If I Forget You(15)

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 f*cking 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.