If I Forget You

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  “Hi,” Margot says as Katherine sits down on the edge of her bed.

  “I just wanted to say I am sorry about what happened,” Katherine says.

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, I mean it. You remember when I was dating Doug? Then found out he slept with Anne out on the boat?”

  Margot nods. She remembers Doug, and that summer, and she thinks that the situation has nothing in common with her and Henry, and this is what she came to terms to with this morning, the fact that no one will ever understand, that despite what anyone can say about heartache being universal, the truth is that it is entirely particular, too. It is entirely relative.

  “Well, I thought I might die after that,” Katherine says. “But then it got better. And I forgot all about it. Listen: Come out tonight. The Jones boys are doing a bonfire. Everyone is going to be there.”

  “I don’t know,” Margot says. “Don’t you ever get tired of it? Smoking pot and drinking beer and Ian playing Grateful Dead songs on the guitar?”

  “Why does everything have to be so serious? I think they’re fun,” Katherine says. “Come on. Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”

  “Fine,” Margot says.

  And so on a night when the ocean stars look close enough to touch, Margot walks the length of the beach and back into the universe she was born into but for the past year had left. Out of the back of a jeep, the Jones boys have tapped a keg, and a driftwood fire burns high and bright. On the sand around it, they sit in small circles, and stories are told loudly, and cigarettes and joints are smoked, guitar is played, and there is singing. And perhaps Katherine is right: Why does everything have to be serious? It feels suddenly like a long time since Margot has let go, and with the beer and the simple comfort of the crackling fire, for the first time it is as if her mind, all the ideas that have consumed her, has been wiped free.

  At one point, Chad, a boy she had kissed summers before, comes over and sits down next to her. He takes his plastic cup full of beer and leans it against hers.

  “Cheers,” he says.

  Chad is a senior at Colby now, tall and blond, and someone she has known since she was in elementary school. His father develops golf courses around the world and their parents are friendly. He is handsome in a conventional way, but never really her type, too embedded, as he has been, in the fabric of all she has wanted to run away from, but tonight in the light from the fire, she likes the way his hair falls over his forehead, the brightness of his sharp blue eyes, the strength of his jaw. And later, when he suggests a walk, she knows what this means and she goes willingly, and when a half mile down the beach he stops and turns to her, Margot is the one who kisses him, stepping up on her tiptoes to meet his lips.

  This is the forgetting she wants. It is her idea to get a blanket from her house, and down among the dunes, Margot lets Chad inside her. The sex itself is indifferent and lacks the urgency and the closeness she always had with Henry, but sometimes there are simple needs, and she wants to feel his weight on her, his breath on her neck, and as he moves on top of her, she looks beyond him to the infinite, placid sea of stars and tries to imagine he is not really there at all.

  Henry, 2012

  This is absurd, Henry thinks, standing in front of the full-length mirror in his small bedroom, tucking his button-down shirt into his jeans before untucking it, smoothing it down, and then spending another moment patting down his hair, looking at himself from every possible angle. He has tried on two pairs of jeans and two shirts and he hasn’t left the apartment yet and he has already had two glasses of wine just to calm his nerves. He is far too old for this shit.

  At 6:45, Henry leaves his apartment building. The night is hot and this is the season when he least likes the city—or loves, he should say, since despite everything else he has always loved the city, its wide avenues, its energy, and its graceful anonymity. But despite all that, the city magnifies everything, and especially the heat of a summer day, the way it radiates off the asphalt, and especially the stink of the black bags full of garbage piled around streetlamp poles.

  Henry is later than he expected. Usually he would walk to Columbus Circle from here, for he has chosen Marea, an Italian seafood place that is a little pricey for him normally, but his challenges with his sartorial choices have put him behind, and also he is concerned this heat is going to have him sweating through his shirt. He can already feel it on his brow.

  On Broadway, Henry hails a cab, and five minutes later, he is standing in front of the restaurant, several hundred yards from where, earlier in the season, he saw Margot bend down next to a fallen bird.

  Henry doesn’t know what to do. He remembers suddenly the first time he walked into a classroom as an assistant professor, some fifteen years ago. How insanely nervous he felt, as if five minutes in, the students would realize he was a fraud and had no right to be the sage at the front of the workshop table, guiding them on how to do this thing that he had come to regard as pure madness, shaping ideas on paper, but yet something that he felt brought him as close as he could be to touching God.

  Come to think of it, that experience pales compared to this one. Henry peers into the window of the restaurant and scans the bar and the waiting area as best he can. Should he wait for Margot inside or stand here on the street instead? What is the protocol here?

  He decides to stay outside, but moves away from the doorway to the restaurant. Next to it is an exclusive apartment building, and in front of it the doormen chatter endlessly in their own particular patois, one that he loves—what they say when no one is listening. There are four of them, and from the look of them, they all come from different corners of the world but have this remarkable ability to keep a constant stream of banter going about cars and women and all kinds of things until that moment when someone is about to exit the building, and then they are suddenly formal and polite. They straddle two worlds, something Henry long ago learned a few things about.

  As Henry is considering this, he sees Margot. She is walking from the circle in a throng of people and she has not seen him yet. She wears dark jeans and a light blouse, high brown boots. A brown bag is slung over her shoulder. She looks down as she walks. The look on her face is strained, and he wonders for a moment if she is aware of it, but then she looks up and she sees him and a broad smile comes over her face and he smiles back. Isn’t it funny how easy we pick each other out from a crowd?

  “Hi,” Henry says when she is in front of him, and he can tell immediately from the flush in her face that she is as unhinged as he is about this meeting. She moves in for a hug and he, for a moment, takes her in his arms, though it is brief. Her perfume, subtle, smells vaguely of flowers.

  “Hi,” Margot says. “This is the place?” she asks, as if searching for something to say.

  “Yes, I hope it’s okay. Do you eat fish? It’s kind of famous for fish. I should have asked.”

  She laughs. “I love fish.”

  “Oh, good. Shall we?”

  “Please.”

  They are inside then, in front of a desk manned by a smiling older man surrounded by young, comely black-haired women in small black dresses that he dare not look at, and Henry is happy to have something to do, so practical this all is now, and yes, they have a reservation, and oh, a few minutes before the table is ready, and perhaps a seat at the bar?

  “Thank you,” Henry says.

  They move to the bar. They are strangers. They are a couple. They are people who used to know each other. They are nothing. They are everything.

  Margot slides onto an empty stool. Henry slips onto the one next to her and studies the bar. No one is staring at them, and that feels miraculous. Around them are couples meeting after work and thick-bodied businessmen with their blocky watches and their dark suits. The beauty of a bar is that everyone looks ahead at the array of bottles on glass shelves and seldom at one another. The city. Anonymity.

  “Start you with drinks?” the bartender is saying.

  “Hendrick’
s martini,” Margot says. “Up. Olives.”

  “Same,” says Henry, though he rarely drinks gin.

  Henry pivots his stool and now he is facing Margot. She looks at him and with a practiced gesture runs her hand over her hair. She smiles again, dimples spreading, the lines around her eyes the only suggestion that time has interfered, and if anything, she is more astounding to him now than she ever was, ever could have been, some twenty-plus years ago in western New York. He thinks then of all of the things that have conspired against them, and of all the things that have come together to lead to this moment. He looks into her eyes. The bartender, to his left, places their drinks down. But Henry cannot turn that way. My God, he thinks, she empties me.

  “I can’t believe this,” he says.

  “Me either,” she says.

  “I mean, look at us.”

  “We’re old, you mean.”

  “No, no. We’re not old. Are we?”

  Margot laughs. “Yes, Henry, we are.”

  “Fuck. I hate that.”

  “Let’s have a drink.”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  They pivot back then to the bar in front of them and away from each other. Margot picks up her drink and brings it to Henry’s, and she touches her delicate glass to his and says, “Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” says Henry.

  They raise their glasses to their mouths, and at that moment the older man from the front desk comes over to tell them their table is ready.

  “Would you mind if we just stayed here?” Margot asks, and this relieves Henry, somehow less pressure to sit at the bar, to be able to face forward, as if they just happened upon each other.

  “Of course,” the man says.

  Henry turns to Margot. “I don’t know where to begin,” he says.

  She laughs. “Me either.”

  “I have a confession. I tried on three different outfits.”

  Margot smiles. “Well, you look very nice. And I have a confession, too. I tried on four.”

  “I was—I am—very nervous.”

  “I almost didn’t come.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I thought about telling you I was sick.”

  Henry laughs. “What is wrong with us?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The bartender is there then, wondering if they have questions about the menu. They pay attention to it for the first time, and for Henry it is all a blur; he is aware of the need to eat, that the gin is going to his head, but focusing on it is hard when all he can think about is that Margot is next to him, and what a strange thing life is, that you can actually reach across time like this and pluck someone out of the past as easily as a nectarine.

  Margot says, “Oh, I can’t. I eat everything. Can you order for us?”

  And so Henry does. He hopes he is acting with coherence, but in truth his choices are random. And one by one dishes come out: shimmering raw crudo, octopus that has been marinated and sliced paper-thin, a pasta blackened with squid ink, and finally a whole branzino that the bartender in a theatrical show brings over to the two of them and displays—long and gray, with bright black marbles for eyes—before it is cooked in a salt crust and then brought back to them as flaky white fillets on a big white plate. He arrays a tray of sauces in front of them, and Henry doesn’t hear a word he says when he describes each one in great detail. All he sees are the colors—red, purple, and the bright green of the first trees of spring.

  Margot does most of the talking at first. He does not remember this about her, and wonders if it is something she has developed later in life. She tells him about her two children, her son at Wesleyan, and her daughter in boarding school, also in Connecticut. She describes her husband, who works on Wall Street, and how they pass each other like ships in the night. “What a weird time of life this,” she says, “don’t you think?

  “Sometimes,” Margot continues, “I think there has to be more to it. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” says Henry.

  “It’s like everyone just goes so fast for so long and then you find yourself here and it’s all so, I don’t know, uneventful? Boring? That sounds awful. I don’t mean that. I have been very blessed.”

  “I have a question,” Henry says.

  Margot looks him in the eyes. It amazes him that they can have this ease and comfort with each other after all these years, the give-and-take so natural, and he imagines she must feel the same way, for in her eyes he sees how she feels.

  “What?” she says.

  “How come you hid from me all these years?”

  Margot sips from her gin and looks away, and she is aware of her legs suddenly shaking and she is happy she is on a stool and that Henry cannot see this. She looks straight ahead when she speaks and her voice softens to almost a whisper.

  “Everything I have done in my life is wrong,” she says. “Everything.”

  “No, it doesn’t work that way,” Henry says. “Things happen, you know? All we can do is try our best. I am sure you have done that.”

  “I haven’t,” Margot says. “This is the thing I always loved about you. How generous you are. You always saw the best in me. And I didn’t deserve it.”

  Henry sits with this for a moment. The bartender is there now, clearing the dinner plates. The restaurant has filled up all around them, stylishly dressed, wealthy people, and for a moment he thinks of the bill to come, and adding up in his head, he realizes it will probably be more than what he pays for food over several weeks and then he chastises himself for the pettiness of that thought. The restaurant suddenly feels close, though, and he wants to be outside with Margot, having this conversation illicitly in the dark.

  When the bartender leaves, Henry says, “I never stopped loving you. Never. Not a day went by when somehow you didn’t enter my thoughts. I am sorry. I needed to say that.”

  Margot takes her hand and brings it to his cheek. Her lips part as if she is going to say something, but he can see that her bottom lip is quivering. And in that moment there is no one else in that gilded, overwrought room, no one else at the zinc-topped bar, no one else moving down the avenue behind them.

  “It’s okay,” Henry says. “Really. Let’s get out of here.”

  The bill comes and Margot goes for her bag and Henry says, “No. I got it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Please.”

  The evening kicks them out onto the uncaring sidewalk. With the sun having set, some of the heat has diffused, though it is humid.

  “Do you have to go?” Henry asks.

  Margot looks at her watch. “I have an hour or so,” she says. “Before my husband starts to be curious.”

  They walk across the street to the entrance to the park. People are everywhere. Street artists are doing charcoal portraits. Horse-drawn carriages are lined up one after another, most of the drivers just sitting on their perches, others like carnival barkers, trying to get a fare. The horses seem sad and out of place, huge blinders shielding their eyes. And then at the mouth of the park, Margot suddenly cries out in delight. She takes his arm and points. “Look!”

  And in front of them, a bright purple light shoots into the air, followed by another and another. The lights rise above the trees and then fall down slowly, fluttering. As they get closer, they realize there are dozens of young men shooting tiny lights into the air with long elastic bands. Hundreds of tiny falling stars, and it couldn’t be more magical.

  They find a bench and sit down and watch this spontaneous show. They don’t talk. Margot sits close to Henry, her thigh almost touching his thigh.

  “God, it’s beautiful,” she says.

  “Yes,” Henry says. “It really is.”

  Margot, 2012

  They sit for a while in silence, watching the whimsical light show, and the silence is a different one for her, not the sad, empty silence of sitting across from Chad in a restaurant and struggling to find something to say. And maybe, Margot thinks, this is
what love really is, the ability to be fully you with another person, to let all the carefully constructed veneers fall away and not have to think anymore, but just be.

  She doesn’t want the night to end anymore, the anxiety she had before having disappeared somewhere after the second martini, when it seems they decided to let their shared history disappear like the tiny pieces of fish they forked off the plate. But in her mind, she has already scripted it out. She remembers then sitting on another bench a long time ago, also on a warm night, looking out over the lake in Bannister, New York. How young she was then, how eager to be a woman; how easy it was for her to make the first move, turning to Henry and kissing him. And now she doesn’t remember the last time she was kissed—really kissed, not the public peck or the kiss good night. How long has that kind of intimacy been closed to her?

  Margot knows how tonight will end. It won’t end with her waking up in his apartment, though she considered this. No, it will end with a kiss, out on the street in the hot summer night, the black Lincoln arriving when she makes her call, waiting to whisk her back to the suburbs, and her not wanting to let go of Henry.

  And this is how it plays out. Riding out of the city in the backseat, she stares out the window at the passing buildings and soon they are on the Merritt and under the stone bridges, and the closer she gets to home, the emptier she feels, and she has to remind herself to pull it together before the car pulls down her tree-lined cul-de-sac and drops her in her driveway.

  That night, after a quick hello to Chad, who barely looks up from the television—“How were the girls?” he asks; she says, “Oh, the usual”—she goes upstairs and draws herself a bath, and when she sinks into it, she doesn’t know whether to cry or to smile, and she settles, as best she can, on the latter, and when she closes her eyes with the hot water swelling around her body, it is Henry she sees, of course, next to her at the restaurant bar, leaning in as he listens to her, as if every inane thing she had to say was somehow as new and original as a poem. And this is his gift, the gift of listening, and it reminds Margot of how plenty of people know how to talk but precious few are good at listening.