If I Forget You(50)

Henry, 2012

They drive in silence. They are as separate as two people can be in the front seats of a small car. Henry grips the wheel with both hands and stares straight ahead at the road disappearing under the tires, and Margot is leaning against the passenger-side door, her head wedged into the small space between the door and her seat. The only sounds come from outside the car, the swish of the windshield wipers as they displace the light rain that started that morning.

The previous night is a dream. Henry is exhausted. He remembers crying until he couldn’t cry anymore. He remembers a fractured dawn coming to the lake, the two of them still outside, the sun not yet risen behind the hills, while above the water a dense mist rose up into the air.

“I didn’t know,” Margot had said, and then, “I knew, but I pretended I didn’t know. I wanted him to be Chad’s just because it was so much easier. And I thought if I believed that, it would be true. But then every time I looked at my son, it was you I saw.”

“Does Chad know?” Henry asked.

Margot shook her head.

“How could he not?”

“People see what they want to see.”

“And Alex has no idea.”

“No,” said Margot.

“Dear God,” Henry said.

Now, driving down Interstate 91 in the rain, Henry is haunted by the photo she showed him on her phone: Alex, tall, slender, standing on a Manhattan street, wearing a coat and tie. The effect of seeing him shakes Henry, for Alex is a perfect amalgam of the two of them, her coloring except for the eyes, which might as well have been lifted off his own face and handed to this child of his he has been robbed of knowing.

There is no need for him to take a test. You know your child when you see him, even if, seeing him for the first time, he is standing on the cusp of manhood.

Henry looks over at Margot. Her eyes are closed, her head kicked back, though he can tell she is not sleeping. Is there anything more lovely than a beautiful woman in repose? And thinking this, Henry wonders what kind of fool he must be to succumb to a love that is harsher than the darkest vicissitudes of life itself. Perhaps there is some inherent flaw in him that he has ignored all these years, moving through life stuck in his head and never fully assessing things. Is that possible? When does it end? Maybe the whole thing—the depth of his love, his obsession, the way she made him feel before last night in the dark—is all some grand illusion, a big f*cking lie that he has been way too gullible to recognize, the ancient cliché of the blind poet who can see in his mind great horizons but misses anything right in front of him. What a terrible fool you are, Henry Gold.

As if feeling the heat of his eyes on her, Margot opens hers. Henry looks back to the road.

“I’m going to leave Chad,” she says.

“I can’t think about that,” Henry says.

“I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for myself. I know you think I am a shitty, horrible person, and you are right, I am. But I need to start living for once. For myself.”

If this is an invitation for him to correct her, Henry is not yet willing to do that. Instead, he just nods and looks back ahead. “Okay,” he says.

The rain picks up then and Henry focuses on the road. As they are coming through Massachusetts, the rain falls hard and they don’t talk anymore. It is as if everything they could possibly say has been said for now, though how could that be true?

For the first time in a long time, Henry can’t wait to be alone.





Margot, 2012

She tells Chad at Artisanal, a busy bistro just off Madison. She chooses the restaurant deliberately, as it is one of his places near midtown, which he considers his domain, and the type of noisy venue where he likes to take a group of clients who will eat perfectly executed steak frites while Chad keeps the thousand-dollar bottles of Pomerol flowing and orders rare cheeses from the restaurant’s own fromagerie cave for the table.

It has been three days since Henry dropped her off at the park and ride in Stamford and helped her retrieve her bags and then turned his back on her. She has texted him three times and left him a voice mail and he hasn’t responded to any of them. This makes Margot afraid, but she made a commitment to herself that night at the lake to live honestly from now on, regardless of the consequences.

And so it is with steely purpose that as soon as the drinks come, she tells Chad everything. She braces herself when she begins, saying, “I need a divorce.” The words are chosen as carefully as the restaurant. She doesn’t say “I want a divorce,” but that she needs one. Then slowly and methodically, she tells him the entire story.

Chad knows about Henry, of course—the young Henry, that is—but not that he has stumbled back into her life. While she talks, telling him about the chance meeting at Columbus Circle, her seeking him out later, the dinner at Marea, the trip to Vermont, Chad looks at her blankly, though she can see his mind racing, his hand now and again running through his thin hair, a tic he has when he is stressed.

What kind of man, Margot thinks, listens to his wife telling him about her love for another man, telling him that she had sex with him at a small lake cabin in the Vermont mountains, and acts no different from how he would have if he had been summoned upstairs to be told he was being relieved of his job?

It is a test of sorts. She almost wishes he would strike her. A flash of anger he cannot control and feels terrible about afterward, out of character but understandable, given what he has learned.