If I Forget You(14)
Henry, 1991
Henry knows who Margot Fuller is. He knows her before he ever sees her. In the weeks before freshman year started, he sat with the facebook they got in the mail, a booklet with head shots of each incoming first-year student. He is not alone in this, as the entire college will do the same when school opens, particularly the upperclassmen, perusing the faces of the new female students, categorizing them instantly and facilely as options or not.
Henry looks at the book for a different reason. He studies it like a mirror, looking for a reflection of himself. Sometimes he just stares at his own photo, his senior year in high school portrait, where he’s wearing a corduroy jacket and his hair is long and curly, a toothy, lopsided grin on his face. Henry Gold, it says. Then underneath: Providence, Rhode Island.
For hours and hours, he pages through the booklet, studying the faces. He is the only one from Providence. Over and over the same towns appear. New York, New York; Darien, Connecticut; Greenwich, Connecticut; Rye, New York; Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; Short Hills, New Jersey; Shaker Heights, Ohio; and so on.
The names of the towns themselves are meaningless to him. They are as exotic as Jakarta to his teenage mind, but part of him knows there is a reason for this narrow geographic reach, although he just doesn’t yet know what it is.
And then there are the faces themselves. Almost exclusively white. There are pretty fair-haired girls after pretty fair-haired girls. And, of course, there is Margot. Margot Fuller, Darien, Connecticut.
Later, Henry will say that he lingered over her face more than the others. That something about her startling blue eyes, her shoulder-length brown hair, and her delicate nose with its slight upturn at the tip spoke to him. But this idea, his lingering on her, comes with wishful reflection, a glaring back through time that he himself doesn’t fully trust.
In truth, freshman year, she is not someone he considers often. When it comes to the social hierarchy of Bannister, Margot is in an elite class. Even though she is only a first-year student, she moves in a pack of beautiful girls, Cricket and the two Whitneys, as they are known, both tall blondes.
Henry plays the wrong sport. No one cares about baseball. At games, a small smattering of fans sit on the hillside to watch him work his deft left-handed magic as shortstop. He has the wrong clothes and the wrong friends. He is invited to rush a few frats because he’s an athlete, but he can barely afford to eat outside the cafeteria, so how could he possibly pay dues?
No, Henry is at the bottom with all the other freshman men, distinguished slightly perhaps by his athletic prowess. Though lacrosse is where the action is. Bannister is known for lacrosse. On Saturdays in the fall, the stadium fills, and lacrosse players are the one exception to the freshman rule. They move with impunity through the campus, regardless of their year.
For Henry, none of this surprises him, for he expects to be on the outside. He makes a few friends. Painfully aware of the gift this education is, he never misses class. He studies. If he goes out, it is to the few big functions where no one will question his being there.
And while now and again he sees Margot Fuller around campus, it is not until they share a class that he really notices her. The class is a large one, a requirement for at least three different majors. European Intellectual History, it is called, a broad survey course held in one of the big lecture spaces, where the two professors stand below the students, who sit theater-style above, with their notebooks on small armchair desks.
Because of the clearly established social hierarchy of the school, Margot Fuller is not someone Henry would ever imagine talking to, or even having anything approaching an encounter with. But staring at her is a different matter altogether. She has a beauty that grows on him over time. Unlike her friends the two Whitneys, who are both blond and symmetrical and far too conventional for him to find interesting, Margot has character in her face.
Her eyes are her most stunning feature, but it’s more than that. There is a sadness in her face that belies how she has actually lived, or so Henry imagines, for how can he know how she has actually lived?
What he does know, after always arriving at that class just slightly on the side of tardy so he can choose a seat that affords him an unfettered view of her, is that Margot captivates him. While far below him a middle-aged professor with dark glasses intones about Hume and Locke, Henry stares at Margot in profile two or three rows below him.
And one of the mysteries of the human brain is that someone can tell when they are being stared at. At one point, Henry is gazing at her dreamily when she turns and looks up at him. He is too slow to look away as quickly as he would have liked, and for the smallest of moments their eyes meet and he feels the blood rising to his face before he looks away casually, as if he was just absentmindedly scanning the room.
By his sophomore year, Henry has found an unlikely home at the college, among the theater people and the aspiring writers and the artists, the ones who eschew the fraternity scene for a small, dimly lit downtown bar. At night, they meet at the bar, with its upholstered booths, and drink bourbon with ginger ale and talk about novels and poetry and movies. These are conversations he has never imagined having before, certainly not in Providence, and within him he feels this great swell of change, aware that he is becoming something new. And even as the fall turns to winter and the leaves fall off the trees and the wind that blows off the lake is icy cold and he has to pull his long coat around him against it, he has around him this sense of the possible that in the past he always associated with spring and the start of baseball.