If I Forget You(16)

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.