If I Forget You(27)

Henry was not sure he loved Ruth and he wasn’t sure Ruth loved him. Later, he would remember advice he had gotten from Jon, his college teacher, who told him never to marry another writer.

“There is too much jealousy involved,” Jon said. “What if she is more successful than you are? What if you are? It never works. Trust me.”

And perhaps this was part of it, for Henry won the Yale Younger Poets prize, and later, he found out that Ruth had been in contention for it as well. She congratulated him in all the proper and appropriate public ways, but underneath it all Henry sensed that she believed she was the more talented of the two of them, that part of his winning was sexism and that voice of his, how personal it was, the way he summoned his youth and poverty and the raw specificity of his own experiences. He didn’t go universal the way Ruth did, at least not as easily, and Henry knew she resented him for it at the same time that she did her best to rise above it and celebrate it.

But then she was pregnant and here they were, both young faculty members with the same circle of friends, and everything became inevitable in a way that both of them seemed to understand but didn’t seem at liberty to do anything about, as if somehow you gave up free will in your thirties. They moved into marriage and parenthood with smiles on their faces, both good people, they told themselves, who would make it all work. And for a time, it did.

They both wrote. They tended to the baby as if she were a hearth. Jess had his black eyes and Ruth’s crazy mess of hair and she was a perfect mash-up of the two of them. And soon she was no longer a baby, but a pretty girl. They had stable careers—as stable as poets in academia can be. They were both publishing.

But they were also drifting apart, the way people do. Henry was too much in his head, Ruth said.

“You’re never present,” she told him once.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Present with me. You live in your head.”

“Don’t you?”

“No, Henry, I don’t. I don’t have that luxury.”

And in hindsight, Henry probably should have known his marriage was over then, that the two of them were playing out the string, going through the motions that constitute a shared life.

But instead he ignored all the signs, and even as he became less and less emotionally available to Ruth, he continued to move forward with plans, as if the future in front of them was bright. They left the city for the leafy quiet of Tarrytown. Jess learned to ride a bike. She could run outside around the neighborhood on her own with other kids. Henry and Ruth had dinner together with Jess, but otherwise, they were becoming more and more separate people. In private, and late at night when he couldn’t sleep, Henry would spend hours on his computer, trying to find Margot. How does someone, in this time, not leave any footprints? he wondered.

And it was as if he had two lives, the one he dwelled in every day, and the one he could access only in the dark of the night, when he and those in his neighborhood lay sleeping and he could reach deep into the pocket of memory and there was Margot.

Sometimes he picked up his collection, Margaret, the one that had won him the Yale prize, and read through it. It was more an act of bearing witness than anything else, this book, and on those pages he found turns of phrase, like your “sea-wet eyes” and “those half-formed moments before dawn when I didn’t want the world to wake because it meant I had to share you.”

At critical moments in his life—the day, for instance, that Ruth told Henry about the affair with Steve Johnson, laying it on him casually one morning while they both sat in the breakfast nook having coffee, as if it were just another piece of information he needed to know, as banal as an upcoming dentist appointment—Henry would go find that collection of his, fall into its pages, and feel the cruelty of life engulf him like fog.

Part of the cruelty was not just the mistakes he had made, the things he had let get away from him—though that was part of it—but also the knowledge when reading his own book that he would never write anything more important. Henry would never again write anything as strong. Winning the Yale prize was supposed to mean a long and illustrious career. But Henry knew that Margot had given him the book that would define who he was the rest of his life. His muse had become just someone he used to know.





Margot, 2012

In the morning, she leaves the hotel in a soft rain; she has a black umbrella from the hotel and the rain is warm and nice. Margot stops at a small kosher bagel place on Amsterdam and she thinks she wants a bagel, but the Hasid behind the counter is rude and angry at everyone, and she suddenly decides she isn’t hungry. She does get coffee in a to-go cup and then she is back out into the rain.

It is early. The night before, Margot ordered room service and ate on her bed and watched a bad movie. She tried to focus on the movie because now, back in the relative quiet of the hotel room, she was aware that she was acting like a madwoman, putting her whole life at risk, and for what?

She drank half a bottle of decent red wine and fell asleep with the television on, and she did not dream. She woke with no sense of what time it was, and with the big chandelier above her head coming into focus, it took her a moment to remember where she was. She looked at the clock and she bolted out of bed and into the shower. She couldn’t help herself. Was Henry a morning person? Did he stay up late? She couldn’t remember. Of course, that was so long ago.