If I Forget You

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  “I don’t want to fight,” she says, smiling in the dark at him.

  “Never,” Henry says.

  In the morning, Henry helps her load up her Saab until it is full to the brim and the only space that is open is the driver’s seat. All around them the school is emptying out for the summer. A steady rain falls, but they don’t care. Margot opens her arms and Henry takes her in his. The rain is soaking both of them. She doesn’t want him to stop holding her, but after a while Henry pulls back and looks at her. He pushes her wet hair off her forehead. He says, “You should go.”

  And then they step away from each other. For what seems like a long time, Margot stands with her hand on the door of her car, and she knows her lower lip is quivering, and there is the rain falling, and it is like they have been sucked apart, a vacuum releasing, and now they are on their own.

  Driving away down South Main Street toward the highway, Margot stares in the side mirrors—she can’t see out the back—until he fades, growing smaller and smaller, and then disappears completely.

  Henry, Henry, Henry, she thinks.

  Eight hours later, the rain has stopped and the skies have cleared and Margot drives her car onto the ferry at Woods Hole. She parks and climbs up to the top deck, where people sit on blue benches, watching the ocean. The sun has just gone down, and the moon has already risen in the east, a crescent sliver. This is normally a trip she relishes, that feeling of leaving the mainland, of getting to the island, of knowing summer is in front of her, but tonight she stares out at the rolling chop as the ferry moves across the sound and she feels an emptiness as vast as the water to her starboard side sweep over her.

  Margot drives off the ferry at Oak Bluffs and now it is completely dark, and on those familiar roads heading up-island with the windows down, she can smell the ocean breeze, and the uniformly planted trees are lined like sentinels at the roadside.

  She passes through a few small villages with little more than a general store, and soon she is in Chilmark and turning off on the sandy road that leads to the house her father built ten years ago by tearing down a farmhouse on the beach and replacing it with a six-thousand-square-foot home. At the time, it was controversial, the idea that in this section of the island, where things changed slowly, someone would take down one of those great old weathered-shingled homes and replace it with something four times the size.

  But as in many things, Margot’s father was in fact ahead of his time, a pioneer, he might tell you, and before long it was happening all over the island and six thousand square feet seemed like an appropriately scaled summer shack in comparison to some of the houses that went up after he built his.

  The house is lit like the sun. Light streams from every window. Margot comes into the broad foyer with the chandelier hanging down like an ornament, a nod to her mother, and then through the hall and into the kitchen.

  Her mother sees her first. “Look who is here!” she exclaims, and comes to her. Her father is standing against the granite island, rows of tumbler glasses in front of him filled with ice, a bottle of gin in his hand. He looks up and smiles. They have company, of course.

  “Honey,” her mother says, and hugs her. Her mother is all perfume and hair, and underneath Margot smells the slightly dank smell of the cigarette she recently sneaked in the composed but wild-crafted landscape between the dunes and the ocean.

  Her father gives her a broad smile across the counter. “Come here,” he says, not stopping making the gin and tonics.

  Margot goes to him and leans into him and her father puts his arm around her. He has on his summer uniform, shorts and a polo shirt.

  “How’s Danny?” her father says.

  “He’s great,” says Margot, lying. She has no idea how Danny is.

  “Well, I hope he comes down this summer. Good kid.”

  “We’ll see,” Margot says.

  “Help me with these drinks. The Baldwins are here.”

  Outside on the fieldstone patio, there is a fire in the large stone pit that is built in the middle of it, and on either side of it sit her parents’ friends, who rise and each give her a hug. Beyond them in the dark Margot can hear the incessant slap of the ocean.

  “Sit down with us,” her mother says. “Have a drink.”

  “Chad will be down on Monday,” Mrs. Baldwin says. “I know he’ll look forward to seeing you.” Chad is their son, who goes to Colby, in Maine. Margot kissed him once in high school. He is handsome in a toothy kind of way. Ever since they were little kids, there has been an effort to put the two of them together.

  “I think I’m going to lie down,” Margot says. “Long drive.”

  “Of course, honey,” her mother says.

  “Good to see you all,” Margot says.

  “Welcome home,” they say in return.

  Upstairs, Margot lies on her bed fully clothed in the dark. With the window open, their empty conversations float up to her, just voices on the air, the gin-soaked laughter of a crude joke landing, and in the distance she can hear the surf.

  Margot is pleased with the solitude. In a few days, her sister and her fiancé will join them on the island. The summer will kick into gear. There will be sun-drenched days on the beach. Clambakes. Afternoons punctuated by cocktail hours that arrive earlier and earlier.

  But tonight she can be deliciously alone in her bed with Henry. She can replay that moment when they said good-bye. She can see his black eyes pleading with her not to go. She can feel his hands on her in the hotel bed from the night before. And this is the part of love no one tells you about: that you can be far apart and if you close your eyes and push your face into the pillow, you can reach across time and space and for a few moments before you fall asleep you can be together for as long as you like.

  Henry, 1991

  Henry is not afraid of hard work. At the winery, the day starts at dawn, and for the first time in his life he fires a gun. Henry rises with the sun and makes his way to the house, always with some trepidation, for Ted and Laura, the owners, have an Australian cattle dog, which never seems to learn that Henry belongs here. Henry has a fear of dogs that comes from growing up in his Providence neighborhood, where few people actually owned dogs and those who did owned ones meant to deter people from coming into their apartments.

  Ted cooks breakfast for the three of them, and it is as if they are a family, Henry thinks, eating eggs at the table, with its view of the blue expanse of lake. Afterward, Henry and Ted go to the winery, where they sit on the rooftop with the acres of grapes below them. Ted teaches Henry how to use a shotgun and the day begins with firing over the grapes at the huge murder of crows that descends every morning to try to eat the grapes. The goal is not to actually kill the birds but, rather, to make them fly away. And Henry is happy about this strategy, for he doesn’t want to kill anything, though on his third day he levels the shotgun and takes one of the huge black birds right out of the sky. Watching it flutter down takes his breath away, and when they discover it a few minutes later, dead between the rows, Henry feels sick about it and Ted laughs at him.

  “It’s okay to hit a few, Henry,” Ted says. “They’re terrible thieves.”

  There are hot mornings when they spend hours on their knees amid the ten acres of grapes, pruning by hand each individual plant. Henry likes the labor and he has the focus of a poet, and Ted teaches him about the grapes, the different varieties—the pinot noir and the chardonnay, the sauvignon blanc and the Riesling, the black-as-night merlot and the cabernet. For lunch, Laura brings them sandwiches and they eat cross-legged in the fields and open a bottle of wine, and Henry loves this, the sun hot on his face, drinking wine from the bottle and feeling the sweat of the morning’s labor.

  The afternoons and rainy days are spent inside the cool, dark winery, and Ted teaches him how they fill the bottles from the wooden casks, in the case of the red wine, and from the stainless-steel tanks, in the case of the white. They bottle by hand, they cork them by hand, and then they apply the labels one a
t a time. It is simple and beautiful work, and Henry thinks Ted and Laura might be the happiest people he has ever met. They have this spit of land on the lake and they have each other. They roll out of bed and into their jobs. At night, they cook beautiful meals and always there is wine. They welcome Henry into their home. His is the old-fashioned life of a farmhand and he loves it.

  At night in his small cabin, Henry reads by the light from the oil lamp, and often he is bone-tired and the morning is unforgiving, but in the dimly lit quiet he forces himself to work, writing at the desk with a bottle of wine. It is a discipline, he reminds himself, like learning to play shortstop, and he practices with the same attention to his poetry as he once did with his glove, when he would take grounder after grounder until it was second nature, until he could read the hop before the ball even came off the grass.

  And amid it all in that first week is Margot. It is as if Henry has built a new cabin in his mind where she lives, a finished poem, a place he can summon whenever he chooses and sometimes when he does not. When he is working in the fields, images of her come to him: those eyes, her laugh, her strong legs, how she tilts her head and closes her eyes softly when he reads to her.

  There is something else, too: a nagging sense of self-doubt. All new loves are like a dream, but sometimes he wonders if Margot is a mirage, and Henry reassures himself by remembering the small particulars of their parting, how she clearly didn’t want to go, the magic of that last night, when they held each other until the sun rose above the lake.

  But she also didn’t invite him to the island, and while she left him the phone number for her house, she knows he doesn’t have a phone other than at Ted and Laura’s, and it is in their kitchen and they are always there, it seems, and in the first days at the winery he is not yet comfortable enough to ask them if he can use it.

  After dinner on his third night there, Henry walks down to the water from his cabin. The night is humid and on his arms is a shine from the heat. At the water’s edge he looks out, and far across he can see the tops of some of the buildings of Bannister, the rise of the clock tower on Bishop Hall interrupting the sky above the trees.

  Henry strips off his clothes and leaves them in a pile at the lake’s edge. Then he wades into the cool water until it’s above his knees and then he dives, going under and then coming back up, doing the crawl until he is far out and can float on his back. From out here he can look both ways, to two different worlds, close but far apart: the college and the winery. One contains Margot. The other does not.

  That night at his writing desk, Henry counts the days till school starts again. There are fifty-three from today. He takes a clean piece of paper and on the top of it he writes in blocky numbers and letters 53 things I miss about you.

  Number 53, he writes. That you want to watch me write as if that is something that can be watched.

  And so Henry makes his list. It is a test of sorts, for it seems like it should be hard to come up with that many, but they roll off his pen with ease. He talks about her laughter, what a beautiful peal it is, echoing in his head; he talks about how she loves to talk after sex, how it makes her manic; he says he loves that her eyes are the color of a foreign sea; he describes the place where her hip meets her leg, the subtle rise and curve of her. He says he loves hearing her say his name, how she says it differently depending on the circumstances, like how Eskimos have so many words for snow, each iteration of Henry meaning something slightly different. He loves her love of ice cream and her unabashed appetite in general, that she will dive into a burger with a relish he is used to associating with baseball teammates. He says he saw tears in her eyes only once, when they were parting, but that he longs to see her cry, even though he doesn’t want to feel what she cries for.

  Number 1, he writes. You, just you, all of you, my Margot.

  In the end, Henry fills three pages of paper. He thinks about rereading them but then reminds himself one of the lessons he learned in creative writing: Don’t self-edit too quickly. This is not a poem, he tells himself. You do not need to sculpt it.

  He folds the paper up and puts it into an envelope and addresses it to Margot, using the address she gave him for the house on the Vineyard. And in the morning, he mails it from Ted and Laura’s house.

  Margot, 1991

  Margot comes in from the beach, and as she is on her way upstairs to change out of her suit, the stack of mail on the front table catches her eye. She moves toward it and she sees the letter and the return address and then she bounds up the stairs and into the bathroom, where she locks the door behind her.

  Her fingers are shaking as she peels the seal away and takes out the folded pieces of paper. She opens them and begins to read and a smile comes across her face. She sinks to the floor, with her back against the tiled wall, and reads the three pages rapidly and then reads them again and again.

  In the days that follow, Margot takes the pages with her everywhere. She considers making a list of her own, but she is not a writer like Henry is: She wouldn’t even know where to begin. Oh, there are things she could say, about his lack of pretension, how he is different from any boy she has ever known. But she could never capture the particularity of him in the way he has captured the particularity of her, and later, when this all sinks in, she will come to realize that this might be the greatest gift another person can give you. The very idea that they pay enough attention to notice what makes you singular, and Margot has no idea how she can possibly repay him.

  But she does. She can commit an act of defiance, and not even a big one. For her entire life she has moved in small orbits, concentric circles of the same people, the same places, and this is what it means to be wealthy in America: You see small slices of life, the same cities, the same islands, the same people. Vast tracts of the country are off-limits to you, and while upstate New York is a fine place to go to college, there is no discernible reason to be there in the summer. Except that for Margot, now there is.

  One morning she comes downstairs to find her father in the foyer with his suitcase packed, looking at his watch and then out the window to the driveway.

  “Where are you going?” Margot asks.

  “Singapore for a few days, if the car ever gets here,” he says. “No rest for the wicked,” he adds, and smiles.

  That night, Margot invites her mother for a walk. They head out through the dunes and onto the open beach. It is a beautiful evening and the number of people on the private beach is sparse—a few runners moving along the water, people walking dogs. There is not much wind and the surf is light, but it is open ocean and it still falls heavily against the hard sand, and as Margot wants to be as close to the water as she can, she and her mother have to raise their voices to be heard.

  “There’s a boy,” Margot says.

  “Your father told me. He thinks highly of him.”

  “It’s not Danny.”

  “Oh?”

  “No, there is another one. His name is Henry.”

  Her mother looks at her oddly, and for a moment they stop. Margot glances past her mother to the long length of beach, to how the water laps and recedes, laps and recedes.

  “I don’t understand,” her mother says.

  “Daddy wouldn’t like him,” Margot says.

  “Why, is he black?”

  “Mom, no. And that is so racist. It shouldn’t matter.”

  “Well, I don’t see what the problem is, then. Is it serious?”

  “I love him,” Margot says.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s back at school. Working for the summer.”

  Margot’s mother looks alarmed. “Back at school? Is he a professor, Margot, is that why? He’s older?”

  “No, no. He’s a student.”

  Her mother looks relieved. “I can’t imagine what it is with this boy that your father would be upset about. He’s quite reasonable, Margot, you know.”

  “You know how Daddy can be,” says Margot.

  “Your father always wan
ts the best for you. That is true. And so do I.”

  Margot looks away to the ocean then, and far away on the horizon she sees the outline of a container ship. For some reason, she wonders how the big ships from a distance always look like they are standing still, when of course they must be moving. Out there on the curvature of the earth, a large, still form, and she suddenly wishes she had decided against this conversation.

  As if sensing this, her mother says, “What is he like, this boy?”

  Margot looks back at her mother. “He’s sweet. Kind. He writes poetry. He used to be a baseball player.”

  Her mother nods, as if weighing this sparse information. “Where is he from?”

  “Providence.”

  “Rhode Island?”

  Margot sighs. “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you invite him to visit? He can stay in the guest room,” her mother says.

  “He can’t,” Margot says back. “He has to work.”

  Her mother considers this. “Well, nothing wrong with work, I suppose.”

  “I need a favor,” Margot says. “I need to go see him. But I don’t want Dad to know.”

  “I’m not in the business of hiding things from your father.”

  “I need this. I just need to know. Do you remember that feeling? Of first being with someone? And how hard it is to be apart?”

  Her mother looks back toward the dunes, which from this angle obscure where the house is, and then back to Margot. She smiles slightly. “Of course,” she says.

  “Then help me,” Margot says.

  Her mother is silent for a moment and they start walking again. “You have one week,” her mother says.

  Margot smiles broadly. She moves to her right and hugs her mother, who is smaller, from behind, her head on her mother’s shoulder like a lover. “What about Daddy?”

  “I will take care of that,” her mother says. She smiles back at Margot. “We haven’t lasted this long without my knowing how to handle him. Now go.”

  An hour later, Margot is on the ferry. The night is clear and the ocean stars bend in a great arc away from her. Normally when she is leaving the island, she looks back with sadness as that hump of land surrounded by sea gets smaller and smaller in the wake of the boat. The place she most identifies with as home. Tonight, though, she stands on the other side, staring at the horn of mainland in front of her. She faces Henry, part of a continent away.