If I Forget You(20)

“It’s okay,” she says, laughing.

Margot knows by looking at him that she will have to lead. It is not something that she is used to, and if someone had asked her before this evening if the idea even interested her, she would have said no. But Henry’s words suggest fragility, and she thinks maybe this extends to who he is, but she can also sense his strength, hidden somewhere like a secret, and this is the part she wants to know.

“Walk with me,” she says.

And like that, Cricket just recedes into the distance with a thin wave, and the two of them take off across campus. Henry is taller up close than he looked onstage, and as they walk, first across the quad and then through a break in the old red-stone buildings and toward the lake, the only logical outcome when she thinks about it, she senses that he is happy to be moving, that it is relaxing him.

They come up a final rise and in front of them is the main street that runs along campus and beyond that is the broad expanse of lake, a mile across here, inky black in the exhausted light and stretching out of view on either side, a giant finger cut into the earth. All along here, benches have been placed to capture the view of the open water, and on this warm night many of them are taken by couples, so without talking about it they move along them until they find one that is open.

“Should we sit?” Margot says.

“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.