If I Forget You(32)

The light changes and they move across the street.

“Where are we going, Daddy?” Jess asks.

“Just over here. I see someone I know.”

And then they are in front of each other, the years peeling away, a moment he has imagined for twenty years now but never really thought would take place. His daughter is on his hand like a balloon he has forgotten he is carrying. They do not hug. They do not embrace. He doesn’t shake her hand or anything more formal. They just stand in front of each other there on Columbus Avenue on a summer day when the rain has stopped but the sun has yet to emerge. Margot is shaking. The earth beneath him is shifting. For what seems like an eternity, they just look at each other. Jess is tugging at Henry’s hand and he knows he needs to say something, or that Margot needs to say something, but all he can do is look at her eyes, those sea blue eyes, and if anything, to him she is more beautiful than he remembered, for it is only with age that the true character of a woman shows. Someone must break the silence.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Henry says.

Margot’s face looks like it might crack. He can see her fighting it, but despite her efforts, her eyes have begun to well up. Margot looks into his eyes and then she looks down at Jess. In an attempt at normalcy, she says, “This must be your daughter.”

“I’m sorry,” Henry says. “Yes, this is Jess.”

Margot, experienced at this, goes down then and gets on Jess’s level. “Let me guess. I think you’re ten.”

Jess smiles. “Nine. You were close.”

“Well, you are adorable. I’m Margot.” And she holds her hand out then for his daughter, and his daughter takes it.

And around them the city continues, blind and unaware. Cabs and buses stream by. Horns honk in open defiance of the signs that line the avenue. Around them, everyone is in a hurry, rushing to get somewhere. If poetry is the search for significance, than the stubbornness of love must be its fullest expression.





Margot, 2012

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.