Henry, 2012
One weekend a month, Henry has Jess. Sometimes he drives up and picks her up in Tarrytown and brings her back, and other times Ruth drives her into the city. In the summer, he will often pick her up on his way to Vermont. Henry both looks forward to the weekends and fears them. Henry tries to be kind to Ruth in those brief moments when they see each other, though there is always this exasperated tension between them, more her than him, Henry thinks, which strikes him as fundamentally unfair, for when a marriage unravels, there is plenty of blame to go around, and his crimes are more crimes of omission.
Ruth left him, after all, not the other way around. She was the one who had the affair—with a college administrator, of all things, an accountant type with a name, Steve Johnson, as bland as the work he did. And while Henry was furious when she first told him, in time he came to realize that the affair was as much his decision as it was hers. Henry had turned his back on Ruth a long time ago. For he had married the wrong woman and he knew it even before that rainy day in late May when they went down to city hall with a few friends and made it official.
Henry was not sure he loved Ruth and he wasn’t sure Ruth loved him. Later, he would remember advice he had gotten from Jon, his college teacher, who told him never to marry another writer.
“There is too much jealousy involved,” Jon said. “What if she is more successful than you are? What if you are? It never works. Trust me.”
And perhaps this was part of it, for Henry won the Yale Younger Poets prize, and later, he found out that Ruth had been in contention for it as well. She congratulated him in all the proper and appropriate public ways, but underneath it all Henry sensed that she believed she was the more talented of the two of them, that part of his winning was sexism and that voice of his, how personal it was, the way he summoned his youth and poverty and the raw specificity of his own experiences. He didn’t go universal the way Ruth did, at least not as easily, and Henry knew she resented him for it at the same time that she did her best to rise above it and celebrate it.
But then she was pregnant and here they were, both young faculty members with the same circle of friends, and everything became inevitable in a way that both of them seemed to understand but didn’t seem at liberty to do anything about, as if somehow you gave up free will in your thirties. They moved into marriage and parenthood with smiles on their faces, both good people, they told themselves, who would make it all work. And for a time, it did.
They both wrote. They tended to the baby as if she were a hearth. Jess had his black eyes and Ruth’s crazy mess of hair and she was a perfect mash-up of the two of them. And soon she was no longer a baby, but a pretty girl. They had stable careers—as stable as poets in academia can be. They were both publishing.
But they were also drifting apart, the way people do. Henry was too much in his head, Ruth said.
“You’re never present,” she told him once.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“Present with me. You live in your head.”
“Don’t you?”
“No, Henry, I don’t. I don’t have that luxury.”
And in hindsight, Henry probably should have known his marriage was over then, that the two of them were playing out the string, going through the motions that constitute a shared life.
But instead he ignored all the signs, and even as he became less and less emotionally available to Ruth, he continued to move forward with plans, as if the future in front of them was bright. They left the city for the leafy quiet of Tarrytown. Jess learned to ride a bike. She could run outside around the neighborhood on her own with other kids. Henry and Ruth had dinner together with Jess, but otherwise, they were becoming more and more separate people. In private, and late at night when he couldn’t sleep, Henry would spend hours on his computer, trying to find Margot. How does someone, in this time, not leave any footprints? he wondered.
And it was as if he had two lives, the one he dwelled in every day, and the one he could access only in the dark of the night, when he and those in his neighborhood lay sleeping and he could reach deep into the pocket of memory and there was Margot.
Sometimes he picked up his collection, Margaret, the one that had won him the Yale prize, and read through it. It was more an act of bearing witness than anything else, this book, and on those pages he found turns of phrase, like your “sea-wet eyes” and “those half-formed moments before dawn when I didn’t want the world to wake because it meant I had to share you.”
At critical moments in his life—the day, for instance, that Ruth told Henry about the affair with Steve Johnson, laying it on him casually one morning while they both sat in the breakfast nook having coffee, as if it were just another piece of information he needed to know, as banal as an upcoming dentist appointment—Henry would go find that collection of his, fall into its pages, and feel the cruelty of life engulf him like fog.
Part of the cruelty was not just the mistakes he had made, the things he had let get away from him—though that was part of it—but also the knowledge when reading his own book that he would never write anything more important. Henry would never again write anything as strong. Winning the Yale prize was supposed to mean a long and illustrious career. But Henry knew that Margot had given him the book that would define who he was the rest of his life. His muse had become just someone he used to know.
Margot, 2012
In the morning, she leaves the hotel in a soft rain; she has a black umbrella from the hotel and the rain is warm and nice. Margot stops at a small kosher bagel place on Amsterdam and she thinks she wants a bagel, but the Hasid behind the counter is rude and angry at everyone, and she suddenly decides she isn’t hungry. She does get coffee in a to-go cup and then she is back out into the rain.
It is early. The night before, Margot ordered room service and ate on her bed and watched a bad movie. She tried to focus on the movie because now, back in the relative quiet of the hotel room, she was aware that she was acting like a madwoman, putting her whole life at risk, and for what?
She drank half a bottle of decent red wine and fell asleep with the television on, and she did not dream. She woke with no sense of what time it was, and with the big chandelier above her head coming into focus, it took her a moment to remember where she was. She looked at the clock and she bolted out of bed and into the shower. She couldn’t help herself. Was Henry a morning person? Did he stay up late? She couldn’t remember. Of course, that was so long ago.
Like the afternoon before, Margot takes a left onto his street, and this morning she is happy for the rain and the umbrella, which feels like a disguise. She moves down the street on the opposite side of his building, and when she is directly across from it, she finds a spot under a tree and slightly to the left of the front door of the nondescript place across, as if she is a woman on her way to work, just casually waiting for her car to show up, albeit wearing a baseball hat.
Margot waits. In the buildings around her, men and women march out with their bags and their work clothes and move briskly past her. No one pays her any attention at all. Every time the door to Henry’s building opens, she holds her breath and has this urge to duck into shadows that don’t exist at this time of day and in this rain.
A half hour goes by. To move her legs, she walks at one point to the end of the block and then returns to her station again. She is nervous that perhaps she missed him, and then she chides herself for this silliness. For all she knows, he doesn’t have a class until the afternoon. She could be standing here all day.
Yet she cannot move. Has she lost her mind? Has she somehow become again the girl she once was, the one who did things impulsively, even if they could ruin everything?
After about an hour, though, Margot’s patience is rewarded, though she doesn’t know it at first. A late-model Volvo wagon comes slowly down the street from the east. It is dark red and loud, and clearly needs a new exhaust pipe. It stops in front of Henry’s building.
The woman driving has a thick head of curly hair and she gets out of the car with the engine still running and walks around to the other side. Margot can see a child in the back, and the woman opens the back door and for a moment the child is shielded from Margot’s view, but then Margot sees the door to Henry’s building open and here is Henry himself, fifty yards away from her, in jeans and a button-down shirt. The child runs to him, and Margot can see now it is a little girl. She leaps up into Henry’s arms and he picks her up in one smooth motion. Margot takes a step back at first, and then removes her phone and pretends to be on it. She looks away, then glances back to the scene across the street.
“Sunday at noon,” Margot hears Henry say to the woman, who has not moved closer to Henry than when she opened the door to the car. Henry’s voice goes right through Margot, rich and resonant, though she can still hear the trace of a nasally accent, which she is glad he has not lost.
The woman blows a kiss to the little girl, who Margot can see is adorable, as all children that age are. She has her mother’s curls and they tumble down on either side of her face. Black buttons for eyes. Henry puts the girl down and goes to the door of the building and opens it, though he doesn’t go in, just reaches in and comes out with an umbrella. The Volvo drives slowly away. Henry opens the umbrella and takes the girl’s hand in his own. The two of them begin to walk away from Margot toward Amsterdam.
It is a small moment she has just witnessed, more of a ritual than anything, one that plays out across the country on weekends and one that tells her in an instant a lot about Henry’s life. He is divorced and this is his daughter. She lives with her mother somewhere else.
While there is nothing intimate in any of this that has been revealed, Margot, standing in the rain, watching them walk away from her, nevertheless feels a twinge of shame for having watched it. But, after all, it is public space, isn’t it? It’s not like she has sneaked into his apartment under the cover of darkness, right?
Margot looks up the street and sees that the two of them are halfway up the block. She should leave now for Darien and go back to her life before she puts everything in jeopardy. But she has come this far. She begins to walk after them.
* * *
On busy Amsterdam, Margot struggles to keep up with the two of them, losing them briefly in the crowd of people with umbrellas making their way down the avenue. But then she spies them just in time before they take a left and head toward Columbus. When she turns onto quiet Eighty-first Street, she once again shares the side street with them, though they are almost at the end of the block, and oblivious to her, a father and daughter holding hands and moving toward, she imagines, the park.
But then on Columbus, Margot watches as they cross the street, heading to Central Park West, and then there is the great facade of the American Museum of Natural History. She has the memory of taking her own children here, how it was once the most magical place on earth for the two of them, the awe they had looking at the Barosaurus in the lobby, the taxidermy animals that appeared as if they might at any moment leave their perches and scoop small children into their huge mouths. This memory pangs her a little bit—what a thief time is—but she knows without a doubt this is where Henry is going.
Margot gives them a ten-minute head start and then she enters the building as well. She has this immediate fear that the security people will figure her out and detain her, for she has to be only the middle-aged woman in the place without at least one child at her side. But this is, of course, silly. Thousands of people pass through these doors every day.
And so Margot follows Henry and his daughter through the museum. She tries to keep her distance, staying half an exhibit away, though at one point she loses the two of them in the Hall of Gems. Margot is standing looking at a topaz display when she hears Henry’s voice, and it moves through her like electricity.
“Look at this, Jess,” he says, and that is how Margot learns his daughter’s name.
The two of them are right behind her. If she was to turn around, she would be face-to-face with them. Her heart is in her throat, and for a moment she imagines doing just this, turning around, his daughter a buffer between the two of them, a governor ensuring the encounter is brief and casual. It will be nothing more than old friends saying hello.
But Margot slides to her left, as if moving to the next display, and she feels them displace her, moving toward the topaz, and now she just keeps moving, out of the room and the space they just shared.
Outside, the rain has stopped, but the air smells of it, warm and wet. Margot stands for a moment outside the giant stone building. Her heart feels like it might spring out of her body. She is as alive as an animal, wanting to run into the park like a deer and vanish into the trees.
Henry, 1991
The night is unseemly hot and Henry sleeps with the cabin door open. Because of the heat, he sleeps unevenly, and when he does sleep, the dreams come in waves—there is Margot underneath him and he is moving above her and then suddenly she is there but not there, her face as blank as a sheet of paper. She has no eyes and no nose and no mouth. He wakes at one point in a sweat and beyond the open door the land leading down to the lake is blue with moonlight.
He drifts in and out of sleep, and when the first yellow of dawn comes, he wakes with a start, as if from a sound, and now looking out, he sees the land is full of heavy mist, as it often is this close to the lake. Henry knows that if he was to walk outside, his world would shrink to the several feet in front of him. And then, thinking this and looking out, Henry suddenly sees someone, an outline in the low-hanging fog that begins to take shape, and he feels all his muscles tense intuitively, and a moment later, it is as if he is still dreaming, for there is Margot, leaning against the doorframe, looking toward where he lies on the bed.
“Knock, knock,” she says.
“Holy shit, you scared me,” Henry says.
“Get over here,” Margot says.
Henry climbs out of bed and goes to her. Margot steps inside the doorway and in the dark he takes her into his arms and she says, “I love the smell of you.”
“Sweaty,” he whispers, and she laughs.
Henry pulls her to him tight and buries his face in her hair, and then he pulls back and holds her face in his hands and they kiss. For a long while they are silent, holding each other, and it is a game of chicken they are playing, neither of them wanting to pull away, and Henry finally breaks the silence by saying, “I can’t believe it’s you. That you’re here.”
“I needed you,” Margot says.
After a time they go to the bed, and when they make love, it is with a deep urgency and Henry reminds himself to be slow, but this morning he cannot and afterward, Margot is crying and he thinks he has done something wrong, but she whispers that she is just so happy to be with him and he knows what she means, that love like this is far closer to insanity than it is to reality, the world around them spinning uncontrollably, and their ability to be together is the only thing holding them on the planet. We are gravity, he thinks as he uses his thumb to wipe the tears away from her eyes.
Margot, 1991
The days are midsummer-long, and after a few of them in a row, they begin to take on a routine. Henry wakes with the sun to work in the vineyard and leaves her lying in bed in the small cabin. It feels gloriously unfair to watch him go out the door while she gets to curl back into the pillows and sleep. After work, they swim in the lake, stripping off their clothes at the shore and skinny-dipping, and on their second night there they have dinner at Ted and Laura’s house, and it is surprising to Margot to see how they interact with Henry, how comfortable he is there, opening the fridge like it’s his own, and then how they all pitch in to help cook.
Ted roasts a chicken, and Margot marvels at the simplicity of people preparing food, since in her life she has never cooked a thing. Her parents always had a chef or they ate out. She loves watching how he rubs the bird down with olive oil and garlic and rosemary, how it seems so easy and natural. Wh
ile the bird cooks, Laura announces that they are going to make baklava.
“That means you, Margot,” she says.
“Me? No. I have no idea.”
“Don’t worry, it’s easy.”
And so in that rustic kitchen with the wide-pane windows that peer out toward the wide blue lake, the four of them lay out rolls of pastry. Margot is in charge of walking back and forth with a small saucepan full of melted butter and a pastry brush and painting, in long strokes, the butter onto the pastry.
Before dinner, the four of them step outside, and while the dog runs off barking into the vines, they stand on the porch and smoke a joint that Ted has rolled.
Now this is something, Margot thinks, smoking pot with older people, and as the joint goes around, Ted unwinds a story about some crazy friend they knew from high school, how he drove his car into the lake after leaving their house one night. The story is meant to be funny and everyone laughs hard, though for Margot her laughter isn’t genuine, for the pot is making her reflective and she hears only bits and pieces. Looking out to the lake and into the fat evening sun still high above the hills, she feels like nothing has ever been more beautiful, and watching the way Ted and Laura feed off each other, the quiet Laura and the gregarious Ted with a smile in his eyes as he unfurls a tale he has undoubtedly told dozens of times, she begins to imagine a future with Henry, something beyond just this moment they are living in.
Margot is ravenous. She is ravenous for the chicken, for the pinot noir they drink with it, for the roasted potatoes, and for the endive salad with pears. She is ravenous for the simple urgency of this moment in time, of watching Ted and Laura make each other laugh, and she can’t help thinking of her own parents, who surround themselves constantly with other people. As a result, she came to think that this is what marriage is, the need never to be alone with each other so as not to face the fact that you don’t really have anything to say to each other.
If I Forget You Page 9