If I Forget You(3)

But of all those things, the painting is what gives her pleasure. Margot wanted to major in art in college—but the kids who majored in art, to put a fine point on it, were not like her. She studied art history instead, which at least had the veneer of practicality. Not that a career was something she would ever need to worry about. But if she couldn’t paint, she could at least pretend that someday she might be the curator at a museum or run a downtown gallery. Art was the only subject she ever really liked, but she harbored her love of painting like a secret. And the only one to ever see anything she has done is Chad, who will look over the swirling brushstrokes, the abstracts she is into now, and always make some joke about how everything she does looks like a vagina and why is that.

“A secret weapon,” her mother says.

“What?” Margot asks, aware suddenly that she had been lost in thought and looking down the length of the dining room to the panel of windows, the ones that look south toward midtown.

“You could be his secret weapon, dear,” her mother says. “Never underestimate how important the wife can be.”

Margot thinks about this. Perhaps she could do more, especially in the city. Cricket and others are always after her to join this or that board, help organize this gala. And the children always give her a polite reason to demur.

Margot makes it through the rest of lunch. Her mother suggests they do some poking around in some of the stores in the mall, but Margot is prepared for this. She has made plans to meet a friend for coffee on the Upper East Side. At the door to the restaurant, they kiss again, on both cheeks, and Margot moves through the expanse of mall, down three sets of escalators, and to the front door.

She is just about to move through the revolving doors when something draws her eyes upward. She sees the pigeon then, sees it before it hits the glass. Then she sees it hit and fall to the ground.

Through the doors she goes, and behind her is the rush of air as the carousel continues, people being pushed out into the spring day.

When she was a child, at her parents’ giant brick house in Westchester, birds used to fall off the roof, out of the gutters, babies, and Margot would nurse them back to health. Sometimes they didn’t make it. Other times she fed them white bread soaked with milk out of an eyedropper, and like a miracle, they grew. In her yard, she would teach them to fly and they would leave her.

Margot kneels next to the pigeon. She is oblivious to the people moving around her. The bird, squat and city-fat, is on its back. Margot puts her fingers on its breast. She feels it heave up, one last time, soft and hard, a final breath. And then the pigeon goes still under her fingertips.

Margot looks up, and twenty yards away or so is Henry. It is an older, stouter version of Henry, but unmistakably him. She would have recognized him from behind, just from seeing him walk. Funny how that works, isn’t it? How the smallest of clues can create an entire portrait of someone we know well?

Henry has his suit jacket slung over one arm. He is saying her name. This is a moment she has long imagined, and part of her knew it would happen like this, when she wasn’t thinking about it all.

Henry starts to walk toward her. Margot stands, her heart in her throat, and she does the only thing she knows how to do. She moves quickly to one of the waiting cabs. She does not look back. She climbs into it and says to the elderly driver, “Fifth and Eighty-second.” He doesn’t say anything in return, just starts to inch out into traffic.

And then Henry is in her window. His face. Those dark eyes, his curly hair cut short now, with a hint of silver above the ears. His hand is reaching out to her; the spread of his fingers and the glass separates them. The car pulls away and into the spinning circle, yellow cabs after yellow cabs, and Margot does not look back.





Henry, 2012

Henry stands at the edge of the curb, watching the traffic flow around the circle and then disperse. In the movie version of his life, he would be more decisive. This moment, the one that just passed, would have been handled differently. He would have climbed into the next available cab and pointed to the one that carried Margot and loudly shouted, “Follow that cab.” He would have handed over a crisp fifty-dollar bill to the driver as encouragement.

How do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?

Henry has never stopped looking for her. Twenty-one years, and some have slid past faster than others, and in between there has been lots of living, the standard victories and defeats that constitute a life, but Margot, the idea of her, the essential memory of her, has been his one constant truth, like a poem he has committed to memory and holds always in the back of his mind.

He waits each quarter for the alumni magazine to come, and as soon as it appears in his mailbox, he has it open before he even reaches the elevator. Henry scans the class notes to see if she has written in, if anyone has seen her lately. Some small note even that says “Caught up with Margot Fuller recently in New York.” He even takes to writing in himself, in case she decides to get in touch with him.

He joins Facebook. He friends everyone he can find from college. He friends friends of hers from those days. Once he wrote a message to a close girlfriend of hers, a woman who still goes by the nickname “Cricket,” and no one knows her given name. He said he was trying to get in touch with Margot and any help would be appreciated. In the manner of the technology, Henry could see that she had read his message, but she never responded.