Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [88]
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t want to know. I know you like me better than anyone, and I wouldn’t want to know. If you cheated, I would take you back.”
On a December night, long after that conversation in the kitchen, he asked for time.
It was after the summer we lived in LA, in the house by the beach with the shutters and the roses. When we returned to New York, John started his last year of law school, and I was cast in A Matter of Degrees, an independent film that was being shot in Providence. I played a seductress torn between two men—one dark and brooding, the other adoring—and made a lifelong friend out of Arye Gross, the talented actor who was playing the adoring one. While I was away in Providence, there was a phone call—a slight pulling back, which I attributed to distance. I knew all would be right, as it always was, once we were back in the same city.
Now I was wedged in a corner of the couch in his living room, and he was on the floor at my feet, the glare from the table lamp on his troubled face. His back was curved, his hair shorter than usual, and when he spoke, I thought I’d never seen him look so young. He was happy with me, with us—the summer had been so happy—but he wanted to see other people. Not forever. For a time. He knew where we were headed, and that was part of it.
I couldn’t look away from him, and I wanted to, and though the couch was deep and the cushions sank, I tried to sit straight, as if the effort would mean something. I tried to reason, to argue, but when he reached for me, I cried. Was it someone …? He stopped me before I could finish. “No, it’s nothing like that. I love you.” He couldn’t imagine spending his life with anyone else, he confessed tearfully, as though it pained him to say it. And there was a connection in his mind with this time apart—this freedom of months—and the future he said we had.
Every good man goes down fighting. It was one of the things he said, and I’d never liked it. He would toss it off, breezy and knowing, when a friend got married or a roguish compadre settled down. Or whisper it loudly, as he held me down and tickled me. But that night, he said it the way you’d admit to a secret. Once, under his breath with his head bowed, and then as he looked up at me, his ankles crossed in front of him. I told him I wasn’t going to fight him or trick him or make him do anything. If we got married, it would be because we both wanted to, and he would have to ask me.
I refused to believe it then—that saying of his. And for a long time after. But he was, of course, partly right. Some men, good or otherwise, do go down fighting. They are won without knowing how they’ve been taken.
At this point in the story, it’s best if the girl storms off in a fury or, better yet, takes a lover. I did neither. He had his sayings, and I had mine, and “Love conquers all” was hardwired in me then like catechism.
A gay friend who knew us both suggested that I try the time-honored tradition of getting pregnant. “Don’t be shocked,” he said, smirking. “People do it all the time. He’s crazy about you. He just needs a push.” The fortune-teller pored over his chart. “It’s Neptune,” she said. “Delusion is heavily aspected for some time.”
I confided in a worldly older friend. Though married to her second husband, with a Park Avenue life, she still carried a torch for her first. Years had passed, but she still loved him. “Give him rope,” she advised. “Let him get it out of his system now.” By that time, he’d met Daryl Hannah. By that time, there had been an item in the columns that he had called to refute—something he never did. When I asked him, he was evasive. “We’re just friends. She doesn’t even live here. And anyway, she has a boyfriend.”
Whatever time we had decided on in December, it lasted six weeks. By the end of January, he said he was desperate to see me, and I realized I wasn’t inclined toward sharing. That winter, there were passionate reunions and love letters left on balconies. We fought like we never had, and in ways we were closer. But by spring, confusion returned.