Sometimes Henry looks at Jess and the love he has for her threatens to overwhelm him, more so as she has grown, for when she was a baby, he felt this distance from her that he never told anyone about, and he thought at the time that maybe there was a coldness to his heart that he didn’t want to admit.
It is different for women, of course, for he remembers his wife holding Jess when she was tiny and how it changed her: Her very looks seemed to soften, and as long as Jess wasn’t crying or sick, Ruth became beatific around their daughter, aglow with the power of making something that could only, by definition, be perfect.
Henry, on the other hand, felt on the outside of it all, staring into a book with a story in which he was just a fringe character. He was supposed to be empathetic and good and yet it was as if none of this had anything to do with him.
But then Jess grew and his worry about this distance he felt from her when she was a baby fell away. Soon, as daughters do, she became his sun and his moon and his stars, and then she was walking, and the fear he had of wanting to protect her from all the dark corners of life kept Henry up at night.
This was one of the many differences between him and Ruth. For while Ruth was a poet, too, she did not have a poet’s temperament. He would never have told her this, but her strength as a writer was a workmanlike devotion to the craft, her willingness to pore over language like a scientist. But she lacked imagination. And the same was true, Henry thought in those early years, when it came to Jess, her ability to let her live and grow and get hurt, as if she was someone else’s child, not one they had made together, of which there was only one.
Of course this was absurd, and Henry knew it, and oftentimes he admired Ruth for how she parented, how easily it all came to her, the practicality with which she went about it. Later, when his marriage was failing, he sometimes wondered if it wasn’t really about the affair and more about his desire to run from death, from the responsibility of his daughter, and his poetic sense that catastrophe just had to lie around every corner for the ones he loved. For this is the great paradox of life, isn’t it? The more you love someone, the more that person will eventually break your heart?
Now, walking through the Great Hall of the American Museum of Natural History for the second time that day, Henry looks down at Jess. Her curly hair falls on either side of her pink face. She is beautiful and without scars literal or metaphorical, which is how it should be at this age. She looks up at him, and for a moment he sees the adult she will be someday, more her mother than him, and as if sensing something in his expression, she takes his hand in her own.
Jess looks up at him. And not for the first time he thinks that while he may have married the wrong woman, they certainly had the right child. And sometimes that should be enough, shouldn’t it? Maybe this is why he and Ruth married, so Jess would be in the world. Despite all his regrets, Henry cannot imagine this being undone.
Outside, the rain has stopped, but the day is still gray and all around them are the signs of the rain, the puddles and the mist coming off them. Henry looks down at Jess.
“Cheeseburgers and milk shakes?” he says.
His daughter sticks her tongue out and nods her head rapidly like a puppy.
At Shake Shack, they order cheeseburgers and fries and a vanilla milk shake for her, a pint of beer for him. They stand for a bit, waiting for their food and for a table to open up, and soon one does and they sit down alongside the bubble window on Columbus Avenue. They sit across from each other, and Henry, so used to eating alone, is itching to look at his phone, though he knows there is no real news there, probably nothing more than departmental e-mails that are as important as pennies.
It is just that he is used to eating alone now and to using the phone as a prop, or a book, which he doesn’t have with him. He has to remind himself to be present, and he starts by asking Jess questions about school, which she answers with one word between bites. “Good,” she says, and “Cool,” she says, until he realizes he is practically asking her yes or no questions and this is no way to draw a child out.
At one point, Henry finds himself gazing out at the street, at the people walking by, the streams of children leaving the museum, while he and his daughter sit in silence like an old married couple.
Suddenly he catches his breath. Amid the hustle and bustle, a lone figure stands across the avenue, looking directly at him. A woman in a baseball hat, not moving at all, her stillness causing her to stand out, a port in the storm.
Margot. It can’t be. Henry looks back over at Jess, who’s cramming french fries into her mouth, and then he looks back out the window, half expecting her to have vanished, a mirage. But she has actually taken a step forward, and for a moment a bus going by shields her from view, and when the bus passes, Henry looks at her and she smiles weakly back at him.
There is no mistaking her now.
Henry has no idea what to do. His heartbeat is in his neck. He is not alone. He is of half a mind just to punch his way through the window, emerge on the street, crouching, with broken glass spilling around him like something out of a movie, and then rush into traffic. Of course, he cannot do any of those things. He looks over at Jess and then out the window again. She has not moved. Is she waiting for him?
Henry waves and she slowly raises her hand before letting it fall back to her side.
Henry looks at Jess’s plate. She has eaten half her burger, which is good for her, and is putting the last of the fries in her mouth.
“All done, honey?” he says.
She nods.
More urgently than he means to, he says, “Okay, let’s get out of here.”
“I need to pee,” Jess says.
“What?” Henry says, aware as soon as he says it that he is acting frantic, and his daughter is just staring at him, confused.
“I have to pee,” she says.
“Of course, of course,” Henry says. He stands, and so does Jess. Henry turns toward the window. Margot continues to stand there, and he holds up one finger to her, as if to say, Give me a minute, please. Give me a minute.
“This way,” Henry says to Jess. “Let’s go.”
He leads her down the narrow corridor to the bathrooms. At the door of the ladies’ room, he tells her to be quick, which he realizes is a totally screwed-up thing to say, and he can see that his tension has Jess’s attention, but she just shrugs and goes into the ladies’ room, which is crowded. Usually this moment frightens him, that she is old enough that he can leave her in a room full of strangers to drop her pants where he cannot see her. But today Henry just wants her to hurry.
Five minutes later, Jess emerges, and Henry breathes a sigh of relief, which he knows is silly, as if somehow the bathroom would swallow her up, or one of the women in there would somehow decide to sneak by him with Jess smuggled into her coat.
“There you are,” Henry says, and he takes her hand. They move through the restaurant and then out the door and onto the street. He panics briefly, as he doesn’t instantly see Margot where she stood some ten minutes before. But then he looks straight ahead, across the crosswalk, and she stands there waiting for them.
The light changes and they move across the street.
“Where are we going, Daddy?” Jess asks.
“Just over here. I see someone I know.”
And then they are in front of each other, the years peeling away, a moment he has imagined for twenty years now but never really thought would take place. His daughter is on his hand like a balloon he has forgotten he is carrying. They do not hug. They do not embrace. He doesn’t shake her hand or anything more formal. They just stand in front of each other there on Columbus Avenue on a summer day when the rain has stopped but the sun has yet to emerge. Margot is shaking. The earth beneath him is shifting. For what seems like an eternity, they just look at each other. Jess is tugging at Henry’s hand and he knows he needs to say something, or that Margot needs to say something, but all he can do is look at her eyes, those sea blue eyes, and if anything, to him she is more beautiful than he remembered, for it is only with age that the true character of a woman shows. Someone must break the silence.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” Henry says.
Margot’s face looks like it might crack. He can see her fighting it, but despite her efforts, her eyes have begun to well up. Margot looks into his eyes and then she looks down at Jess. In an attempt at normalcy, she says, “This must be your daughter.”
“I’m sorry,” Henry says. “Yes, this is Jess.”
Margot, experienced at this, goes down then and gets on Jess’s level. “Let me guess. I think you’re ten.”
Jess smiles. “Nine. You were close.”
“Well, you are adorable. I’m Margot.” And she holds her hand out then for his daughter, and his daughter takes it.
And around them the city continues, blind and unaware. Cabs and buses stream by. Horns honk in open defiance of the signs that line the avenue. Around them, everyone is in a hurry, rushing to get somewhere. If poetry is the search for significance, than the stubbornness of love must be its fullest expression.