Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [93]
“Ready?” he says. He’s certain.
I look across at the trees and see how close they really are.
Ending
If we do not burn
How will these shadows turn to light?
—NAZIM HIKMET
On a November night, when the tops of the trees were bare, John came home from dinner with his mother. It was the time of the year he called “difficult.” I met him by the door of his apartment where I had been waiting, and undid the chain in the brass lock. He was quiet, troubled by something. We sat on the couch in the living room, and he said that that night they had spoken of his father. In the course of the meal, his mother told him that if his father were to come back to her now, she wondered if she might say no. Hesitating, as she had, he showed me. He held up his hand, palm pressed out, and with his eyes closed, he began to shake his head slowly.
When he did this, I saw her in him. Her eyes, her mouth, her long neck, her tender, wise face clouded. I knew the weight he felt hearing this—I held my father’s secrets—but the strength required for her to lift her hand, that I did not know. It was something I could only imagine. I did not know then that there are those you love no matter how much they hurt you, no matter how many years have passed since you felt them in the morning. I did not know how long it took to get over such a love, and that even when you did, when you loved again, you would always carry a sliver of it in your stitched-together heart. I did not know that you could love them in death, and that if one day they returned to you in a dream or half sleep, you might hold up your hand as she had done, because life and time had changed you.
Timing is the short answer. There was no single fight, no dramatic flourish, no black and white of tabloid scribes. We ended the way things do with most people when it’s long and complicated, when there’s love and desire and much that works and some that doesn’t. We ended slowly.
Romances, like stories, have endings. In a restaurant overlooking Mulholland, a legendary but reformed lothario once told me that marriage is an ongoing conversation, but romance is something different altogether. “It’s from the French word for story,” he said, “and by definition it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” And if this were a story and I had to choose a dénouement, just one, it would be a night in early December 1990.
As the elevator inched its way to the top floor of a redbrick building on Hudson Street, one of two on that block with a crowned cornice, I rehearsed what I would say. John was waiting for me in the loft he’d moved to six months before. We both knew there would be a fight. He was better in an argument than I, but tonight, armed with facts, I would not back down. My anger was rare, but when ignited, it was the smoldering Old Testament sort—of I am right and you are wrong and I have ocular proof. That night, it felt like strength. The truth was more fragile; I could no longer continue as we were. We’d reunited the year before to see if things would move forward, but they hadn’t. We hadn’t. He’d warned me long ago never to give him an ultimatum, as they didn’t work with him, but in October I had.
I can’t remember now what it was that had set me off that night. It could have been any number of things—a phone number, a postcard left out, rumors of him with a raven-haired beauty, to which he responded, She’s just a stupid model. Or the specter of Daryl, once receded, now hovering.
Or it could simply have been the wearing distance that had grown between us. I no longer remember, and it no longer matters. But what is burned in my mind is his face as the elevator door slid wide and how seeing him, I was instantly disarmed. It was a face not of fight, deception, or denial. It was a boy’s face, open and marked by sorrow.
Still, I began my list of grievances. To each, he replied, “You’re right.” And when I had no more words, he murmured, “It’s bigger than this. Don’t be afraid.” But I was.
He took me in his arms and carried