Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [75]
I opened the notebook. At the top of the page, I had jotted phone numbers, what I’d spent that week, and a line from the play. Yet swear not, lest you be forsworn again. I smiled. On the next page, John had drawn a Picasso face for me to find. All unruly lips and eyes. Beside it, a mushy note. “I kiss your faults,” I scribbled with abandon beside the face, the ink staining my fingers. I closed the notebook and pressed it deep into the bag on the seat beside me and settled into the familiar rhythm of the train.
It was the end of his first year of law school. Exams were starting, and I wouldn’t see him for fifteen days. Outside the window, the houses turned to woods, and I waited for the dreamy stretch of green that came somewhere before Baltimore. Make time count, Don’t count time, I told myself. But I didn’t. I numbered the days until I would see him again, until we would move into the mammoth white apartment across from the Key Bridge, the one so close to Arlington.
He remembered things about his father, but those recollections came with the uncertainty as to whether they were his own or someone else’s telling enfolded in his memory. Sometimes, if we were lying in the grass, he’d graze a buttercup against my chin to prove I liked butter. “My father did that,” he’d say. Or he’d whisper nothing in my ear—Pss, Pss, Pss—until I laughed. My father did that. There was his hiding place in the desk; the helicopter’s roar; his father calling him Sam and that making him mad; and nine days before Dallas, the performance of the pipers of the Black Watch on the South Lawn of the White House. The last memory he knew was his: the drums, the marching, and how he’d squirmed off his father’s lap to get closer.
There was a park nearby we’d bike to after work. On the way, we’d pass the entrance at Memorial Drive, but we never went in. That summer, while careful of his reticence, I urged him to go. Some mornings, before the heat was too much, he’d run the trails, past the flags and the military graves—it calmed him, he said—but never to where his father was. We visited his cousins in Georgetown and mine in Maryland. He took me to meet Provi, his mother’s personal maid at the White House and someone whom he considered family. So it felt strange to me to be so close and not to go. It was a visit waiting to happen. But he’d put it off or we’d forget. Something would come up. Until the last day. With the Karmann Ghia gassed up for New York and packed to the hilt, and everything else shipped, we stopped for a moment to say a prayer by the flame on the hillside.
It was to be a grand tour, a trip to end all trips. “We’ve spent weeks sweltering in DC,” he said. “We deserve it!” First, Aspen and white-water rafting on the Colorado River. Then five days in Cora, Wyoming, at his friend John Barlow’s ranch. He had worked there the summer he was seventeen and was anxious for me to see it. And after that—Venice. He’d asked his mother where he should take me. Well, she’d replied, Venice is the most romantic city. Marta, who’d lived there, concurred. We would stay a few days at the Gritti Palace, then a week at the Cipriani.
There’s an old adage in theater: Plan a vacation, get a job. (In the years since, I’ve found it’s best also to buy the tickets.) And so it was that when we got back to New York a week before the trip, I was cast as Ophelia at Baltimore Centerstage—a great theater, a part I’d longed to play, and Boyd Gaines, a few years shy of the first of his four Tony Awards, as Hamlet. I paused, imagining the Grand Canal, but it was impossible to turn the part down.
When I called John to tell him, he was disappointed about our trip but excited for me. “I’m proud of you. Come over—we’ll celebrate,” he said. But when I got to his apartment, the lights were out.
I found him in the back on the small terrace off the bedroom. It was August, but the night was cool. He was smoking a cigarette in one of the metal deck chairs, and his feet were bare. He didn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the bricked backs of the brownstones. Slowly,