For me, these meetings were a relief from the rigidity of Juilliard. Legend has it that Robin Williams, an alumnus, called it boot camp, and on many days that"s what it felt like. For John, they were a way to hold on to his love of the theater. Robin Saex knew that he missed acting. Although he had majored in history at Brown, he"d appeared in plays there with authors as varied as Shakespeare, Pinero, Rabe, and O"Casey. She sensed that we would work well together and often spoke of finding the right vehicle. The play she found was Winners Winners. It was a perfect fit.
Brian Friel is one of Ireland"s most prominent playwrights. He was born in Omagh, county Tyrone, in 1929 but grew up in Derry. His more notable plays include Philadelphia, Here I Come!; Translations; Philadelphia, Here I Come!; Translations; and and Dancing at Lughnasa Dancing at Lughnasa, which would receive the Tony for Best Play in 1992. In 1980, along with actor Stephen Rea, he had co-founded Field Day, a theater company and literary movement that sought to redefine Irish cultural ident.i.ty. He also happened to be one of my favorite playwrights. At twenty, while traveling through Dublin, I had attended the opening night of Faith Healer Faith Healer at the Abbey Theatre, and when, by chance, I was introduced to him, without thinking I bowed slightly. It was as if I"d met a rock star. at the Abbey Theatre, and when, by chance, I was introduced to him, without thinking I bowed slightly. It was as if I"d met a rock star.
Winners had premiered at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1967 before coming to Broadway. It"s really one part of a two-part play, had premiered at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1967 before coming to Broadway. It"s really one part of a two-part play, Lovers: Winners and Losers. Losers Lovers: Winners and Losers. Losers is about a middle-aged couple married for many years, but is about a middle-aged couple married for many years, but Winners Winners is about young love. It"s often performed on its own, as we did in our production. is about young love. It"s often performed on its own, as we did in our production.
Maggie Enright and Joseph Brennan are seventeen and seventeen and a half, respectively, and Catholic. It"s a warm day in June, a Sat.u.r.day, and they are studying for final exams on Ardnageeha, the hill above their town. Mag is "intelligent but scattered" and Joe dreams of becoming a math teacher. They"re to be married in three weeks because Mag is pregnant. As they look out over Ballymore, they fight, they sleep, they laugh, and they tease; they profess their love and talk about the future.
When we reached the subway stop at Sheridan Square, John suggested that we enjoy the day. He would walk me to Fourteenth Street, and I could get the subway there. Usually we parted here. He"d get on his bike, and I would head to Brooklyn, where I"d moved the month before, or to my boyfriend"s on the Upper West Side. But today we got ice cream. He ordered a pistachio double scoop, and I got coffee swirl. As the woman at the register handed him his change, she seemed suddenly flummoxed.
"What"s your name?" she said.
"John."
"John what?"
"Haag. John Haag."
"Spell it," she insisted, her eyes narrowing.
"H-a-a-g."
"You positive? You related to the General?"
He told her he was a Democrat, and we made for the door.
"Wait!" she cried out, trying to enlist me. "Do you know who he looks like? I mean, who does he look like if you didn"t know him?"
"Richard Gere," I deadpanned. "Definitely Richard Gere."
"Oh no, he looks like John-John!"
Outside in the sun, we laughed. "You need a persona," I said, as he moved to unlock the heavy chains that bound his bike to a nearby street sign. He handed me his cone and nodded. When he turned his back I thought, He has to do this all the time He has to do this all the time. I must have known it in the years before, but the worlds of high school and college had been coc.o.o.ns of a sort and it was only there, by the newsstand at Sheridan Square, that I grasped that life, in the smallest of ways, even getting ice cream, was very different for him.
"You may be right about that," he said, taking his cone back, the bike balanced with one hand. "But Richard Gere...I"m way better-looking." He winked, then bit into his pistachio.
"How"s yours?" he asked as we walked.
"Yum," I said. "Perfection."
"Mine tastes a little funny. Smell it."
We stopped, and he held out his cone. As I leaned in, he took the chance to dab my nose with green. "Hey!" I said, looking up. He was thrilled that I had fallen for his trick, one that had been played on him by countless cousins when he was young. I brushed the ice cream from my nose, and we continued up Seventh Avenue, pa.s.sing cafes and secondhand shops and looking in windows. We talked about our grandfathers. He told me that Joe Kennedy had prized mystery in a woman, and I smiled, imagining myself a siren. I told him that my Irish grandfather had been a rancher who had moonlighted as a Prohibition bootlegger and kept stills in Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota. He liked that. "We have something in common," he said. "Word is mine was, too." Larger territory, I suggested slyly.
My grandmother had died that May near the Nebraska homestead where my mother had been born. I"d gone back for the funeral. I told him about the land that seemed to stretch forever, land that was as wide and as rolling as the sea. I described the shock of its beauty-how you knew it in the roller-coaster dips of the dirt country roads and the burnt-yellow fields broken only by barbed wire, cattle, and a windmill here and there; by the ma.s.sive snowdrifts in winter; and, in spring, by the lilac shelterbelts, some twelve feet high, planted during the Dust Bowl to keep the soil down. He stopped for a moment and with surprising urgency said, "You know the heartland. You don"t understand how lucky you are."
I remember being struck by the phrase, its quaintness, and realizing that I didn"t know him as well as I had thought. I was sure I saw something in his eyes then, a yearning for a kind of life he had missed, for s.p.a.ciousness. But when I look back now, I think of the black-and-white photographs of his father and his uncle Bobby, shirtsleeves rolled up, receiving hands reaching to them from the crowds, the faces weeping, smiling, believing. I think of the weight of those images and imagine that the call of service might have been there for him-was always there for him-even as he walked the city on a warm spring day with a girl he had known for years.
By Fourteenth Street, we had finished our ice cream. He asked if I wanted to keep going, and for no reason, we cut over to Sixth Avenue. The incidental music to our production was all early Beatles-Rubber Soul and and Help! Help!-and as we walked, we sang, mangling lyrics to "I"m Looking Through You" and "Ticket to Ride." We left the Village, with its kaleidoscope of lanes and avenues, and the buildings grew higher and the streets quieter. In 1985, that span of blocks had not yet been gentrified. Bed Bath & Beyond, Filene"s, Burlington Coat Factory, and the crowds they engendered were a thing of the future. On that day in June, the streets were ours, and the city looked new. At the Twenty-third Street stop, he didn"t leap on his bike and I didn"t say goodbye. We didn"t even think about it.
Earlier, during rehearsal, Robin had informed us that she"d found the right venue for the play. We"d be performing it in early August in a seventy-five-seat black box theater at the Irish Arts Center, a nonprofit cultural inst.i.tution in h.e.l.l"s Kitchen. There would be six performances for an invitation-only audience. John didn"t want any publicity and Robin had ended an a.s.sociation with another theater when an item was leaked to Page Six. We were both excited about the news and discussed it as we walked north. It meant that in July, we would begin rehearsing five nights a week.
We pa.s.sed through Herald Square-lines converging and the noise and color of traffic-and kept on going, through the Garment District and past the Broadway theaters. Finally, we found ourselves at Columbus Circle, flushed and fifty blocks from where we"d started. The sun was going down behind the Coliseum. I looked up past the monument of the famed explorer that stands in the center of the circle and took in the fact that we had not stopped talking for the entire walk. Now, at Merchants" Gate, the southwestern entrance to Central Park, we were quiet.
It had gotten cooler, and I braced my arms around my waist while we waited for the uptown bus. "That was fun," I heard him say, but his voice was somber. We looked away from each other and into the roundabout of cabs.
"Yes, that was fun," I said. I was not the kind of girl who found tramping fifty blocks-or anything even remotely athletic-fun, but it had been.
He turned back to me. "Well...see you next week," he said, brushing his lips against my cheek, and before I could climb the steps of the bus that had come too soon, he had gotten on his bike and was gone.
From the window, I watched as he weaved through the traffic. With my forehead to the gla.s.s, I followed the swerves and the zigzags until I lost sight of him.
Why is my heart beating so fast? Why am I so happy? And why, in G.o.d"s name, did I walk so far? Well, maybe I do have a little crush on him, but I can handle it, I can enjoy it. It"s just a feeling, that"s all. Nothing has to happen. Nothing will happen. He"s my friend, and we"ve known each other so long. If anything were going to happen, it would have happened already. And anyway, he couldn"t possibly feel the same way about me.
Thoughts rushed in-fear and pleasure at once. I talked them down as I rode north on Central Park West to my boyfriend"s apartment, a ground-floor studio with bars on the windows and light from an airshaft. I thought I was safe.
No matter how many times you fall in love, it always comes at you sideways. It always catches you by surprise.
After more than twenty years, it"s strange to read my script of Winners Winners. With the highlighted chunks and dog-eared pages and penciled-in stage directions, it could have been any script from that time in my life. But this one I saved. This one made it through the years and the many apartments and the shuffling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York and all the places in between, the constant shifting that makes up the vagabond life of an actor. For a time, I kept it with other scripts, old photographs, opening-night cards, cast lists, and telegrams in a wooden chest that had belonged to my great-great-grandmother on my father"s side.
Ann Dargan had come from county Cork during the great famine, a spinster alone on a sailing ship with all her belongings in the humble chest. On the ship, she met a man from the north with two small girls and a wife. The wife died of fever, as many did on those voyages, and before they reached the Port of New York, Ann married this stranger called McIntosh. They moved to the hills of western Pennsylvania-green hills that looked much like the ones they"d left. They farmed the land that was pocked with stones and raised the girls and had five more children of their own, one of them my great-grandmother. I liked the story, and I kept the chest.
The papers were in no particular order, and I found the script buried at the bottom under an old tax return. The binding had split, and the last quarter of the play was missing. But I knew how it ended.
Winners is a play about first love, and although we were young when we performed it, this wasn"t the first time for either of us. I had just turned twenty-five; John was months shy of it. But we weren"t that much older than Friel"s characters, and like them, we"d grown up together. We also shared their traits. I could be studious and overly serious, like Joe. I sulked when I was hurt, like Mag, and talked a blue streak when nervous. John had Mag"s impulsiveness and love of a colorful tale. And he smoked the odd cigarette now and then. Like Joe, he could tease and joke himself out of any fight. He would explode in anger and strong words, but soon it would be over and forgotten for him, and he"d be baffled if you didn"t feel that way, too. And much like Joe, he had a vulnerability, which was at times difficult for him to express-a kind of loneliness and a sense of being separate no matter who else was around. Because he loved people and had a wealth of friends, this wasn"t always apparent, but I suspect that anyone who knew him well saw it, and loved him for it. is a play about first love, and although we were young when we performed it, this wasn"t the first time for either of us. I had just turned twenty-five; John was months shy of it. But we weren"t that much older than Friel"s characters, and like them, we"d grown up together. We also shared their traits. I could be studious and overly serious, like Joe. I sulked when I was hurt, like Mag, and talked a blue streak when nervous. John had Mag"s impulsiveness and love of a colorful tale. And he smoked the odd cigarette now and then. Like Joe, he could tease and joke himself out of any fight. He would explode in anger and strong words, but soon it would be over and forgotten for him, and he"d be baffled if you didn"t feel that way, too. And much like Joe, he had a vulnerability, which was at times difficult for him to express-a kind of loneliness and a sense of being separate no matter who else was around. Because he loved people and had a wealth of friends, this wasn"t always apparent, but I suspect that anyone who knew him well saw it, and loved him for it.
One of my favorite parts of the play is when Joe tells Mag how he feels about her. Throughout the morning, he has teased, scolded, and ignored her, but when he is certain she"s asleep, he leans over and gently brushes the hair from her face. Then, covering her with his jacket, he reveals his heart. He tells her he"s crazy for her and vows to be true. I remember that summer lying on the fake gra.s.s of the small raked stage for his three-page monologue, the stage lights hot on my face. As I feigned sleep and his words washed over me, there was delight in the secret knowledge, the tender mix where make-believe and reality-lives onstage and off-had begun to meet.
When I reread the play many years later, other things came back: how he stressed a particular word, how he sang a song about kisses, how effortless he was. And that I laughed. Laughter onstage is often harder to come up with than tears, especially when you"ve heard the joke a thousand times in rehearsals. No matter how gifted the teller is, spontaneity fades, and it can sound forced. But with John it was easy. I needed only to listen.
What makes this a powerful play-and what I"ve left out until now-is the knowledge almost from the beginning that in a few hours, Mag and Joe will drown in the shallow waters of Lough Gorm, a lake east of their town. Friel uses two narrators, a man and a woman, who function like a Greek chorus. In our production, they sat on stools at either end of the stage with bound scripts in their hands. Although the deaths are never solved, the narrators interrupt the dialogue with facts-about weather, topography, and sociological, medical, and family histories. They describe, in excruciating detail, the lack of wind, low water levels, an abandoned boat, search parties, sightings in Liverpool and Waterford, airport and border closings, search parties called off, and bundles of clothing washed ash.o.r.e. Then the bodies found facedown in twenty-seven inches of water, the inquest, the coroner"s reports, the requiem Ma.s.s, and the large turnout.
The final image of the play is of Mag and Joe laughing, hands joined, running down the hill at Ardnageeha on a June day to begin their lives together.
At twenty-five, I found the irony poignant, romantic, even affirming. Carpe diem; life is fleeting Carpe diem; life is fleeting, it said to me. But fourteen years later, when I heard the words on the news-search party, clothing found, autopsy (along with the endless facts about water depths, haze, and flight plans) they were familiar to me. Words that the heart does not understand, words you keep reading in hopes that they will help you to fathom what you cannot.
During the summer of 1999, the country was gripped by a ma.s.sive heat wave. The East Coast was the hardest hit-blackouts in New York City, roads buckling in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and in Rhode Island, a spate of temperatures not seen since 1895. In western Ma.s.sachusetts, it was cooler, but only by degrees. Drought had singed the once verdant lawns that July, and a dull persistent haze blanketed everything.
It had been years since I"d seen him-not from ill will, but our lives had gone in different directions. Still, when I learned he had gotten married, I was devastated. It was early on a Sunday morning almost three years before, and I was wandering through Penn Station waiting to board a train when I saw the headline. We had broken up at the end of 1990, but for a year or so after that, we would meet and there was the sense of possibility in the air. By the time I stood at the kiosk at Penn Station, I no longer felt this. Yet he remained in my heart, and seeing the photograph was like a small death, a vivid punctuation of an end that had already taken place.
For the last two years, I"d been living and working in Los Angeles. I"d also fallen in love with someone, an actor, and was visiting him that July at a theater in Stockbridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. I hadn"t thought about John in a long time, but two days before his death, I did. The actor"s family would be arriving the next day, and I would meet them for the first time. But in a sunlit aisle in a supermarket in Lee, I stopped the cart, looked up, and for a moment almost violent in its clarity, it was as though he were with me.
On Sat.u.r.day, July 17, a friend called early and woke me. She"d heard about the missing plane on the radio, and didn"t want me to find out that way. As she reported what she knew, I crumpled to the kitchen floor, my back pressed on cabinet k.n.o.bs. I held the phone against my chest, and when I stopped crying, she spoke. "But it is is John. He"s come out of things like this before." John. He"s come out of things like this before."
I remember little of that day, only the heat. The actor"s family shielded me from news reports, steered me from televisions, and tried to keep me busy, their helplessness etched on their kind, embarra.s.sed faces.
I keep searching for a word I once knew, or perhaps imagined. It"s to hold two opposing beliefs at once, fully and without judgment; to know that both are true. Like ambivalence ambivalence, but without its reticence. That day, when I received my friend"s call, I knew in my heart that he was gone. There would be no rescue. And I also knew that this was not possible. In my mind, I kept seeing the purple shadows of the small, uninhabited islands off Martha"s Vineyard, ones I had been to with him years before. Surely, they would be found there. Surely, they would be rescued. And like everyone else, I waited.
The next morning when the light was still gray, I got up and drove for hours alone on the back roads of Otis, New Marlborough, and Tyringham. I drove fast, careless with myself. As in a dream, lush white fog covered the hills and wrapped itself around the young birch trees. I blinked to see the road. Things forgotten, tucked away and put to bed, tumbled by across the gla.s.s as if they were present. A glance, a touch. The way he said my name and woke me in the morning. Spaghetti he made with soy sauce and b.u.t.ter. Leaping on the benches outside the Museum of Natural History. Candles flickering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he insisted I see for the first time at night, his hand guiding mine over names of cold stone. Another night-skating over black ice. My back against his chest, his arms holding me up; cold on our faces and the sound of the blades. Black trees, black below, black sky. The brush of blue satin against his tuxedoed leg. And the adventures-dangers that fate had tipped in our favor. Once safe, they became the stories we told. But now, pulled over by the side of a country road, I remembered the terror I had felt.
By eight thirty, the heat was full on, and I stopped at a coffee shop in Lenox. Coffee Coffee, I thought. The paper. Do things that are normal The paper. Do things that are normal.
Outside by the steps, the sun glinted off the newspaper stand. And I saw, on the front page of every national and local paper, the headline, the wedding photograph. I stood for a long time, never making it past the steps. In the thickness of shock, I tried to puzzle out why this was in bold print, why this was news, why this was public. I hadn"t understood until then that it was real. And that he would be mourned deeply by people who had never met him but whose lives he had touched all the same.
Plane debris had begun to wash ash.o.r.e on Philbin Beach near Gay Head by Sat.u.r.day afternoon. On Tuesday, at a depth of 116 feet, the fuselage was spotted several miles northwest of Nomans Land, the island you could see from his mother"s beach. News broadcasts began to play the biographical montages mixed with grainy long-lens footage of the house in Hyannis Port, the wide green lawn, and the white tent for the family wedding that had now been canceled. On Wednesday, after the bodies were found, I took the train to New York to attend a memorial service that Friday-not the one filled with dignitaries and family members, with a reception in the Sacred Heart ballroom, but one arranged by his friends Jeff Gradinger and Pat Manocchia and held at La Palestra, an upscale gym he frequented near Cafe des Artistes.
When I walked in, I felt welcomed, even though I hadn"t seen many of the people in years. Some of his cousins, including Timmy Shriver and Anthony Radziwill, had come directly from the earlier service. I embraced Anthony. He was weeks from the end of his fight with cancer. I hadn"t seen him since his wedding in 1994, when he had spun his bride around the dance floor and everyone had applauded. Now he was fragile, his weight resting on a cane. "I"m all cried out," he said quietly when we spoke of the events of the past week. "There"s nothing left."
When I looked across the crowded room, I saw disparate groups-lawyers, bankers, journalists, musicians, artists; friends from grade school, law school, boarding school, and Brown-the many tribes that John had knit together. There was anger, grief, and disbelief in that room, but also a celebration of the friend we"d lost.
People stood up to speak. Some attempted humor. Others told of exploits, athletics, bravery. I read a poem he"d once read to me, one his mother loved. But it was Christiane, our Benefit Street roommate, whose words comforted the most. They still do. "He was an ordinary boy in extraordinary circ.u.mstances," she said, her voice unwavering. "And he lived his life with grace."
After it was over, I went back to my apartment in the West Village, and for the first time in days, I wept. Then I went to the old chest. In it, I found a slim volume of Gray"s Elegy Elegy. I brushed the dust from the sepia cover. My grandmother had given it to me when I was eleven, but I"d never read it. When I was young, I had no interest in graveyards or dead youths, "to Fortune and to Fame unknown." On the first page, in her careful schoolteacher"s hand, she"d inscribed it FOR TINA WHO LIKES POETRY FOR TINA WHO LIKES POETRY. I turned one of the thread-bound pages, and a newspaper clipping, one she must have tucked there long ago, fluttered to the floor. Now yellowed, as fragile as a bee"s wing, it was an artist"s rendering of a commemorative stamp from the mid-1960s, a drawing of a three-year-old boy saluting a casket.
Deeper in the trunk, I found my copy of Winners Winners, and I opened it.
At the end of July, a week and a half before the play opened, John bought a red motorcycle. Bullet red with clean lines. There had been no hint of it in the weeks since rehearsals had relocated to the Irish Arts Center, so when he rode up that evening, it was a surprise. "At least it"s not a Corvette," he quipped. We teased him, but really everyone was thrilled. It was a welcome distraction from the nerves before opening, and after rehearsal we stood on the sidewalk and he took turns giving us rides.
Robin got on first. She was tiny and settled in tight. Then Denise, the stage manager. She didn"t want to, but John coaxed her. After that, Santina, the lighting designer, who"d also gone to Brown. They were good friends, and she"d directed him in two of his best performances there, Short Eyes Short Eyes and and In the Boom Boom Room In the Boom Boom Room. Next, Phelim, a lanky, red-haired boy with cowboy legs as long as the bike. He grinned when he got on board, and when they came trundling down the block, he pitched his legs out to the side and we all laughed.
I hung back, talking to Toni, the a.s.sistant stage manager. We stood by a chain-link fence that bordered the abandoned lot near the theater, a three-story converted carriage house on the north side of Fifty-first Street. It was late, but I could feel the afternoon"s swelter on the bottoms of my sandals. I could smell the river a block and a half away.
I"d changed out of my rehearsal clothes-a short blue skirt and a red cardigan. It was 1985, the Madonna/Like a Virgin era. I eschewed the leggings, the bleached hair, and the ubiquitous skinny rubber bracelets, but sported a slinky black dress I"d gotten cheap at a street fair, a wide leather belt low on my hips, and a bronze-colored cuff on my arm. The cuff was a remnant of a costume from some Shakespeare play I"d been in, and I"d taken it as a totem. My hair was loose and long and out of the clip that turned me into seventeen-year-old Mag Enright. era. I eschewed the leggings, the bleached hair, and the ubiquitous skinny rubber bracelets, but sported a slinky black dress I"d gotten cheap at a street fair, a wide leather belt low on my hips, and a bronze-colored cuff on my arm. The cuff was a remnant of a costume from some Shakespeare play I"d been in, and I"d taken it as a totem. My hair was loose and long and out of the clip that turned me into seventeen-year-old Mag Enright.
The play had been going well since rehearsals had moved from Robin"s apartment. John sometimes complained about the stepped-up hours (he insisted on having weekends off and won), but he always showed up after work ready to go. We"d had one squabble. It was over the word G.o.d G.o.d, a matter of where the pitch lay in the mouth and if and how the lips were rounded. It was slight, but I corrected him and we argued. For days, neither of us would back down. I knew I was right. After all, the year before, while John had been exploring India and Thailand, I had been learning all manner of dialects-from Afrikaans to c.o.c.kney to Czech-and could transpose them into IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. I"d also spent hours studying a tape labeled "Donegal native speakers," compiled and given to me by Tim Monich, the speech teacher at Juilliard. Finally, Nye Heron, the artistic director of the Irish Arts Center and a native Dubliner, was brought in to settle the matter. He would set John straight. But as it turned out, I was wrong. My version, Nye said, was correct-for a county or two over. But John had it down to the township. Humbled, I took pains from then on to say it exactly as he did, and I was grateful when he didn"t gloat. His ear, the gift of any actor, was superb, and at least in the matter of G.o.d G.o.d, it had trumped mine.
In rehearsal clothes, we tumbled and wrestled on the small stage. There was ease, banter, and trust, and he"d lean against me when Robin gave notes. But over the past week, once we were alone and in street clothes, something was different between us. There was a seriousness, a glance too long, and, for me, the awareness always of where he was in the room. I couldn"t stop thinking about him, and I fought it.
"Hey," he called out from the bike. "I"ll give you a ride home."
That night home was Brooklyn, the walk-up I shared with another actress on the outskirts of Park Slope. Not over-the-bridge Brooklyn, but eight miles as the crow flies and forty minutes on the D train-if it was running express. And that summer, it never was.
A trek to one of the outer boroughs didn"t concern him. He flicked his wrist and the engine growled. "Hop on," he said. I pressed my sandal onto the rubber-wrapped metal foot peg and slid on the back of the bike, pulling at the slithery fabric of my dress. "Hang tight," he said as he revved the engine once more.
My hands-where to put them. Certain they"d give me away, I tried the silver hitch behind me on the saddle. No good; I"d fall. As they fluttered forward, I thought, He will know if I hold him. He will know by my touch He will know if I hold him. He will know by my touch. It was as though I had no memory of the hour before. Earlier, in the theater, we"d begun to rehea.r.s.e the kiss at the end of the play, the one we"d always marked or skipped over, a long kiss during the narrator"s speech about death and drowning. Robin wanted it pa.s.sionate, extending well beyond what the script called for, and as we knelt on the itchy stage gra.s.s facing each other, she told him to grab me and he did.
On the bike, I touched his back lightly, then placed my hands at the sides of his torso. We waved goodbye to Robin and Santina and the crew, and took off down Eleventh Avenue, past the warehouses and tire shops.
A few blocks later, he turned right toward the river. At the stoplight, his legs dropped, decisive, to either side of the bike. He reached back, grabbed my arms, and placed them firmly around his chest, pressing twice so they"d stay put. And then, as quick as air, we swerved into the fast lane of the West Side Highway. If we hadn"t-if the light had been a little longer or he"d hesitated, taking time perhaps to adjust the mirror or run his fingers through his hair-he would have heard a sharp intake of breath before I gave over and let myself sink into his back. Before I surrendered. Then I knew. It wasn"t my hands that were telltale; it was my heart, pounding against the thin white cotton shirt he wore that night. I tried to slow it down, to slow my breath. He"ll know, he"ll know how you feel He"ll know, he"ll know how you feel. It didn"t occur to me that he already did.
I knew that if we spoke of it, everything would change. It was like a dream. And you know that if you tumble forward into it, there will be no way back.
It was late, but the traffic was heavy. He dodged the taxis and potholes, and I held on, my knees wedged against his. Near the FDR Drive, he took the long, lean ramp up to the Brooklyn Bridge. The railings and cables were lit for the night. The sky was velvet. No stars. And the city moon, days from being full for the second time that month, scattered itself over the oily current of the East River like a soothsayer bestowing gifts. The wind flapped his shirt back, the cotton silk on my skin. I closed my eyes. And somewhere on the bridge, I rested my head against him and listened to the hum of the night.
When we hit the Brooklyn side, I directed him from Adams to Flatbush. We pa.s.sed Borough Hall and Junior"s Deli (still open, bustling and bright), the shuttered storefronts, and the Beaux Arts facade of the Academy of Music. And when I saw the domed clock tower where Atlantic meets Flatbush, I knew it was almost over. I wanted to keep going, to take him farther into Brooklyn, all the way to Brighton and the sea.
"Here," I said at Fourth Avenue. "Turn."
Union Street was wide and empty, and I pointed to a brownstone identical to many on the block. He parked the bike, and I slid off, dizzy from the speed, my eyes dry, my hair tangled. We stood close but apart, under the glow of a streetlamp, and he began to rock the toe of his sneaker against the curb.
"This is where you live."
"It is. I feel like I have sea legs." My face was warm, and I realized that if I said anything else, it wouldn"t make sense.
But he nodded; it had been a long ride. Then I saw him look up to the door of the brownstone.
"I had a thought," he said. "What if we leave for Peapack on Thursday night after rehearsal instead of Friday morning. You know...spend the night, have the whole day?"
On Friday, the crew would be in the theater, and we were going to New Jersey to rehea.r.s.e on the hill near his mother"s house.
"I thought I"d check with you before floating it by Robin," he continued. "Whatever you think..."
I fiddled with the bronze cuff, twisting it on my wrist. He watched.
"I think it"s a great idea," I said slowly. "Are there horses there?"
"Yeah...there"re horses." He looked at me as if he was trying to recall something. He"d stopped fooling with his sneaker and we were still.
"So how do you feel?" I asked. "About the play?" Although it wouldn"t be reviewed and the setting was humble, it was a big deal. His New York debut and mine, and though we didn"t know it, his swan song.
Although he"d mentioned that many of his cousins would be at the opening, as well as his mother"s friend Mr. Tempelsman, and this made him happy, I knew his mother wouldn"t be there, and neither would his sister. "They"re on the Vineyard." I was quiet when he told me. Were the rumors true? Did his mother disapprove? But he quickly brushed it off. It was better this way, he said. If they came, it would only cause a fuss.
"How do you feel?" I asked again.
I imagined him not as he was, standing before me by a skinny tree on Union Street, but in his costume: the wool cap and leather satchel, and the striped schoolboy tie askew on the collar of his wrinkled b.u.t.ton-down. It was hard to make John look nerdy, but onstage, in our play, he did. He"d perfected the hangdog look, and in a blue blazer sizes too small, he stooped.
He was looking up at the tree, his lips pursed. "I feel good. I feel okay. I mean, I"m nervous-with you I"m fine." He nodded, as if trying to convince himself. "But that speech I have about Kerrigan shooting the cows, sometimes I blank. Even though I say the words, I"m out of the scene."
I smiled. He was wonderful in the role. "Listen," I said. "I"m going to tell you something an acting teacher once told me. If you"re in trouble-don"t just keep going. Stop, take a breath, and look into my eyes. It will ground you. It may feel like it"s forever, but it"s not, it"s just a moment. And you"ll remember. I promise. You"ll know where you are."
"Okay," he said, nodding again. "I"ll try. But same for you. Deal?"
"Deal."
I reached out my hand and he took it. Our eyes locked. I wanted to hold him, to be back on the bike, but when my hand slipped down again, we were no longer smiling and he spoke so low I could barely hear him.
"It"s heady stuff. Very intense being with you like this each night." It was an offering, a way into new territory, and when I stayed quiet, sure and unsure of his meaning, deciding whether to dodge, play dumb, or lunge headlong, he kept on. "I don"t mean in a bad way. I just-"
"Oh, yes," I began, astonished by my duplicity. "Friel is amazing!" And I continued to rattle on breathlessly about the magnificence of playwrights and the transcendence of the theater, before I turned to climb the steps of the brownstone, leaving him to his journey alone across the bridge to Manhattan.
A week after the play closed, the motorbike was stolen, and in September the police found it abandoned in a field somewhere on Staten Island. I mourned the idea of the shiny new machine, but John seemed indifferent. He decided not to claim it. "Anyhow, they"re dangerous," he said. "A good thing it"s out of my hands." And the following spring, when we were together and I no longer retreated up brownstone steps away from him, the motorcycle, whether it was red like I remember or not, became part of the story we told each other. "I didn"t care that it was stolen," he would announce. "I bought it to woo you, and it was worth every penny." He said this, whether it was true or not, always adding, "I can"t believe I took you all the way to Brooklyn, and you didn"t even invite me up for a gla.s.s of water!"
"What"s your favorite New York memory?" he asked. We"d met at noon on the steps of his old school under the guise that I would help him find a present for his sister. And now, hours later, we had walked in circles all over the Upper West Side. It was four days before Christmas, and the city was crammed with tourists and shoppers. The tree sellers were out in full force, drinking steamy coffee at their makeshift stands, and the sky was clear, although the news called for snow.
It had been more than four months since the play had closed, since he"d kissed me by the McDonnells" horse barn, and we"d seen each other only a handful of times.