If I Forget You(43)

That night, after a quick hello to Chad, who barely looks up from the television—“How were the girls?” he asks; she says, “Oh, the usual”—she goes upstairs and draws herself a bath, and when she sinks into it, she doesn’t know whether to cry or to smile, and she settles, as best she can, on the latter, and when she closes her eyes with the hot water swelling around her body, it is Henry she sees, of course, next to her at the restaurant bar, leaning in as he listens to her, as if every inane thing she had to say was somehow as new and original as a poem. And this is his gift, the gift of listening, and it reminds Margot of how plenty of people know how to talk but precious few are good at listening.

The next day, Margot sleeps late. She is vaguely aware of Chad leaving in the morning, his routine, the half hour down on the treadmill, then his shower and his getting dressed in the walk-in closet as he does, going in wearing a towel and emerging like the Wall Street superhero he loosely aspires to be, a crisp suit and shiny brown shoes on. When she rolls back over a few hours later, he is gone.

Margot sits up in bed. Looking out the windows, she can see the day is overcast, though it doesn’t appear to be raining. She reaches for her phone. She stares at it, looking for the text from Henry that is not there. What is the protocol here? Perhaps it’s too old-fashioned to think he should be the one to reach out to her? Did she imagine the idea that time had done nothing to erode their connection? A barb of doubt comes over and she thinks, Oh, be grateful, will you? Do you want to throw everything away?

Margot looks out at the gray day and a wave of sadness sweeps over her. She suddenly longs for her children. Emma is deep in the woods of Maine, probably out on a canoe in the middle of the vast lake, or on one of the daily hikes they take to some vista where you can see hundreds of miles of green forests rolling toward the sea. Alex is in the city, like his father, his first job, though unpaid, and at a publisher, of all things. She remembers that conversation when he said he wanted to be an editor, and she was proud of Chad, for though he said he thought books were dying out in America, and that editors were lucky to make enough money to afford to live near the city, let alone in it, he also told Alex he thought he should take the position and see what he thought for himself. Of course, it was a far easier thing to say knowing that Alex would leave college with a healthy trust fund intact from his grandparents.

Margot takes her phone then and texts her son.

“Can you escape for coffee?” she writes.

The response comes immediately. “Yeah. U okay?”

“Fine. Just miss you.”

An hour and half later, she waits for her tall son to emerge from the Flatiron Building. When he finally comes out, looking to her like such a full-fledged man in his coat and tie, the goofy flop of hair dangling over his forehead the only remnant of his teenage years, Margot feels something give within her. She goes to Alex and hugs him.

“You sure you’re okay?” he says.

“Of course. Just wanted to see you. Are you too old now for your mother?”

“Jeez. No.”

In front of them as they walk is the Empire State Building, the best view of it in the city, the great limestone obelisk rising up above the other buildings. At a Starbucks a block away, she orders both of them lattes. He doesn’t have long before he needs to be back. He tells her about the work, mainly filing and running errands, sorting mail. But the other day, a famous author stopped by and everyone drank champagne to celebrate the delivery of her latest manuscript, a certain best-seller. Alex talks about how hot the building gets, up on the nineteenth floor, and the ancient and slow elevators. How in the dive apartment in Alphabet City that he shares with two other boys from college they sit at night in their underwear and drink beer in front of fans. And looking at her soft-eyed son, Margot finds herself getting nostalgic for the time of life he is occupying, and part of her hates herself for this, the always looking back, the inability to live now or for the future, and maybe, she thinks, this is what it means to be over forty. Everything interesting is behind you and you live out the string as best you can, finding the small moments that make you happy. Either that or start over.

*

Walking through Union Square Park by herself fifteen minutes later, Margot feels her phone vibrate, and the text that comes through makes her smile.

“Are you there?” Henry writes.

It is such a poet’s question, Margot thinks. Does he mean am I out in the world somewhere? Or is it the more narrow question: Am I currently holding my phone in my hand?

“I am here,” writes Margot.

Margot stops walking and stares at her phone. People stream around her. She moves into the lee of a building to escape them.

“I can’t think of anything but you,” Henry writes. “I just taught a class and I don’t remember a thing about it. I need to see you. Can I come out there? Are you alone?”

“You don’t have to come out,” Margot types back. “I am here.”





Henry, 2012

The funny thing about getting older, Henry decides, is how the rules you lived with for so long change. For much of his adult life, he wouldn’t have dreamed of having a drink before five, that very rational marker that indicated the shift to nighttime. And often it was far later than that, for if he had work to do, he liked to address it with a clear head. Among his colleagues, this made him unusual.