If I Forget You Read online

  She grits her teeth and says, “Just go. Leave me alone. I have done everything you asked. Why do you have to be here?”

  “Really?” her father says, grabbing her arm now. “I don’t know what you are so upset about.”

  “What do you want me to do? You don’t go here anymore. Why can’t you just let me live my life?”

  Her father’s voice softens. “Listen, I’m proud of you. That’s all. I’m going, okay? Just calm down, honey.”

  “Don’t tell me to be calm,” Margot says. “I don’t want to be calm. And I don’t need your approval.”

  And he tries to hug her then, puts his arms out, as if taking her into his arms can bridge the gulf that exists between them now. But Margot is not having it, not tonight. She does not want to hear about how he approves of Danny, how he has the stuff. She does not want to bend to his will, which everyone is used to doing.

  “I’m leaving,” Margot says, and she turns and walks away. She expects him to follow her, but he lets her go. And as she walks back to her dorm across manicured lawns freshly stiff with frost, Margot starts to cry and then she stops, and for a moment the tears make it hard to breathe and she wonders if anyone ever escapes.

  Henry, 1991

  Henry knows who Margot Fuller is. He knows her before he ever sees her. In the weeks before freshman year started, he sat with the facebook they got in the mail, a booklet with head shots of each incoming first-year student. He is not alone in this, as the entire college will do the same when school opens, particularly the upperclassmen, perusing the faces of the new female students, categorizing them instantly and facilely as options or not.

  Henry looks at the book for a different reason. He studies it like a mirror, looking for a reflection of himself. Sometimes he just stares at his own photo, his senior year in high school portrait, where he’s wearing a corduroy jacket and his hair is long and curly, a toothy, lopsided grin on his face. Henry Gold, it says. Then underneath: Providence, Rhode Island.

  For hours and hours, he pages through the booklet, studying the faces. He is the only one from Providence. Over and over the same towns appear. New York, New York; Darien, Connecticut; Greenwich, Connecticut; Rye, New York; Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts; Short Hills, New Jersey; Shaker Heights, Ohio; and so on.

  The names of the towns themselves are meaningless to him. They are as exotic as Jakarta to his teenage mind, but part of him knows there is a reason for this narrow geographic reach, although he just doesn’t yet know what it is.

  And then there are the faces themselves. Almost exclusively white. There are pretty fair-haired girls after pretty fair-haired girls. And, of course, there is Margot. Margot Fuller, Darien, Connecticut.

  Later, Henry will say that he lingered over her face more than the others. That something about her startling blue eyes, her shoulder-length brown hair, and her delicate nose with its slight upturn at the tip spoke to him. But this idea, his lingering on her, comes with wishful reflection, a glaring back through time that he himself doesn’t fully trust.

  In truth, freshman year, she is not someone he considers often. When it comes to the social hierarchy of Bannister, Margot is in an elite class. Even though she is only a first-year student, she moves in a pack of beautiful girls, Cricket and the two Whitneys, as they are known, both tall blondes.

  Henry plays the wrong sport. No one cares about baseball. At games, a small smattering of fans sit on the hillside to watch him work his deft left-handed magic as shortstop. He has the wrong clothes and the wrong friends. He is invited to rush a few frats because he’s an athlete, but he can barely afford to eat outside the cafeteria, so how could he possibly pay dues?

  No, Henry is at the bottom with all the other freshman men, distinguished slightly perhaps by his athletic prowess. Though lacrosse is where the action is. Bannister is known for lacrosse. On Saturdays in the fall, the stadium fills, and lacrosse players are the one exception to the freshman rule. They move with impunity through the campus, regardless of their year.

  For Henry, none of this surprises him, for he expects to be on the outside. He makes a few friends. Painfully aware of the gift this education is, he never misses class. He studies. If he goes out, it is to the few big functions where no one will question his being there.

  And while now and again he sees Margot Fuller around campus, it is not until they share a class that he really notices her. The class is a large one, a requirement for at least three different majors. European Intellectual History, it is called, a broad survey course held in one of the big lecture spaces, where the two professors stand below the students, who sit theater-style above, with their notebooks on small armchair desks.

  Because of the clearly established social hierarchy of the school, Margot Fuller is not someone Henry would ever imagine talking to, or even having anything approaching an encounter with. But staring at her is a different matter altogether. She has a beauty that grows on him over time. Unlike her friends the two Whitneys, who are both blond and symmetrical and far too conventional for him to find interesting, Margot has character in her face.

  Her eyes are her most stunning feature, but it’s more than that. There is a sadness in her face that belies how she has actually lived, or so Henry imagines, for how can he know how she has actually lived?

  What he does know, after always arriving at that class just slightly on the side of tardy so he can choose a seat that affords him an unfettered view of her, is that Margot captivates him. While far below him a middle-aged professor with dark glasses intones about Hume and Locke, Henry stares at Margot in profile two or three rows below him.

  And one of the mysteries of the human brain is that someone can tell when they are being stared at. At one point, Henry is gazing at her dreamily when she turns and looks up at him. He is too slow to look away as quickly as he would have liked, and for the smallest of moments their eyes meet and he feels the blood rising to his face before he looks away casually, as if he was just absentmindedly scanning the room.

  By his sophomore year, Henry has found an unlikely home at the college, among the theater people and the aspiring writers and the artists, the ones who eschew the fraternity scene for a small, dimly lit downtown bar. At night, they meet at the bar, with its upholstered booths, and drink bourbon with ginger ale and talk about novels and poetry and movies. These are conversations he has never imagined having before, certainly not in Providence, and within him he feels this great swell of change, aware that he is becoming something new. And even as the fall turns to winter and the leaves fall off the trees and the wind that blows off the lake is icy cold and he has to pull his long coat around him against it, he has around him this sense of the possible that in the past he always associated with spring and the start of baseball.

  That winter, he has his first real girlfriend, a skinny, dark-haired aspiring actor named Sue. Henry cannot tell if he loves her or not. She is part of his new extended crowd, and he likes it when she sits next to him at the bar, snuggling slightly into him, and he likes how she seems to listen more appreciatively when he talks, as if his words are fat with importance. He is grateful to her on those nights when they lie in his small single dorm room and make love, the way her hair falls down around her face when she is on top of him, the soft kindness of her hands on him. Sue gives Henry, for the first time, the sense of how eternal and lovely life can be, slow and patient, and after they make love, he feels this rush of energy come over him and he wants to talk and write and make poetry in front of her. Sometimes he gets out of bed and it is deep in the middle of the night and under slight lamplight he reads to her the things he has written that day. He loves how she listens, her head cocked, looking away from him to the wall, nodding when a particular phrase hits her ear like a song.

  But sometimes Henry misses being alone in a way that reminds him he has been alone his whole life. It is the fate of only children to learn how to be alone, to learn how to desire it. And now and again he asks Sue if he can take a night off, and he
can see this idea bothers her. And then once, she wants to smoke a joint, and they do, in his room, and after, they make love, and he is particularly attuned to her slender body, the barely visible rise of her breasts, and it is as if he disappears into the pieces of her without seeing the whole, and this doesn’t disconcert him until afterward, while they are lying next to each other, staring up at the ceiling, when she says, “Henry, do you love me?”

  Henry considers this. He doesn’t even know what it means. He knows what it means to love his mother, and to love his quiet, simple father, and that is a love that never really has to be spoken or imagined; it just is. Henry enjoys Sue and sometimes he misses her when she is gone. He has gotten jealous when she leans in close to one of his friends, and there is an easy sexuality about her, a comfort with herself that she projects out into the world. But if she left tomorrow, would he be okay? Is this the standard? Could he live without her?

  And in the moment she asks him this, Henry decides that yes, he could, and he responds honestly.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “You don’t know?”

  Henry turns and looks at her brown eyes and he can see that he has hurt her. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

  “That’s a weird fucking answer,” Sue says.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I’d rather you’d said no,” says Sue, and with that she is standing up, slipping into her jeans and buttoning her shirt.

  “Wait,” Henry says, but he doesn’t mean it. He wants her to go. He wants her to go as a test to see how it feels, to try on her angry absence like a coat he covers his shoulders with against the cold.

  And with that, she walks out into the winter night. A few days later, they are together again. But it has changed. When spring comes, they have simply drifted apart like the ice on the lake.

  * * *

  By the end of that year, Henry has become the darling of the English Department. All the professors know him by name, and he loads up on creative writing classes. They start treating him almost like a peer, at least to Henry’s idea of what that might mean, choosing him and a senior girl to attend dinners with visiting writers. Many of them suggest he call them by their first names, and one of his professors, a kind-eyed, matronly gray-haired woman who wears long, flowing dresses, tells him to call her Deborah before she says to him one day in the long hallway outside the faculty offices, “Henry, you need to decide what kind of poet you want to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She smiles at him. “It’s your next step. You are a poet. You do know that?”

  “I think so,” he says.

  “You can be a great one,” she says.

  Henry blushes. “Thanks.”

  “But your next job is to decide what you want to be. To find your own voice. The one that speaks honestly to the world.”

  “I’m not sure I like my voice very much,” Henry says.

  Deborah arches an eyebrow. “I don’t understand.”

  “Listen to me,” Henry says. “The way I talk. No one else here talks like that.”

  Deborah smiles broadly. “Yes,” she says. “This is what you must write about.”

  “How I talk?”

  “No, no. But yes. Where you are from.”

  “No one wants to read about the West End of Providence,” says Henry.

  “Oh, I disagree,” Deborah says. “Tell the raw truth of things and everyone will want to hear what you say.”

  That night, Henry stays away from the bar. He holes up in his room with the window open and the warm spring air coming off the lake. He makes a pot of coffee on the little hot plate he has and sits at his desk, and he writes differently from the way he ever has before. He lets the poems fall out of him, telling himself not to self-edit, just let them find the page.

  He writes about his mother and her black clothes and her black eyes and her fierceness. He writes about his father, who can sit silently in a room after a day of cleaning floors and yet never let anyone into his thoughts. He talks about the blue streets of his neighborhood slick with rain. He writes of the clotheslines and the antennas and the peeling paint. He writes of his shame about being the only Jew for blocks and blocks, of trying to mask it by learning how to bat a ball. He tells of those summer trips to Vermont, the only place he ever felt like himself. He describes the sound of his father’s oar slipping into inky water, the whir of the fishing reel as it unspooled, of hearing birds for the first time.

  When Henry finally puts his pencil down, he has filled ten pieces of paper. He loves the look of them, the poems, how they sit in the middle of the page with all that white around them, cabins in the snow.

  Outside, the first colors of dawn are above the lake. He is exhausted but elated. It is like the moment after a virus leaves the body, the catharsis that comes with departure.

  Later that day, he rushes to Deborah’s office and thrusts the stack of poems at her. “Look,” he says.

  “Henry,” she says. “Slow down.”

  “Sorry,” he says.

  But while he sits there, she takes the pages in her hands, slides her reading glasses onto the edge of her nose, and he can tell from the look on her face that he has something special. A few weeks later, she tells Henry that a very famous poet will be coming to speak and she would like Henry to read before he does, in front of a large audience of faculty and students.

  “Are you serious?” he says.

  “Yes,” she says. “The Providence poems. Read three of those.”

  The reading is in the college’s black box theater, a room that holds three hundred in stadium seating. In the days leading up to it, Henry cannot get the image of the sea of faces above him out of his mind, hundreds of eyes, a spotlight on him. Hours before, he feels like he might he throw up, and pacing around his small room, practicing, Henry begins to think of excuses he could make—a sudden flu, a death in the family, anything to get out of it.

  But he wills himself to take the walk across the campus. The night is warm and the quad is full of students lounging about, and some people he knows greet him along the way, but if anyone knows he is about to take the biggest leap of his life, they do not say anything to him.

  The theater is already starting to fill up, and as he comes in, Deborah spies him from the stage and motions to him. He goes to her, and she says, “There is someone I want you to meet.”

  In a fog of anxiety, Henry goes up onto the stage and then past the thick curtains to the area behind. The famous poet is standing there, next to a small table with a bottle of wine and glasses on it. He is not what Henry expects; in fact, he looks to Henry like a banker or a corporate titan. He wears a navy blue suit and a red tie, and he is clean-shaven, with short-cropped gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses. When he smiles, his face is as deeply lined as tree bark.

  “This is Henry,” Deborah says, “the student poet I was telling you about.”

  “Henry,” the famous poet says. “I have heard good things about you.” And then, looking at Henry’s face, his tight expression, he says, “Here, have a glass of wine. It helps. Trust me.”

  Henry takes the wine and sips it. He has drunk wine only a few times before and to him it tastes like sour apples. Beyond the curtain, they can hear the room filling up, and the poet asks Henry a few questions, which Henry somehow manages to answer, and then the poet says, “Where you from, kid? Southie? Charlestown?”

  “Providence,” Henry says.

  “Listen,” the poet says. “Is there a girl you like? Someone you want to impress?”

  For some reason, Henry thinks of Margot Fuller, and he can suddenly picture her, and this serves only to terrify him more. “Sure,” says Henry.

  “Think she’ll be here tonight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. But if she is, just read to her. And if she isn’t, just read to her, you know what I mean? And be patient. Nothing is more important to women than patience. You will learn this
,” the poet says, and then he laughs. “Be patient. Because when you are patient, you will be slow. And then you will dwell on each word and everyone in the room will feel your poetry.”

  Henry nods. He does not know what to say to this, so he just stands there nodding, and he finally says, “Thank you.”

  Ten minutes later, it is like a dream, hearing Deborah’s voice echoing through the theater, and then her words stopping and his slow walk to the podium, looking up and seeing the faces arrayed in front of him, the air warm and thick with the number of people inside.

  Henry is happy for the podium, this small wall between him and them, and his hands shake as he lays the paper down, and he can feel the muscles in his legs contracting and flexing, as if his knees have been tapped with a rubber mallet.

  “‘Mother at Home,’” he says, reading the title, and there is a slight giggle in the crowd in front of him, and he knows it is because of how he says mother, coming out in his accent more like mutha.

  But then he is reading, and he reminds himself to look up from the page, and there, halfway up in the crowd, Margot Fuller looks back at him and he remembers the advice of the famous poet. He stares down at the white paper in front of him and now he imagines each word as a single, separate thing, and he reminds himself to be patient, to hold each word like he would a baseball in his hand. And when he looks up in that moment after the first poem and before he launches into the second, the crowd has shrunk to an audience of one.

  Margot, 2012

  During the second week of June, the night before Chad is set to leave for a conference in New Orleans, Margot and her husband have dinner out at the one bistro on Main Street anyone goes to. They order drinks, and with their menus in front of them, they sit in silence for a while. Looking around the room, Margot sees other couples sitting in silence and she thinks, This is what marriage is. There comes a time when you just don’t have much to say to each other anymore. There is no one to impress and the things you share, the children, are no longer here.