Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [76]
“You will always be leaving me,” he said at last. And I said some things, trying to break the spell. The part—how I wanted it. A month less than Washington. Two train stops closer. Over before you know it.
His voice didn’t change. “You don’t understand. This is how it will be. You’ll always be leaving me.” I wanted to cajole him from the darkness, lift him from his mood, but I knew it was an old sorrow, one nameless to him, and whatever I said or did would be powerless against it. But I said it anyway. “I’m not leaving you.” And it was then that he looked at me, saw me, and lowered his head to mine.
In the morning, it was over. We went to the Greek coffee shop on Eighty-sixth Street, where he ate two breakfasts. “I’ll get used to it,” he promised over Belgian waffles and a big plate of scrambled eggs.
I left the next week, and we fell into the back-and-forth and the drill of the trains. He saw the play twice, the one about the prince who mourns his father; and he liked my mad scene. After the curtain, we kicked around the bars and fish restaurants near Fell’s Point. On an October night, we went to hear an Irish band at the Cat’s Eye. He sang along to “The Black Velvet Band” and “The Skye Boat Song.” His nanny Maud Shaw had taught him when he was little, and he remembered all the words.
Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
Onward, the sailors cry
Carry the lad that’s born to be king
Over the sea to Skye.
Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep,
Ocean’s a royal bed.
Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep
Watch by your weary head.
On the late-night streets, we walked back to the actors’ housing near North Calvert, and he taught me the songs. By the courthouse steps, deserted and grand, he asked if I would come to Los Angeles with him after his second year of law school. He’d been offered a summer associate position at a firm there. “You don’t have to tell me now, but think about it,” he said, hunched on a step. “And if you won’t come, I’ll stick with one of the firms in the city. I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want us to be apart.”
A few weeks later, I decided. My agents had an office in L.A., and by spring I was cast in a play at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset Boulevard. That’s one thing about being an actor—you may spoil vacations, but you can also pick up and go.
Before, in Washington, living together had just happened. This time he asked me, and he had me pick the house. It was by the beach, a clapboard cottage on Thornton Court, with roses in the garden and a low picket fence. I’d finally gotten my driver’s license, and he bought me an old powder blue Buick Skylark Custom with a black interior.
Santa Monica Airport was close, and that summer he took up flying again. He went up with an instructor most Saturdays and always came back happy. When he was ready to do a solo landing on Catalina Island, he pressed me to come along. A tricky descent, he said, excited—downdrafts and a slim, pitted runway on top of a 1,602-foot mesa.
“Don’t worry, Puppy,” he said. “The instructor will be there.”
It was a cloudless LA morning, and he buzzed us around the basin—John in the pilot’s seat, the instructor next to him. They talked over the headphones, pointing to the colored lights on the instrument panel. I was in the back, peering down at the tight squares of neighborhoods snaked through with gray highway. He turned the plane, and soon we were over water. Near a sheer cliff with the runway in sight, the plane began to shake. He was afraid of stalling, but when the instructor reminded him of something, John leveled the wings and the landing was easy.
Before we flew back, we wandered across the tarmac to the Airport in the Sky Café and celebrated with buffalo burgers. The instructor was pleased, John was elated, and even I, who knew nothing about planes, could tell how well he had done.
It was in this way I knew he was jealous.
He was never controlling in the tethering way some men can be, but there’d be a gibe or a tease if I flirted too long at a party or