Come to the Edge: A Memoir (16 page)

It was during that lunch, perhaps, as we sat in the shadows of the trees feasting on chicken salad, oatmeal cookies, and sweet tea, that John brought up one of the hypotheticals he’d sometimes play with: If you could choose—excluding being old and happy and in your own bed—how would you want to go? He said he wanted it to be quick. I disagreed. I didn’t
want
illness, I told him, but at least it had consciousness. You knew what was going on. Being hit by a car, you’re just gone. Boom. Exactly, he said blithely.

The small, clapboard chapel that Andy took us to after lunch stood by a grove of longleaf pines. Pale grass snuck from the edges of the stone foundation, and I remember that the paint on the sills of the First African Baptist Church where he would one day marry was a worn, flaking red.

John and I went inside, but Andy did not. He waited for us by a barbed wire fence, arms crossed, one leg hitched over the other. Behind the wooden doors, the chapel had a musty, shut-in smell. There was a dirty green runner and eleven pews—five pairs and one on its own. In the center of the room was a stand with an open Bible. We sat in a back pew and said a prayer, and before we left, John placed a pinecone on the makeshift altar.

We took the beach route back, a straight shot of packed sand all the way. I sat in the back of the jeep next to the empty wicker baskets, a stray thermos rattling at my feet, while John rode up front with Andy. They were compadres—eyes narrowed by the glare and wind on their young faces.

“Hold on!” Andy shouted as he gunned the engine.

“Faster!” John rallied him. With one hand braced against the dashboard, he stood up and let out a war cry. He almost fell but, laughing, steadied himself. Andy floored it, and we zigzagged in and out of the waves. John turned back to me, alive from the speed. He put out his hand.

“You try!” The sound of his voice was lost to the wind and the roar of the engine. I shook my head vehemently—I didn’t need to do this, the things he did—and I gripped the back of the seat. But he wouldn’t give up.

“Don’t be afraid. I’ve got you!” he yelled to me. I began to stand up, shaky at first, without commitment, one hand still glued to the seat, the other clutching his wrist on my waist. I believed in his hands. He stayed on me until I yelled back, until he saw on my face the same exhilaration he felt and knew that my fear was gone.
I’ve got you!

Andy dropped us at the beach near Stafford and took off. We would walk back. By then, the sun was blinding. I tossed my hat on the sand. John doffed his clothes, leaped into the flat water, and swam out as far as he could. I tied the long skirt of my dress on one hip and waded in, thigh-high, to wash off the dust of the day. The water was clear and there was no wind. I turned back to the land. There was no one there, and I could almost see the whole island, end to end—from Christmas Creek in the north to the jetties near the Pelican Banks in the south. Behind me, I could hear his strong, even strokes cutting the water, a sound of safety, of constancy. “This is the widest beach I’ve ever seen,” I said aloud. It was low tide, and the sand was bare, dressed only by coquinas, slipper shells, and bits of jellyfish—a string of tiny cabochon moonstones laid out like a necklace on the broad lip of the shore.

John came back and dressed, drying himself with his T-shirt.

“Brown as a berry.” He kissed my shoulders. “Let’s make it back for cocktails.”

I laughed. “More like a salmon.” I knew I was getting burned.

“Look.” He pointed up as we walked. From the west, a bank of black clouds raced toward us. Then—a deafening rumble.

“What do we do?”

“What do you mean what do we do? We keep walking.”

The rain started, lightly at first, in patches, as we moved south to the break in the dunes at Greyfield. But then the sky darkened, the rain kicked in, and, as hot as it had been minutes ago, I was suddenly shivering, my hat bedraggled and my flowered dress soaked through.

Out of nowhere, a red truck appeared. It was Pat. He reached over and rolled down the passenger’s side window. “You folks want a ride?”

His devil grin was a welcome sight. Relieved, I moved toward the truck.

“Thanks, I’m gonna walk,” I heard John say behind me.

“Why?”

“It’s just rain.”

I was stumped. Why would anyone choose a downpour over a dry truck? When my efforts at persuasion fell flat and it was clear this was a nonnegotiable, I knew I had to choose—John or the truck. I didn’t want to get any wetter than I already was and I hated the rain, but the truth was, at that moment, twenty minutes away from him seemed unbearable to me.

I hemmed and hawed. Pat revved the engine.

“For Christ’s sake, make up your mind!” John barked. “It’s only rain.”

The pickup won, and I jumped in. I was not, to my dismay, the girl who walked in the rain. I was the girl who chose the truck. I smiled at Pat, a little embarrassed that he knew this. As he smiled back, my hat slid to the truck floor, and I saw that my dress was stuck to my thighs. I began to shake it. “Don’t worry, you’ll be warm soon,” Pat said, turning on the heater. Just then, the sky lit up. The storm hit full-tilt, and the rain came down in a crackling roar. Instinctively, I ducked.

When I lifted my head. I could barely see out the window. “They don’t call it a barrier beach for nothing,” I said.

“What?”

“I said, they don’t call it a barrier beach for nothing!”

Whether he heard me or not, Pat nodded. Windshield wipers beating furiously, we made our way up the roll of the double dune. Maybe John had changed his mind. Maybe he was running to the truck. I looked back. The glass was fogged, but I saw him. He was walking slowly—head down, hands deep in the pockets of his windbreaker. I was safe, out of the rain, but he was infinitely cooler; he was getting drenched, and he was happy.

The night before we left, we went to a party in a small A-frame in the woods—a roof raising for Mouse McDowell, one of Andy’s cousins. We danced barefoot in the small hours to Little Feat and the Band with the inn staff and various Carnegie descendants—McDowells, Fergusons, Fosters. The virgin house throbbed to the beat and reeked of bourbon, weed, and sawdust. The heavy night air wafted through the glassless windows, and when Prince’s
Dirty Mind
came on, John pulled me in, mouthing the words on the back of my neck. We danced like there was no one else in the room, his arms over my shoulders, mine on his back.

On our way back to the inn through an open field, with horses and armadillos rustling unseen in the dark, he told me he loved me for the first time, though I already knew. And as the night began to deepen, we made love on one of the porch swings at Greyfield, a fan overhead ticking time.

Afterward, I thought I heard someone. “There’s no one there,” he said. But moments later, below the high porch, Andy walked by, his blond head aglow in the darkness.

T
hat fall, John switched apartments and began law school. He left the shared two-bedroom in a doorman building off West End Avenue where he’d lived for almost two years and moved to the top floor of a renovated town house on West Ninety-first Street. The building, more spruced up than those on the rest of the block, had a red door with globe lighting. Steps from the entrance was a community mural depicting people of all races in harmony, but if you left your bike outside overnight or neglected to pop the car radio, it was likely to be stolen. The apartment was a block from the park, around the corner from a D’Agostino market, and across from the PS 84 schoolyard, and afternoons, the sounds of children playing fell lightly over the street.

Before our trip to Cumberland Island, he took me to see the apartment, and we walked through the empty rooms on a summer night. We stood in the largest one discussing the pros and cons. “What do you think?” He spoke softly, leaning in to nudge me. “Should I take it?” He wasn’t sure; there was another place closer to NYU. If there was a choice of trails up a mountain or where to set up camp for the night, instinct served him, but with less corporeal decisions, he’d check himself and weigh what others thought. Maurice thinks this, he’d tell me, or Mummy and Caroline said that. As the amber light deepened in the room, I saw, in a way I hadn’t before, how much he trusted my counsel, desired my guidance, and, more than simply wanting my approval, needed me to be happy here, too.

I touched his cheek. “I think it’s grown-up. I like it,” I said, before asking if he would leave his water bed behind.

While we were away, the bare rooms were outfitted with sturdy essentials—comfortable furnishings you could kick about. A nap-inducing canvas-covered couch, a leather recliner, a plain coffee table, a small dining set. Simple lamps and mirrors. The masks he collected peered from the walls. I opened a kitchen cupboard. It was stocked with matching dishes and oversize mugs. In the linen closet, new sheets and towels had been stripped of their plastic and folded squarely by someone who knew how. “You must have a fairy godmother,” I teased. He winked, aware this wasn’t the norm. “Well, Mummy did what she does best and called up Bloomingdale’s and Conran’s. Nice, huh?”

At the back, down a dark skinny hall, there were two small rooms. In the one that would become his study, there was a saw-horse desk and a pine bookshelf. Spider plants crowded the window. The bedroom was furnished with an antique highboy, a new brass bed with an art deco lamp of his mother’s on the side where I would sleep, and, in a corner, one of his father’s padded rockers. It didn’t quite fit, and whenever he passed it, he grazed the arm.

I moved as well, from Brooklyn back to Manhattan, and after a series of ill-fated and illegal sublets, I found a studio in a converted brownstone on West Eighty-third Street—a front apartment with tons of light and little floor space. The stairwell was shabby—a torn carpet and the perpetual tang of Chinese food—and when the couple upstairs argued, as they did weekly, I could hear every word. But I was in heaven. A vanity, my grandmother’s bed, and a green velvet love seat fit snugly, and there were high ceilings and a working fireplace. It was a perfect artist’s garret. Plus, I had a lease, and in New York, where geography is destiny, it was eight blocks from John’s.

The apartment had a terrace that jutted over the parlor floor below, and whether he remembered his key or not, John preferred to enter through my window. He’d give a whistle—soft, two-toned, and flirty—and with a foot on the stone planter and his hand on the iron rail, he’d hoist himself up the side of the brownstone. I liked it, and the neighbors got used to his Romeo act, but one night when we were in bed, we heard a voice through a bullhorn.

“This is NYPD. Come to the window.”

We burst out laughing. Then a spotlight froze the room.

“You go to the window,” he hissed.

“No, you!”

“Come on … the papers.”

I did what he asked and lifted the sash. Everything’s fine, I explained. Just my boyfriend crawling through the window. Below, three officers stood in front of a double-parked squad car, the cherry lights whirling like mad. One of them aimed a bright beam on my face.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. We need to confirm you’re all right.”

“Really, Officer, I’m fine.”

“Ma’am, whoever’s in there needs to come to the window at once, or we
will
enter the apartment.”

John stepped beside me, and they turned the light on him. He spoke with an easy, self-effacing charm, the same way he did with reporters and people he didn’t know well. He didn’t press the point or pull rank; he simply wondered if this might stay off the record. Even two flights down, they recognized him—not right away, but when the officer in charge began to apologize at length without blinking, it was apparent. Before they got back in the squad car, the junior guy, slow on the uptake, suddenly began shaking his head. “Sir, I think … Was that JFK Jr.?”

I closed the window and pulled the lock shut. John was back in bed, hands behind his head and ankles crossed. He looked pleased. “I’d say we gave them their story for the night, don’t you?”

There were times when he could go unnoticed, slipping through the streets without heads turning or his name being repeated sotto voce as he passed. But after the fall of 1988, when he appeared on the cover of
People
as the Sexiest Man Alive, that happened less often. From then on, whenever a picture was published in the
Post
or the
Star
, it was more likely that strangers would approach to tell him what his father/mother/uncle meant to them. He would be cordial, graceful, and sometimes, depending on his mood, he’d thank them. Most of the time, he would just let them talk. And when they left, it would be with the sense that they knew him, that the words they had said had not been said before.

There would be a shift in him then, effortless and imperceptible to whoever was walking away, but I’d notice. It was as though a measure of spirit would leave him and then, as easy as breath, would slip back in. He had found something that had not quite been realized when the woman in the ice-cream shop near Sheridan Square thought she recognized him years before—a necessary removal that allowed him to walk this world and keep his kindness intact. Conscious of it or not, he had found a persona.

Mornings, if he didn’t take the subway, he would ride his bike the eighty-odd blocks to Vanderbilt Hall, a large redbrick building at the south end of Washington Square. He had been away from school for more than two years, and law school was a challenge, especially that first semester. But he kept at it.

On weekends, we’d drive out alone to his mother’s house in New Jersey. We’d take walks in the fields behind the house, visit the barn cats next door, and, if the weather was good, head down to the stables for a ride. But afternoons, he’d hit the books. I was just beginning to drive and didn’t have my license, and while he worked, he’d send me out to practice in his mother’s racing-green BMW, a birthday gift one year from Mr. Onassis that she kept at the Peapack house. “Go on. She won’t mind,” he’d say, opening the door and scooting me in. So I’d go off on the winding, wooded roads, past horse farms and mansions, past fields of autumn green, sometimes stopping at a small lake I knew. We’d gone there the summer before with Robin, the day after he’d kissed me by the horse barn. There was an old boathouse, whose floorboards were sunken. A river had been dammed at the turn of the century by a wealthy banker, and if you rowed out far enough, you could hear the rush of water.

When I’d return, he would be where I had left him—head in his hands, books open. Looking up, he’d sigh. “You have no idea. It’s like another language.”

…

We had been together more than a year, and there were things I had learned. He was chivalric and competitive, puritan and sensual. He wore Vetiver and Eau Sauvage, and when he didn’t, his skin was like warm sun. He loved to cook but burned his food, and he slept with the windows open. I wore his sweaters, he ate off my plate, and we spent most nights at his apartment on Ninety-first Street. And if he was in a mood and I wanted something, a small thing—a light turned on, a fan turned off—I found that if I said the opposite, it worked like a charm. When I smiled and told him this, it made no difference. Like a reflex, he was helpless to it. He had a theory, he said, that what he called his occasional contrariness was due to being “bossed by so many women” when he was young.

One evening in New Jersey, he announced, somewhat nervously, that he had something to discuss. He had me sit on the peach-colored sofa while he settled on one of the hard-back chairs near the fire. He took a breath. By his look, all seemed dire. You must ski, he began. Now that we’re together. It was one of the things he loved best in life and, by his own admission, excelled at. It was so important, so much a part of him, that if I didn’t share it, he was worried about our future. I bit my lip, trying not to smile at his gravity. I did, in fact, ski, but in a haphazard, here-and-there sort of way, and he knew this. After consulting a cousin or two, he’d even chosen the place to begin. Sun Valley, he was sure, would be the spot where I would fall for his passion. He’d observed relationships—the ones he admired, the ones that were lasting—and believed that their success was due in part to shared hobbies. As an example, he mentioned his aunt Eunice’s marriage to Sargent Shriver. His pragmatism, of which I had none, both surprised and touched me. I felt happy.

So I skied more than I ever had. I camped and I climbed. That January, he gave me my first scuba lesson off Lyford Cay and the next year, in Baja, we kayaked among the gray whales. These forays into his world never felt like conforming. Instead, I felt as if I was spreading new wings, ones I hadn’t known were there. And when I saw the sunrise out of the flap of a tent in the Green Mountains, or felt my skis cut the slope, or learned to feather a kayak paddle so it sliced the air with precision, in these small ways I knew him.

One December, we took a weekend trip to the Adirondacks. We stayed at the Point, a fancy, seventy-five-acre lodge that had once been a Rockefeller summer retreat. Animal heads hung in the Great Hall, jackets were required at dinner, and a sumptuous breakfast was brought to the cabins each morning. Ours was called Trappers, and it resembled a Ralph Lauren photo shoot. The other guests that weekend were older, and they weren’t about to go hiking. They stayed in the Great Hall playing backgammon and reading by the enormous fire, biding their time until cocktails. But we set off, although the forecast was for snow. It might not happen, he reasoned, and when we left, the ground was dry and the sun bright.

The trail was flat at first, through a hardwood forest with a noisy brook, but the last mile was straight up. Flurries had begun to fall, and we kept losing the trail. He pushed me up the last bit, and when we reached the bare summit, there was a spectacular view of the lakes and the High Peaks region to the north. “Worth it, right?” he said. He loved a mountaintop more than anyone I knew. We stayed for a while, out of the wind, by the hollowed stump of a dead tree, and ate chocolate and apples until without question the storm had arrived. As we descended, it roared around us. The trail, hard to spot on the way up, was now treacherous. So he wouldn’t lose me, he had me walk just ahead of him, and when the path grew icy, he found a length of rope in his pack and tied it around my waist to keep me from falling. We also traded gloves; his were warmer. I was afraid, but I knew he would get us down the mountain.

After several hours, the trees got thicker, and we began to hear the brook. And when we made it to the flat stretch at the bottom, everything was white. By a stand of aspens, we lay down in the new snow and made angels, and he kept laughing as the snow fell on his face and on mine. I looked up. The trees, still leaved, towered above us, and suddenly the wind quieted.
I will remember this
, I thought. And on my back, on the snow that was no one’s but ours, I could see a slip of silver sky. I turned to him, to tell him, but he was already there—arms wide like a prayer—looking at me.

Later, when I asked why, on that night in New Jersey by the fire, he had been so nervous, he replied, “You might have said no.”

As he made his way with civil procedure and torts, I was discovering life as an actor. Halfway through my time at Juilliard, I’d longed to be out. After rehearsals, we’d gather at McGlades and talk knowingly of the real world. Now that I had graduated, I was finding out what that meant. Along with the thrill I felt running to appointments, with headshot and highlighted mimeographed sides in hand, at the casting directors’ offices that dotted Fifty-seventh Street, and the sleeker ones at Paramount and CBS—or, if it was a Broadway play, to the illustrious theaters farther south, there was also rejection, downtime, and the harrowing phrase “They went with a name.” And I began to learn that the loss of certain parts, for no reason I could fathom, was far more painful than others. It cut and bruised, something like heartbreak.

I rode the zigzag of energy and time, keen to find balance but not knowing how. Days of nothing were succeeded by others so full I could hardly see straight. And doubt was lifted by a single message from my agents on my Bells Are Ringing answering service.

I wanted everything to go faster.

“Patience,” the agents said. “It’s going well.”

“Maybe you need a persona,” John suggested after a particularly crushing audition.

But it was my friend Kate Burton who counseled best. She was three years ahead of me in all this, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, and genetically wise about the ups and downs. “In a minute,” she promised in her sunny way, “everything can change.”

At the end of January 1987, I was cast in a one-act festival on Theatre Row, and before the run ended, I had a job at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
was the play, and the contract was for fifteen weeks. With it came a ground-floor apartment on Capitol Hill, blocks from the Folger Shakespeare Library, where the theater was then housed; a round-trip ticket on the Metroliner; and a weekly check of $375. It seemed like a fortune. The company of actors became instant family, bound by out-of-town necessity and the rigor and joy of saying words that remained alive centuries after they were written. After performances, chatty and awake, we’d spend our paychecks on charcuterie and wine at a small brasserie near Constitution Avenue.