Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [70]
On weekends, we’d drive out alone to his mother’s house in New Jersey. We’d take walks in the fields behind the house, visit the barn cats next door, and, if the weather was good, head down to the stables for a ride. But afternoons, he’d hit the books. I was just beginning to drive and didn’t have my license, and while he worked, he’d send me out to practice in his mother’s racing-green BMW, a birthday gift one year from Mr. Onassis that she kept at the Peapack house. “Go on. She won’t mind,” he’d say, opening the door and scooting me in. So I’d go off on the winding, wooded roads, past horse farms and mansions, past fields of autumn green, sometimes stopping at a small lake I knew. We’d gone there the summer before with Robin, the day after he’d kissed me by the horse barn. There was an old boathouse, whose floorboards were sunken. A river had been dammed at the turn of the century by a wealthy banker, and if you rowed out far enough, you could hear the rush of water.
When I’d return, he would be where I had left him—head in his hands, books open. Looking up, he’d sigh. “You have no idea. It’s like another language.”
…
We had been together more than a year, and there were things I had learned. He was chivalric and competitive, puritan and sensual. He wore Vetiver and Eau Sauvage, and when he didn’t, his skin was like warm sun. He loved to cook but burned his food, and he slept with the windows open. I wore his sweaters, he ate off my plate, and we spent most nights at his apartment on Ninety-first Street. And if he was in a mood and I wanted something, a small thing—a light turned on, a fan turned off—I found that if I said the opposite, it worked like a charm. When I smiled and told him this, it made no difference. Like a reflex, he was helpless to it. He had a theory, he said, that what he called his occasional contrariness was due to being “bossed by so many women” when he was young.
One evening in New Jersey, he announced, somewhat nervously, that he had something to discuss. He had me sit on the peach-colored sofa while he settled on one of the hard-back chairs near the fire. He took a breath. By his look, all seemed dire. You must ski, he began. Now that we’re together. It was one of the things he loved best in life and, by his own admission, excelled at. It was so important, so much a part of him, that if I didn’t share it, he was worried about our future. I bit my lip, trying not to smile at his gravity. I did, in fact, ski, but in a haphazard, here-and-there sort of way, and he knew this. After consulting a cousin or two, he’d even chosen the place to begin. Sun Valley, he was sure, would be the spot where I would fall for his passion. He’d observed relationships—the ones he admired, the ones that were lasting—and believed that their success was due in part to shared hobbies. As an example, he mentioned his aunt Eunice’s marriage to Sargent Shriver. His pragmatism, of which I had none, both surprised and touched me. I felt happy.
So I skied more than I ever had. I camped and I climbed. That January, he gave me my first scuba lesson off Lyford Cay and the next year, in Baja, we kayaked among the gray whales. These forays into his world never felt like conforming. Instead, I felt as if I was spreading new wings, ones I hadn’t known were there. And when I saw the sunrise out of the flap of a tent in the Green Mountains, or felt my skis cut the slope, or learned to feather a kayak paddle so it sliced the air with precision, in these small ways I knew him.
One December, we took a weekend trip to the Adirondacks. We stayed at the Point, a fancy, seventy-five-acre lodge that had once been a Rockefeller summer retreat. Animal heads hung in the Great Hall, jackets were required at dinner, and a sumptuous breakfast was brought to the cabins each morning. Ours was called Trappers, and it resembled a Ralph Lauren photo shoot. The other guests that weekend were older, and they weren’t about to go hiking. They stayed in the Great Hall playing backgammon