She is still standing, right? Around her is the banal normalcy of the passive city. Margot watches Henry and his daughter walk toward the park as if nothing just happened, the two of them holding hands, a slight skip in his daughter’s step, the only hint of anything having happened to Henry is perhaps a little weight to his walk, a slight listing to the right, though that could be age, or just her desire that Henry be suddenly altered by her appearance on a sidewalk across from him.
Margot watches them until they round the corner on Central Park West and disappear. In her hand she holds his business card, such a funny small thing, words and numbers but a tie to Henry that she has not had before, his cell phone number scrawled on it in pen, his hands visibly shaking as he wrote it.
As if on cue, the rain begins again, a soft rain, and Margot is suddenly terribly tired and hungry and she wants now to be back at the hotel, to curl up in her bed after managing to eat something and replay what has just happened in the quiet, anonymous space that only a hotel room can afford.
Margot begins to walk. Back at the hotel, she comes into the small lobby and then to the elevator and up to her room. Now she is more tired than hungry, but she knows she needs to eat, so she orders room service, a burger, which she will only pick at, and a bottle of wine, which she will drink until maybe she can sleep.
When she finally lies down on the bed, having eaten three bites of the expensive burger and a handful of fries, pushing her face into the pillow, Margot sees Henry as he was earlier, standing in front of her, the dutiful father with a lovely child connected to his fingers. She sees the way he looked at her, the pregnancy of his eyes, wanting to burst with all that had been stolen from him.
And here is the paradox of time: Looking at him, Margot felt like Henry knows her better than anyone ever has. And yet he learned just in that moment that she had two children, that she was married, that she lived in Darien. And while she knows that gives a certain portrait, one that saddens her, the cliché of the wealthy housewife in her big house, within that life she has lived since she last saw him are the multitudes of details that one cannot possibly explain in a street-side meeting, and that collectively make her who she is. Could he actually know her? Or does he know only the girl frozen in time from a lifetime ago?
Oh, what a folly this is! What is she doing, exactly? Following an old boyfriend around the city, manufacturing a run-in? One that could undo all she has managed to build in the last twenty years?
Margot pushes her face farther into the pillow. Sometimes she wishes you could just turn life off like a switch, and everything would go dark. She starts to cry. She cries for Henry because she could see the sadness in his face, but mostly she cries for herself, for the woman she has become, how entrenched she is in a life she suddenly isn’t sure she wants anymore. She falls asleep.
The ringing of her phone wakes her up.
Margot is disoriented: She has no idea whether it is day or night, or even where she is. She remembers, of course, that she is in the hotel room, though the heavy curtains are drawn, blocking out either the light or the night. She rolls over and sees that it is her husband calling.
Margot answers it with a hello.
“Where are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” Chad says. “I’m home and you are not here.”
Margot tries to wipe the fog out of her mind. How long has she been here? She is certain Chad wasn’t due home until tomorrow.
“Where are you?” Chad asks for the second time, not stern yet, just trying to figure it out.
“In the city,” she says, getting up now while she talks, looking around the room frantically, as if he might come rushing through that door.
“Shopping?”
“A little,” Margot says. “Met Cricket for a drink.”
“You drove,” says Chad.
Did she? Of course she did. It seems forever ago that the hotel valeted her car. “Yes, I was running late for the train.”
“Okay, well, are you heading back? There’s nothing to eat here. I was thinking of calling in for some Thai.”
“Go ahead,” says Margot, seeing now on the clock that is just past five thirty. She was asleep for a few hours. “I’m going to wait till after rush hour. Poke around a little bit.”
“Drive safe, then,” Chad says. “Love you.”
“Love you, too,” says Margot and hangs up the phone. In the mirror she dislikes herself, eyes red from the crying, clothes a wrinkled mess from the rain and then sleeping in the bed.
She hurries into the shower, and while the water tumbles over her she thinks about this, the boring safety of marriage, how moments ago she was just a woman in a hotel room, asleep, and now she is racing to put herself back together to get home to her husband, who will have eaten his Thai food out of a box in front of SportsCenter, having fulfilled his obligation for calling her and now grateful for her absence, since he can spend this time alone after his flight.
In the mirror she applies her makeup. When she is finished, she stares at her reflection and makes small corrections here and there. Margot looks now like someone who spent a day shopping in New York, and she suddenly remembers she should e-mail Cricket to say they had a drink together when they didn’t, but then she realizes that she would rather invite Chad’s questions than Cricket’s. Plus, what are the odds of Chad even saying something?
Instead, sitting on the edge of the bed with her bag packed, a bag she will have to hide in the way back of her SUV, as if she has not been away for a few days, she pulls out the business card Henry gave her earlier today.
She types his number into the phone and then writes, “It was good to see you today. Oh, this is Margot.”
Then she hits SEND and holds her breath.
A reply is back in moments. “It was GREAT to see you.”
Oh, Jesus, Margot thinks, her heart racing. She has a sudden urge to be outside, to run again. Don’t think, she tells herself. She types quickly with her thumbs. “We should do it again sometime. Maybe not on the street.”
“Meet me for a drink. Not tonight. I have Jess. But Monday.”
Margot sits and stares at his sentences on her phone. She feels somehow as if she has already cheated, like she won’t be able to look Chad in the eye when he rises out of his chair to give her a perfunctory hug.
But for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t really give a shit, and this is a good feeling. It has been forever since she has done something that feels true and honest.
She types back. “Where?”
A moment later, her phone lights up again.
“Anywhere you are willing to be,” the poet says.