If I Forget You(40)

“Well, I thought I might die after that,” Katherine says. “But then it got better. And I forgot all about it. Listen: Come out tonight. The Jones boys are doing a bonfire. Everyone is going to be there.”

“I don’t know,” Margot says. “Don’t you ever get tired of it? Smoking pot and drinking beer and Ian playing Grateful Dead songs on the guitar?”

“Why does everything have to be so serious? I think they’re fun,” Katherine says. “Come on. Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”

“Fine,” Margot says.

And so on a night when the ocean stars look close enough to touch, Margot walks the length of the beach and back into the universe she was born into but for the past year had left. Out of the back of a jeep, the Jones boys have tapped a keg, and a driftwood fire burns high and bright. On the sand around it, they sit in small circles, and stories are told loudly, and cigarettes and joints are smoked, guitar is played, and there is singing. And perhaps Katherine is right: Why does everything have to be serious? It feels suddenly like a long time since Margot has let go, and with the beer and the simple comfort of the crackling fire, for the first time it is as if her mind, all the ideas that have consumed her, has been wiped free.

At one point, Chad, a boy she had kissed summers before, comes over and sits down next to her. He takes his plastic cup full of beer and leans it against hers.

“Cheers,” he says.

Chad is a senior at Colby now, tall and blond, and someone she has known since she was in elementary school. His father develops golf courses around the world and their parents are friendly. He is handsome in a conventional way, but never really her type, too embedded, as he has been, in the fabric of all she has wanted to run away from, but tonight in the light from the fire, she likes the way his hair falls over his forehead, the brightness of his sharp blue eyes, the strength of his jaw. And later, when he suggests a walk, she knows what this means and she goes willingly, and when a half mile down the beach he stops and turns to her, Margot is the one who kisses him, stepping up on her tiptoes to meet his lips.

This is the forgetting she wants. It is her idea to get a blanket from her house, and down among the dunes, Margot lets Chad inside her. The sex itself is indifferent and lacks the urgency and the closeness she always had with Henry, but sometimes there are simple needs, and she wants to feel his weight on her, his breath on her neck, and as he moves on top of her, she looks beyond him to the infinite, placid sea of stars and tries to imagine he is not really there at all.





Henry, 2012

This is absurd, Henry thinks, standing in front of the full-length mirror in his small bedroom, tucking his button-down shirt into his jeans before untucking it, smoothing it down, and then spending another moment patting down his hair, looking at himself from every possible angle. He has tried on two pairs of jeans and two shirts and he hasn’t left the apartment yet and he has already had two glasses of wine just to calm his nerves. He is far too old for this shit.

At 6:45, Henry leaves his apartment building. The night is hot and this is the season when he least likes the city—or loves, he should say, since despite everything else he has always loved the city, its wide avenues, its energy, and its graceful anonymity. But despite all that, the city magnifies everything, and especially the heat of a summer day, the way it radiates off the asphalt, and especially the stink of the black bags full of garbage piled around streetlamp poles.

Henry is later than he expected. Usually he would walk to Columbus Circle from here, for he has chosen Marea, an Italian seafood place that is a little pricey for him normally, but his challenges with his sartorial choices have put him behind, and also he is concerned this heat is going to have him sweating through his shirt. He can already feel it on his brow.

On Broadway, Henry hails a cab, and five minutes later, he is standing in front of the restaurant, several hundred yards from where, earlier in the season, he saw Margot bend down next to a fallen bird.

Henry doesn’t know what to do. He remembers suddenly the first time he walked into a classroom as an assistant professor, some fifteen years ago. How insanely nervous he felt, as if five minutes in, the students would realize he was a fraud and had no right to be the sage at the front of the workshop table, guiding them on how to do this thing that he had come to regard as pure madness, shaping ideas on paper, but yet something that he felt brought him as close as he could be to touching God.

Come to think of it, that experience pales compared to this one. Henry peers into the window of the restaurant and scans the bar and the waiting area as best he can. Should he wait for Margot inside or stand here on the street instead? What is the protocol here?

He decides to stay outside, but moves away from the doorway to the restaurant. Next to it is an exclusive apartment building, and in front of it the doormen chatter endlessly in their own particular patois, one that he loves—what they say when no one is listening. There are four of them, and from the look of them, they all come from different corners of the world but have this remarkable ability to keep a constant stream of banter going about cars and women and all kinds of things until that moment when someone is about to exit the building, and then they are suddenly formal and polite. They straddle two worlds, something Henry long ago learned a few things about.

As Henry is considering this, he sees Margot. She is walking from the circle in a throng of people and she has not seen him yet. She wears dark jeans and a light blouse, high brown boots. A brown bag is slung over her shoulder. She looks down as she walks. The look on her face is strained, and he wonders for a moment if she is aware of it, but then she looks up and she sees him and a broad smile comes over her face and he smiles back. Isn’t it funny how easy we pick each other out from a crowd?