If I Forget You(17)

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.