If I Forget You(6)

Henry gets to work. He moves the outside furniture, which has sat in the living room all winter, out to the deck. He opens the windows and airs out the mustiness. He plugs in the appliances and turns on the electricity. And then comes the arduous process of undoing what he did last fall, getting the water flowing out of the lake now and into the pump and filling the pipes into the house.

That night he grills a steak he bought at the general store and eats it with some lightly dressed spinach to feel virtuous, though it is only the steak he wants.

Henry eats outside at the table on the deck, drinking a bottle of cheap Rh?ne he also found at the general store, and while he eats he watches the sun fall behind the hills to the west, and the lake, rippling and glowing in the afternoon sun when he arrived, becomes as still as glass, a mirror full of trees, an impressionist painting of the dying light.

Right before dusk, the resident loons arrive, the pair of them, back for the season. They glide in front of Henry’s deck, as if he isn’t there. It is their lake, after all. They are elegant swimmers. They dive under, and in the half-light of the fading evening, he can see their bodies underwater, like tiny dolphins, soaring, soaring, and soaring, a calibrated dance, moving around each other as gracefully as acrobats.

Last summer, there was a baby loon. They would take turns teaching it to fish, each feeding it by catching a small pumpkinseed and swimming over to the baby with the squirming little fish clutched in his or her beak. Loons mate for life. You never see a loon alone. This year, the baby is gone. But how, Henry wonders, do they find each other? How do they choose?

Of course, he is not thinking about loons at all.

Things rise and things fall and sometimes they converge and sometimes they fall apart. The most one can hope for is that you find someone who can tolerate your flaws and your faults and see her way to loving you anyway. That maybe you figure out how to make a life together. That maybe you decide not to fight the darkness by yourself. The rest of it can be only a romantic notion, right?

It is the stuff of goddamn poets.





Margot, 2012

The cab is hot. It is suffocating. Henry’s face, floating in front of her like a balloon, is gone. Margot is heading uptown. She rolls down the window, and the hot air of traffic that blows in on her doesn’t help. How is it that he was suddenly there? Her fingers on the bird, soft, warm feathers rising one last time, the city as loud as thunder around her, and there, in the only stillness for miles, stands Henry, resolute and fixed before moving toward her and saying her name.

Much earlier in her life, Margot was prone to panic. Mainly in her late twenties—a few episodes, nothing serious, though one time before her wedding she ended up in the hospital because her death appeared imminent. They strapped her to machines that, in defiance of all logic, said she was fine.

“You are having an anxiety attack,” the ER doctor told her, as if he saw her kind several times a night. “There is nothing wrong with you.”

Everything is wrong with me, she wanted to say, but didn’t.

It is a failure that will compound throughout her life, a failure to speak her mind. But of course she knew that was only part of it. The harder thing to reconcile, always, is what she carries within her, the complications of the adult mind, the cognitive dissonance that allows for secrets and truths to reside next to one another and never emerge into the world.

Now, coming through Central Park, downslope through the trees and under the bridge, Margot begins to breathe again. The air is suddenly light and springlike, not of the city. The panic rising within her starts to recede, a familiar feeling to her, the sense that what was about to overwhelm her is then somehow falling away.

She can still feel the blood in her face, though, and in her mind is the image of Henry. He has aged well, for the most part, and is still boyish in his forties. Why did she run? Wouldn’t the more appropriate thing have been simply to chat with him, old friends running into each other? Talk to him and then walk away. Wouldn’t that have made it easier? Move into the teeth of the storm and hope it goes away. Of course, it is far more complicated than that.

This is the other thing Margot doesn’t like about adulthood: Every interaction seems to bring with it a history, a context, and nothing is simple. Young children meet each other and after a moment of awkwardness play with ease. Adults circle each other like stray cats.

Last summer on Martha’s Vineyard, her daughter, Emma, had her first boyfriend. One of those towheaded preppy boys who seem to grow like mushrooms after a rainfall on the island. The kind of boy who looks like he just stepped off a sailboat. He was tall and lean and sun-browned, the swoop of blond hair that covered his eyes a remaining semblance of awkward adolescence.

Watching them together, walking on the beach in front of their house, waiting until they were a reasonable distance away from her parents before holding hands, Margot was struck by the innocence of it all, the here and now of it, the impermanence of summer. Oh, she didn’t want to know what they did out of sight, at night when they rode their bikes and sat on a blanket together, hidden in the dunes. She had an idea, of course, and she trusts Emma, who has always been a cautious girl. But it’s hard for Margot not to feel a twinge of envy in seeing her daughter experience things for the first time, those tentative first steps toward adulthood, when the days seem eternally long, and joy, simple joy, comes without strings or any depth of thought, as true as the salty breeze blowing off the sound.