If I Forget You(30)

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.

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.