?” he whispered in my hair, and told me I looked pretty. Then he made me repeat everything the cousins had said about him. “Jerks!” he bellowed, but I thought he seemed quite pleased.
I loved dancing with him to the old songs. He did well with the box step, and I coached him on the fox-trot and Lindy. Like any private school boy, he knew the steps and could dip and spin with the best of them, but he didn’t like to lead. It wasn’t his forte. He was better doing his own thing, solo but connected, and so was I.
When it grew dark, after dinner and the cake and the fireworks, he found me again. The second band had come on. His pink tie was loosened, the jacket was off, and his shirtsleeves rolled. He pulled me onto the dance floor, and soon I kicked my sandals into the wet grass.
On the night before the wedding, after we returned from the late-night tour of the tent, Mrs. Onassis showed me to the room where I would stay. It was small, near the top of the stairs, with sewing supplies and an ironing board ready for morning. As she held the door open, she said she hoped I wouldn’t mind, the guest rooms were full. My bags were already there, placed neatly inside the door by Marta. In the back of the room, suspended from the eaves, was Caroline’s wedding dress, low-waisted with a shamrock appliqué and a twenty-foot train stretched out in sweeping dips.
“Oh,” I gasped. The dress was stunning.
Mrs. Onassis smiled, watching. “Well … good night.” She stood there a moment before she closed the door, her voice a caress that lingered.
Maybe, I thought as I undressed, the bridal custom extended to all the women in the house, that we all must sleep alone the night before a wedding. Maybe, like Aphrodite, purity could be renewed by ritual. As much as I wanted to sneak across the floorboards to my man in the sarong across the way, I didn’t dare. Not that night. She had shown me to the room.
I sat on the edge of the single bed. The dress hung in front of the small window, backlit by a streetlamp on Irving. When I was little, I hadn’t always played at being a bride—it was more harems and intrigue, more ballerinas and Indian princesses, torch singers and Mata Hari. But that night was different. Under a thin coverlet, I tried to sleep, but the dress, consuming and fragile, moved in and out of my dreams, like a beautiful ghost.
In the years that I was with him, and the many nights I was a guest in his mother’s homes, this was the only time I was shown to a separate bedroom. I asked him once if his mother was all right with us sleeping together under her roof. I knew there were rules to be followed with her, and I didn’t want to misstep, but he assured me that this was not one of them. His girlfriends had always stayed over. “She’s cool with it,” he said with a measure of pride. “Since high school.” I thought of my parents and the byzantine double standards of those years that never seemed to include my brothers. Even at the age of twenty-six, having a boyfriend sleep over was an iffy prospect. “No, she’s not like that. Not at all.” His mother had a theory, he went on, that his grandmother Rose’s attitude toward sex had created problems for his father, and she didn’t want that for him. I didn’t ask about the problems. I nodded.
The day after the wedding, before I left to begin the trip back to Connecticut and the long push of rehearsals before opening, John