Come to the Edge_ A Memoir Part 9

"Only, sometimes-I'm afraid to open up, afraid you'll go away, and that when you come back, you won't speak my language anymore."

"Never," I said, my voice quiet and bright because then I knew. "I promise that won't ever happen."

He pulled me closer and took my face in his hands.

"I love your hair. I love your neck. I love that other people see how much we love each other. I love when they tell me."

When we spoke of these things, we were almost shy, as if the feelings might drown us, and at times it was safer for him not to look at me. But not that night. That night he looked in my eyes. That night we spoke of family and marriage, how he never wanted to get divorced and that he believed in what he called his family's way of family. He wanted that, he said, and it was more important than success. For the first time, I told him, I could see having a child, and in the rain one night, walking home from the theater, I'd imagined a tiny hand in mine. I wasn't going to tell him; I thought it might make him afraid, but he gathered me in his arms and told me how happy that made him.

What we were talking about then, although we didn't use the word, was equilibrium, and I wonder now, more than twenty years later, if the house that knew secrets made us speak. That night, for the first time, I thought I could be both a wife and a lover; and I knew what kind of father he would be. And in that room, I saw myself growing old with him.

In April, John accepted a summer interns.h.i.+p with the Justice Department. Since our time in Was.h.i.+ngton would overlap, he suggested that I stay on after the play ended. New York and auditions were only a train ride away, and he missed me. I looked at places. There was a small house I loved on the Hill and an elegant but expensive apartment in a Georgetown row house near his cousin Timmy and his wife, Linda, and their new baby. But Myer Feldman, an adviser in his father's administration and a family friend, had graciously offered us a vacant duplex condo. It was across the river in Rosslyn, one stop north of Arlington on the Blue Line-a high-rise, the kind where you get lost in the corridors and all the doors look the same. Inside, everything was white and gla.s.s-pristine white carpet, white baby grand, and a small balcony that overlooked a highway and the Iwo Jima Memorial.

I pushed against it, but John's mind was made up. "It's free!" he argued. But the real enticement, I knew, was behind the building near the parking lot: the Olympic-size pool he'd spotted before we'd even set foot in the apartment.

On my day off in New York at the end of May, weeks before he moved to Was.h.i.+ngton, I went to a fortune-teller. I had been there before, and she read the numbers and cards with a green-eyed cat sleeping on her lap.

"With this one, you've had lives," she said, glancing up to check my face. "The first was happy, then tragic. He lost you near water, and when you died, he never recovered. The next was a great pa.s.sion. Forbidden. Undiscovered. Powerful families."

She's read her Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet, I surmised, trying not to wrinkle my nose.

His Venus. My Sun. A Grand Trine and the Sun/Moon midpoint. Challenge would come later. This summer, she continued, the feelings would deepen, but I would discover things about him I wouldn't like.

"What things?" I leaned in, the backs of my knees pressed against the frayed fabric of the chair.

"Minor things. Irritations."

On the train back to Was.h.i.+ngton and a performance that night, I had a red Mead notebook on my lap, and I was thinking about "the things." Some of his more jocklike friends irked me (if there were too many on a Vineyard weekend, I gravitated toward Caroline and her friends); he didn't always tell me his plans; he was often late and sometimes messy; and when he lost something, he expected me to find it. But these were slight grievances, and even they had dissipated these past months with the comings and goings and the romance of distance. "I can't imagine how it would end," he had said, and I felt that way, too. I was eager for the summer, and yet a part of me wondered whether in living with him, I might lose something.

The week before, he had told me a story. He'd seen a Karmann Ghia on the street with a For Sale sign in the window and bought it on a whim. He called his mother and Marta to say that he had a surprise and would tell them all about it that weekend in New Jersey. When he drove up, proud in his vintage orange sports car, it was his mother who had a surprise for him.

"She...got some things out of the safe." He looked nervous.

"What things?" I said dimly.

"Her engagement ring."

His mother, he said, wasn't surprised. She'd expected it, although it had happened quicker than she thought it would. Since his call, she'd been adjusting herself to the idea. Then he began to laugh. Marta, it seemed, antic.i.p.ating an engagement party, had bought a $1,300 Ungaro dress that couldn't be returned. Funny, huh? He laughed again, an elbow in my side.

I opened the notebook. At the top of the page, I had jotted phone numbers, what I'd spent that week, and a line from the play. Yet swear not, lest you be forsworn again Yet swear not, lest you be forsworn again. I smiled. On the next page, John had drawn a Pica.s.so face for me to find. All unruly lips and eyes. Beside it, a mushy note. "I kiss your faults," I scribbled with abandon beside the face, the ink staining my fingers. I closed the notebook and pressed it deep into the bag on the seat beside me and settled into the familiar rhythm of the train.

It was the end of his first year of law school. Exams were starting, and I wouldn't see him for fifteen days. Outside the window, the houses turned to woods, and I waited for the dreamy stretch of green that came somewhere before Baltimore. Make time count, Don't count time Make time count, Don't count time, I told myself. But I didn't. I numbered the days until I would see him again, until we would move into the mammoth white apartment across from the Key Bridge, the one so close to Arlington.

He remembered things about his father, but those recollections came with the uncertainty as to whether they were his own or someone else's telling enfolded in his memory. Sometimes, if we were lying in the gra.s.s, he'd graze a b.u.t.tercup against my chin to prove I liked b.u.t.ter. "My father did that," he'd say. Or he'd whisper nothing in my ear-Pss, Pss, Pss-until I laughed. My father did that My father did that. There was his hiding place in the desk; the helicopter's roar; his father calling him Sam and that making him mad; and nine days before Dallas, the performance of the pipers of the Black Watch on the South Lawn of the White House. The last memory he knew was his: the drums, the marching, and how he'd squirmed off his father's lap to get closer.

There was a park nearby we'd bike to after work. On the way, we'd pa.s.s the entrance at Memorial Drive, but we never went in. That summer, while careful of his reticence, I urged him to go. Some mornings, before the heat was too much, he'd run the trails, past the flags and the military graves-it calmed him, he said-but never to where his father was. We visited his cousins in Georgetown and mine in Maryland. He took me to meet Provi, his mother's personal maid at the White House and someone whom he considered family. So it felt strange to me to be so close and not to go. It was a visit waiting to happen. But he'd put it off or we'd forget. Something would come up. Until the last day. With the Karmann Ghia ga.s.sed up for New York and packed to the hilt, and everything else s.h.i.+pped, we stopped for a moment to say a prayer by the flame on the hillside.

It was to be a grand tour, a trip to end all trips. "We've spent weeks sweltering in DC," he said. "We deserve it!" First, Aspen and white-water rafting on the Colorado River. Then five days in Cora, Wyoming, at his friend John Barlow's ranch. He had worked there the summer he was seventeen and was anxious for me to see it. And after that-Venice. He'd asked his mother where he should take me. Well, she'd replied, Venice is the most romantic city. Marta, who'd lived there, concurred. We would stay a few days at the Gritti Palace, then a week at the Cipriani.

There's an old adage in theater: Plan a vacation, get a job. (In the years since, I've found it's best also to buy the tickets.) And so it was that when we got back to New York a week before the trip, I was cast as Ophelia at Baltimore Centerstage-a great theater, a part I'd longed to play, and Boyd Gaines, a few years shy of the first of his four Tony Awards, as Hamlet. I paused, imagining the Grand Ca.n.a.l, but it was impossible to turn the part down.

When I called John to tell him, he was disappointed about our trip but excited for me. "I'm proud of you. Come over-we'll celebrate," he said. But when I got to his apartment, the lights were out.

I found him in the back on the small terrace off the bedroom. It was August, but the night was cool. He was smoking a cigarette in one of the metal deck chairs, and his feet were bare. He didn't look at me. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the bricked backs of the brownstones. Slowly, I knelt beside him. I saw it was not the trip.

"You will always be leaving me," he said at last. And I said some things, trying to break the spell. The part-how I wanted it. A month less than Was.h.i.+ngton. Two train stops closer. Over before you know it.

His voice didn't change. "You don't understand. This is how it will be. You'll always be leaving me." I wanted to cajole him from the darkness, lift him from his mood, but I knew it was an old sorrow, one nameless to him, and whatever I said or did would be powerless against it. But I said it anyway. "I'm not leaving you." And it was then that he looked at me, saw me, and lowered his head to mine.

In the morning, it was over. We went to the Greek coffee shop on Eighty-sixth Street, where he ate two breakfasts. "I'll get used to it," he promised over Belgian waffles and a big plate of scrambled eggs.

I left the next week, and we fell into the back-and-forth and the drill of the trains. He saw the play twice, the one about the prince who mourns his father; and he liked my mad scene. After the curtain, we kicked around the bars and fish restaurants near Fell's Point. On an October night, we went to hear an Irish band at the Cat's Eye. He sang along to "The Black Velvet Band" and "The Skye Boat Song." His nanny Maud Shaw had taught him when he was little, and he remembered all the words.

Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing Onward, the sailors cry Carry the lad that's born to be king Over the sea to Skye.Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep, Ocean's a royal bed.

Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep Watch by your weary head.

On the late-night streets, we walked back to the actors' housing near North Calvert, and he taught me the songs. By the courthouse steps, deserted and grand, he asked if I would come to Los Angeles with him after his second year of law school. He'd been offered a summer a.s.sociate position at a firm there. "You don't have to tell me now, but think about it," he said, hunched on a step. "And if you won't come, I'll stick with one of the firms in the city. I've thought about it, and I don't want us to be apart."

A few weeks later, I decided. My agents had an office in L.A., and by spring I was cast in a play at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset Boulevard. That's one thing about being an actor-you may spoil vacations, but you can also pick up and go.

Before, in Was.h.i.+ngton, living together had just happened. This time he asked me, and he had me pick the house. It was by the beach, a clapboard cottage on Thornton Court, with roses in the garden and a low picket fence. I'd finally gotten my driver's license, and he bought me an old powder blue Buick Skylark Custom with a black interior.

Santa Monica Airport was close, and that summer he took up flying again. He went up with an instructor most Sat.u.r.days and always came back happy. When he was ready to do a solo landing on Catalina Island, he pressed me to come along. A tricky descent, he said, excited-downdrafts and a slim, pitted runway on top of a 1,602-foot mesa.

"Don't worry, Puppy," he said. "The instructor will be there."

It was a cloudless LA morning, and he buzzed us around the basin-John in the pilot's seat, the instructor next to him. They talked over the headphones, pointing to the colored lights on the instrument panel. I was in the back, peering down at the tight squares of neighborhoods snaked through with gray highway. He turned the plane, and soon we were over water. Near a sheer cliff with the runway in sight, the plane began to shake. He was afraid of stalling, but when the instructor reminded him of something, John leveled the wings and the landing was easy.

Before we flew back, we wandered across the tarmac to the Airport in the Sky Cafe and celebrated with buffalo burgers. The instructor was pleased, John was elated, and even I, who knew nothing about planes, could tell how well he had done.

It was in this way I knew he was jealous.

He was never controlling in the tethering way some men can be, but there'd be a gibe or a tease if I flirted too long at a party or if the calls from a particular matinee idol or ex-flame were too frequent. He didn't like my screen kisses, no matter how chaste they were, and he'd scold, "Do you have to kiss everyone everyone?" Plays were a different story, perhaps because he knew that world, and the s.p.a.ce between audience and proscenium made it palatable.

There was one exception-an especially torrid clinch in a Naked Angels production of Chelsea Walls Chelsea Walls, where the theater was tiny, I was in a slip, and the bad-boy actor in question, clad only in boxers, threw me on the bed with Method gusto. Later that night, John refused to speak to me and insisted on walking around the block alone. To cool off, he said. But he never forbade me to do anything. He gave me freedom, and I believed it was because he trusted me.

In November, after I'd returned to New York from playing Ophelia in Baltimore, we went to a dinner his aunt Jean gave at her town house for Roger Stevens, the veteran theater producer and founding chairman of the Kennedy Center. I was seated next to Jane Alexander, an actress I had always admired. Over the toasts, we spoke of her long-cherished project, a film about Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, which she would both produce and star in. Maximilian Sch.e.l.l, newly signed to play the famed photographer, would direct. And, she added, with palpable excitement, he was flying in next week from Munich. I hadn't seen his Academy Awardwinning performance in Judgment at Nuremberg Judgment at Nuremberg, but I knew his film Marlene Marlene and thought it was genius. After dessert, she handed me her card and said that I bore an uncanny resemblance to Dorothy Norman, Stieglitz's much younger, married lover and protegee of almost twenty years. and thought it was genius. After dessert, she handed me her card and said that I bore an uncanny resemblance to Dorothy Norman, Stieglitz's much younger, married lover and protegee of almost twenty years.

Five days later, I was on my way to meet Jane, the screenwriter, and Maximilian Sch.e.l.l in his rented suite at the Warwick Hotel. I'd been out of drama school a year, and although I'd come close on film and television roles, I had been doing plays since I'd graduated. The script was unfinished, my agents said, so over the weekend I rushed down to the Gotham Book Mart to find a copy of Encounters Encounters, Dorothy Norman's newly published memoir, in an effort to glean what I could.

At fifty-six, the Viennese-born actor was still handsome-his eyes bright, his thick hair peppered with silver-and the nubby black scarf thrown about his neck gave him the air of an old-time impresario. As I entered the room, he appeared to smolder, impatient perhaps with the long day of meeting young actresses who, he would later confide, were "too American." I sat in the chair opposite him, and after the initial chitchat and a perfunctory glance at my resume, he leaned forward.

"Are you Jewish?" he said, searching my face.

"No," I answered, then quickly remembered that Norman was. "But I am a New Yorker. And my friends say I was Jewish in a past life."

He frowned. "My friends say I was Peter the Great in a past life, but I'm not not. Still...there is something something Jewish about you." Jewish about you."

Instinctively, I knew not to appear cowed by him and began to a.s.sume what I imagined were Norman's qualities: pa.s.sion and an alluring, penetrating smarts. He loosened up and so did I, and soon he had us laughing with his stories. He didn't look like Stieglitz, but when he spoke, I could picture the legendary black cape over his shoulders. Finally, Jane rose. It was late, and she had to beat the traffic to her house upstate. "Why don't you stay," she suggested, placing a soft hand on my shoulder, and the screenwriter followed her out the door.

Hours had pa.s.sed, and I was still there. It was dark by the time she called. There was only the light from the street and the glow from the table lamp between the two couches. Though by no means an a.s.surance of getting the part, a heavy whiff of flirtation wasn't uncommon in auditions, but this was beyond anything I'd experienced. Perhaps it was European, I told myself, and when he offered me a gla.s.s of wine, I moved closer, to the empty couch nearby. Tossing my head back, I sat with my feet curled under me, and although I could see a wedge of bed through the half-opened door to the next room, I didn't leave.

"Are you all right?" Jane asked when he handed me the phone. "You can go now, you know."

We had talked about everything, about painting and philosophy, our childhoods and religion, and certainly the theater. He had played Hamlet and I had played Ophelia, and we'd both been in Pinter's Old Times Old Times. We talked of plays as if they were real worlds, but when I asked what he would see while he was in New York, he said, "Why watch when you can do." His gaze was intense, and at one point I moved to the window, touching my winegla.s.s absently. "Does the tension make you nervous?" he asked, adding that for him it was a rare thing. "No," I replied. But I had dropped mentions of a boyfriend and how I was meeting him later. He smiled, cat-like, but scoffed when I used the word boyfriend boyfriend again. It was, he said, so American. again. It was, he said, so American.

Then we began to talk about the film-how he would shoot it and what did I think of this or that idea, and if I had the role, how would I respond, how would I wear my hair, how would I move. Together we conspired over the story, sliding easily into the roles of acolyte and mentor. It was, after all, the point of our meeting, to test the thread of chemistry, and when I stood to leave, he stood as well, offering to get me a cab. Once in the lobby, he wanted to show me a mural in the Time-Life Building a few blocks south. He knew the painter, Josef Albers, and collected his work, as well as the paintings of Klee, Rothko, and Dubuffet.

I was eager to learn, and I went with him.

After the murals, we kept walking. To show my daring, I took him not up Columbus, but through the park, until finally we stood under a streetlamp outside John's apartment building on West Ninety-first Street.

"Farewell," I said.

"Adieu," he corrected. "I will see you again." With that, he kissed my hand and backed off into the cold night.

Upstairs, the apartment was empty. I sat at the dining table savoring the moment. I was giddy, seduced not so much by the still-chiseled movie-star profile or the quality of attentiveness an older man can give to a much younger woman-although I was flattered by the fact that he'd followed me thirty-odd blocks in the cold-but by the spark I'd felt. The talk of Art and artists. The ebullient sense of what it would be like to work with him. This was what was powerful to me, and though relieved to have escaped, I wanted the part and thought, as I waited for John to come up the stairs, that this might be the break I'd been waiting for, the role that would change everything.

I heard the key in the door. John wheeled his bike in, dropped it by the bench, and, grinning, turned on the hall light. "How'd it go?" he said, whipping off his headphones. He had been as excited as I had about the meeting. I began to tell him everything-the walk through the park, the murals, the questions. Then, with my eyes fixed on the middle distance, I sighed and said, "He's the most powerful man I've ever met."

His smile dropped. As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. Speechless at first, he began to berate me. I was foolish, naive, and, more than that, silly. How could I not see that? "I can't believe believe you!" he bellowed. "He's playing you." When I protested, he waved me off. There'd be a lull and he'd go off into another room, but soon he'd stomp around the apartment and it would start again. He carried on so much that night that I began to doubt what had happened. Until the next morning, when my agents called. He's smitten, they said. you!" he bellowed. "He's playing you." When I protested, he waved me off. There'd be a lull and he'd go off into another room, but soon he'd stomp around the apartment and it would start again. He carried on so much that night that I began to doubt what had happened. Until the next morning, when my agents called. He's smitten, they said. Nice work Nice work.

To my embarra.s.sment, John began to tell the story every chance he got. I didn't like it, but when I heard him act it out for Anthony, I had to admit he had me down pat.

At his mother's holiday party two weeks later, we were greeted at the door by a smiling Maurice. When John left with our coats, Maurice lowered his voice and shook his head, concerned. "My dear, I heard about Maximilian Sch.e.l.l." Ed's reaction was similar, only more dismissive, and by the time I reached his mother at the center of the gallery, I was prepared to take my lumps. But she surprised me. She beamed.

"Oh," she said, kissing my cheek. "It's so exciting about Maximilian Sch.e.l.l! John told us all about it at Thanksgiving dinner. He seemed to be making fun, but you just knew he was so so jealous." The thing was, until that moment, I hadn't known. I smiled, grateful she'd let the secret slip. That he was jealous seemed in some way to delight her. She wanted to know more. After all, though she was his mother, she was also a woman who knew and appreciated power in men and, without question, valued her effect on them. jealous." The thing was, until that moment, I hadn't known. I smiled, grateful she'd let the secret slip. That he was jealous seemed in some way to delight her. She wanted to know more. After all, though she was his mother, she was also a woman who knew and appreciated power in men and, without question, valued her effect on them.

Not long after that, I had a second meeting in the suite at the Warwick. This time I was more confident, buoyed in part by Mrs. Ona.s.sis's enthusiasm, and before I was out the door, he offered me the part. I did end up playing Dorothy Norman, but it was years later and with a different actor, in a different time altogether. Due to a writers' strike, Maximilian Sch.e.l.l was no longer attached to the project.

When I saw Max again, it was at an opera opening in Los Angeles in 2005. By then, I'd long abandoned the thought that a role might change my life-the sanguine belief that all actors hold close. He was seventy-five. His eyes were still bright, and tossed around his neck was what appeared to be the same black scarf. When we spoke, his face lit up, and I knew he remembered everything.

On that night years before, as we'd walked past his hotel to John's apartment, he'd turned to me with an abrupt tenderness and said, "Whatever happens with the film, whether we work together or not, when you pa.s.s by the Warwick, I hope you will think of me and this night." Strange thing is, I do.

The waves licked the sides of the kayak as we set out from Great Pedro Bay on the remote southern coast of Jamaica. We pushed past the barefoot children on the sh.o.r.e and the brightly colored fis.h.i.+ng boats to have our adventure. It was why we had come.

The day before, we'd left the more predictable resort scene in Negril and headed southeast, not knowing where we would land. We traveled well together from day one. John was the spontaneous pied piper, the one who'd swerve the car over, saying, Let's go-let's get out and do this Let's go-let's get out and do this. I was the navigator, riding shotgun with a variety of guidebooks, reading aloud historical and cultural tidbits as he drove. He loved that, being a team. He called me Chief, and I called him King.

After we were no longer together, he'd send a postcard now and then from his travels. A riverboat in Asia. A midsummer bonfire in Finland. And from Costa Rica, a card covered with golden toads that said, "It's a beautiful country, but I must confess to feeling ignorant about the place without you."

At this point in our lives, we were like a puzzle and our different pieces fit; I held him back a bit, and he pushed me to go further. And we both relished the idea of taking off without a plan and seeing where the day would take us. We loved the possibility that something could happen, something we could tell a story about later on. Stories were the golden treasure, s.h.i.+ny bits that brought us closer.

In February, a few months back, I'd broken my foot horseback riding in Virginia. The jump was low; it was a fluke, really. But the break was serious. I'd be on crutches for four months, and the doctors wouldn't know until then if the bone had died and would need to be fused to my heel, the result being a permanent limp.

John's cousin Anthony was with me when I fell. After I underwent a six-hour operation, he spent the night beside my bed at Fauquier hospital. As I went in and out of a morphine daze, he read aloud to keep me company. Anthony had a habit of teasing everyone he liked. Otherwise, he could appear quite formal. He goaded me once at a gym, saying his aunt Jackie could lift heavier weights than I could. In a baby voice, he loved to imitate the pet names John had for me-Christmas Mouse, Puppy, Sweet Frog. But that night, he showed his true and tender colors by keeping vigil, not wanting me to wake up and find myself alone hooked up to an IV.

The next morning, when I opened my eyes, the room was filled with flowers-from my family, from John's mother and his aunt Lee. Red roses from John in New York, along with a card: "Let's go dancing, Baby!" In the chair beside me, Anthony, the night watchman, was dozing, a Newsweek Newsweek sprawled on his lap. sprawled on his lap.

When I returned to New York, I was treated at the Inst.i.tute for Sports Medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital. The inst.i.tute had been founded by Dr. James Nicholas, one of President Kennedy's doctors and a good friend of Mrs. Ona.s.sis. She was kind and supportive, and gave me the use of her car service for months while I was laid up. She told me stories of when she was engaged to John's father and broke her ankle playing touch football. "That was the last time," she said. You don't have to keep up with him You don't have to keep up with him, her eyes seemed to confide. He wants you He wants you because because you're feminine you're feminine. She smiled, recounting the effort it took to hobble across the room for a book or a cashmere sweater. I didn't have a drawerful of cashmere, but I nodded as if I did.

After three weeks, the cast was taken off, and in its stead I was given a lightweight removable brace-a blue plastic miracle. I wouldn't be able to walk without crutches for another three months, but now, with the brace, I could swim in a pool, receive ultrasound treatments, and take a bath. John would gallantly carry me up the five flights of stairs to his brownstone apartment, but he wasn't able to look at my cadaver-like foot. Nor could he bear to hear how painful it was or of the fears I had. He wanted me to be a trooper, a sport, but for all his exploits, he was squeamish about blood and weakness of any kind.

Around Easter, he had a break from school and decided a vacation was in order. His aunt Lee invited us to join her and her husband, Herbert Ross, at a rented villa in Acapulco, and it was tempting. But we chose the less cushy alternative.

We landed in Montego Bay. Waiting for our delayed luggage at a roadside hut, John drank the manroot drink to be manlier and bought me a wooden cane carved by a Rasta with wild eyes.

On a side road to Negril, we saw a handwritten sign-HOLY CAVE CAVE-and pulled over. When the men there caught sight of my crutches, they began waving their arms and shouting, insisting I go to the healing spring deep within the cave. I smiled at John, and he smiled back; it was the beginning of adventure.

A price was settled on, torches were lit, and my crutches were laid at the entrance. With three men as our guides and one tagging along, John flung me over his shoulder he-man-style, and we entered the cave. Soon any trace of sunlight was gone, and we were enveloped by rock. Bats flew by us. I swallowed my fear and tried to breathe the dank, dead air. Against my stomach, I could feel his heart beating fast. As we went deeper, the rock walls narrowed, and when the ceiling got so low that his knees shook, one of the younger guides took over carrying me. He moved quickly in a deep squat until we heard the roar of the spring.

The pa.s.sage opened suddenly into a wide cavern. Without speaking, the men began to form a half circle around the spring, as John and the young guide lowered me into the cold water-the force of it so strong, I had to grip the rocks or be swept into the deeper darkness. The gush of water and the men's voices echoed off the rock walls. Because of the dialect, no words were discernible; it was like a chant, louder and more insistent, until finally I cried out. By the whites of eyes lit by fire and the black smoke of the kerosene, I cried and prayed. I prayed to the divinity of the dark that I would be healed and walk again.

We drove away invigorated by my baptism in the cave spring. We sang old songs as the rental car hugged the coast. Then he said he had a surprise, a temporary but genius solution for my inability to walk, at least in Jamaica. He'd secretly brought his Klepper kayak, a fancy collapsible kind. I didn't tell him that I would have been happy to lie on the beach reading while he explored solo to his heart's content. He wanted us to do things together and he wouldn't have believed me anyway. His sense of well-being was so tied to his ability to move and do that he thought everyone was like that. He had also packed something else-a book on Tantric s.e.x a friend from Andover had given him after returning from Thailand. "It comes highly recommended," he said with a wink, and a.s.sured me that walking was not a requirement.

Treasure Beach is made up of a string of sleepy fis.h.i.+ng villages and farm communities in St. Elizabeth Parish, between Negril and Kingston. There are no big resorts on the four bays-Billy's Bay, Frenchman's Bay, Calabash Bay, and Great Pedro Bay-and the people who live there are friendly and laid-back. The feel is offbeat and authentic. Pirate Billy Rackham had headquartered there, hence the name Treasure Beach, and legend has it that in 1492, Columbus came ash.o.r.e after the Nina Nina sank nearby. The locals of Treasure Beach are called "red men" by other Jamaicans, and indeed there is a prevalence of blue and green eyes, blond and red hair, and freckles. They're said to be descended in part from seventeenth-century Scottish sailors who survived the wreck of their s.h.i.+p and stayed to fish and work the fields. sank nearby. The locals of Treasure Beach are called "red men" by other Jamaicans, and indeed there is a prevalence of blue and green eyes, blond and red hair, and freckles. They're said to be descended in part from seventeenth-century Scottish sailors who survived the wreck of their s.h.i.+p and stayed to fish and work the fields.

We checked into the Treasure Beach Hotel, built in the 1930s. It was charming, un-renovated, and relatively devoid of tourists. We dropped our bags and went down to Great Pedro Bay to catch the sunset. The last cove of Treasure Beach dead-ended into Pedro Bluff, a promontory more than a hundred feet high and jutting more than a mile out to sea. In the waning light, it loomed above us.

As John tinkered with the kayak, he realized he'd left the spray skirts and life jackets back in New York. Spray skirts are made of neoprene and keep water from getting in the boat. You wear them around your waist and fasten the edges to the round opening of the kayak, and if you're hit by a large wave, they keep you from sinking. In the bay, we would be in protected water, so not having them didn't seem all that important.

After the boat was ready, we sat on the beach and drank a little of the magic mushroom tea we'd brought from Negril, a requisite purchase there and, we were a.s.sured, "da real ting." The effect was mild and relaxing, the pace of Treasure Beach just right, and we paddled around in the smooth waters of the bay. But soon John began to steer the boat toward the current at the end of the bluff. The unknown beyond was referred to by locals as "back seaside," miles of undeveloped land and cliffs that rose up 1,750 feet. One of the highest points was a spot called Lover's Leap, where two slaves had jumped rather than be separated. Or, as another tale told, a woman had watched as her lover sailed away and then leaped from the cliff in an effort to join him.

"Just a little farther, Chief. It'll be fun."

The sun had gone down, and the silver waves grew higher.

"I promise. Just around the point and we'll come back."

He always wanted to see what he couldn't see. Like an itch, like longing, it was out of his control. I was dizzy from the tea, but I wanted to overcome my fear and push through it. When I did, I felt powerful, more alive-and with John, I'd found an inkling of my risk-taking self. I wanted to keep going, to show him I could, but I looked up at the darkening sky and remembered the rudimentary map in the Lonely Planet guide that showed no towns, no roads for miles on the other side of the bluff that led east to Spanish Town and Kingston. No one and nothing.

Maybe it was the mushroom tea. Maybe it was common sense or my busted foot. Maybe it was just plain old fear kicking in-not the self-created, insecure kind I was p.r.o.ne to and he wasn't, but the necessary fear that keeps you alive by alerting you to danger. But when I asked him to turn back, he didn't argue, bargain, or cajole with the battle cry he often used: Couragio, Christina! Couragio, Christina! He seemed relieved and kissed me lightly. He was also hungry, an urge as strong for him as conquering the unknown. "Tomorrow, tomorrow is another day," he sang in a soft voice, and I knew we would be back in the morning. He seemed relieved and kissed me lightly. He was also hungry, an urge as strong for him as conquering the unknown. "Tomorrow, tomorrow is another day," he sang in a soft voice, and I knew we would be back in the morning.

That night we ate at a thatched place a fisherman had told us about. We were happy. John ordered the goat curry-he told me that in Indonesia he had once eaten monkey brains-and I had conch. There were hardly any lights in Treasure Beach, not where we were, and the stars were huge in the moonless sky. We stopped the car on the way back to the hotel and got out-to stand in what seemed to us the rarity of utter quiet.

We kissed for a long time in the open field, until goats encircled us, nudging greedily at the backs of our knees and gnawing on his sneaker laces. The moon rose. Then, in the distance, we heard faint chanting. Moving toward the voices, we saw a whitewashed building-a Pentecostal church. It was the night before Palm Sunday. We listened outside as people spoke in tongues, sang, and testified, their voices rising into the midnight sky. The enchantment of Treasure Beach began to show itself as more potent and primal, more mysterious and subtle, than the magic of the mushroom tea, the cave spring, the manroot drink, or the Rasta's cane.

The next morning, we set out in the two-man Klepper with three sandwiches, a mango, and a liter of water. A Klepper is a folding kayak, an elegant version of the Plexiglas kind, with a frame of blond wood and a hull of heavy canvas. They have circled Cape Horn, crossed the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, and served on expeditions to the North and South Poles. You can also pack one in two duffel bags and travel with it. John had fallen in love with them, so much so that he and Michael Berman, the friend with whom he would later start George George magazine, founded Random Ventures to invest in similar handmade boats. magazine, founded Random Ventures to invest in similar handmade boats.

In the daylight, Pedro Bluff was transformed, no longer ominous or shadowy, but a thing alive with seabirds, brush, and cactus flowers. We paddled hard and made it through the heady current at the end of the bluff around to back seaside. It was beautiful and wild and seemed to go on forever-miles of high cliffs, jungle, and deserted beach.

"You see, nothing to be afraid of." He leaned in, nuzzling my neck. "Good job, Sport." He was right. We were together, the water was turquoise, the sun was s.h.i.+ning, and we were far enough out so that the swells beneath us were only a murmur of what they would become. We stopped, ate our sandwiches, and watched the dolphins nearby. A good omen, we said.