Page 4 of The Things We Never Say

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Sitting with his wife at breakfast, while sunlight eased its way into the room, that morning after his dream—it was Saturday, after the party at the Merrills’—he thought of Flossie, how Flossie often told him her dreams, and they were crazy dreams—one had to do with her having to eat her father’s cut-off penis like it was a hot dog that was sliced open, with spices on it—and then she would howl with laughter. “Artie! Who am I?” Laughing and laughing. In his state now, Artie could not imagine laughing about such a dream.

Watching Evie raise a spoonful of oatmeal precisely to her mouth, Artie saw a drop of moisture on the tip of her nose. It got longer, and he felt a very deep pity for her; he had to look away. “Did you ever call the plumber?” she asked, and he looked at her then and her face was gentle and inquisitive, and an almost physical pain moved within him. “Going to do it first thing this morning, they have Saturday hours at their office,” he said, and she said, “Oh good.”

He touched his own nose. “Sweetie heart, it’s there again.” For a few weeks now whenever his wife ate breakfast her nose would start to drip, and when he had first mentioned this to her she was abrupt with him, and only later did he realize that it embarrassed her. She took her napkin now and swiped it across her nose.

The faucet in the downstairs bathroom sink was leaking. In the past, Artie had put in a new washer and that had done the trick, but this time he could not figure out what was wrong, and the leak was getting worse. It amazed him that his father had known how to fix so many problems in those old apartment buildings, and yet Artie could not fix a dripping faucet.

The plumber could not come for another week. “No problem,” Artie said. “Not a problem at all.”

All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others. This was true for Artie Dam.

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To his wife, he appeared the most considerate man she had ever known, though irritating in his way. For example, five years earlier he had been named Teacher of the Year by the state of Massachusetts and he had been—what had he been? not proud of it? not exactly—not pleased by it? not exactly—but he had not taken—by Evie’s standards—a sufficient measure of happiness in this honor. He said, “Oh Evie, who cares. There’s many good teachers out there.” Why could he not accept the praise? This had irritated her. (Along with his white socks, which still, after all these years, drove her crazy.)

She was unaware—even after their thirty-four years of married life—of the deep pockets of sensitivity that Artie had. And why did she not know? Because she herself did not have those particular sensitivities—and like almost everyone else on this Earth her imagination could not take her fully to another place, even with her husband. (She had her own sensitivities, of course, like about her nose now dripping in the morning, but that was different to her. And in fact their sensitivities—or sensibilities—were very different.)

She had never expected to marry someone like Artie, meaning someone from the working class; she had come from an old Brahmin family, but she had met him when they were both volunteering on Saturdays at a soup kitchen in South Boston the summer after they had graduated from their different colleges, and she had become infatuated with him almost immediately; the feeling became so intense that she wanted to marry him, and she did, and she did not regret it. She felt that after The Accident, which is how she thought of it, Artie had not fully dealt with his anger about it, Artie had trouble being angry. In any event, there were a few times when she would be irritated with him and she would think: Boy, he got a good ride with me.

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To Flossie, he appeared to be the loveliest man in the entire world, and yet he was almost dopey. (A perception that most likely came from years of Reginald’s saying to her, “That man is stupid. He’s just stupid, Flossie,” and so on a certain level she believed her husband, who was, she thought, as did others, brilliant.) But when Artie was with her, he would laugh and laugh, sometimes until tears came from his eyes, and she would howl with laughter as well. There was no one in the world better to share a laugh with than dear Artie. But he was kind of a dope in a way, almost as though he didn’t care about being any sharper, and perhaps he did not.

—

To his son, he was an enigma. To Rob his father had always been Jolly Artie, and Rob felt that there had to be more to him. But he could not really find it (even as he had noticed a sobering in his father these last few months). Ever since the accident, Rob had lived with a sense of almost unbearable shame. Because his father—Rob knew this—understood what had been happening at the time of the accident.

When he married Francesca, in a civil ceremony without even telling his parents until after, Rob had felt a lifting of his spirits. She seemed clean to him, though she was personally very sloppy in her habits, but something about her career and her piano and her being so much older than he was had appealed to him, he thought it was slightly offbeat to have married her, which had been pleasant for him.

And now, recently, this past year, Rob had gone through something absolutely devastating—almost as bad as the car crash that had killed Heather—and all he wanted to do was to tell his father, but he could not. (But he had also had an unexpected joy come to him.)

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To Anne Merrill, Artie was brilliant. She taught English to juniors, but she had sat in on a few of Artie’s classes over the years, they had co-taught a class together twice, on Walt Whitman’s role in the Civil War, and she was amazed at Artie’s natural ability with these kids, these teenagers. She thought that he was extremely special, even gifted, in his ability to teach. She was a little bit in love with him.

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To Rhonda Lazarre, Artie was a man she would adore for the rest of her life, long after she had passed out of his class; long after that, Rhonda would remember him, and think of him with deep love as she went through her various tribulations and joys. In her mind he had been her first love.

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To Danny Marino, Artie was a man who infuriated him. Infuriated him because Artie had (Danny thought) humiliated him in class that day. But this feeling would not last, and years later, Danny would think of Mr. Dam, and think—at least once a year he would think this: That man changed my life.

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What was Artie to think? He didn’t think much about himself at all. But he thought of his mother every day. He thought of his father as well, though not as often. (And his poor, now dead sister, she lived like a shadow pressed against him all the time.) And he thought more frequently these days of his in-laws, who had been kind to him, but only as time passed by did he absorb their unspoken, quiet, maybe not even fully conscious sense of superiority. (Stepping into their house that first time Artie had thought: I am never coming here again, because he had not liked it, finding it ostentatious and austere, but he did go again, and now he lived in that very same house.) One morning, years ago now, his father-in-law had said to him, “Artie, how much do you owe in school loans?” Artie told him, and the man simply wrote him a check for the full amount. As Artie took the check, he thought: Now I am a free man. Because he had been worried about the school loans, they would take years to pay off, and he wanted to get a master’s degree in history, which he did. It wasn’t until many years had gone by that Artie started to think: No, he bought me that day. But of course, Artie had not been bought. This happened all the time, people married up or down. His wife had married down, and he had married up. Period.

History was what he really thrilled to.

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Artie’s mother had had a series of psychotic episodes in their dark basement apartment, and she had been hospitalized those two times in his youth. These episodes often caused her to be violent, especially to Artie’s sister, Maria. To the extent that Artie thought about himself at all, he often thought that his personality had been partly formed by this; he was a cheerful child in spite of—or maybe because of—the anxiety he felt so often, and when he could make his mother laugh, a relief flowed through him. She had been dead now for almost thirty years, yet the trepidation that had been instilled in him as a child did not recede. And in truth, these days it was getting worse. It was a full-blown fear now, and the fear was unnamed, a large and massive thing that hung in front of him that he had to move through all the time.

Artie was gathering his old coat and was about to put on his rubber boots—this day, Saturday, was a perfect day for a sail—when his son pulled into the driveway and got out of his car. “Rob!” Artie said, walking toward him from the open garage, feeling his face fill with pleasure.

Rob stood in the driveway for a moment, sunlight falling over him, and then Evie came to the kitchen door, and only later did Artie fully understand that Evie was not surprised by Rob’s visit. “Hello, Robbie,” she said, walking out to give him a kiss.