If I Forget You(56)

“What?” Henry says.

“This place is so f*cking gross,” she says, laughing. “It’s worse than anything in college.”

Henry looks around and nods. The look on his face is almost prideful.

“Yes, it is,” he says, and now they are both laughing, and suddenly a siren wails outside, the city sound she has never gotten used to, and at once they both look toward the window and then back at each other.





Henry, 2012

His collection comes out in October, his first in more than a dozen years. His editor at Wesleyan University Press rushes it to publication because, after reading it, she thinks it could compete for the major prizes.

“We’re going to submit it to everyone, Henry,” she says. “It’s that important. Pulitzer. Everyone. I can’t tell how you excited we all are.”

On a cool early-fall night, Henry drives north to Middletown, where the English Department at Wesleyan has invited him to do a reading, and the press is throwing him a book party after.

Getting dressed earlier for it, he put on his jeans and his white shirt and threw a tweed blazer over it and then slipped on brown wing tips. He had this moment of awareness looking at himself in the mirror, a shard of memory of him a lifetime ago in his baseball uniform, and thinking, That is how it is now. We all still wear uniforms. Behold, everyone, the academic poet.

An hour later, Henry stands backstage, behind a curtain with two members of the English faculty. On the stage now, a student is reading, a young Indian girl he met briefly before she went onstage. She was selected to read before he does. Unlike his own experience at Bannister many years ago, she was remarkably self-assured when he met her. She seemed pleased to meet him but was far from intimidated or nervous about having to go out first. From here, he can hear the sound of her voice, capable and with perfect, clear diction, though her words come to him in snatches.

“You ready, Henry?” his editor, Suzanne, asks.

“Sure.”

Suzanne goes out first and Henry opens the curtain slightly from the side so he can hear her. He hears his name: “Henry Gold.” He hears: “Yale Younger Poet. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review,” and on and on. “He holds the Wilhelm Chair in Poetry at New York University. Please join me in welcoming … Henry Gold.”

Henry steps out from the curtain. Suzanne leaves the podium and turns toward him and they meet halfway, and with the applause in the background, he gives her a hug before he steps up to the podium with his book in his hand.

The applause stops. The fecundity of the moment confronts him, one he has learned to enjoy. Henry adjusts the microphone.

Audiences are enormously generous and patient, which is something that takes time to learn. Henry peers out into the crowd. Three hundred or so, stacked on top of one another, moving up and away from him to the back of the room.

His eyes move from row to row and then he sees Margot, eight rows or so back, and next to her, of course, is her son—his son, he should say—a senior now and an English major. Henry is seeing him in person for only the second time, but that does not matter to him at all.

Henry looks right at Alex, at his soft brown eyes, which he can see even from here. Alex’s eyes are mirrors; his chin is upturned and he is looking, naturally, at Henry. Everyone is looking at Henry, but the crowd has shrunk to one.

“‘Native Son,’” Henry says, and he begins to read.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began this novel on a hot summer afternoon in 2014, sitting on the deck of a small lake cabin in northern Vermont and watching a pair of loons dive under the clear, cool water. I finished it six months later over lunch at Three Penny Taproom, and in between, I wrote it in all kinds of places. It was the fastest, by far, I have ever completed a novel, and I can say now that I wrote it with a wind at my back because of the support of so many people.

John Cheever once said that writing is not a competitive sport, which is true, but publishing is a team one. My gratitude begins with everyone at Thomas Dunne Books, starting with Tom himself. Every writer should be fortunate enough to have such a champion. I want to thank Pete Wolverton for his insight and support of this book from the beginning. And, of course, my talented, hardworking, and brilliant editor, Anne Brewer, who helped this novel sing a little more every step of the way.

I want to thank my agent, Marly Rusoff, who sets the standard for representation and to whom I am so grateful for her wisdom, counsel, and advocacy.

I want to thank the Vermont College of Fine Arts community for all your support as colleagues and friends, and allowing me to be an artist as well as your president.

I want to thank my family, my parents, my brothers and sisters, and Tia and my daughter, Sarah, for all your support of my work.

While this is not an autobiographical novel by any measure and is entirely a work of fiction, one of the pleasures of writing it was revisiting my own path toward becoming a writer, those first tentative and awkward steps I took, like Henry, many years ago. And so I want to thank, as well, those early teachers of mine: Jon Maney, Mary Caponegro, and the late Deborah Tall, who once pulled me aside and told me I had the talent to do this mysterious thing, and that made all the difference to a twenty-one-year-old writer. I also want to thank Deborah’s husband, the poet David Weiss, who, with enormous kindness and generosity, once bailed me out of a thicket of trouble. I haven’t forgotten.