If I Forget You(51)

“It’s the right thing for both of us,” Margot says. “I don’t believe you love me anymore, either.”

Chad cracks a thin smile. “I don’t even know what love is at our age,” he says.

“It’s no different than it ever was,” says Margot.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Chad says.

“You have had affairs, yes?”

Chad shakes his head. “No. Never.”

“I’m shocked. I always assumed. All those nights you stayed over in the city. Your trips. I thought I was just being French about it all,” she says, though she doesn’t really mean this, either, and as soon as she says it, she realizes that candor will take practice, that it’s one thing to do it on the large scale, but a lifetime of cultivation that values small lies and half-truths will be hard to overcome.

“I haven’t,” he says. “I always knew there was an imbalance between us, you see? I always loved you more than you loved me. That was clear to me. I wasn’t your first choice and I knew that.”

“Why did you marry me, then?”

“Because you were pregnant. I thought it was mine.”

This takes Margot’s breath away. “You know? About Alex?”

Chad sits back in his chair, takes a long pull off his martini. “Of course. I’m not stupid, Margot. I didn’t know right away. But after a while, it was pretty clear to me.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything? All these years?”

Chad shrugged. “What could I say?”

“I don’t deserve you,” Margot says.

“You’re right,” Chad says. “You don’t.”





Henry, 2012

It is all a dream, a crazy, foggy dream, and in the dream there are words, and before there are words, there are letters, and he has never really considered letters before, just small things, right, like the invisible grains of sand that make up glass? And simply foundational, just as a brick is just a brick until you put some together, and then you have a wall, and why hasn’t he ever thought about them before in quite this way? Each one is as different as a snowflake, and why are there only twenty-six of them?

And the words themselves aren’t really words anymore, but just naked sounds and raw aboriginal music, and when he strings them together, they sound like songs, amazing and old, songs that were there before language was there. They are songs that were there before he was here. Before anyone he loves was ever here. Are they about him? Can they be about him? Does it matter? Where does he end and art begin?

It is hot in his apartment. The air is close. The air is stifling. Henry doesn’t care.

He writes with a pen on paper, wearing only his underwear, and the sweat comes off his forehead and as soon as he finishes writing, he moves over to his laptop on the small desk and takes the words and types them as fast as he can, and he likes this, seeing them appear on the screen in front of him, as if they are fully formed and about to be.

He drinks. He stares at them. He puts a jazz record on the stereo and plays it as loudly as he can. He stares at the words. He changes them. He changes them back. He thinks of new words. He builds sand castles on the page. He tears them down. He builds them again, and this time more ornately. He hates the writing. He loves what he has written. He hates what he has written. It is a cycle that exists without day or night, until he is so exhausted that he tries to sleep, and when he cannot sleep, he ventures out into the city and walks and walks until it hurts to walk anymore and all he can do is lie on his unkempt bed and stare at a ceiling blanker than the page.

Henry is up all night. There is a delicious insanity to it, to watching the dawn appear like gold to the east and then slowly cast its lazy blanket over the city to where he stares out the window to the Hudson and to the first tendrils that rake the the fat blueness stretching toward the rising Palisades on the opposite shore.

Then he is dressing, a suit, for some reason, wrinkled and well overdue for the dry cleaner’s, and for a while he considers shoes and then chooses, oddly, a pair of sandals, but it doesn’t matter. Then he is out in the city, and Henry has no sense of time, but he knows from the light that it is early.

Henry moves across the city in an odd diagonal, meandering like a child who doesn’t want to get home too quickly from school. He walks initially through the park and then drifts down Fifth, and it is all a marvel, the race everyone appears to be in to get somewhere, while for him the day in front is as long as the summer itself.

He walks for more than an hour. And then, in front of him, at the split of Fifth and Broadway, is the object of his desire, the great prow of a ship jutting out into the sea of Manhattan, the Flatiron Building.

He moves down Fifth toward the main entrance. People stream in and out. Henry goes to a lamppost across from the glass doors and casually leans against it. He will stay here as long as he needs to.

Henry’s focus is singular. Discipline has always guided him. Discipline made him a shortstop once and discipline later made him into a poet. The passion came from his mother and the work ethic from his father. And now what he needs is patience.

The people go in and out all morning. Henry has little sense of time. How long has he been standing here?

And then, lunch, or what must be lunch, for suddenly the doors are busier, people of all kinds streaming out onto the street, dissipating in different directions, on their phones, looking at watches, moving with clutched briefcases. And then just as suddenly, he is there, Alex, fast as smoke, coat and tie on, chinos, and Henry knows him instantly, would know him anywhere, and next to him is a young blond woman in a suit and they are laughing as they move out of the building and head north, passing only a few feet in front of Henry, and he sees, for the first time, his son in profile, and it is like falling backward through time to his own slender youth.