Come to the Edge: A Memoir by Christina Haag Page A

weekends.
    “Yup, my steed’s parked around the corner. I had some repairs done at a garage on West End.” (Years later, he would confess to the lie, saying that he’d brought the car just so he could drive me home, so he could woo me.)
    We were both going to the East Side, to the streets we’d roamed as kids, he to his mother’s at 1040, and I to the high-rise on Third Avenue where I lived for two years in the spare room of my father’s office. I’d leave it each morning as though I didn’t exist—corners tucked, surfaces wiped, and any trace of me jammed into a tiny closet with a rickety accordion door.
    We went south on Columbus. He didn’t take the transverse at Sixty-fifth Street, the straight but potholed cut through Central Park; he took the long way. There was some plan to ride the lights up Madison, but at Fifty-ninth Street, when we saw that the blue barricades that so often blocked the lower entrance to the park were open, he asked, “Shall we take the Drive?” It was a question to which there was only one answer. The Drive is six miles of meandering road that runs the length of the park, and ever since I was a child, I’ve loved going through at night. The pavement seems smoother, the darkness darker, and there is rarely any traffic in this cool scented heart of the city.
    I smiled at him, perhaps because it was all so unexpected, and when the light changed, we pulled in front of a horse carriage and followed a yellow cab onto the curving road. It was October but warm, and we rolled all the windows down and turned the radio up. My legs were bare, too close to his hand on the stick shift. He drove fast, and I leaned back in the seat, letting my fingers trail the air outside. It would rain later; you could feel it. We took the loop around the park three times that night—up to 110th Street and back down near the Plaza where we’d started—before he turned east on Seventy-second Street to take me home. Each time he asked, “Once more?” Each time I said, “Yes, again.” The wine had worn off, but the air and speed were intoxicants, and I was drunk somehow.
    He’d be gone for seven months, and it would be longer than that before I saw him again. There were postcards—one of a masked Nepalese demon, all skulls and silk; the other of temples he remembered I longed to see. And, before he left for Bangkok, a letter describing Everest Base Camp and a dream in which I’d appeared. “Now what does this mean?” he offered in orange marker on tattered blue aerogram paper. It was a letter I looked at sometimes, smiling at the rangy script and trying to decipher a section at the bottom obscured by a mysterious bronze stain. Now what does this mean?
    While he was in India, my relationship with an actor in the class ahead of me got serious. Bradley Whitford was from Wisconsin and he was irresistible. He would later go on to fame as Josh Lyman in The West Wing . We’d meet between classes on the Juilliard roof, and at night he would ferry me on the handlebars of his bike to his apartment twenty blocks north. Lanky, sweet, and original, he was blessed with a rapier wit, but more lethal to me were his gifts as an actor. I had never gone out with an actor before, and our fights were frequent and passionate, ignited by a shift in mood or a slight. They were also over quickly. After one stormy argument in Sheep’s Meadow, he carved our names in a park bench near Tavern on the Green; and when he played Astrov, or as Orlando, gushed, “But heavenly Rosalind!” I hoped he was thinking of me.
    I pushed the drive around the park out of my head. Like the weather that night, it was defined by exception. I decided I had made it up—not the smooth road or the candlelight or the warm night air—those I knew had happened—but the sense that it was something more.
    He hadn’t kissed me that night, and I hadn’t asked him upstairs, although we had lingered awkwardly when I got out of his car. We hadn’t crossed the