Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [71]
The trail was flat at first, through a hardwood forest with a noisy brook, but the last mile was straight up. Flurries had begun to fall, and we kept losing the trail. He pushed me up the last bit, and when we reached the bare summit, there was a spectacular view of the lakes and the High Peaks region to the north. “Worth it, right?” he said. He loved a mountaintop more than anyone I knew. We stayed for a while, out of the wind, by the hollowed stump of a dead tree, and ate chocolate and apples until without question the storm had arrived. As we descended, it roared around us. The trail, hard to spot on the way up, was now treacherous. So he wouldn’t lose me, he had me walk just ahead of him, and when the path grew icy, he found a length of rope in his pack and tied it around my waist to keep me from falling. We also traded gloves; his were warmer. I was afraid, but I knew he would get us down the mountain.
After several hours, the trees got thicker, and we began to hear the brook. And when we made it to the flat stretch at the bottom, everything was white. By a stand of aspens, we lay down in the new snow and made angels, and he kept laughing as the snow fell on his face and on mine. I looked up. The trees, still leaved, towered above us, and suddenly the wind quieted. I will remember this, I thought. And on my back, on the snow that was no one’s but ours, I could see a slip of silver sky. I turned to him, to tell him, but he was already there—arms wide like a prayer—looking at me.
Later, when I asked why, on that night in New Jersey by the fire, he had been so nervous, he replied, “You might have said no.”
As he made his way with civil procedure and torts, I was discovering life as an actor. Halfway through my time at Juilliard, I’d longed to be out. After rehearsals, we’d gather at McGlades and talk knowingly of the real world. Now that I had graduated, I was finding out what that meant. Along with the thrill I felt running to appointments, with headshot and highlighted mimeographed sides in hand, at the casting directors’ offices that dotted Fifty-seventh Street, and the sleeker ones at Paramount and CBS—or, if it was a Broadway play, to the illustrious theaters farther south, there was also rejection, downtime, and the harrowing phrase “They went with a name.” And I began to learn that the loss of certain parts, for no reason I could fathom, was far more painful than others. It cut and bruised, something like heartbreak.
I rode the zigzag of energy and time, keen to find balance but not knowing how. Days of nothing were succeeded by others so full I could hardly see straight. And doubt was lifted by a single message from my agents on my Bells Are Ringing answering service.
I wanted everything to go faster.
“Patience,” the agents said. “It’s going well.”
“Maybe you need a persona,” John suggested after a particularly crushing audition.
But it was my friend Kate Burton who counseled best. She was three years ahead of me in all this, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, and genetically wise about the ups and downs. “In a minute,” she promised in her sunny way, “everything can change.”
At the end of January 1987, I was cast in a one-act festival on Theatre Row, and before the run ended, I had a job at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. Love’s Labour’s Lost was the play, and the contract was for fifteen weeks. With it came a ground-floor apartment on Capitol Hill, blocks from the Folger Shakespeare Library, where the theater was then housed; a round-trip ticket on the Metroliner; and a weekly check of $375. It seemed like a fortune. The company of actors became instant family, bound by out-of-town necessity and the rigor and joy of saying words that remained alive centuries after they were written. After performances, chatty and awake, we’d spend our paychecks on charcuterie and wine at a