If I Forget You(41)

“Hi,” Henry says when she is in front of him, and he can tell immediately from the flush in her face that she is as unhinged as he is about this meeting. She moves in for a hug and he, for a moment, takes her in his arms, though it is brief. Her perfume, subtle, smells vaguely of flowers.

“Hi,” Margot says. “This is the place?” she asks, as if searching for something to say.

“Yes, I hope it’s okay. Do you eat fish? It’s kind of famous for fish. I should have asked.”

She laughs. “I love fish.”

“Oh, good. Shall we?”

“Please.”

They are inside then, in front of a desk manned by a smiling older man surrounded by young, comely black-haired women in small black dresses that he dare not look at, and Henry is happy to have something to do, so practical this all is now, and yes, they have a reservation, and oh, a few minutes before the table is ready, and perhaps a seat at the bar?

“Thank you,” Henry says.

They move to the bar. They are strangers. They are a couple. They are people who used to know each other. They are nothing. They are everything.

Margot slides onto an empty stool. Henry slips onto the one next to her and studies the bar. No one is staring at them, and that feels miraculous. Around them are couples meeting after work and thick-bodied businessmen with their blocky watches and their dark suits. The beauty of a bar is that everyone looks ahead at the array of bottles on glass shelves and seldom at one another. The city. Anonymity.

“Start you with drinks?” the bartender is saying.

“Hendrick’s martini,” Margot says. “Up. Olives.”

“Same,” says Henry, though he rarely drinks gin.

Henry pivots his stool and now he is facing Margot. She looks at him and with a practiced gesture runs her hand over her hair. She smiles again, dimples spreading, the lines around her eyes the only suggestion that time has interfered, and if anything, she is more astounding to him now than she ever was, ever could have been, some twenty-plus years ago in western New York. He thinks then of all of the things that have conspired against them, and of all the things that have come together to lead to this moment. He looks into her eyes. The bartender, to his left, places their drinks down. But Henry cannot turn that way. My God, he thinks, she empties me.

“I can’t believe this,” he says.

“Me either,” she says.

“I mean, look at us.”

“We’re old, you mean.”

“No, no. We’re not old. Are we?”

Margot laughs. “Yes, Henry, we are.”

“Fuck. I hate that.”

“Let’s have a drink.”

“Yes, let’s.”

They pivot back then to the bar in front of them and away from each other. Margot picks up her drink and brings it to Henry’s, and she touches her delicate glass to his and says, “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” says Henry.

They raise their glasses to their mouths, and at that moment the older man from the front desk comes over to tell them their table is ready.

“Would you mind if we just stayed here?” Margot asks, and this relieves Henry, somehow less pressure to sit at the bar, to be able to face forward, as if they just happened upon each other.

“Of course,” the man says.

Henry turns to Margot. “I don’t know where to begin,” he says.

She laughs. “Me either.”

“I have a confession. I tried on three different outfits.”

Margot smiles. “Well, you look very nice. And I have a confession, too. I tried on four.”

“I was—I am—very nervous.”

“I almost didn’t come.”

“Really?”

“Really. I thought about telling you I was sick.”

Henry laughs. “What is wrong with us?”

“I have no idea.”

The bartender is there then, wondering if they have questions about the menu. They pay attention to it for the first time, and for Henry it is all a blur; he is aware of the need to eat, that the gin is going to his head, but focusing on it is hard when all he can think about is that Margot is next to him, and what a strange thing life is, that you can actually reach across time like this and pluck someone out of the past as easily as a nectarine.

Margot says, “Oh, I can’t. I eat everything. Can you order for us?”

And so Henry does. He hopes he is acting with coherence, but in truth his choices are random. And one by one dishes come out: shimmering raw crudo, octopus that has been marinated and sliced paper-thin, a pasta blackened with squid ink, and finally a whole branzino that the bartender in a theatrical show brings over to the two of them and displays—long and gray, with bright black marbles for eyes—before it is cooked in a salt crust and then brought back to them as flaky white fillets on a big white plate. He arrays a tray of sauces in front of them, and Henry doesn’t hear a word he says when he describes each one in great detail. All he sees are the colors—red, purple, and the bright green of the first trees of spring.

Margot does most of the talking at first. He does not remember this about her, and wonders if it is something she has developed later in life. She tells him about her two children, her son at Wesleyan, and her daughter in boarding school, also in Connecticut. She describes her husband, who works on Wall Street, and how they pass each other like ships in the night. “What a weird time of life this,” she says, “don’t you think?