If I Forget You

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  “I see,” Margot says.

  “I’m not looking for affirmation,” says Henry.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything,” Henry says. “You just need to know what you stole from me.”

  These last words cut her, the sharp diamond edge of truth, and they are cruel only in their honesty, and she knows this, but it is as if his knife just punctured her lungs in a search for her heart, and now she is struggling to breathe.

  “I’m sorry,” Margot says.

  “How?” Henry says, raising his voice to a shout through his tears. “How could you do this to me?”

  “I don’t know,” Margot whispers. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, God,” Henry says, spinning away from her. He moves to the railing and leans over it. Margot listens to him crying now, the sobs catching in his throat, gagging like he might vomit, and she wants more than ever to go to him, but she knows she cannot.

  Henry, 2012

  They drive in silence. They are as separate as two people can be in the front seats of a small car. Henry grips the wheel with both hands and stares straight ahead at the road disappearing under the tires, and Margot is leaning against the passenger-side door, her head wedged into the small space between the door and her seat. The only sounds come from outside the car, the swish of the windshield wipers as they displace the light rain that started that morning.

  The previous night is a dream. Henry is exhausted. He remembers crying until he couldn’t cry anymore. He remembers a fractured dawn coming to the lake, the two of them still outside, the sun not yet risen behind the hills, while above the water a dense mist rose up into the air.

  “I didn’t know,” Margot had said, and then, “I knew, but I pretended I didn’t know. I wanted him to be Chad’s just because it was so much easier. And I thought if I believed that, it would be true. But then every time I looked at my son, it was you I saw.”

  “Does Chad know?” Henry asked.

  Margot shook her head.

  “How could he not?”

  “People see what they want to see.”

  “And Alex has no idea.”

  “No,” said Margot.

  “Dear God,” Henry said.

  Now, driving down Interstate 91 in the rain, Henry is haunted by the photo she showed him on her phone: Alex, tall, slender, standing on a Manhattan street, wearing a coat and tie. The effect of seeing him shakes Henry, for Alex is a perfect amalgam of the two of them, her coloring except for the eyes, which might as well have been lifted off his own face and handed to this child of his he has been robbed of knowing.

  There is no need for him to take a test. You know your child when you see him, even if, seeing him for the first time, he is standing on the cusp of manhood.

  Henry looks over at Margot. Her eyes are closed, her head kicked back, though he can tell she is not sleeping. Is there anything more lovely than a beautiful woman in repose? And thinking this, Henry wonders what kind of fool he must be to succumb to a love that is harsher than the darkest vicissitudes of life itself. Perhaps there is some inherent flaw in him that he has ignored all these years, moving through life stuck in his head and never fully assessing things. Is that possible? When does it end? Maybe the whole thing—the depth of his love, his obsession, the way she made him feel before last night in the dark—is all some grand illusion, a big fucking lie that he has been way too gullible to recognize, the ancient cliché of the blind poet who can see in his mind great horizons but misses anything right in front of him. What a terrible fool you are, Henry Gold.

  As if feeling the heat of his eyes on her, Margot opens hers. Henry looks back to the road.

  “I’m going to leave Chad,” she says.

  “I can’t think about that,” Henry says.

  “I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for myself. I know you think I am a shitty, horrible person, and you are right, I am. But I need to start living for once. For myself.”

  If this is an invitation for him to correct her, Henry is not yet willing to do that. Instead, he just nods and looks back ahead. “Okay,” he says.

  The rain picks up then and Henry focuses on the road. As they are coming through Massachusetts, the rain falls hard and they don’t talk anymore. It is as if everything they could possibly say has been said for now, though how could that be true?

  For the first time in a long time, Henry can’t wait to be alone.

  Margot, 2012

  She tells Chad at Artisanal, a busy bistro just off Madison. She chooses the restaurant deliberately, as it is one of his places near midtown, which he considers his domain, and the type of noisy venue where he likes to take a group of clients who will eat perfectly executed steak frites while Chad keeps the thousand-dollar bottles of Pomerol flowing and orders rare cheeses from the restaurant’s own fromagerie cave for the table.

  It has been three days since Henry dropped her off at the park and ride in Stamford and helped her retrieve her bags and then turned his back on her. She has texted him three times and left him a voice mail and he hasn’t responded to any of them. This makes Margot afraid, but she made a commitment to herself that night at the lake to live honestly from now on, regardless of the consequences.

  And so it is with steely purpose that as soon as the drinks come, she tells Chad everything. She braces herself when she begins, saying, “I need a divorce.” The words are chosen as carefully as the restaurant. She doesn’t say “I want a divorce,” but that she needs one. Then slowly and methodically, she tells him the entire story.

  Chad knows about Henry, of course—the young Henry, that is—but not that he has stumbled back into her life. While she talks, telling him about the chance meeting at Columbus Circle, her seeking him out later, the dinner at Marea, the trip to Vermont, Chad looks at her blankly, though she can see his mind racing, his hand now and again running through his thin hair, a tic he has when he is stressed.

  What kind of man, Margot thinks, listens to his wife telling him about her love for another man, telling him that she had sex with him at a small lake cabin in the Vermont mountains, and acts no different from how he would have if he had been summoned upstairs to be told he was being relieved of his job?

  It is a test of sorts. She almost wishes he would strike her. A flash of anger he cannot control and feels terrible about afterward, out of character but understandable, given what he has learned.

  “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.

  For a moment, he considers following the two of them. But a small gesture stops him. Alex reaches his arm out suddenly and stretches it around the woman’s back, bringing her close to him for a moment, and she turns her head up to his and smiles, and they are both so endlessly young and pretty, it breaks his heart to see it, and they are laughing again now, moving into each other, and Henry thinks they deserve to be as alone as they believe they are, the city colliding all around them.

  Margot, 2012

  The following day, Margot pays a visit to her parents’ Central Park West penthouse. She calls her mother to tell her she is coming, that she has news, but she doesn’t say anything else. Her mother pries, but Margot says, “I will be there in an hour. I need to talk to you and Dad.”

  Her mother meets her at the door and they move out to the patio, where her father sits in a cast-iron chair painted white at a table with a diet soft drink on it, still saluting the brand he managed for thirty years. Her father pivots his head away from the view and toward her, the park far below them, the buildings of the Upper East Side rising up beyond it, and for a moment Margot’s eyes go to a tall, thin building, and she remembers that they call this building “Donald Trump’s penis,” since it was the first high rise he built in New York.

  A minor stroke two years ago has left her father’s face slightly off center and has affected his gait when he walks, but otherwise, he looks well for his eighties, a full head of hair, and those clear, sharp wolf eyes.

  “Margot,” he practically barks at her. “Sit down.”

  Margot slides a chair out from the table, hearing the soft scrape of it across the tiled balcony, and her mother sits down across from her.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she says.

  “View never gets old, does it?” her father says.

  “No,” Margot replies with a thin smile.

  “What can I help you with?” her father says.

  “Nothing, actually.”

  “Oh, your mother said you needed to talk.”

  “I do, but I don’t need any help.”

  Her father reaches out with his big hand and grabs the can of soda, takes a long pull of it. The habit he picked up decades ago—six to ten cans of it a day—and he is still continuing. All that caffeine, Margot thinks.

  “What is it, then?”

  “I have asked Chad for a divorce,” Margot says.

  Her mother gasps slightly and says, “Oh, sweetie, why?”

  Her father sits up straighter in his chair and looks at her. “Fullers don’t get divorced,” he says.

  “Well, this one does,” says Margot.

  “He’s having an affair, isn’t he?” her dad says. “That bastard.”

  “No,” Margot says. “I am. Not that it matters. That’s not why. I am not in love with him. And I never was.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Margot,” her mother says. “You aren’t a teenager anymore.”

  “I know. I am not asking your permission. I wanted you to know.”

  “Say you’re sorry and get on with it,” her father says.

  “No, I won’t do that. I am doing this for myself.”

  “You’re going to need a good lawyer. Chad will take you to the cleaner’s. Karen, get the phone and get me Doug Brenniman.”

  “No,” Margot says firmly. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Yes, you goddamn do,” her father says.

  “No, I don’t. And now I am leaving. I have a busy day.”

  Margot stands and her father looks up at her and says, “Sit back down.”

  “No,” she says. “I have to go.”

  “Wait,” her father says.

  “Good-bye, Daddy,” Margot says. “Bye, Mom.”

  And with that she is back through the expa
nsive apartment to the elevator, moving down to the street and to the new day.

  * * *

  It is all very civil. They get lawyers by the end of the week. The lawyers talk and they don’t. Chad moves into the guest room, and in the mornings he is gone before she wakes. The following week, they will go to Maine and speak with Emma. And then they will talk to Alex in the city. The money is primarily Margot’s, the expansive trust fund she brought into the marriage. She quickly agrees that Chad is entitled to a generous annuity. She doesn’t want the fucking money. She doesn’t care about the fucking money. This is his major concern, but now he won’t have to worry about any of it. He can get his apartment in TriBeCa. Once that is settled, there is little else to talk about. The kids are old enough. There are no custody questions.

  Margot sleeps late and then she forces herself to make coffee. She is not hungry ever, it seems, and often doesn’t eat until dinner. She can feel herself losing weight and knows she looks like shit. But she is not depressed—no, something else is happening to her. It is something not so easy to grasp.

  There is a heavily wooded park near their house, and in the mornings she goes there after her coffee and just walks. She walks up and over the small hills and through the leafy pathways, and she likes the way the sunlight is obscured and dappled at her feet and she likes the sounds of the birds, and now and again she sees joggers or young women pushing strollers as she herself once did, but mostly it is just her and her thoughts, and this is how it should be now.

  Margot walks until her legs ache and then she returns home and paints. She paints with something approaching fury, her hand dancing over the canvas, the brushstrokes coming easily to her, as if it is not her hand and her mind guiding them, but something else. She doesn’t know if it is any good and she doesn’t care. She just loves the blank physicality of it, of taking the white space and filling it with color and shape and form until it is something that not even she understands.