If I Forget You(25)

At night in his small cabin, Henry reads by the light from the oil lamp, and often he is bone-tired and the morning is unforgiving, but in the dimly lit quiet he forces himself to work, writing at the desk with a bottle of wine. It is a discipline, he reminds himself, like learning to play shortstop, and he practices with the same attention to his poetry as he once did with his glove, when he would take grounder after grounder until it was second nature, until he could read the hop before the ball even came off the grass.

And amid it all in that first week is Margot. It is as if Henry has built a new cabin in his mind where she lives, a finished poem, a place he can summon whenever he chooses and sometimes when he does not. When he is working in the fields, images of her come to him: those eyes, her laugh, her strong legs, how she tilts her head and closes her eyes softly when he reads to her.

There is something else, too: a nagging sense of self-doubt. All new loves are like a dream, but sometimes he wonders if Margot is a mirage, and Henry reassures himself by remembering the small particulars of their parting, how she clearly didn’t want to go, the magic of that last night, when they held each other until the sun rose above the lake.

But she also didn’t invite him to the island, and while she left him the phone number for her house, she knows he doesn’t have a phone other than at Ted and Laura’s, and it is in their kitchen and they are always there, it seems, and in the first days at the winery he is not yet comfortable enough to ask them if he can use it.

After dinner on his third night there, Henry walks down to the water from his cabin. The night is humid and on his arms is a shine from the heat. At the water’s edge he looks out, and far across he can see the tops of some of the buildings of Bannister, the rise of the clock tower on Bishop Hall interrupting the sky above the trees.

Henry strips off his clothes and leaves them in a pile at the lake’s edge. Then he wades into the cool water until it’s above his knees and then he dives, going under and then coming back up, doing the crawl until he is far out and can float on his back. From out here he can look both ways, to two different worlds, close but far apart: the college and the winery. One contains Margot. The other does not.

That night at his writing desk, Henry counts the days till school starts again. There are fifty-three from today. He takes a clean piece of paper and on the top of it he writes in blocky numbers and letters 53 things I miss about you.

Number 53, he writes. That you want to watch me write as if that is something that can be watched.

And so Henry makes his list. It is a test of sorts, for it seems like it should be hard to come up with that many, but they roll off his pen with ease. He talks about her laughter, what a beautiful peal it is, echoing in his head; he talks about how she loves to talk after sex, how it makes her manic; he says he loves that her eyes are the color of a foreign sea; he describes the place where her hip meets her leg, the subtle rise and curve of her. He says he loves hearing her say his name, how she says it differently depending on the circumstances, like how Eskimos have so many words for snow, each iteration of Henry meaning something slightly different. He loves her love of ice cream and her unabashed appetite in general, that she will dive into a burger with a relish he is used to associating with baseball teammates. He says he saw tears in her eyes only once, when they were parting, but that he longs to see her cry, even though he doesn’t want to feel what she cries for.

Number 1, he writes. You, just you, all of you, my Margot.

In the end, Henry fills three pages of paper. He thinks about rereading them but then reminds himself one of the lessons he learned in creative writing: Don’t self-edit too quickly. This is not a poem, he tells himself. You do not need to sculpt it.

He folds the paper up and puts it into an envelope and addresses it to Margot, using the address she gave him for the house on the Vineyard. And in the morning, he mails it from Ted and Laura’s house.





Margot, 1991

Margot comes in from the beach, and as she is on her way upstairs to change out of her suit, the stack of mail on the front table catches her eye. She moves toward it and she sees the letter and the return address and then she bounds up the stairs and into the bathroom, where she locks the door behind her.

Her fingers are shaking as she peels the seal away and takes out the folded pieces of paper. She opens them and begins to read and a smile comes across her face. She sinks to the floor, with her back against the tiled wall, and reads the three pages rapidly and then reads them again and again.

In the days that follow, Margot takes the pages with her everywhere. She considers making a list of her own, but she is not a writer like Henry is: She wouldn’t even know where to begin. Oh, there are things she could say, about his lack of pretension, how he is different from any boy she has ever known. But she could never capture the particularity of him in the way he has captured the particularity of her, and later, when this all sinks in, she will come to realize that this might be the greatest gift another person can give you. The very idea that they pay enough attention to notice what makes you singular, and Margot has no idea how she can possibly repay him.

But she does. She can commit an act of defiance, and not even a big one. For her entire life she has moved in small orbits, concentric circles of the same people, the same places, and this is what it means to be wealthy in America: You see small slices of life, the same cities, the same islands, the same people. Vast tracts of the country are off-limits to you, and while upstate New York is a fine place to go to college, there is no discernible reason to be there in the summer. Except that for Margot, now there is.