if i loved you
When I think of him, he is singing.
When we met, he was 74. I was 24, and a scene study class with Ron Leibman was the prize before graduation. It was the last semester of my last year of graduate school. We had waited so long to meet him.
By then, it had already been decades since he won the Tony Award for playing Roy Cohn in Angels in America. Some of us knew him as Rachel Green’s father in “Friends.” Others had seen him opposite Sally Field in “Norma Rae.”
He was a true actor. We loved him, my classmates and I, because he told the truth. We were afraid of him because he told the truth.
We were enamored of his wife, too, his Jessica, who most of us knew as Lucille Bluth, the matriarch in “Arrested Development.” She rarely made appearances at the school, but his eyes when he spoke of her, the way his face softened, made us feel as if we loved her, too.
Before I moved to New York City to study with Ron, I watched his 1993 Tony Award acceptance speech. He was what I wanted to be, full of tenacity and love. “I saw my first Broadway play when I was three years old,” he said. “I’ve been a professional actor for thirty-five years. Angels in America is my tenth Broadway play. This is my first Tony nomination. I hope you know in your hearts how deeply grateful I am to be here tonight. …Jessica, the love of my life, thank you. Maybe we can get an apartment with a washer-dryer now.”
Ron would slip into the building on Bank Street once a week in his jeans and dark green puffer vest and blue baseball cap, the one that said “Keep Back 20 Feet” above the closure. Once a week, he’d hand us scripts, assigning us scenes and partners based on where he thought we needed most to grow. We’d go away and rehearse, then arrive in the studio to present the scenes to Ron, who would assess our truth-telling.
One morning, we sat behind Ron in the rehearsal studio, black curtains pulled over the mirrors we used in our movement classes, and watched our friends play out a scene: a man and a woman on a park bench, neither able to say what they needed to say nor express how they felt.
I don’t remember the name of the play. I don’t remember the context of the moment. I remember Ron’s urgency. He stopped the scene. “Don’t you see? They’re going to lose it all,” he said. “He’s not going to tell her.” He stood up. “She’s going to leave. This is a tragedy. Try again,” he said.
The scene began again, and again, Ron stopped the actors. “It’s that moment in Carousel.” He looked at us. “You know Carousel.” We were silent. “Rogers and Hammerstein. What kind of acting students…” He paused for a moment, and then he began to sing.
“If I Loved You” is a duet in the first act. The characters are afraid and uncertain. It is night, the afterglow of a carnival. Beset by spring, they’re about to miss their chance to say what needs to be said.
Ron’s voice was like blossoms falling from a tree, smooth and aching. He was an old man with a thick New York accent singing as if he might weep: “Soon you'd leave me / Off you'd go in the mist of day / Never, never to know / How I loved you / If I loved you.” He sang two verses slowly with his eyes closed. He was trying to tell us something.
It’s May again. Over a decade has passed since I sat in the cold studio behind Ron. Earlier this month, I chased a hawk through Green-Wood Cemetery. I felt almost sick with spring—the air, the smell, blossoms coming down by themselves. I wondered what would come to fruition, what would fall away.
The night before, my son had climbed down from his bunk and held out a tooth, the last of his baby teeth, and offered it to me without any ceremony at all.
I took it from him. Tooth in my palm, I felt like Persephone. Some bargain had been made. I needed to speak but could not. I looked at my son, ten, as tall as his mother, curls tumbling into his eyes, and thought of Ron stopping class to sing, disrupting a moment for the sake of tenderness.
“I love you forever,” was all I could muster.
“I love you forever,” my son said. He said it simply and plainly and without hesitation.
All afternoon in the cemetery, I felt as though the ground might open up, as though I might be claimed. I feel like this every year. The trees bloom, and I unravel. My son ran ahead of me. Occasionally, he’d turn to find me on the hill—love like a storm, love like a shipwreck, wild and true as the spring.
I followed my son and the hawk. The ground was soft with recent rain, and I thought of serviceberries, a plant I recently learned got its name from cemeteries. When the serviceberries bloom, it is a sign the ground has thawed enough for gravediggers to do their work. The flowers they produce are white and short-lived, giving way to clusters of fruit.
A pair of girls in athleisure walked arm in arm up Battle Avenue, where I sat looking at the hawk, who had perched herself atop a nearby pine. I leaned against the Pilots' Monument, a 40-foot shaft of marble sitting atop a sarcophagus decorated with scenes of a storm-tossed sea and shipwreck. Carved into stone, allegorical Hope holds an anchor and points skyward. The grave belongs to Thomas Freeborn, pilot of a boat called Blossom.
In my notebook, I noted the hawk's movement and wondered what causes blossoms to loosen themselves from trees. What is the mechanism of release? The trees were sweet and silvered. Blossoms covered the grass.
“I have to tell him,” one girl said.
“Don’t,” said the other. “Don’t say anything. I’ve never regretted silence. Let him wonder.”
My neck flushed red. My chest clenched. I thought, There’s no one to stop the scene. There’s no one to ask them to consider what’s at risk. This is how it goes: There is either bravery or there is not. There is either action or there is not. Time will pass regardless. Children will be born or not and lose the last of their baby teeth without ceremony. The blossoms will continue to come down by themselves.
Ron is gone now, and Jessica, too. But I wanted to hear him say again what I’d heard him say before: “It’s this. It’s this. If they cannot say the words, they’re going to lose each other. This is a tragedy. Do you feel it?” I could hear him singing again. I watched my son through the trees and began to cry. “Right. It’s that feeling, right?” Ron said this to me once. “Now. Let’s try the scene again.”
GORGEOUS. Tears. Thank you, Lindsey.
This is wonderful, thank you Lindsey. "Time will pass regardless" hit me right in the gut.