Most of all, she is ravenous for Henry, for his dark eyes and his smile, the way he looks over at her when Ted makes another joke, some of them lame, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, for Henry is right here, not overly solicitous, but instead bringing her in, saying with his eyes, Be with me, just be with me. Please.
In the dark, they walk back through a row of vines to the cabin. The path is narrow and they are wine-drunk and above them the moon is high in the sky and bright enough that the sea of stars is opaque as if behind a veil.
Margot leans into Henry as they walk, more of a stumble really, and at one point, walking between the rows of grapes, he trips on a root or something and then they are both going down, laughing as they fall. He falls on her, she falls on him, and Margot rolls on top of him. Her hair hangs down and obscures her face. Henry is laughing. She pins him now with her knees on his arms.
“Oh, is that how we’re doing it?” he says.
“Yes, yes,” Margot says, and the lust roiling inside her is so intense that it almost scares her, and for a moment as she stands to wriggle out of her jeans, it is as if she has left her own body, the line between control and madness blurry, and when she gets back on top of Henry, the herbaceous smell of the vines all around them, she wants to bite him hard.
Later, when Henry snores next to her on his back on the small bed, Margot listens to him, the rise and fall of his breath, and she looks out the doorway to the moonlit stretch of field that leads down to the lake. She cannot sleep. She lies on her back. The bed is small and Henry at one point slings a heavy arm over her as he moves to his side.
His body against her is warm. She presses back into him, just to feel the unconscious response, his moving back into her instinctively. Bodies come together and then fall apart. There is something simple and yet profound about this. She remembers the first tentative steps of becoming a woman. Boys she kissed, boys she let touch her, boys she touched, losing her virginity on a beach under the stars and liking the warmth of the moment but left afterward wondering if this was it. She remembers thinking about sex as something she enjoyed having done, rather than something she enjoyed doing. There was the rite of passage to it all, and when she was younger, she just wanted to be a girl who had done things. There was also, of course, the growing sense of power that she had. Those moments when she took a boy into her hand and sometimes her mouth and heard the gasp from him, this separate entity that she could own somehow, a living, sentient thing, and it was easy, boys were easy, if you knew what to do.
But then Henry, and suddenly it is as if a window on an entirely new world has been opened to her, and she has never told anyone about the feelings she has, what he does to her, not even Cricket, for she doesn’t believe she would understand. She considers all the other couples she knows, and it is as if they are separate even when they are together. An elaborate theater put on for everyone else, and perhaps just to make it appear as if you are capable of feeling something. With Henry, half the time she doesn’t know where she ends and he begins anymore.
The light outside the cabin doors is already starting to change when Margot finally drifts off to sleep. The land outside is gradually lightening. She dreams of oceans, the great blue-gray Atlantic, and then fragments she cannot piece together: looking down at Henry at the bottom of the staircase; her mother in a bed, yelling at her; riding in the back of a car moving swiftly through a thick woods. And then there is a voice, her father’s, and Margot comes to with a start.
“Get up, get dressed,” he says.
Her sleep-wet mind takes a moment to understand what she is seeing in front of her. The sun is up. Her father is standing over their bed. Henry is snoring away, unaware that anything is happening at all.
Henry, 2012
Sometimes Henry looks at Jess and the love he has for her threatens to overwhelm him, more so as she has grown, for when she was a baby, he felt this distance from her that he never told anyone about, and he thought at the time that maybe there was a coldness to his heart that he didn’t want to admit.
It is different for women, of course, for he remembers his wife holding Jess when she was tiny and how it changed her: Her very looks seemed to soften, and as long as Jess wasn’t crying or sick, Ruth became beatific around their daughter, aglow with the power of making something that could only, by definition, be perfect.
Henry, on the other hand, felt on the outside of it all, staring into a book with a story in which he was just a fringe character. He was supposed to be empathetic and good and yet it was as if none of this had anything to do with him.
But then Jess grew and his worry about this distance he felt from her when she was a baby fell away. Soon, as daughters do, she became his sun and his moon and his stars, and then she was walking, and the fear he had of wanting to protect her from all the dark corners of life kept Henry up at night.
This was one of the many differences between him and Ruth. For while Ruth was a poet, too, she did not have a poet’s temperament. He would never have told her this, but her strength as a writer was a workmanlike devotion to the craft, her willingness to pore over language like a scientist. But she lacked imagination. And the same was true, Henry thought in those early years, when it came to Jess, her ability to let her live and grow and get hurt, as if she was someone else’s child, not one they had made together, of which there was only one.
Of course this was absurd, and Henry knew it, and oftentimes he admired Ruth for how she parented, how easily it all came to her, the practicality with which she went about it. Later, when his marriage was failing, he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t really about the affair and more about his desire to run from death, from the responsibility of his daughter, and his poetic sense that catastrophe just had to lie around every corner for the ones he loved. For this is the great paradox of life, isn’t it? The more you love someone, the more that person will eventually break your heart?
Now, walking through the Great Hall of the American Museum of Natural History for the second time that day, Henry looks down at Jess. Her curly hair falls on either side of her pink face. She is beautiful and without scars literal or metaphorical, which is how it should be at this age. She looks up at him, and for a moment he sees the adult she will be someday, more her mother than him, and as if sensing something in his expression, she takes his hand in her own.
Jess looks up at him. And not for the first time he thinks that while he may have married the wrong woman, they certainly had the right child. And sometimes that should be enough, shouldn’t it? Maybe this is why he and Ruth married, so Jess would be in the world. Despite all his regrets, Henry cannot imagine this being undone.
Outside, the rain has stopped, but the day is still gray and all around them are the signs of the rain, the puddles and the mist coming off them. Henry looks down at Jess.
“Cheeseburgers and milk shakes?” he says.
His daughter sticks her tongue out and nods her head rapidly like a puppy.
At Shake Shack, they order cheeseburgers and fries and a vanilla milk shake for her, a pint of beer for him. They stand for a bit, waiting for their food and for a table to open up, and soon one does and they sit down alongside the bubble window on Columbus Avenue. They sit across from each other, and Henry, so used to eating alone, is itching to look at his phone, though he knows there is no real news there, probably nothing more than departmental e-mails that are as important as pennies.
It is just that he is used to eating alone now and to using the phone as a prop, or a book, which he doesn’t have with him. He has to remind himself to be present, and he starts by asking Jess questions about school, which she answers with one word between bites. “Good,” she says, and “Cool,” she says, until he realizes he is practically asking her yes or no questions and this is no way to draw a child out.
At one point, Henry finds himself gazing out at the street, at the people walking by, the streams of children leaving the museum, while he and his daughter sit in silence like
an old married couple.
Suddenly he catches his breath. Amid the hustle and bustle, a lone figure stands across the avenue, looking directly at him. A woman in a baseball hat, not moving at all, her stillness causing her to stand out, a port in the storm.
Margot. It can’t be. Henry looks back over at Jess, who’s cramming french fries into her mouth, and then he looks back out the window, half expecting her to have vanished, a mirage. But she has actually taken a step forward, and for a moment a bus going by shields her from view, and when the bus passes, Henry looks at her and she smiles weakly back at him.
There is no mistaking her now.
Henry has no idea what to do. His heartbeat is in his neck. He is not alone. He is of half a mind just to punch his way through the window, emerge on the street, crouching, with broken glass spilling around him like something out of a movie, and then rush into traffic. Of course, he cannot do any of those things. He looks over at Jess and then out the window again. She has not moved. Is she waiting for him?
Henry waves and she slowly raises her hand before letting it fall back to her side.
Henry looks at Jess’s plate. She has eaten half her burger, which is good for her, and is putting the last of the fries in her mouth.
“All done, honey?” he says.
She nods.
More urgently than he means to, he says, “Okay, let’s get out of here.”
“I need to pee,” Jess says.
“What?” Henry says, aware as soon as he says it that he is acting frantic, and his daughter is just staring at him, confused.
“I have to pee,” she says.
“Of course, of course,” Henry says. He stands, and so does Jess. Henry turns toward the window. Margot continues to stand there, and he holds up one finger to her, as if to say, Give me a minute, please. Give me a minute.
“This way,” Henry says to Jess. “Let’s go.”
He leads her down the narrow corridor to the bathrooms. At the door of the ladies’ room, he tells her to be quick, which he realizes is a totally screwed-up thing to say, and he can see that his tension has Jess’s attention, but she just shrugs and goes into the ladies’ room, which is crowded. Usually this moment frightens him, that she is old enough that he can leave her in a room full of strangers to drop her pants where he cannot see her. But today Henry just wants her to hurry.
Five minutes later, Jess emerges, and Henry breathes a sigh of relief, which he knows is silly, as if somehow the bathroom would swallow her up, or one of the women in there would somehow decide to sneak by him with Jess smuggled into her coat.
“There you are,” Henry says, and he takes her hand. They move through the restaurant and then out the door and onto the street. He panics briefly, as he doesn’t instantly see Margot where she stood some ten minutes before. But then he looks straight ahead, across the crosswalk, and she stands there waiting for them.
The light changes and they move across the street.
“Where are we going, Daddy?” Jess asks.
“Just over here. I see someone I know.”
And then they are in front of each other, the years peeling away, a moment he has imagined for twenty years now but never really thought would take place. His daughter is on his hand like a balloon he has forgotten he is carrying. They do not hug. They do not embrace. He doesn’t shake her hand or anything more formal. They just stand in front of each other there on Columbus Avenue on a summer day when the rain has stopped but the sun has yet to emerge. Margot is shaking. The earth beneath him is shifting. For what seems like an eternity, they just look at each other. Jess is tugging at Henry’s hand and he knows he needs to say something, or that Margot needs to say something, but all he can do is look at her eyes, those sea blue eyes, and if anything, to him she is more beautiful than he remembered, for it is only with age that the true character of a woman shows. Someone must break the silence.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” Henry says.
Margot’s face looks like it might crack. He can see her fighting it, but despite her efforts, her eyes have begun to well up. Margot looks into his eyes and then she looks down at Jess. In an attempt at normalcy, she says, “This must be your daughter.”
“I’m sorry,” Henry says. “Yes, this is Jess.”
Margot, experienced at this, goes down then and gets on Jess’s level. “Let me guess. I think you’re ten.”
Jess smiles. “Nine. You were close.”
“Well, you are adorable. I’m Margot.” And she holds her hand out then for his daughter, and his daughter takes it.
And around them the city continues, blind and unaware. Cabs and buses stream by. Horns honk in open defiance of the signs that line the avenue. Around them, everyone is in a hurry, rushing to get somewhere. If poetry is the search for significance, than the stubbornness of love must be its fullest expression.
Margot, 2012
She is still standing, right? Around her is the banal normalcy of the passive city. Margot watches Henry and his daughter walk toward the park as if nothing just happened, the two of them holding hands, a slight skip in his daughter’s step, the only hint of anything having happened to Henry is perhaps a little weight to his walk, a slight listing to the right, though that could be age, or just her desire that Henry be suddenly altered by her appearance on a sidewalk across from him.
Margot watches them until they round the corner on Central Park West and disappear. In her hand she holds his business card, such a funny small thing, words and numbers but a tie to Henry that she has not had before, his cell phone number scrawled on it in pen, his hands visibly shaking as he wrote it.
As if on cue, the rain begins again, a soft rain, and Margot is suddenly terribly tired and hungry and she wants now to be back at the hotel, to curl up in her bed after managing to eat something and replay what has just happened in the quiet, anonymous space that only a hotel room can afford.
Margot begins to walk. Back at the hotel, she comes into the small lobby and then to the elevator and up to her room. Now she is more tired than hungry, but she knows she needs to eat, so she orders room service, a burger, which she will only pick at, and a bottle of wine, which she will drink until maybe she can sleep.
When she finally lies down on the bed, having eaten three bites of the expensive burger and a handful of fries, pushing her face into the pillow, Margot sees Henry as he was earlier, standing in front of her, the dutiful father with a lovely child connected to his fingers. She sees the way he looked at her, the pregnancy of his eyes, wanting to burst with all that had been stolen from him.
And here is the paradox of time: Looking at him, Margot felt like Henry knows her better than anyone ever has. And yet he learned just in that moment that she had two children, that she was married, that she lived in Darien. And while she knows that gives a certain portrait, one that saddens her, the cliché of the wealthy housewife in her big house, within that life she has lived since she last saw him are the multitudes of details that one cannot possibly explain in a street-side meeting, and that collectively make her who she is. Could he actually know her? Or does he know only the girl frozen in time from a lifetime ago?
Oh, what a folly this is! What is she doing, exactly? Following an old boyfriend around the city, manufacturing a run-in? One that could undo all she has managed to build in the last twenty years?
Margot pushes her face farther into the pillow. Sometimes she wishes you could just turn life off like a switch, and everything would go dark. She starts to cry. She cries for Henry because she could see the sadness in his face, but mostly she cries for herself, for the woman she has become, how entrenched she is in a life she suddenly isn’t sure she wants anymore. She falls asleep.
The ringing of her phone wakes her up.
Margot is disoriented: She has no idea whether it is day or night, or even where she is. She remembers, of course, that she is in the hotel room, though the heavy curtains are drawn, blocking out either the light or the night. She rolls over and s
ees that it is her husband calling.
Margot answers it with a hello.
“Where are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” Chad says. “I’m home and you are not here.”
Margot tries to wipe the fog out of her mind. How long has she been here? She is certain Chad wasn’t due home until tomorrow.
“Where are you?” Chad asks for the second time, not stern yet, just trying to figure it out.
“In the city,” she says, getting up now while she talks, looking around the room frantically, as if he might come rushing through that door.
“Shopping?”
“A little,” Margot says. “Met Cricket for a drink.”
“You drove,” says Chad.
Did she? Of course she did. It seems forever ago that the hotel valeted her car. “Yes, I was running late for the train.”
“Okay, well, are you heading back? There’s nothing to eat here. I was thinking of calling in for some Thai.”
“Go ahead,” says Margot, seeing now on the clock that is just past five thirty. She was asleep for a few hours. “I’m going to wait till after rush hour. Poke around a little bit.”
“Drive safe, then,” Chad says. “Love you.”
“Love you, too,” says Margot and hangs up the phone. In the mirror she dislikes herself, eyes red from the crying, clothes a wrinkled mess from the rain and then sleeping in the bed.
She hurries into the shower, and while the water tumbles over her she thinks about this, the boring safety of marriage, how moments ago she was just a woman in a hotel room, asleep, and now she is racing to put herself back together to get home to her husband, who will have eaten his Thai food out of a box in front of SportsCenter, having fulfilled his obligation for calling her and now grateful for her absence, since he can spend this time alone after his flight.
If I Forget You Page 10
