If I Forget You(18)

At Ninety-second Street, Margot takes a left and heads toward the river. Partway down the block, she begins to check numbers. She found his address by Googling him, and a donation to a political campaign showed up. There were other Henry Golds, but this address made sense to her. It is not far from Columbus Circle, where she last saw him. Plus, it is the kind of place where a poet of Henry’s age would live.

The building, when she finds it, is nondescript, seventeen stories or so and without any defining characteristics. One of those New York buildings that no one who doesn’t live there will ever consider twice.

Margot suddenly realizes she is the only one on the block. She looks toward Broadway and then farther east toward Amsterdam. What if Henry were to walk out right now? They would be face-to-face.

She quickly retreats across the street. Fifty feet away sits a bench, and Margot goes to it and sits down. She hadn’t thought this through very well, she decides. She pulls her hat down a little tighter and looks nervously up and down the street. She wishes suddenly she had a newspaper, as in the movies. Someone doing a stakeout like this always has a newspaper. She reaches into her pocket and takes out her phone, and this is what she will be doing if Henry comes down the street. She will hide in her phone.

Margot sits on the bench, and for a while nothing happens. A few people stroll by. An elderly black man pushing a shopping cart asks her for change, but she tells him she doesn’t carry any, and he moves on. Chad texts her to say he has landed and that it’s a good thing she didn’t come. The air is like soup down there, he says.

Margot instantly writes him back and says she is glad he made it safely. The day is warm, but where she sits is shaded. She keeps thinking she should just get up and go back to the hotel and call this foolish thing off, but she cannot will herself to move. At one point, a woman of about her age goes into the building, and Margot studies her from a distance and wonders if it is Henry’s wife. It occurs to her that she has been assuming for some reason he is not married, when in fact she has no idea what his situation is. For all she knows, he lives in this building with his wife and kids. Perhaps he is perfectly happy. This is indeed stupid, she thinks, and she is about to rise and walk back to the hotel, check out and get in her car and drive back to Darien when she sees him.

Henry is coming toward her, but thankfully on the other side of the street. Margot’s heart rises as she watches him stroll, a messenger bag slung over his shoulder, his button-down shirt rolled up at the sleeves, every bit the professor. She looks down at her phone as he gets closer to her but then peers up at him, praying that he will not look across the street and see her on the bench. But he walks with that practiced city weariness, looking straight ahead, not so much as glancing across to where she sits.

A moment later, he disappears into the building. Margot scans up the facade, though she doesn’t know what she is looking for. If it had been night, perhaps a light would come on, though it would be too far up for her to see anything anyway. She counts the stories. She knows he is in 14C, though she doesn’t know which way his apartment might face. When she reaches the fourteenth floor with her eyes, she lingers there, as if those implacable windows might reveal something.

Margot sits there for a while. There is more foot traffic now, since it’s the end of the workday, people returning home from downtown offices. No one pays her any attention at all. She tries to imagine Henry inside, perhaps pouring himself a glass of wine, perhaps staring out the window at a slice of late-afternoon sky. And in that moment, Margot thinks she really should leave, but as she thinks it, she also feels more alone than she ever has in her life. Where should she go? Should she go back to the small hotel room with its chandelier and windows that don’t open? Back to her empty house in Darien to pace around its large rooms and stare out at all the features, the shrubbery, the lawns, the gardens, that separate her from the rest of the world?

Margot wills herself off the bench and crosses the street. Her heart is racing. She is a teenager again. This is insane. Oh, she wishes she had a drink, but she tells herself just to move forward. Keep going and don’t think.

She reaches the building, Henry’s building. There is no doorman. Looking through the glass, she sees that the lobby is empty. She tries the door and it is locked, of course. Next to her is the row of buttons that buzz each apartment, many of them with names next to them, some without. His, of course, is without.

That instant before she presses down on 14C feels like a lifetime. She is going to do it. She is not going to do it. She must do it. There is no choice. Oh, how could she? What is she about to do?

And then she does. She holds it down. She hears the long, rewarding buzz and she tells herself, It’s okay, I will hear his voice and say I pressed the wrong button. He will not recognize my voice after all these years, will he?

But there is no answer. She holds it down again, this time longer. She imagines the loud buzzer echoing through his apartment, Henry putting down his glass of wine and moving to the door. She holds it down the third time and this time she doesn’t want to let go, and now she wants him to answer even if she might not be able to speak in return, but there is no voice coming over the intercom asking who it is; there is no sound of the door in front of her releasing its lock, only the abject silence of an uncaring stone building and the sound of a garbage truck moving down the street behind her.





Henry, 2012

Henry’s heart, this day, is not in the classroom. Through the tall windows of his classroom, the early-summer sun streams in, and he opens the windows before his workshop students arrive, something he rarely does, since the sounds of the street are not exactly conducive to focusing on the poems in front of him.