Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [73]
Afterward, he was shaken but relieved to have spoken up. He smiled when I told him that law school had come in handy. He’d been firm but not rude, and I was proud of him. What I didn’t say was that there was something undeniably sexy about him coming to my rescue.
That summer in Hyannis, it seemed all the cousins knew the story of how John had stood up to Ethel. They knew about the bags and they knew about the rooms. I smiled, somewhat embarrassed, until I realized that nothing was private in his family and everyone had an opinion. It was a rite of passage, his cousin Willie explained. “We’ve all had our run-ins with Ethel.” And what was initiation for me was a badge of courage for John. The cousins admired him, and there were backslaps and high fives. In private his mother especially appreciated the story. She clapped her hands and made us retell it, then divulged one of her own. Even his beloved aunt Eunice, while not condoning the premarital sharing of rooms, weighed in during a morning sail on his uncle’s boat. Her behavior was inexcusable, she said, as we lowered our heads for the boom. And when it came around again, she touched my arm, adding, “You remind me of Jackie, you know.”
…
“Did you always know?” he asked me.
It was our last night in Palm Beach. The casement windows were open wide, and the moon was on our faces. I lay in his arms watching the shadows on the vaulted ceiling.
He asked again. “With other people? Did you know how it would end?”
9½ Weeks had come out that year, and there was a line about it, about knowing the end at the beginning and waiting for it to happen.
I told him I had. It didn’t keep me from falling; it didn’t keep me from anything. But I had. And when I knew from the start, that made it all the more poignant. Like fighting fate.
Earlier, he’d kicked the sheet off, and now I pulled it close.
“Cold?” he asked.
“No—keep talking.”
He told me the times he knew it wouldn’t work. When and how. The sadness he felt. The difficulty of parting. “But with you, I can’t imagine how it would end. And I don’t want it to.”
“Me neither,” I whispered back. It wasn’t a real lie. But earlier that day, as I had walked alone on the beach, I had sensed something I’d never sensed before. It was the distinct impression that I had two lives and I would have to choose.
As if he knew my thoughts, he began to talk about what he called our lifestyle, choosing each word carefully.
“My career, you mean?” I said wryly. “I miss you so much when I’m away. I wonder, could I give it up?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want that. That’s not why I’m saying it. It’s part of you.”
I knew there was more, but we listened to the waves.
“Only, sometimes—I’m afraid to open up, afraid you’ll go away, and that when you come back, you won’t speak my language anymore.”
“Never,” I said, my voice quiet and bright because then I knew. “I promise that won’t ever happen.”
He pulled me closer and took my face in his hands.
“I love your hair. I love your neck. I love that other people see how much we love each other. I love when they tell me.”
When we spoke of these things, we were almost shy, as if the feelings might drown us, and at times it was safer for him not to look at me. But not that night. That night he looked in my eyes. That night we spoke of family and marriage, how he never wanted to get divorced and that he believed in what he called his family’s way of family. He wanted that, he said, and it was more important than success. For the first time, I told him, I could see having a child, and in the rain one night, walking home from