If I Forget You(42)

“Sometimes,” Margot continues, “I think there has to be more to it. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do,” says Henry.

“It’s like everyone just goes so fast for so long and then you find yourself here and it’s all so, I don’t know, uneventful? Boring? That sounds awful. I don’t mean that. I have been very blessed.”

“I have a question,” Henry says.

Margot looks him in the eyes. It amazes him that they can have this ease and comfort with each other after all these years, the give-and-take so natural, and he imagines she must feel the same way, for in her eyes he sees how she feels.

“What?” she says.

“How come you hid from me all these years?”

Margot sips from her gin and looks away, and she is aware of her legs suddenly shaking and she is happy she is on a stool and that Henry cannot see this. She looks straight ahead when she speaks and her voice softens to almost a whisper.

“Everything I have done in my life is wrong,” she says. “Everything.”

“No, it doesn’t work that way,” Henry says. “Things happen, you know? All we can do is try our best. I am sure you have done that.”

“I haven’t,” Margot says. “This is the thing I always loved about you. How generous you are. You always saw the best in me. And I didn’t deserve it.”

Henry sits with this for a moment. The bartender is there now, clearing the dinner plates. The restaurant has filled up all around them, stylishly dressed, wealthy people, and for a moment he thinks of the bill to come, and adding up in his head, he realizes it will probably be more than what he pays for food over several weeks and then he chastises himself for the pettiness of that thought. The restaurant suddenly feels close, though, and he wants to be outside with Margot, having this conversation illicitly in the dark.

When the bartender leaves, Henry says, “I never stopped loving you. Never. Not a day went by when somehow you didn’t enter my thoughts. I am sorry. I needed to say that.”

Margot takes her hand and brings it to his cheek. Her lips part as if she is going to say something, but he can see that her bottom lip is quivering. And in that moment there is no one else in that gilded, overwrought room, no one else at the zinc-topped bar, no one else moving down the avenue behind them.

“It’s okay,” Henry says. “Really. Let’s get out of here.”

The bill comes and Margot goes for her bag and Henry says, “No. I got it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he says. “Please.”

The evening kicks them out onto the uncaring sidewalk. With the sun having set, some of the heat has diffused, though it is humid.

“Do you have to go?” Henry asks.

Margot looks at her watch. “I have an hour or so,” she says. “Before my husband starts to be curious.”

They walk across the street to the entrance to the park. People are everywhere. Street artists are doing charcoal portraits. Horse-drawn carriages are lined up one after another, most of the drivers just sitting on their perches, others like carnival barkers, trying to get a fare. The horses seem sad and out of place, huge blinders shielding their eyes. And then at the mouth of the park, Margot suddenly cries out in delight. She takes his arm and points. “Look!”

And in front of them, a bright purple light shoots into the air, followed by another and another. The lights rise above the trees and then fall down slowly, fluttering. As they get closer, they realize there are dozens of young men shooting tiny lights into the air with long elastic bands. Hundreds of tiny falling stars, and it couldn’t be more magical.

They find a bench and sit down and watch this spontaneous show. They don’t talk. Margot sits close to Henry, her thigh almost touching his thigh.

“God, it’s beautiful,” she says.

“Yes,” Henry says. “It really is.”





Margot, 2012

They sit for a while in silence, watching the whimsical light show, and the silence is a different one for her, not the sad, empty silence of sitting across from Chad in a restaurant and struggling to find something to say. And maybe, Margot thinks, this is what love really is, the ability to be fully you with another person, to let all the carefully constructed veneers fall away and not have to think anymore, but just be.

She doesn’t want the night to end anymore, the anxiety she had before having disappeared somewhere after the second martini, when it seems they decided to let their shared history disappear like the tiny pieces of fish they forked off the plate. But in her mind, she has already scripted it out. She remembers then sitting on another bench a long time ago, also on a warm night, looking out over the lake in Bannister, New York. How young she was then, how eager to be a woman; how easy it was for her to make the first move, turning to Henry and kissing him. And now she doesn’t remember the last time she was kissed—really kissed, not the public peck or the kiss good night. How long has that kind of intimacy been closed to her?

Margot knows how tonight will end. It won’t end with her waking up in his apartment, though she considered this. No, it will end with a kiss, out on the street in the hot summer night, the black Lincoln arriving when she makes her call, waiting to whisk her back to the suburbs, and her not wanting to let go of Henry.

And this is how it plays out. Riding out of the city in the backseat, she stares out the window at the passing buildings and soon they are on the Merritt and under the stone bridges, and the closer she gets to home, the emptier she feels, and she has to remind herself to pull it together before the car pulls down her tree-lined cul-de-sac and drops her in her driveway.