Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [74]
What we were talking about then, although we didn’t use the word, was equilibrium, and I wonder now, more than twenty years later, if the house that knew secrets made us speak. That night, for the first time, I thought I could be both a wife and a lover; and I knew what kind of father he would be. And in that room, I saw myself growing old with him.
In April, John accepted a summer internship with the Justice Department. Since our time in Washington would overlap, he suggested that I stay on after the play ended. New York and auditions were only a train ride away, and he missed me. I looked at places. There was a small house I loved on the Hill and an elegant but expensive apartment in a Georgetown row house near his cousin Timmy and his wife, Linda, and their new baby. But Myer Feldman, an adviser in his father’s administration and a family friend, had graciously offered us a vacant duplex condo. It was across the river in Rosslyn, one stop north of Arlington on the Blue Line—a high-rise, the kind where you get lost in the corridors and all the doors look the same. Inside, everything was white and glass—pristine white carpet, white baby grand, and a small balcony that overlooked a highway and the Iwo Jima Memorial.
I pushed against it, but John’s mind was made up. “It’s free!” he argued. But the real enticement, I knew, was behind the building near the parking lot: the Olympic-size pool he’d spotted before we’d even set foot in the apartment.
On my day off in New York at the end of May, weeks before he moved to Washington, I went to a fortune-teller. I had been there before, and she read the numbers and cards with a green-eyed cat sleeping on her lap.
“With this one, you’ve had lives,” she said, glancing up to check my face. “The first was happy, then tragic. He lost you near water, and when you died, he never recovered. The next was a great passion. Forbidden. Undiscovered. Powerful families.”
She’s read her Romeo and Juliet, I surmised, trying not to wrinkle my nose.
His Venus. My Sun. A Grand Trine and the Sun/Moon midpoint. Challenge would come later. This summer, she continued, the feelings would deepen, but I would discover things about him I wouldn’t like.
“What things?” I leaned in, the backs of my knees pressed against the frayed fabric of the chair.
“Minor things. Irritations.”
…
On the train back to Washington and a performance that night, I had a red Mead notebook on my lap, and I was thinking about “the things.” Some of his more jocklike friends irked me (if there were too many on a Vineyard weekend, I gravitated toward Caroline and her friends); he didn’t always tell me his plans; he was often late and sometimes messy; and when he lost something, he expected me to find it. But these were slight grievances, and even they had dissipated these past months with the comings and goings and the romance of distance. “I can’t imagine how it would end,” he had said, and I felt that way, too. I was eager for the summer, and yet a part of me wondered whether in living with him, I might lose something.
The week before, he had told me a story. He’d seen a Karmann Ghia on the street with a For Sale sign in the window and bought it on a whim. He called his mother and Marta to say that he had a surprise and would tell them all about it that weekend in New Jersey. When he drove up, proud in his vintage orange sports car, it was his mother who had a surprise for him.
“She … got some things out of the safe.” He looked nervous.
“What things?” I said dimly.
“Her engagement ring.”
His mother, he said, wasn’t surprised. She’d expected it, although it had happened quicker than she thought it would. Since his call, she’d been adjusting herself to the idea. Then he began to laugh. Marta, it seemed, anticipating an engagement party, had bought a $1,300 Ungaro dress that couldn’t be returned. Funny, huh? He laughed again, an elbow in my side.