If I Forget You(44)

And yet here he finds himself at a little past noon with an open bottle of wine across from Margot at a bistro near Union Square. He tops her glass off with the white wine and then pours himself another. He is feeling strong. Last night, he slept better than he had in a long time. The wine is helping. As are the french fries cooked in duck fat, which he eats with the relish of a teenager.

“I’ve had a night to think about this,” Henry says. “Really think about it.”

“What?”

“I’m going to Vermont in the morning. For a few days. I want you to come with me.”

“Oh,” Margot says. “I don’t know. Where would I say I was going? I need to think.”

Henry leans forward. “There are two places I feel like myself. Do you know what they are?”

Margot shakes her head. “No.”

“This little cabin I bought on a lake in Vermont. And the second is with you. I need to know what happens if I put them both together. I need to know if it’s all real.”

“If what is real?”

Henry reaches into the side pocket of his messenger bag. “This,” he says, and he hands a small rectangle to Margot.

“Oh,” she says, and puts her hand over her mouth. It is a photograph, the only one he has of the two of them, and the sides of are wrinkled and it has a tear in it. It was taken on the Bannister campus, a sunny fall day. They are at the edge of the campus quad, on a small hillock, and he is sitting on the ground and smiling at the camera, while Margot looks up at his face adoringly.

“I can’t believe you have this,” she says.

“It’s been much loved, like an old stuffed animal.”

“Look at us,” she says. “We were such babies.”

“You know what’s amazing to me?”

“What?”

“I think you are far more beautiful now.”

“Oh, stop it. Really.”

“No, I’m serious. All young people are kind of blandly beautiful, you know? Trust me. I teach them. But a measure of a woman’s beauty is how she ages. And last night when I saw you coming down the street toward me, you took my breath away.”

Henry sees the welling of tears in her eyes, and he says, “Hey, don’t cry. It’s okay.”

Margot half laughs. “Then don’t be so f*cking nice to me.”

“Will you come with me?”

“You know what is crazy? I’ve been married a long time and this doesn’t feel wrong. What does that say about me?”

“Will you come?”

“Yes,” Margot says. “Of course I will.”

The next morning, on a clear, sunny day, Henry drives north out of the city, and off of I-95, he follows the sign for the train station in Stamford, and when he gets to the parking lot, he drives through it, looking for her, and he doesn’t see her anywhere. She decided not to come, he thinks. He drives around again. And then a moment later, a Mercedes SUV pulls into the lot, and even from this distance he can tell it is Margot. A moment later, she is parked and climbing into his Volkswagen with a small brown duffel bag.

“I didn’t think you were going to come,” Henry says.

“I’m just always late,” she says. “You should know this about me. One of my many terrible qualities.”

The weather holds all the way to Vermont. Three hours later, they are off the highway and driving those webs of half-marked dirt roads that lead to the lake. When they get to the final turn that is Henry’s road, the cow path that cuts through the woods, he says, “We’re here. And this is my favorite part. The road.”

Up and through the trees they go, swooping down into the wide-open meadow before they are back into the woods again on the narrow dirt track, the dappled sunlight coming through the high trees and speckling the path in front of them. A minute later, the lake opens up in front of them and Henry looks at Margot and she is smiling and he says, “This is it.”

“I love it,” she says.

“It’s not much, really. But it’s mine.”

“It’s wonderful.”

They stand there for a moment, on the grassy top of the cliff, the house below them, and they can see out to the peninsula that cuts the lake in half, the silvery birch trees that grow on it. The afternoon is hot and humid and Henry knows from looking at the weather that they may get thunderstorms later, and he secretly hopes so, the drama of it all, the windswept water and the rain falling in torrents while he and Margot sit on the screened-in porch and drink wine and watch the lightning expose the sky.

“Let’s unload,” Henry says.

And so down the steps they go, with Margot carrying their two bags while Henry manages a cooler and two bags of groceries on top of it. He shopped the night before at Fairway for everything they might need, not wanting to have to leave here for anything.

And then they are inside the musty cabin, the door opening onto his simple bedroom with its double bed, and then down the stairs into the one room that contains the kitchen and a small living area framed by a big stone fireplace.

Henry runs around opening everything, aware of how stale it all smells, and then he opens a bottle of white wine and they move out onto the deck that sits right above the lake. He raises the umbrella on the outdoor table and they sit down now and he pours them both glasses of the wine and hands one across to Margot.