The days are midsummer-long, and after a few of them in a row, they begin to take on a routine. Henry wakes with the sun to work in the vineyard and leaves her lying in bed in the small cabin. It feels gloriously unfair to watch him go out the door while she gets to curl back into the pillows and sleep. After work, they swim in the lake, stripping off their clothes at the shore and skinny-dipping, and on their second night there they have dinner at Ted and Laura’s house, and it is surprising to Margot to see how they interact with Henry, how comfortable he is there, opening the fridge like it’s his own, and then how they all pitch in to help cook.
Ted roasts a chicken, and Margot marvels at the simplicity of people preparing food, since in her life she has never cooked a thing. Her parents always had a chef or they ate out. She loves watching how he rubs the bird down with olive oil and garlic and rosemary, how it seems so easy and natural. While the bird cooks, Laura announces that they are going to make baklava.
“That means you, Margot,” she says.
“Me? No. I have no idea.”
“Don’t worry, it’s easy.”
And so in that rustic kitchen with the wide-pane windows that peer out toward the wide blue lake, the four of them lay out rolls of pastry. Margot is in charge of walking back and forth with a small saucepan full of melted butter and a pastry brush and painting, in long strokes, the butter onto the pastry.
Before dinner, the four of them step outside, and while the dog runs off barking into the vines, they stand on the porch and smoke a joint that Ted has rolled.
Now this is something, Margot thinks, smoking pot with older people, and as the joint goes around, Ted unwinds a story about some crazy friend they knew from high school, how he drove his car into the lake after leaving their house one night. The story is meant to be funny and everyone laughs hard, though for Margot her laughter isn’t genuine, for the pot is making her reflective and she hears only bits and pieces. Looking out to the lake and into the fat evening sun still high above the hills, she feels like nothing has ever been more beautiful, and watching the way Ted and Laura feed off each other, the quiet Laura and the gregarious Ted with a smile in his eyes as he unfurls a tale he has undoubtedly told dozens of times, she begins to imagine a future with Henry, something beyond just this moment they are living in.
Margot is ravenous. She is ravenous for the chicken, for the pinot noir they drink with it, for the roasted potatoes, and for the endive salad with pears. She is ravenous for the simple urgency of this moment in time, of watching Ted and Laura make each other laugh, and she can’t help thinking of her own parents, who surround themselves constantly with other people. As a result, she came to think that this is what marriage is, the need never to be alone with each other so as not to face the fact that you don’t really have anything to say to each other.
Most of all, she is ravenous for Henry, for his dark eyes and his smile, the way he looks over at her when Ted makes another joke, some of them lame, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, for Henry is right here, not overly solicitous, but instead bringing her in, saying with his eyes, Be with me, just be with me. Please.
In the dark, they walk back through a row of vines to the cabin. The path is narrow and they are wine-drunk and above them the moon is high in the sky and bright enough that the sea of stars is opaque as if behind a veil.
Margot leans into Henry as they walk, more of a stumble really, and at one point, walking between the rows of grapes, he trips on a root or something and then they are both going down, laughing as they fall. He falls on her, she falls on him, and Margot rolls on top of him. Her hair hangs down and obscures her face. Henry is laughing. She pins him now with her knees on his arms.
“Oh, is that how we’re doing it?” he says.
“Yes, yes,” Margot says, and the lust roiling inside her is so intense that it almost scares her, and for a moment as she stands to wriggle out of her jeans, it is as if she has left her own body, the line between control and madness blurry, and when she gets back on top of Henry, the herbaceous smell of the vines all around them, she wants to bite him hard.
Later, when Henry snores next to her on his back on the small bed, Margot listens to him, the rise and fall of his breath, and she looks out the doorway to the moonlit stretch of field that leads down to the lake. She cannot sleep. She lies on her back. The bed is small and Henry at one point slings a heavy arm over her as he moves to his side.
His body against her is warm. She presses back into him, just to feel the unconscious response, his moving back into her instinctively. Bodies come together and then fall apart. There is something simple and yet profound about this. She remembers the first tentative steps of becoming a woman. Boys she kissed, boys she let touch her, boys she touched, losing her virginity on a beach under the stars and liking the warmth of the moment but left afterward wondering if this was it. She remembers thinking about sex as something she enjoyed having done, rather than something she enjoyed doing. There was the rite of passage to it all, and when she was younger, she just wanted to be a girl who had done things. There was also, of course, the growing sense of power that she had. Those moments when she took a boy into her hand and sometimes her mouth and heard the gasp from him, this separate entity that she could own somehow, a living, sentient thing, and it was easy, boys were easy, if you knew what to do.
But then Henry, and suddenly it is as if a window on an entirely new world has been opened to her, and she has never told anyone about the feelings she has, what he does to her, not even Cricket, for she doesn’t believe she would understand. She considers all the other couples she knows, and it is as if they are separate even when they are together. An elaborate theater put on for everyone else, and perhaps just to make it appear as if you are capable of feeling something. With Henry, half the time she doesn’t know where she ends and he begins anymore.
The light outside the cabin doors is already starting to change when Margot finally drifts off to sleep. The land outside is gradually lightening. She dreams of oceans, the great blue-gray Atlantic, and then fragments she cannot piece together: looking down at Henry at the bottom of the staircase; her mother in a bed, yelling at her; riding in the back of a car moving swiftly through a thick woods. And then there is a voice, her father’s, and Margot comes to with a start.
“Get up, get dressed,” he says.
Her sleep-wet mind takes a moment to understand what she is seeing in front of her. The sun is up. Her father is standing over their bed. Henry is snoring away, unaware that anything is happening at all.