If I Forget You(4)

Henry wonders if perhaps Margot has been under his nose all these years. For all he knows, they share a neighborhood—no, that is unlikely. New York can be a surprisingly small town, a web of villages. He sees the same people over and over again. Surely he would have seen her before now.

Standing on the curb, looking out toward the park, Henry is aware of his heart, the steady percussive thump of it. He replays seeing her over and over in his mind. Did he imagine it, or was there something in her eyes when they connected, first when she knelt next to the dying bird and then later when he was less than a foot away from her as the cab pulled away? Was it a longing he saw? Could you even see that in someone’s eyes, or is he transferring what he himself felt onto her?

Henry begins to walk. It feels like a long time ago that he left his classroom with this idea he would amble home. It is almost as if his day has been split in two—before Margot and after Margot. Then again, he could say the same of his life, this afternoon’s having become simply a microcosm of his entire existence.

On Amsterdam, he stops at his regular Indian place and orders the same thing he always does, the chicken tikka masala to go. At his apartment, Henry eats in front of the television with a bottle of wine, an early-season Yankees game on. He barely watches it. Instead, he has a pervasive sense of loneliness bigger than any he has felt in a long time. He considers his apartment. Two rooms really. A square box. He looks toward the window, where the spring sun has set and the sliver of visible sky is fading to purple.

Tomorrow, Henry decides in that moment, he will go to Vermont and open the camp for the season. He doesn’t have class again until after the weekend. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?

This idea lifts his spirits a little, the desire to do something, to feel like he is moving forward instead of giving in to the stoppage of his internal clock a few hours ago at Columbus Circle.

Vermont was his father’s place. His taciturn Polish father, who cleaned floors in office buildings and factories his whole life, discovered Vermont. Once a summer, the three of them, for Henry is an only child, packed up their car, borrowed a pop-up camper from someone his father knew, and drove north, where they camped at the edge of a small lake. Henry’s mother, who had been born in Warsaw, grew up in Queens, and lived her life in Providence, hated the woods.

But Henry discovered later it was a gift they were giving him, this week, that it was less about the woods and more about showing him that there was a world outside the neighborhood and that he could have it. That he didn’t have to stay in Providence. There were possibilities for him. It was why they named him Henry, too. Henry Gold sounded like Henry Ford to his mother. As if he, this child of immigrants, could someday embody the American dream.

Henry has never forgotten the first time he saw dirt roads cutting through the forest. He has never forgotten his father teaching him to fish, riding a canoe out onto the broad expanse of water and dropping a line and reeling it in, a perfect sport for his father, since it was about repetition and silence, the two things he knew better than others.

It was when his father died, the summer Henry turned thirty-four, that he decided to buy his own piece of Vermont. He spent a year looking before he settled on a six-hundred-square-foot seasonal cabin at the end of a cow path through the woods and built into the side of a cliff, the lake coming right up to the deck that extended off the front of the house. The place was small and ill built, but it looked out clear across the small lake toward a rising hillside of pines, birches, and maples, and the water itself was clean, clear, and cold.

Yes, Henry thinks, tomorrow, Vermont. This decided, he pours himself some more wine. On the television, the Yankees are losing badly to the Orioles. He watches for a moment and tries to summon his old love of the game. But it eludes him now, and the euphoria of thinking about opening the camp fades quickly, and the loneliness returns, sweeping over him like a cold wind.

Henry stares at his phone. He desperately doesn’t want to be alone all of a sudden. Sometimes he wishes he was like some of his male colleagues in the department, who don’t think twice about using their station as a platform for seducing young women. It is such a cliché and farce, he thinks, but yet, like all clichés, true: Women will sleep with you just because you are published, as if somehow your minor (to them, major) success can be conferred upon them by their giving themselves up to you.

If Henry had been like that, he could simply send a text right now, and perhaps one of them would come over. He could read to her and then they could make love. It would be lovely to share a bed with someone again. Just to feel that warm body next to his when he rolled over at night, the timeless refutation of the darkness of it all.

But Henry knows only one way to love a woman, and that is completely. Sure, some of his students have come on to him, some of them blatantly; others he has been oblivious to until someone else pointed it out. He has always kept a certain remove, though, and maybe that’s because of how he was brought up, the strength of his own mother tempering, always, how he relates to women.

Once, when he was around twelve, a group from the neighborhood went to Narragansett Beach, about forty minutes from Providence. He doesn’t remember how they got there, and it wasn’t a school trip, since it was the summer.

What Henry does remember is the ocean on that sun-soaked day, how it twinkled as far his eye could see, the crashing of the surf, and the gang of neighborhood boys, mostly Italians who had accepted him into their circle solely because he was good at stickball, jostling and roughhousing at the edge of the endless sea, each of them mildly afraid of the ocean’s power.