Come to the Edge: A Memoir (19 page)

T
he 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 shore and the brightly colored fishing 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
. 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, shiny 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
sprawled on his lap.

When I returned to New York, I was treated at the Institute for Sports Medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital. The institute had been founded by Dr. James Nicholas, one of President Kennedy’s doctors and a good friend of Mrs. Onassis. 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
, her eyes seemed to confide.
He wants you
because
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
—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 passage 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 sex a friend from Andover had given him after returning from Thailand. “It comes highly recommended,” he said with a wink, and assured me that walking was not a requirement.

Treasure Beach is made up of a string of sleepy fishing 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 ashore after the
Niña
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 ship 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 assured, “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 prone 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!
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
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 shining, 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.

Then he wanted to go a little farther. And once we did that, he wanted to land. I refused. I had agreed only to come past the point. We had no spray skirts, I argued, and we hadn’t seen another boat since we’d left Great Pedro Bay more than an hour before. But he was seductive—the water was calm, we didn’t need spray skirts—and he wanted what he wanted. He also knew more than I did about the sea, about anything outdoors. He had opened these worlds to me. But more to the point, in Negril I had glanced at the book John had brought, and the idea of landing on one of those beaches and enacting our very own desert island Tantric sex fantasy was alluring.

We moved in for reconnaissance, staying behind the break, but the same swells that had seemed so gentle farther out were now larger. They were also breaking on something well before land. We drew closer, and I saw it—darkness in the water. Danger between paradise and us.

“It’s a reef—turn back, King,” I heard myself saying in a voice much higher-pitched than my own. We paddled back out and conferred.

“You’re first mate and I’m captain, but we’re a team and I need you behind me,” he said. “If we pull in and you say no for any reason—any reason at all—I’ll turn back.” He kept his eyes on me and waited. There were the bits of dried salt on his large brown shoulders.

I wanted that desert island fantasy, sand and all. I also wanted to feel powerful, as afraid as I was. And somewhere in the mix, I wanted to please him.