If I Forget You Read online

  Standing on the curb, looking out toward the park, Henry is aware of his heart, the steady percussive thump of it. He replays seeing her over and over in his mind. Did he imagine it, or was there something in her eyes when they connected, first when she knelt next to the dying bird and then later when he was less than a foot away from her as the cab pulled away? Was it a longing he saw? Could you even see that in someone’s eyes, or is he transferring what he himself felt onto her?

  Henry begins to walk. It feels like a long time ago that he left his classroom with this idea he would amble home. It is almost as if his day has been split in two—before Margot and after Margot. Then again, he could say the same of his life, this afternoon’s having become simply a microcosm of his entire existence.

  On Amsterdam, he stops at his regular Indian place and orders the same thing he always does, the chicken tikka masala to go. At his apartment, Henry eats in front of the television with a bottle of wine, an early-season Yankees game on. He barely watches it. Instead, he has a pervasive sense of loneliness bigger than any he has felt in a long time. He considers his apartment. Two rooms really. A square box. He looks toward the window, where the spring sun has set and the sliver of visible sky is fading to purple.

  Tomorrow, Henry decides in that moment, he will go to Vermont and open the camp for the season. He doesn’t have class again until after the weekend. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?

  This idea lifts his spirits a little, the desire to do something, to feel like he is moving forward instead of giving in to the stoppage of his internal clock a few hours ago at Columbus Circle.

  Vermont was his father’s place. His taciturn Polish father, who cleaned floors in office buildings and factories his whole life, discovered Vermont. Once a summer, the three of them, for Henry is an only child, packed up their car, borrowed a pop-up camper from someone his father knew, and drove north, where they camped at the edge of a small lake. Henry’s mother, who had been born in Warsaw, grew up in Queens, and lived her life in Providence, hated the woods.

  But Henry discovered later it was a gift they were giving him, this week, that it was less about the woods and more about showing him that there was a world outside the neighborhood and that he could have it. That he didn’t have to stay in Providence. There were possibilities for him. It was why they named him Henry, too. Henry Gold sounded like Henry Ford to his mother. As if he, this child of immigrants, could someday embody the American dream.

  Henry has never forgotten the first time he saw dirt roads cutting through the forest. He has never forgotten his father teaching him to fish, riding a canoe out onto the broad expanse of water and dropping a line and reeling it in, a perfect sport for his father, since it was about repetition and silence, the two things he knew better than others.

  It was when his father died, the summer Henry turned thirty-four, that he decided to buy his own piece of Vermont. He spent a year looking before he settled on a six-hundred-square-foot seasonal cabin at the end of a cow path through the woods and built into the side of a cliff, the lake coming right up to the deck that extended off the front of the house. The place was small and ill built, but it looked out clear across the small lake toward a rising hillside of pines, birches, and maples, and the water itself was clean, clear, and cold.

  Yes, Henry thinks, tomorrow, Vermont. This decided, he pours himself some more wine. On the television, the Yankees are losing badly to the Orioles. He watches for a moment and tries to summon his old love of the game. But it eludes him now, and the euphoria of thinking about opening the camp fades quickly, and the loneliness returns, sweeping over him like a cold wind.

  Henry stares at his phone. He desperately doesn’t want to be alone all of a sudden. Sometimes he wishes he was like some of his male colleagues in the department, who don’t think twice about using their station as a platform for seducing young women. It is such a cliché and farce, he thinks, but yet, like all clichés, true: Women will sleep with you just because you are published, as if somehow your minor (to them, major) success can be conferred upon them by their giving themselves up to you.

  If Henry had been like that, he could simply send a text right now, and perhaps one of them would come over. He could read to her and then they could make love. It would be lovely to share a bed with someone again. Just to feel that warm body next to his when he rolled over at night, the timeless refutation of the darkness of it all.

  But Henry knows only one way to love a woman, and that is completely. Sure, some of his students have come on to him, some of them blatantly; others he has been oblivious to until someone else pointed it out. He has always kept a certain remove, though, and maybe that’s because of how he was brought up, the strength of his own mother tempering, always, how he relates to women.

  Once, when he was around twelve, a group from the neighborhood went to Narragansett Beach, about forty minutes from Providence. He doesn’t remember how they got there, and it wasn’t a school trip, since it was the summer.

  What Henry does remember is the ocean on that sun-soaked day, how it twinkled as far his eye could see, the crashing of the surf, and the gang of neighborhood boys, mostly Italians who had accepted him into their circle solely because he was good at stickball, jostling and roughhousing at the edge of the endless sea, each of them mildly afraid of the ocean’s power.

  In front of the boys were the neighborhood girls—in particular, Lani Moretti, Henry’s first crush. She was two years older, olive-skinned, with long black hair, and any opportunity Henry got to stare at her unfettered, he took.

  The girls were less afraid of water. In fact, they were wading out, in a line of four, into the surf, passing each progressive wave, leaping as they did, so the ocean broke as low on their bodies as they could handle, and it was because Henry was staring at Lani’s back that he was the first one to see a stronger than anticipated wave crash across her chest and tear her bikini top clean off her body.

  Lani shrieked, and shortly after Henry saw it, the other boys did, too: how she cupped her hands around her adolescent breasts and scanned the water around her for the stray top, which at that very moment was floating directly toward Henry and the boys.

  “Grab it,” one of the boys yelled, and Henry, quick as light then with those shortstop hands, was the first one to it. He scooped it out of the water, and the boys were cheering, since they had Lani now, could keep her top and force her to come out of the water to get it.

  “Henry Gold,” Lani said. “Help me.”

  Until then, Henry had not been sure she even knew his name. Henry took the top and began to move toward Lani. He went quickly, since he heard the boys behind him in disbelief about what he was going to do. He waded out to her with it above his head, and when he reached her, he demurely looked away and handed it to her, seeing out of the corner of his eyes how quickly and deftly she tied it on herself. She leaned down then and gave him a kiss.

  “Thank you, Henry.”

  It was a feeling he would chase his whole life like a drug, her lips on his, the feeling of having made a pretty girl happy, and it didn’t matter to him that when he reached the shore, Vince, the biggest of the kids, pushed him into the sand and held his face there with the bottom of his oversize teenage foot.

  Now, in his living room and worlds away from that childhood, Henry picks up the phone. He stares at it for a moment and then presses his ex-wife Ruth’s name. A moment later, she answers.

  “Henry,” Ruth says. “Everything okay?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Okay.”

  “How are things there?” Henry asks.

  “You sure everything is okay?” Ruth says.

  “Positive. Look: I’m sorry to bother you. I’m going to Vermont tomorrow.”

  “Well, good for you, Henry.”

  “I’m hoping Jess can come with me.”

  “She has school tomorrow.”

  “Oh, right. I just thought it would be nice for her to be there when I open. She alw
ays liked that, remember?”

  On the other end of the line, Henry hears Ruth sigh. “It’s a school day,” she says.

  “Okay, right,” Henry says. “Can I say hello to her?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Wow, what time is it?”

  “It’s almost ten. You sure you are okay?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine. Today just got away from me, that’s all.”

  Henry hangs up the phone and he can picture his nine-year-old daughter, in the house in Tarrytown that was once his. Jess is up in her room, in her single bed, sleeping, as always, on her back, her eyelids softly closed, the place he used to stare at when he would put her to bed, watching them flutter and flutter until they finally closed soft as pillows.

  * * *

  That night, Henry has a dream about Margot. In his dream, he returns to his apartment and goes into the bathroom, where the shower is on. Henry opens the door, and behind the glass is her form, and he smiles, as if it is what he expected, her here, in his place, or perhaps it is their place? For the bathroom is similar but different. The shower has a curtain, not the opaque glass that confronts him in the dream. He moves to the door and opens it, and there she is, no longer frozen in time as in so many of his thoughts and dreams about her she has been, but the age she is now, as he saw her today, her hair cut short, tiny crow’s-feet emanating from the corners of her clear blue eyes.

  Water is running off her shortish hair, down the width of her shoulders, across her breasts, and down the smooth table of her stomach. She smiles at him.

  “Come in,” she mouths to him, but she makes no sound.

  “I love you,” he says.

  Margot just shakes her head, like she can’t hear him.

  “I love you,” he says again.

  Again, she shakes her head, and this time he yells it. “I love you.”

  That is all Henry remembers. In the morning, he wakes and walks across the street for a coffee and a bagel. The weather has held: a bright, beautiful, cloudless day.

  An hour later, he is driving to Vermont, against the traffic, and this is a trip he has down pat, and by midafternoon, he is turning onto the narrow unmarked road that leads to his camp.

  The road is what he fell in love with the first time. It rises quickly up, single-laned, through a pine forest that opens up into a broad meadow, wildflowers and tall grasses blowing slightly in the breeze. Then the road swoops down again into a deciduous forest, the sunlight dappling through the green leaves. And then, farther on, it opens once again and ends at a small clearing above a cliff, the lake in the distance. Parking here, he sees the roof of his cabin is slightly below the height of the cliff, and a staircase leads down to a second-floor entrance.

  Henry gets to work. He moves the outside furniture, which has sat in the living room all winter, out to the deck. He opens the windows and airs out the mustiness. He plugs in the appliances and turns on the electricity. And then comes the arduous process of undoing what he did last fall, getting the water flowing out of the lake now and into the pump and filling the pipes into the house.

  That night he grills a steak he bought at the general store and eats it with some lightly dressed spinach to feel virtuous, though it is only the steak he wants.

  Henry eats outside at the table on the deck, drinking a bottle of cheap Rhône he also found at the general store, and while he eats he watches the sun fall behind the hills to the west, and the lake, rippling and glowing in the afternoon sun when he arrived, becomes as still as glass, a mirror full of trees, an impressionist painting of the dying light.

  Right before dusk, the resident loons arrive, the pair of them, back for the season. They glide in front of Henry’s deck, as if he isn’t there. It is their lake, after all. They are elegant swimmers. They dive under, and in the half-light of the fading evening, he can see their bodies underwater, like tiny dolphins, soaring, soaring, and soaring, a calibrated dance, moving around each other as gracefully as acrobats.

  Last summer, there was a baby loon. They would take turns teaching it to fish, each feeding it by catching a small pumpkinseed and swimming over to the baby with the squirming little fish clutched in his or her beak. Loons mate for life. You never see a loon alone. This year, the baby is gone. But how, Henry wonders, do they find each other? How do they choose?

  Of course, he is not thinking about loons at all.

  Things rise and things fall and sometimes they converge and sometimes they fall apart. The most one can hope for is that you find someone who can tolerate your flaws and your faults and see her way to loving you anyway. That maybe you figure out how to make a life together. That maybe you decide not to fight the darkness by yourself. The rest of it can be only a romantic notion, right?

  It is the stuff of goddamn poets.

  Margot, 2012

  The cab is hot. It is suffocating. Henry’s face, floating in front of her like a balloon, is gone. Margot is heading uptown. She rolls down the window, and the hot air of traffic that blows in on her doesn’t help. How is it that he was suddenly there? Her fingers on the bird, soft, warm feathers rising one last time, the city as loud as thunder around her, and there, in the only stillness for miles, stands Henry, resolute and fixed before moving toward her and saying her name.

  Much earlier in her life, Margot was prone to panic. Mainly in her late twenties—a few episodes, nothing serious, though one time before her wedding she ended up in the hospital because her death appeared imminent. They strapped her to machines that, in defiance of all logic, said she was fine.

  “You are having an anxiety attack,” the ER doctor told her, as if he saw her kind several times a night. “There is nothing wrong with you.”

  Everything is wrong with me, she wanted to say, but didn’t.

  It is a failure that will compound throughout her life, a failure to speak her mind. But of course she knew that was only part of it. The harder thing to reconcile, always, is what she carries within her, the complications of the adult mind, the cognitive dissonance that allows for secrets and truths to reside next to one another and never emerge into the world.

  Now, coming through Central Park, downslope through the trees and under the bridge, Margot begins to breathe again. The air is suddenly light and springlike, not of the city. The panic rising within her starts to recede, a familiar feeling to her, the sense that what was about to overwhelm her is then somehow falling away.

  She can still feel the blood in her face, though, and in her mind is the image of Henry. He has aged well, for the most part, and is still boyish in his forties. Why did she run? Wouldn’t the more appropriate thing have been simply to chat with him, old friends running into each other? Talk to him and then walk away. Wouldn’t that have made it easier? Move into the teeth of the storm and hope it goes away. Of course, it is far more complicated than that.

  This is the other thing Margot doesn’t like about adulthood: Every interaction seems to bring with it a history, a context, and nothing is simple. Young children meet each other and after a moment of awkwardness play with ease. Adults circle each other like stray cats.

  Last summer on Martha’s Vineyard, her daughter, Emma, had her first boyfriend. One of those towheaded preppy boys who seem to grow like mushrooms after a rainfall on the island. The kind of boy who looks like he just stepped off a sailboat. He was tall and lean and sun-browned, the swoop of blond hair that covered his eyes a remaining semblance of awkward adolescence.

  Watching them together, walking on the beach in front of their house, waiting until they were a reasonable distance away from her parents before holding hands, Margot was struck by the innocence of it all, the here and now of it, the impermanence of summer. Oh, she didn’t want to know what they did out of sight, at night when they rode their bikes and sat on a blanket together, hidden in the dunes. She had an idea, of course, and she trusts Emma, who has always been a cautious girl. But it’s hard for Margot not to feel a twinge of envy in seeing her daughter experience things for th
e first time, those tentative first steps toward adulthood, when the days seem eternally long, and joy, simple joy, comes without strings or any depth of thought, as true as the salty breeze blowing off the sound.

  The cab lets Margot off on Fifth, just across from the museum. A block away, at a coffee bar, Cricket is waiting for her. They have known each other their whole lives. They spent summers on the Vineyard, and attended the same schools from seventh grade through college. They both married men from similar families with similar ambitions: husbands who both work on the Street.

  Until recently, Cricket lived in Darien, but with their only child at Trinity, they sold the house in Darien and moved into a new building in TriBeCa. Margot braces herself to hear about how great it is to live in the city, and how did they ever suffer for so long in the suburbs?

  They exchange air-kisses and Margot studies her best friend, put together in her Manhattan finest, of course—skinny jeans set off by a gold Hermès belt buckle, heels, and a frilly white blouse.

  Before she leaves her to order a latte, Margot has this sudden idea that she barely knows Cricket, which of course cannot be true. She has known her longer than she has known anyone. Then again, she has had a similar feeling lately about Chad, waking up in the middle of the night and studying his sleeping face as if a stranger had somehow found his way into her bed.

  Margot returns to the table, and the pitter-patter of small talk begins. The building, the building, the building. How great it is. How much they love it. Of course, Margot has never been there. This is one of the funny things about New York. Outside of major events, people keep their elegant houses to themselves. They meet in public spaces, the first floors of Manhattan.

  Cricket moves on: Pilates class, and the new French restaurant that opened next door. The chef was somewhere else before; Cricket can’t remember, but surely Margot knows, doesn’t she? It was definitely in the Times.