Page 3 of The Things We Never Say

That same night, Friday, there was a party at the Merrills’. Anne Merrill had taught with Artie for many years, and her husband was a lawyer in town. As he and Evie got ready, Artie recognized within himself a sense of almost-anticipation, these were his old friends, after all, who would be there. “Ready?” Evie asked, putting on her black coat, and he said he was, holding up the car key. Evie had the figure of a slim teenage girl, meaning her stomach was flat and she was small. She did this with yoga and a good diet, and also her skin was remarkable, it had a glow to it at all times, and she applied her various creams with a religiosity that amazed Artie. This was clearly not going to be the story with Artie, whose face (he thought) had become just one more old man’s face lacking any distinguishing features behind his large wire-framed glasses. Although he, like Evie, still had a full head of hair.

Rob had begun to lose his hair about a year after the accident, and now he shaved his head completely, and he was tall, and every time Artie saw him, Artie’s heart broke a little more. The boy had gotten his height from Evie’s father, who had been a tall man as well, though not as tall as Rob had turned out to be.

—

“Look at you!” Anne Merrill said this to Evie as she bent to give her a hug. “You look just as pretty as ever. Hello there, Artie!” And Artie said, “Anne, why don’t you ever tell me I’m looking pretty?” Anne laughed and gave his shoulder a small push. “Your white socks are pretty,” Anne said coyly, and Artie nodded. Artie always wore white socks with what he thought of as his (now) old man black sneakers. When he had first met Evie, she had gone out and bought him some dress socks, and he had not liked them. “These are awful, they hurt my calves,” he had told her. And over the years Artie continued to wear his white socks, except for exceptional circumstances, and Evie still could not stand them.

The Merrills’ house was a large one, and people were moving through the living room; lights shone against the dark windowpanes as people held out their wineglasses to be refilled.

“Hello, hello!” Artie nodded to the many people who were happy to see him. A joke was made about the boys’ soccer team this year; their first game was to be next week, and they weren’t looking too good to Coach Clark, and this was blamed on Artie for no longer being the assistant. “It is my fault. My God, how could you think otherwise?” Artie said. He put some cheese into his mouth just as a woman said hello, and he made a joke about that, about his mouth being full, holding up a finger and chewing with exaggeration while the woman waited with merriment in her eyes.

And yet, an hour into the party, Artie, though he continued talking with people, wanted to go home. He had said the following to the high school principal, Hoover Lakeland: “Do you think there’s any free will in this world?” Artie had been serious; this was something he had been thinking about a lot lately, and his remark to Hoover was in response to the two men’s discussion of the mess in Ukraine after they had spoken about the mess in Israel and Gaza and then they had talked briefly of the upcoming presidential election and how divided was the country they lived in these days.

Hoover looked at Artie—looked at him—then moved his eyes away and said “Hey, how are you?” to Patricia Davenport.

—

When they arrived home, pulling into their driveway, Artie said to Evie, “I wonder why people never say anything real.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, stepping from the car.

“I mean this.” Artie walked slowly to the side door of their house. He could hear the water lapping on the shore, a slight breeze had picked up, the leaves in the maple tree he walked past were moving. “We all know that the Davenport girl recently had an abortion. We know that the Merrills’ daughter is in rehab. Why can’t anybody talk about what’s really happening? And we all know that Hoover Lakeland has been having an affair for at least ten years, and when I mentioned free will he just looked away.”

“Artie, don’t be an idiot. No one at a cocktail party is going to talk about their daughter’s abortion or the affair they’re having. Honestly.” Evie walked through the side door of the house, which Artie had opened for her, and she turned back to him and said, “Reg used to say, ‘Each man is an island.’ ”

“Who said what?”

“Reginald MacDonald. You know that saying, ‘No man is an island,’ well, Reg thought that was baloney. He said we were all islands.”

“I don’t understand,” Artie said, slipping his coat off.

Evie waved her hand. “Forget it. But what is this with you, anyway, this free will stuff?” She handed him her coat.

“I told you, it’s just something my mind plays with these days. We all think there is free will, but what if there isn’t?”

Evie gave a sigh and shook her head slightly.

And Artie, as he walked to the closet with their coats, felt a dismalness return to him.

Artie’s secret was this: For more than two months, he had been thinking how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so. It was a great deal more complicated than he had originally thought. And this frightened him, to think that it could not be done swiftly. He could not shoot himself and pretend that he had been cleaning a gun, because he had no guns. He had thought about buying one and walking way out into the woods behind the point, but he would eventually be found, and the gun would be found, and they would find out that he had bought it. He had thought about walking into the ocean and shooting himself there, but his body would wash up with the gun wound. Also, he had never in his life shot a gun. So: no guns.

He could not cut his wrists or hang himself; people would know he had killed himself. The same with pills, plus he didn’t have any that would get the job done; there were only his cholesterol and blood pressure pills.

He considered driving into a bridge abutment, “losing control of the wheel,” and he had even driven around looking for ones to drive into, but it was more difficult than it seemed, because there were shrubs and small trees near most of them these days, if they weren’t already behind guardrails. And also—this is what really stopped him—he could not bear to think of anyone seeing the accident, because they might then drive off the road themselves, and that was intolerable to him. Unless he did it late at night, but he was never out late at night. Also, a car crash seemed too cruel for his wife and son to have to endure again.

Drowning was the most plausible. He could take his sailboat far out and slip over the side, but how could he do that without people figuring it out? His sailboat had a deep and heavy keel, it would take a hurricane to flip the boat over, and the sides were high enough that he could not just fall off as he would want people to think he could. But still, drowning remained at the top of the list.

Had Artie ever had these thoughts before? He had not.

But his thinking about this would not go away, it became obsessive.

As a result of this, he found himself living a double life. He still joked with his class, joked with his fellow teachers, and yet it was as though he was doing it by rote, playing a role he had learned over the years that came naturally enough to him now that he could continue on with it.

But at night he no longer read.

At night he watched, on his computer, real-life crime dramas, men who killed their wives, wives who killed their children, ghastly gruesome things.

Oddly enough, a week before the event happened, Artie Dam had a dream where the very same thing took place. Artie was a man of few dreams; if he did dream, he did not remember them. Although this one he did remember; the vividness of it was astonishing. He woke in the middle of the night with a sense of awe and lay there next to his slumbering wife and never went back to sleep. A breeze rattled the window just slightly as the September dawn came through the tiny opening of the long curtains. Artie did not move.