If I Forget You

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  “Sure,” says Henry.

  On the bench they can sit side by side and look out and not have to look directly at each other, though Margot looks at him more than he looks at her, and she knows this is his shyness and she does not mind. When she does look at Henry, it is his long lashes she notices and the way his mouth purses when she asks him a question and then how, a moment later, it relaxes. They talk about the reading. Henry tells her how he fell in love with poetry. “I want to be a poet,” he says.

  “You are a poet,” she says.

  “Not yet.” He laughs. “Not the kind of poet I want to be.”

  And this, Margot decides, more than his handsome earnestness, his long lashes and his warm, dark eyes, is what draws her to him. It is the first time she has met a boy here who knows with great certainty what he wants to do with his life, and the thing he wants to do is not working for his dad’s firm, or just figuring it out in New York, or even, like Danny, knowing that for the rest of his life the choice to work or not work will always be an option. It is not something Margot has ever really considered before, but it is his raw ambition that draws her in, the impracticality of it all, this idea that he wants to do great things with words, that he wants to chase some kind of ancient fame, perhaps even become one of the people they read about in books. It is something she wishes sometimes that she had, instead of always making light of her love of painting if anyone asks, as if it could only possibly be a hobby and not something ever carefully considered.

  And sitting on that bench, looking out at the lake, she knows that tonight she will kiss him and that soon she will sleep with him and she also knows, more broadly, that if she doesn’t want to fall in love with him, she needs to decide that now.

  Margot turns toward Henry and she doesn’t say anything. He is aware of her staring at him, and in a moment he turns toward her. Her face is upturned and a few people walk by in front of them, shadows in the night, and Henry quickly glances toward them and then back to her, and when he does, he leans forward and brings his lips to hers and then they are into it.

  Henry, 1991

  “I want to watch you write,” Margot says.

  “It’s not very interesting,” says Henry. “Watching someone write.”

  “Well, I think it is.”

  “It’s not like baseball.”

  “Baseball is boring.”

  “Bite your wicked tongue,” Henry says, and laughs.

  They are in his room. It is warm and the windows are open and it is late. Now and again, the voices of students coming loudly back from the bars drift up to them. Henry lies on the bed naked and spent after making love. Margot is walking around the room, wearing this fedora he bought for himself on a lark. She is wearing only the fedora. She is magnificent. All of her is magnificent. The rise of her small breasts, the way her hair falls gently over her face. He loves the very shape of her, the wondrous curve of her hips. How she moves, strong and feral and magnificent to him. How each part of her comes together into a coherent whole: the perfect poem.

  Henry is in love. He is in crazy, mad, nutty, insane love. He thinks of nothing else but Margot. The rest of the world is something that happens outside these walls. Margot is something that happens only to him. Margot is something that could happen only to him.

  It has been only two weeks since they met, but it feels so much longer, lifetimes together. Did he have a life before her?

  Henry has to remind himself to breathe sometimes. He has to remind himself that it is okay to not be with her every single moment. He has to remind himself that she will still be there if he goes to class by himself.

  That spring, Henry moves through his days with an electric urgency. Everything he sees is throbbing, alive, bright. A mania overtakes him in such a way that he wonders if he has been asleep for all his years and this is what it feels like to finally wake up. As for sleep, he barely needs it. In the mornings, he wakes with the sun and always before Margot, and this is when he writes. The words pour out of him in great jumbles that he seeks to tame on the page. Henry loves words. He loves how they fall off his tongue, like syrup spiraling off a spoon. He loves the music of words, the math of them, the logic of shifting them around like numbers until they make just the right sound. Mostly, though, Henry loves that words allow him to organize the world around him, to make order out of chaos, to take life and family and in short phrases bend them into something as pure as a baseball diamond on a summer evening. Words are a way to make sense of it all.

  There is no friction between Margot and him. There is no awkwardness. It’s instantly easy, almost too easy, though there is one exception. Until now, they have moved in different circles, Margot with her elite group, the pretty girls and the lacrosse players with the large fraternity houses as their anchor. Henry, by contrast, has become part of the underground of artists and actors and musicians who gather at the little dive bar and have made it their own.

  And Henry and Margot don’t speak about it, but they both intuitively understand that he cannot move into her universe with the same ease that she can move into his. So for a few nights he takes her out and introduces her around, and Henry sees the reaction from some of his crowd, and he knows it is not lost on her, either, the idea that Henry Gold is seeing Margot Fucking Fuller, of all people. And mostly he doesn’t care, but once he overhears his friend Drew make a whispered comment about Margot to the others.

  Drew is the one who Henry wanted to be when he first joined this crowd. Drew is an actor and the best one among the bunch of them, always playing the lead in contemporary versions of Shakespeare, where the actors, thanks to a particular fetish of the theater director, are dressed in Vietnam-era clothing. Drew has long dark hair that hangs to his shoulders and wears a small stud in one ear.

  One night after Drew mutters something under his breath about troglodytes, his new favorite word, and one he uses all the time now to describe the frat culture he hates, Henry pulls Drew outside into the dewy spring night.

  “Hey, man,” Henry says. “What was that?”

  Drew deftly rolls a cigarette. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Margot.”

  Drew takes a long, contemplative drag off his cigarette and looks down the block, away from Henry. A group of youths from town, African-Americans, stand in a circle under a streetlamp, and it is a note of dissonance that infects Bannister and other small college towns, the wealthy white kids on the hill, while kids of a different color, for whom college is a distant dream, live down below.

  “She’s just not you, man,” Drew says.

  Henry feels the anger rising. “She is me,” he says. “She couldn’t be more me.”

  “Look, I love you like a brother; you know that. But girls like her—they’re not for guys like us.”

  “She’s different,” Henry says.

  “You’re whipped.”

  “So what if I am?”

  “She drives a convertible Saab,” Drew says. “You walk.”

  “Who gives a fuck what she drives?”

  “The universe does, Henry. The universe.”

  “That’s such bullshit.”

  “Look, you do what you want,” Drew says. “I will behave.”

  And Drew smiles then, and Henry knows he can’t stay mad at him. Drew has a way about him, a natural charisma, and they are also feeling out this friendship in the same way they are learning to feel out the world. They are all constantly testing, pushing against things to see which ones give and which ones respond by not moving at all.

  * * *

  Looming in front of Henry that spring is the impending summer. It is something the two of them have not talked about and Henry wants to figure out how they can be together somehow, but summers are tricky for him, as he needs to make money and work, and he knows that she does not have to.

  The previous year, he had returned to Providence, living again with his parents, and his father got him a job at a staple factory on the edge of town. It was in a small,
windowless aluminum building, eight different machines, with one man on each one. They wore earmuffs to protect from the noise, but it didn’t matter. Henry felt it in his sleep, the constant rat-a-tat of the pounding machines that measured, shaved, and ultimately cut long strips of slender metal.

  The guys he worked with were good guys, Portuguese and Italian and Puerto Rican, and at lunch they sat outside in the lee of the building and ate the lunches they had brought with them in lunch boxes and thermoses like schoolchildren, and that is when Henry noticed that many of them were missing fingers. Some had stubs that ended halfway down and others had entire digits gone. It was the price they paid for making $17.50 an hour, good jobs for a nonunion shop. Mostly, though, Henry enjoyed the quickness of their banter, the back-and-forth, how smart they were. And the greatest compliment, of course, was when they began to give him shit like he was one of them, calling Henry “college boy” and telling him to get out of there before he ended up like them, stuck in this job where the smallest gap in attention could mean a healthy chunk of phalanx was scattering across a cement floor.

  And Henry’s job was the most dangerous of all. All day long he was expected to stand between these two machines, and when the hot thread of metal came out of one and into the final one, where it was snipped into its ultimate shape, he was expected to use his hands to ensure that it stayed straight and true and didn’t fold onto itself. But, he was told, if he held on too long, his fingers could end up in the machine, which might then spit them out unceremoniously onto the floor.

  As a result, Henry spent that summer with a focus greater than he had ever had. Sometimes he would find himself staring mindlessly at that endless thin stream of metal and would remind himself to pay attention, but his mind was swimming with poems, with verse and structure and the beauty of the silence that came between words, between stanzas, all that blank space an answer to the constant throbbing noise that required earmuffs just to block out.

  And then at night, Henry wanted nothing to do with the old crowd. Plus, his parents saddened him. In some ways, he thought, you can never truly go home. Oh, he appreciated his mother’s cooking, and her chicken soup, in particular, clear and golden, served with bread and schmaltz on the side, always gave him a lift.

  But the apartment was smaller than he remembered, his dad was even more withdrawn, his mother doted on him as if he were twelve, and the narrow streets were impossibly humid and hot on summer days, so much so that he longed for nights when they were slick with rain and the ocean breeze reached deep into the neighborhoods and he could sit on the rickety third-floor porch and read with a flashlight and listen to the water cascading all around him.

  Henry knew Margot summered on the Vineyard. It was not until he had arrived at Bannister that he had heard summer used as a verb. And Martha’s Vineyard, while only perhaps forty-five miles away as the crow flies from where he has spent the majority of his life, might as well be on the other side of the planet. Until Margot, he had never met anyone who had ever been there. It is a place for rich people.

  And so April turns to May and the summer is almost upon them. One afternoon, one of the English faculty members, a medievalist named O’Neill, stops Henry on the pathway running to the right of the largest quad and asks him about his summer plans. Henry tells him he is not yet sure, and he feels an ache as he says it, knowing that it is hard to imagine a plan that involves Margot, and then the professor asks him if he has any interest in staying here in the Finger Lakes and working at a winery owned by his brother and his brother’s wife.

  “Hard work,” the professor says. “Work in the fields. Sell wine to tourists. But it comes with housing on the lake. Not much of a place, but good for a poet. If you’re interested, I could make an introduction.”

  Later that afternoon, Henry tells Margot about it, and he hopes she will express disappointment and say, “Oh, I thought you would come to the Vineyard with me,” but instead she says that it sounds really cool. And the next day, Henry goes to meet Ted, the professor’s brother, a mild-mannered man with a long beard, and his wife, Laura, who is as quiet and serious as his father.

  The winery is almost directly opposite Bannister, on the other side of the lake. Henry rides a bike there and it is a day bright with sun and the road to the small winery runs through acres of cornfields and then opens up with ten acres of grapes swooping down to the shimmering blue lake. The winery itself is nestled into a small hillside, so that only the roof is visible, and the front opens onto a sandy driveway. The owners have a house they built, visible across the fields to the south of the winery, and as part of the tour they take him down to show him where he would live if he is offered the job and chooses to accept.

  It is a seasonal cabin, though it might be generous to call it that. It was erected originally for a family of migrant workers and has no running water or electricity, only an outhouse in the trees behind it. Inside it has two single beds, a few wooden chairs, and a table. Two small windows look out each side, one back to the vineyard and the other toward the lake. But it is only fifty feet from the shore of the lake and is completely private, and despite the subsistence living, it might be the most beautiful place Henry has ever seen.

  “What do I do for water?” Henry asks.

  “There is a spring right over there,” Ted says. “With a pump. And you can shower up at the house.”

  Henry laughs. “And no refrigerator?”

  “You can eat with us at the house. Meals included. When you want. You might get sick of us. And there is one at the winery. You can keep things in there.”

  “I guess I always secretly wanted to be a monk,” Henry says with a smile.

  Henry looks out to the lake then, and with an awareness that will later come to define his poetry, he thinks of how he almost left his fingers behind last summer on the floor of a Providence warehouse, only to live a year later on the shore of a new prodigious one far away from home.

  Margot, 1991

  The last night together before summer, neither of them wants to sleep. Margot is aware of the imbalance between them, the fact that Henry scrapes for a few dollars to buy himself a whiskey and ginger ale a few nights a week at the bar, while thousands flow directly into her bank account every month without her saying so much as a thing about it. But on this night, she says to him that she doesn’t want to hear any objections, that this one is on her, and they walk down to the lake on an evening that is summer-hot, to a place Henry has never been, this five-star hotel over the lake that is most famous for being the setting in a scene from the film version of Nabokov’s Lolita.

  They walk into the massive inn with their arms linked, and at the front desk Margot asks for the honeymoon suite, saying it theatrically, and the clerk, a young man barely older than they are, takes her American Express Gold Card and says to both of them, “Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Fuller.”

  “You can call me Henry,” Henry says. “Henry Fuller.”

  And it is the shared joke of the evening, his taking her name, and all night he calls her Mrs. Fuller, and upstairs they check into a room that is built within the turret of the castle that is the hotel, and from its windows they look down on the lake below them and can see all the way across to where the land rises again and to where Henry will spend his summer.

  It is Henry’s eyes that Margot loves the most. Dark eyes that are instantly friendly, eyes that literally twinkle when he is amused, as he is now, looking around at this room and the massive bed with its canopy hanging over it.

  “That’s not a bed, Mrs. Fuller,” Henry says. “It’s a goddamn playground.”

  Margot laughs. “I confess I am very nervous, Mr. Fuller. After all, it is our wedding night.”

  “I will be patient with you, Mrs. Fuller.”

  “Not too patient, I hope,” Margot says.

  Henry picks her up then, and she shrieks when he does. He carries her in his arms in an imitation of a groom taking a bride over a threshold, and on the bed he lays her down and then h
e lies next to her. Margot loves his hands on her, how capable and intuitive they are, and she loves the feel of his weight on her and she loves when she can feel his breath start to become ragged and she knows he is close, that she has done this to him, that they have done this to each other.

  Downstairs after, they are seated in the formal dining room at a table that replicates the same view they had upstairs. There is one other couple here, old enough to be her grandparents, but otherwise, it is just the two of them. Henry’s eyes are wide and he says to her, “I have a confession.”

  “What is it?”

  He smiles. “I’ve never been in a restaurant with tablecloths before.”

  “No,” she says. “Really? How is that possible?”

  Henry shrugs. “My mother cooked. We never went out. Ever. And if we did, we weren’t in places like this.”

  And Margot loves this about Henry: She has never met anyone like him before. There is no carefully constructed facade to him like all the other boys have, most of them practicing to become their fathers, down to the talk of Republican politics and money and the market and already choosing their drink, scotch often, or the gin and tonics of summer. It is as if he is without guile; born somehow into this moment as white and clean as the tablecloths he is eating on for the first time.

  That night they make love in the huge bed and afterward they lie facing each other, their arms around each other, mouths only inches away, their noses almost close enough to touch. Henry’s breath is hot on her face, and when they talk, they whisper, but mostly they just look into each other’s eyes. She has never felt so close to anyone before, didn’t know it was possible to feel so close to someone, and the very idea of it threatens to overwhelm her for a moment, and before she starts to cry, Henry takes her face in his strong hands and holds it.

  “I love you,” she whispers.

  “You have no idea how much I love you,” he says.

  “I think I do,” she says.

  “You cannot,” he says.