To make conversation, Margot says, “Isn’t it going to be hot down there?”
“I checked earlier,” Chad says. “It’s like a swamp.”
“Why don’t they do these things in January, when people actually want to be in a place like New Orleans?”
Chad smiles. “Because it’s cheap.”
“It seems like an odd way to save money,” Margot says.
Margot looks around. A few tables away, a younger couple are deeply engaged with each other, both leaning in and making the table smaller. She has a pang of memory. They used to do this, too, when they were first together, Saturday nights when they ate out in the city and the room disappeared around them, and then after they would walk back to his apartment and make love and then stay in bed the entire next day, sharing a copy of the Times and then watching movies curled up next to each other until the night came again.
“You should come with me,” Chad says all of a sudden.
“Where?”
“New Orleans,” he says. “I have some downtime.” He smiles. “Staying right in the French Quarter. We could find some trouble, I bet. What do you think?”
Margot smiles. He is making an effort, though it is a halfhearted one, since he knows she will treat his question as rhetorical, and for a moment she considers surprising him and saying she will go, just to see how much it throws him off. But Chad is too good at all of this for her to do that. Plus, she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to be on a plane, and the idea of New Orleans saddens her. She imagines waiting for him all day in an air-conditioned hotel room, looking through half-parted curtains to the street.
In the morning, she watches Chad ready himself, come out of the bathroom fully dressed—when did they become so modest? And a moment later, he is bending down and giving her a kiss on the forehead, and then he is out their bedroom door with his garment bag slung over his shoulder.
Margot falls back asleep. When she wakes, it is past nine. Downstairs, she makes coffee and rummages around the fridge until she finds some yogurt. She eats halfheartedly, and looking out the window to the expanse of lawn in the back, she can see that it is a stunning day. Bright sun. For some reason, this energizes her, and she gets an easel and her paints and then she is outside, the sun on her face, mixing oils on her palette, loving the way they swirl together and become something entirely new, and then the rough physicality of applying the paint to the blank canvas, pushing the color into all that white, the unconscious beauty of her mind and her hand coming together and leaving the rest of her out of it.
Painting, for Margot, is like leading a secret life, and an hour later, when she steps back and looks at what she has done, an abstract representation of the world outside her house, it is as if she has taken what she can see and shaken it up in a snow globe so that she is the only one who can possibly discern what it used to be, and this feeling both pleases and elates her.
But now with that work done, Margot is feeling suddenly unmoored and restless. It is not as if Chad hasn’t gone away before—he travels a lot—it is something else. She paces around for a while and out loud she says to herself, “Fuck it.” And shortly thereafter, she is burning down the Merritt in her Mercedes SUV toward the city, and there is something about the impulsivity of it all, hastily taking a shower and packing a bag and driving into New York, that both thrills and frightens her.
On West Seventy-ninth Street, she checks into the Lucerne Hotel, a terra-cotta and brick building on the corner of Amsterdam. It is not a place she has stayed before; in fact, it’s a little boutiquey for her general taste, but she has eaten at the restaurant attached and she wants to stay there precisely for the reason that it is not the kind of place they usually stay. Chad always wants to be downtown, some homage to youth. The Upper West Side is for old people.
Margot rides the elevator upstairs to a sixth-floor room with a marginal view out to Amsterdam Avenue. She puts her overnight bag down and almost instinctually lies down on the bed. The ceiling is high and a chandelier hangs down. Otherwise, the room is small. She wonders if maybe she can nap but decides she cannot and looks at the clock. It is just past one.
Margot rises and from her bag takes a baseball hat and a pair of sunglasses. She is wearing jeans and flats and a T-shirt. She pulls her hair into a ponytail and slips the hat on and pulls it down.
Out on the street, she moves into the midday crowd. Women pushing strollers and a group of Hasidic men with their black suits and their curls tumbling down the sides of their faces stand at the corner, waiting to cross. A police car sits parked on Seventy-ninth, two female officers inside. Young German men wait for a cab, wearing skinny jeans and shiny, pointy brown shoes. Four of them with the same haircut, all dark-haired, each shaved tight on the sides and then a long lock hanging over their foreheads. They speak in rapid German and photograph everything. Margot feels old.
This is madness, she thinks. What is she doing? The anxiety suddenly rises inside her. Standing in front of the hotel, she wonders if she wears it on her face. She takes out her sunglasses and puts them on.
Margot begins to walk. She heads north up Amsterdam, past the row of bars, and even during midday the outdoor tables are generally full, young people, mostly, drinking beer behind iron fences. No one pays her any attention, and this is one of the beauties of the city: It takes a lot to stand out. She knows people in this neighborhood, of course, and that is a concern, though most of them are closer to the park. And anyway, she had an appointment, right? That is what she will say.
At Ninety-second Street, Margot takes a left and heads toward the river. Partway down the block, she begins to check numbers. She found his address by Googling him, and a donation to a political campaign showed up. There were other Henry Golds, but this address made sense to her. It is not far from Columbus Circle, where she last saw him. Plus, it is the kind of place where a poet of Henry’s age would live.
The building, when she finds it, is nondescript, seventeen stories or so and without any defining characteristics. One of those New York buildings that no one who doesn’t live there will ever consider twice.
Margot suddenly realizes she is the only one on the block. She looks toward Broadway and then farther east toward Amsterdam. What if Henry were to walk out right now? They would be face-to-face.
She quickly retreats across the street. Fifty feet away sits a bench, and Margot goes to it and sits down. She hadn’t thought this through very well, she decides. She pulls her hat down a little tighter and looks nervously up and down the street. She wishes suddenly she had a newspaper, as in the movies. Someone doing a stakeout like this always has a newspaper. She reaches into her pocket and takes out her phone, and this is what she will be doing if Henry comes down the street. She will hide in her phone.
Margot sits on the bench, and for a while nothing happens. A few people stroll by. An elderly black man pushing a shopping cart asks her for change, but she tells him she doesn’t carry any, and he moves on. Chad texts her to say he has landed and that it’s a good thing she didn’t come. The air is like soup down there, he says.
Margot instantly writes him back and says she is glad he made it safely. The day is warm, but where she sits is shaded. She keeps thinking she should just get up and go back to the hotel and call this foolish thing off, but she cannot will herself to move. At one point, a woman of about her age goes into the building, and Margot studies her from a distance and wonders if it is Henry’s wife. It occurs to her that she has been assuming for some reason he is not married, when in fact she has no idea what his situation is. For all she knows, he lives in this building with his wife and kids. Perhaps he is perfectly happy. This is indeed stupid, she thinks, and she is about to rise and walk back to the hotel, check out and get in her car and drive back to Darien when she sees him.
Henry is coming toward her, but thankfully on the other side of the street. Margot’s heart rises as she watches him stroll, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder, his button-down shirt rolled up at
the sleeves, every bit the professor. She looks down at her phone as he gets closer to her but then peers up at him, praying that he will not look across the street and see her on the bench. But he walks with that practiced city weariness, looking straight ahead, not so much as glancing across to where she sits.
A moment later, he disappears into the building. Margot scans up the facade, though she doesn’t know what she is looking for. If it had been night, perhaps a light would come on, though it would be too far up for her to see anything anyway. She counts the stories. She knows he is in 14C, though she doesn’t know which way his apartment might face. When she reaches the fourteenth floor with her eyes, she lingers there, as if those implacable windows might reveal something.
Margot sits there for a while. There is more foot traffic now, since it’s the end of the workday, people returning home from downtown offices. No one pays her any attention at all. She tries to imagine Henry inside, perhaps pouring himself a glass of wine, perhaps staring out the window at a slice of late-afternoon sky. And in that moment, Margot thinks she really should leave, but as she thinks it, she also feels more alone than she ever has in her life. Where should she go? Should she go back to the small hotel room with its chandelier and windows that don’t open? Back to her empty house in Darien to pace around its large rooms and stare out at all the features, the shrubbery, the lawns, the gardens, that separate her from the rest of the world?
Margot wills herself off the bench and crosses the street. Her heart is racing. She is a teenager again. This is insane. Oh, she wishes she had a drink, but she tells herself just to move forward. Keep going and don’t think.
She reaches the building, Henry’s building. There is no doorman. Looking through the glass, she sees that the lobby is empty. She tries the door and it is locked, of course. Next to her is the row of buttons that buzz each apartment, many of them with names next to them, some without. His, of course, is without.
That instant before she presses down on 14C feels like a lifetime. She is going to do it. She is not going to do it. She must do it. There is no choice. Oh, how could she? What is she about to do?
And then she does. She holds it down. She hears the long, rewarding buzz and she tells herself, It’s okay, I will hear his voice and say I pressed the wrong button. He will not recognize my voice after all these years, will he?
But there is no answer. She holds it down again, this time longer. She imagines the loud buzzer echoing through his apartment, Henry putting down his glass of wine and moving to the door. She holds it down the third time and this time she doesn’t want to let go, and now she wants him to answer even if she might not be able to speak in return, but there is no voice coming over the intercom asking who it is; there is no sound of the door in front of her releasing its lock, only the abject silence of an uncaring stone building and the sound of a garbage truck moving down the street behind her.
Henry, 2012
Henry’s heart, this day, is not in the classroom. Through the tall windows of his classroom, the early-summer sun streams in, and he opens the windows before his workshop students arrive, something he rarely does, since the sounds of the street are not exactly conducive to focusing on the poems in front of him.
He muddles through his two workshops. Even Ricky, a young black poet from Queens who reminds Henry of a young Henry, all raw talent and earnestness, cannot fully get his attention. But when you have been teaching for as long as he has, you become skilled at fudging it, knowing when you need to tune in, what comments you can use to swiftly redirect a debate that has gotten stale or, more damaging to the psyche of the young writer, personal.
In the weeks since he saw Margot outside the Time Warner Center, it is as if he has been in a state of suspended animation. Henry goes through the motions of the day, and that afternoon, riding the crowded subway uptown, he sees a woman in profile in the reflection of the glass, and he turns, half expecting it to be her. And, of course, it is not. But seeing her opens the possibility for him that it will happen again, and at the very moment he least expects it. He moves through the world both heightened and aware and also resigned to the fact that it was pure chance, a moment in time certain not to repeat.
Back in his building, Henry waits for the elevator, and when it opens, his neighbor Russell Hurley is there in his workout clothes, riding up from the basement. Russell recently remarried, a woman named Betsy, though for a time the two of them were the token bachelors in the building and struck up a friendship. Russell works in the DA’s office, and once in a while they used to get together for a beer and watch a game. Now Henry barely sees him anymore.
Russell is an ex-jock as well, a college basketball star, and stands half a foot taller than Henry. In the elevator, Russell greets him enthusiastically, and Henry is immediately reminded of how long it is has been since he has worked out, since he has broken a sweat, and for a minute he feels the guilt of his inactivity.
“Hey, man,” Russell says. “How have you been?”
“Crazy busy,” Henry says, though this is not really true.
“I know it,” Russell says.
For a moment, they stand in silence as the elevator ticks upward slowly. Russell breaks the silence by saying, “Hey, what are you doing now? Come over for a beer. Betsy brought this stuff back from Vermont. Heady something. I guess it’s a big deal in the beer world.”
It is the last thing Henry wants to do after today. Mostly, he wants to be alone with his thoughts, perhaps stare out the window and maybe, for the first time in months, put pen to paper. He wants to start a poem. Not finish one, because that would be too much to ask. But to write again, that he can imagine, that feeling of the blood coursing through his veins.
But Henry has always had a hard time saying no, and today is no different, so he finds himself telling Russell that would be great, let him just drop his bag off and he’ll be right over.
“Perfect,” says Russell.
And in the hallway, they split up, and in his apartment Henry hangs his messenger bag on one of the kitchen chairs and then is back out into the hallway when he hears the buzzer. Henry stops. It goes off again. He considers turning around and going in to answer it but then decides it couldn’t be his place; he never gets any visitors and he is not expecting a package. No, he thinks, hearing it again, it must be coming from 14A, where Mrs. Goldstein lives. Henry continues down the narrow hallway to Russell’s and leaves the incessant ringing behind.
Margot, 1991
“He’s adorable,” Margot whispers to Cricket in the large auditorium. They are required to be there, an elective both of them are taking on American literature, one of those survey classes with a famously easy professor. If they went to the reading, he would eliminate one paper.
“Who?” Cricket whispers back.
“The poet boy, look at him.”
“I think you’re losing it.”
“He’s adorable,” Margot says. “The accent. Those eyes. And the words. Listen to the words.”
“You’re really losing it,” Cricket says.
Outside, the spring night is warm and the sun has set over the low hills, but traces of it, long, slender ribbons of purple and red, are visible above the trees. They wait for him. Students stream out of the theater and walk past the two of them, and when the building is almost empty, there is Henry by himself, walking out and staring around as if it is odd to be outside.
Margot stands back while Cricket approaches him. She witnesses their conversation, sees Henry look up in her direction, and she tries to read his expression. Is it fear? Shyness? Is it a lack of interest?
A moment later, he makes the short walk with Cricket over to where she stands.
“Hi,” Margot says.
“Hello,” he says, and it is almost as if he cannot look at her, his dark eyes glancing at her face before moving away. Margot finds it rather endearing.
“I loved your reading,” she says, and it’s true, she did; it moved her, his words, and it is because she
had never heard anyone be so honest about anything before. She had never heard a man talk about women that way. She had never heard a man confess to a profound love and, at the same time, deep embarrassment in the presence of his own mother. It seems to Margot that, when reading, Henry was all exposed heart, and listening through the veil of his thick accent and the rise and tumble of his incantatory language, she felt like he was speaking directly to her.
“Thank you,” Henry says. Then, “I was nervous.”
“It didn’t show.”
“No? I was shitting bricks. Excuse me, I didn’t mean to say that.”
“It’s okay,” she says, laughing.
Margot knows by looking at him that she will have to lead. It is not something that she is used to, and if someone had asked her before this evening if the idea even interested her, she would have said no. But Henry’s words suggest fragility, and she thinks maybe this extends to who he is, but she can also sense his strength, hidden somewhere like a secret, and this is the part she wants to know.
“Walk with me,” she says.
And like that, Cricket just recedes into the distance with a thin wave, and the two of them take off across campus. Henry is taller up close than he looked onstage, and as they walk, first across the quad and then through a break in the old red-stone buildings and toward the lake, the only logical outcome when she thinks about it, she senses that he is happy to be moving, that it is relaxing him.
They come up a final rise and in front of them is the main street that runs along campus and beyond that is the broad expanse of lake, a mile across here, inky black in the exhausted light and stretching out of view on either side, a giant finger cut into the earth. All along here, benches have been placed to capture the view of the open water, and on this warm night many of them are taken by couples, so without talking about it they move along them until they find one that is open.
“Should we sit?” Margot says.
If I Forget You Page 6
