If I Forget You(21)

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 f*ck 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.