Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [89]
There were distractions. A dreamy actor who took me to French restaurants in the West Fifties and kept his Marlboros tucked in the sleeve of his T-shirt. A musician who saw auras and sent notes with wildflowers pressed in the pages. An older, upbeat Wall Street hotshot who kept saying, What do you see in him, anyway? He’s not strong enough for you. And when I was offered a part in a new translation of The Misanthrope, one that would take me out of town for four months—first to the La Jolla Playhouse in California and then to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago—I jumped at it. The production, updated to Hollywood, was to be directed by Robert Falls. The set, inspired by a Vogue photo shoot at Madonna’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills, would feature gym equipment and a vast closet filled with identical black lace-up boots. Kim Cattrall was cast as the temptress Célimène, and this time I was Éliante, the adoring one.
We met for dinner before I left. I chose a dress, black with small roses and a pencil skirt, that I knew he would remember, and when he whistled up at my balcony, a straw hat in his hand, I smiled. “You look like Huck Finn,” I called down. We were on our way to Café des Artistes but ended up at the All State instead. At dinner, he ran his hand down my back, and closed his eyes. “What are you doing to me,” he murmured. “You still make me melt.” I had changed the outgoing message on my phone machine recently, and when he said it was needlessly provocative, I smiled like a cat. He told me about studying for the bar, “a mother beyond belief,” and that his days and nights were like a monk’s. He wasn’t seeing anyone, he offered. Why then, were we apart? I didn’t say this. I blinked. The spell of the evening was too potent.
We walked up Broadway in the soft June rain, we kissed in doorways, and he bought me irises pressed in damp paper.
I took that night with me, one he later called pure pleasure. I took it with me that summer, through phone calls of back-and-forth and misunderstanding and possibility. Through distance, through rumor.
I took it with me, until frayed and worn, it no longer was enough.
“Are you still there?”
Before I answered, I held the phone against my chest, trying not to imagine him where he was—on the white couch in his living room in New York, with his feet braced against the coffee table and all the lights out. I was in Chicago, in a short-term rental on North LaSalle that the Goodman had leased, boxes all around and Levolor blinds open. It was early evening at the beginning of November, and there’d been a strange bout of heat. But when I think of it now, the whole fall had been like that, bright, hot days one after another. The play had just closed, but I’d stayed on. I’d been cast in an independent film that was being shot in Chicago. Arye was in it, too, along with Courtney Cox.
I had seen John sporadically that summer and fall—at the Four Seasons in LA after he took the bar exam, a long weekend at the La Valencia in La Jolla, a smattering of days in New York between the California and Chicago runs, and then, in October, a night at the Drake, when we’d both tried to end things for good but couldn’t.
“I’m here,” I said finally, playing with the phone cord.
He told me I sounded different, distant, but really I had cried all day. And if I sounded distant—if I managed any sangfroid—it was practiced. I’d talked to two friends in New York before he called, and they had coached me: black or white, yes or no, fish or cut bait. On the yellow pad near the phone were words to remind me of what I’d already resolved, what I knew. But it wasn’t only his presence that had a hypnotic effect on me; it was his voice as well.
“Are you still going to California?” he asked warily. After the night at the Drake that had been so painful, I was finally able to risk losing him. I’d flown to New York on my day off, and