Part 4 (1/2)

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, s.h.i.+rtsleeves 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, brus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 s.h.i.+p with all her belongings in the humble chest. On the s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+elded 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.