If I Forget You(7)

The cab lets Margot off on Fifth, just across from the museum. A block away, at a coffee bar, Cricket is waiting for her. They have known each other their whole lives. They spent summers on the Vineyard, and attended the same schools from seventh grade through college. They both married men from similar families with similar ambitions: husbands who both work on the Street.

Until recently, Cricket lived in Darien, but with their only child at Trinity, they sold the house in Darien and moved into a new building in TriBeCa. Margot braces herself to hear about how great it is to live in the city, and how did they ever suffer for so long in the suburbs?

They exchange air-kisses and Margot studies her best friend, put together in her Manhattan finest, of course—skinny jeans set off by a gold Hermès belt buckle, heels, and a frilly white blouse.

Before she leaves her to order a latte, Margot has this sudden idea that she barely knows Cricket, which of course cannot be true. She has known her longer than she has known anyone. Then again, she has had a similar feeling lately about Chad, waking up in the middle of the night and studying his sleeping face as if a stranger had somehow found his way into her bed.

Margot returns to the table, and the pitter-patter of small talk begins. The building, the building, the building. How great it is. How much they love it. Of course, Margot has never been there. This is one of the funny things about New York. Outside of major events, people keep their elegant houses to themselves. They meet in public spaces, the first floors of Manhattan.

Cricket moves on: Pilates class, and the new French restaurant that opened next door. The chef was somewhere else before; Cricket can’t remember, but surely Margot knows, doesn’t she? It was definitely in the Times.

As Cricket prattles on, Margot wonders when it was that they stopped really talking to each other. Margot means really talking. Confiding. At what age do women start speaking around each other?

After all, the woman across from her was once a young girl, a girl she used to bunk with at camp in the summer in the Maine woods, and when everyone else was asleep, they would climb into the same bed and whisper secrets back and forth, with the comfort of knowing that no two human beings could possibly trust each other more.

They have cried together over heartbreak. They have stood side by side at each other’s weddings. They have held each other’s heads against the cold porcelain of the toilet after youthful nights of overindulgence. And now, somehow, having passed forty, they have grown armor, and the intimacy that defined their youth feels like it is gone forever.

Margot doesn’t tell Cricket she ran into Henry Gold. She doesn’t say that she can barely think because of it. She wants to tell someone how good he looked. He looked really good. He looked like Henry. And how that scared her even more.

Margot doesn’t tell her she wonders sometimes if Chad is having an affair. That perhaps he is in love with someone younger than she, or is at least f*cking someone, since God knows he barely attempts to f*ck her anymore. Let alone come home before she is asleep.

Margot doesn’t tell Cricket that she is painting and this makes her happy. Saying you are painting is almost like saying you are a painter, and what middle-aged woman has the hubris to do that when no one besides her husband has seen her work? Though is happy even the right word? Perhaps she simply doesn’t remember what it is like to be happy, not that she’s sad per se, but it’s just that if there is anything she has learned, it is that there is no longer such a clear continuum as there was when they were younger, when she swerved from happy to sad with the synchronicity of a metronome. She dwells now in moments of gray.

Painting gives her pleasure, then, though pleasure is not the same as happiness. Pleasure is fleeting.

There are days, however, especially at the ocean, when she feels a surge of joy, and oftentimes her children, in certain singular moments and through the smallest of gestures—a glance, a smile, a laugh—allow Margot to see herself in them, to recognize that they exist only because of her, that they in fact are her, and this, too, can bring her back quickly to a place where she finds beauty.

But the truth is that some days Margot asks herself, Is this it? Is this all there is? Not that she would trade her life for anything. Despite the angst she sometimes feels, Margot knows how good she has it. Even Chad, who worries her, is never anything but kind. What else could she possibly want?

Though in Cricket’s pretty brown eyes and her expensively dyed streaky blond hair, Margot sees a sadness reflecting back at her, a mirror of how she feels. And yet neither of them have the courage to acknowledge this truth. It is as if they have reached an age where that is no longer appropriate between friends. That’s what therapists are for. Pay someone two hundred an hour to hear your problems. For everyone else, put on a good face. Let them know you are doing at least as well they are. And if you know bad things that are happening to other people, share them. It is the dark, satisfying pleasure of schadenfreude, and they are all guilty of it, whether they want to admit.

On the train home, Margot gets a text from Chad.

“Stuck here. Dinner with clients. How r u?”

“It’s fine,” she writes back. “I’m good.”

That night she eats some leftover salmon with couscous and drinks a glass of white wine on the back patio. She stares out at the woods, beyond the formal gardens. Later, she wanders around her large, empty house, pausing at the kids’ bedrooms, looking into them, thinking of both of them in their dorm rooms right now, her youngest certainly sitting at her desk for study hall and Alex doing who knows what. She thinks of Chad, in his tailored suit, at one of the steak houses he takes people, where they wheel steaks that are bigger than your head out on carts. Chad holding court and passing around some ridiculously priced robust red wine made in small batches in a Sonoma garage, digging into his repertory of long-form off-color jokes, the men he is with guffawing with their heads kicked back when he eventually delivers, with a pitch-perfect timing developed over years, the biting punch line.