1
t was the middle of June and the sun all day had kept right on shining withI sweet mightiness. “Stay jovial, please, Artie! Just promise me that. Please stay your old jovial self!” Flossie MacDonald had wiped her napkin across her weeping eyes and told this to Artie Dam the last time she had seen him, which had been on this spectacular evening in June. And he assured her that he would.
They had gone to Spud’s Bar and Grille, the place near Artie’s house that was right there on the water on the coast of Massachusetts; the bay, seen through the windows, was calm, and many boats sat there quietly, sailboats and fishing boats and boats large enough to sleep eight people. The sun, which was not yet fully headed down, shone against the water with a golden brilliance, and when Artie looked at Flossie her large black-rimmed glasses had sun reflecting off them.
He and Flossie had come here every other Tuesday night since Flossie’s husband died last year; her husband had been a retired math professor, and— to Artie’s way of thinking—a regal-looking, thin, hypercritical man. “He was such an asshole,” Flossie would say each time she and Artie were together, wiping her eyes, mascara dripping down her cheeks. “And I miss him so much!” But this was their last time in the place; Flossie was moving to Ohio to be near her daughter, Sophie. “Oh Artie,” Flossie had said, wrapping her arms around him outside by the door as they said goodbye, “I love you.” And he had told her the same.
As they left the place together, Artie saw the masts of sailboats in the bay, standing tall, motionless. He did not remember ever seeing the water so
calm. “Amazing,” he had said to Flossie, and she had said, “What’s amazing is you.”
—
ARTIE’S WIFE, EVIE, had never cared for Flossie, saying that she was “too much.” And Artie understood, but he loved Flossie for it; he loved her overly made-up face, her too-yellow hair piled on top of her head, the scent of perfume that followed her everywhere, the delicate way she would sit her large body down after waving to him enthusiastically when she came through the heavy wooden door at Spud’s. He loved her, but he was not remotely in love with her.
It was that he could be himself with her; he realized this only later.
—
“HOW WAS POOR old Flossie?” Evie had asked Artie that night; she was sitting in the living room with a newspaper on her lap, and she looked up at him as he walked into the room. Evie was one of the few people Artie knew who still read a real newspaper.
“She misses Reginald,” Artie said, sitting down in a chair across from her. “She says it every time. Understandable, I guess. They were married forty-two years.” He added, “The water’s beautiful tonight. Flat, flat, flat.”
Evie said nothing. She folded the paper and put it on the coffee table in front of her.
“But she did say—she says it every time—that he was an asshole.” Artie chuckled, sticking his legs out in front of him.
Still, Evie made no comment.
“Well, he was lucky to go fast, only two months.” Artie said this looking around the room. Through the windows he could see the light on the end of the small wharf down past their lawn. The room they sat in had a high ceiling with rafters far up; theirs was a spacious house, with a newly renovated kitchen that also looked out over the water. In the living room was the grand piano that had been there for years (and which Artie, with no piano lessons to
his name, would sit and compose little pieces on). There were different upholstered chairs, and a few small tables on which sat various framed photographs beside many small—tiny—boxes that had been in Evie’s family.
Artie, even having been here for almost thirty years, still could not believe that this was the house he lived in. The house was on a private road right there on the ocean, with two other houses that shared the road, and although Artie had said many times that he did not like the sign declaring it PRIVATE, he had lost that battle years earlier. The house had belonged to his in-laws, and Evie had inherited it long ago when her parents moved to Florida. Both had since died, more than ten years ago now, and Evie’s one sister lived in Colorado, where she had gone, years before, to college.
“Reginald MacDonald,” Artie said, shaking his head slowly. “Poor brilliant man.” He added, “He drank too much, though.”
“He had to, living with Flossie,” Evie said, and Artie let it go.
“She drinks too much herself,” Evie added, and Artie let that go as well; it was true.
THIS WAS NOW the first week of September, a Friday, and the weather was staying warm. The leaves had not yet really started to change, and from his classroom windows on the second floor Artie could see the soccer field and the trees behind it, with only one tree turning red at its very top. It was the last class of the day, and he understood that the students were restless. He leaned back against his desk and said, “Would you folks like to know about venereal disease during the Civil War?”
The students looked up at him, they were interested.
“Whoa, Damn-dam,” said one fellow who had shaggy brown hair; his name was Willoughby.
“Topic for Monday,” Artie said. “Now get together in your groups.” And they shuffled their chairs around until they were sitting in the four separate sections Artie had assigned earlier.
Artie taught history to eleventh graders at the local high school. For years he had also been the assistant coach to the boys’ soccer team; he was not a tall man, and he was thick, and while he had always been fit, he had begun to gain weight in his stomach, so he’d had to stop running down the field a few years ago and he became the assistant coach to the baseball team instead. But Coach Clark liked him, as did the soccer and the baseball teams, as did his students and the other faculty.
“Damn-dam, the greatest man,” his students would sometimes say to him, their faces shining with affection, and he would laugh, his big chest moving. “Damn-dam,” they said, and he would tell them, “Go on, go on, get out of here now,” waving his hand and chuckling. He was fifty-seven years old, and he did still love his students.
But the pandemic had been hard on them, he had noticed this in the more than three years since: The students had changed. They were anxious, and not argumentative—with him or with one another—as he had known them to be in the past, when there had been lively discussions. It was often difficult now to get them even to talk.
On the first day of every school year Artie would hand out sheets of white lined paper, saying to his students, “Write anything you want. But I need at least two pages. Write about who you can’t stand, what you like, write anything. But write.”
“Why?” a student sometimes asked, and Artie told the truth: “So I get to know you. And so I get to see how you put sentences together.” He was always surprised at the students’ willingness to do this. Some would sit for many minutes and then start to write quickly, others began to write immediately; over the years he had noted that their handwriting had become increasingly bad. He was often very moved at what they wrote. Many lately had written about the pandemic. Two students had started this year with the sentence “I’m scared.” And yet neither of these two had been able to really articulate what it was they were scared about.
Today Artie had put the students in the groups he had assigned on the first day of the school year, only a few days earlier. Each student was to take on the role of a Civil War soldier or a nurse from Massachusetts and discuss
this soldier or nurse with the group. They were talking quietly among themselves now, and he heard one of them—a young woman named Tamera, with long red hair—say, “No, he wrote his girlfriend that he enlisted because of slavery. He wrote that in his letter home to her. That he didn’t think people should buy other people.”
“Good for you.” Artie nodded at Tamera as he walked among the groups; he stopped and rapped on a desk. “That’s exactly what you should be doing, using their letters home.”
He walked over to the window and saw again the soccer field and the trees behind it, the top of that one tree turning red. Something moved deep inside him, a memory perhaps of his childhood in Revere, where his father had been the super of the three-story wooden apartment building they lived in as well as the two similar buildings right next to it. Artie and his sister and their parents had lived in the basement apartment; today it would be called the garden apartment, but back then it looked like, and pretty much was, a basement apartment. Where was this memory of a red-topped tree coming from? Artie turned back to the class as a memory clicked into place: the state hospital his mother had been sent to two times in his youth, going there with his father and his sister on a weekend to visit her, seeing her slumped on a thin mattress on a metal bed. There might have been such a tree outside her
window.
He went and sat down at his desk.
Every year Artie received a few notes—in the far past they had been handwritten—from students saying that he had changed their lives, he was their favorite teacher ever, this sort of thing. In recent years, the notes were more apt to be emailed to him, and Artie would print them out and put them with all the other notes in his mother’s big jewelry box in the attic. He never understood why the box was so big; his mother had had almost no jewelry, and the few pieces she had were not remotely expensive.
Except for his wife, Evie, Artie told no one about the notes.
—
“MR. DAM?”
He stood and bowed toward Rhonda Lazarre, who had raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“Uhm, could I go to the bathroom?”
“You may indeed.” He nodded at her gently. The poor girl was unfortunate-looking. Artie had had her in a study hall last year, and he had a special place in his heart for her. She was short, her neck was short, her glasses were always skewed; it’s just who she was. Her mouth was often open, and she walked with her arms out. (“I don’t understand much,” she had written in her first-day essay, “and sometimes I get mad at God.”) Rhonda smiled shyly, looking down, covering her mouth with her hand.
“Thank you,” she said, and she left the room.
—
WHEN SHE RETURNED a few minutes later, Artie saw Danny Marino rise up halfway in his chair and do an imitation of the way Rhonda walked, swinging his arms out, his mouth open, and Artie knew, as the students who saw this knew, that he was making fun of Rhonda.
An unexpected fury rose within Artie, and he stood up from his desk and said, “I just now saw that one of you thought you were better than someone else in this class.” He did not look at Danny Marino or at Rhonda Lazarre.
Artie could feel his face getting red, his face was hot—hot!—and he said, “Do not ever feel that you are superior to someone else. Because you are not.” He sat down. He held out his finger to the whole class and shook it. “No one is superior to anyone else in this world.”
He glanced fleetingly at Danny Marino and saw that Danny—and the fellow next to him—understood that he was the one being spoken about; Danny looked down at the floor. But as Artie finished with a final admonition —“Don’t you ever think you are better than anyone else here on God’s Earth!”—he allowed himself a quick look at Rhonda and saw that she had no idea that she was the one who had provoked this reaction in him. And so that was good; she did not know that she had been made fun of.
A few minutes later the bell rang, and Danny Marino left the room right away, but the rest of the students walked out quietly, almost sheepishly.
Lockers in the hallway could be heard slamming shut, and then it was silent.
For many moments Artie remained sitting at his desk, staring out the window. Finally, he roused himself and went down the hall to the teachers room, where Carl LeBlanc said to him, “You going to take a sail this weekend?” And Artie said, “You bet, the weather’s supposed to hold.”
People understood that Artie loved sailing; his modest sailboat sat in the center of the small harbor, and he was often seen getting out of his dinghy and into the sailboat, and then off he would go. Evie did not like boats, she never had. But that was all right, he still went out when the wind was right.
AS MANY PEOPLE DO, Artie and Evie had suffered a tragedy. Ten years earlier, when their only son was seventeen years old, he had been driving at night with his girlfriend and the car crashed and his girlfriend had been killed. Her name was Heather Morrison, and her family had—naturally enough—gone crazy with grief, and they tried for more than a year to sue Rob Dam, meaning his parents. The case was eventually settled; the Morrisons moved out of town. But Rob had never been the same.
Artie had sat at the conference room table in the law office with his son during depositions, and this is what he remembered: Rob sitting, pale, while he was questioned by lawyers. A woman lawyer had said, “Was there any sexual activity that preceded this crash?” Rob hesitated, his lips were without color, and he said, “No.” And then he glanced at his father. And it was that glance that made Artie understand.
When the police had arrived at the crash scene, Rob had been found with the belt buckle of his jeans open. Heather had not been wearing a seatbelt and she had been crushed beneath the steering wheel. Rob had been saved by the airbags.
The accident, of course, had changed not just Rob but the family. It was as though the three of them had been walking on their lawn down by the
water, peacefully, unknowingly, happily, and then the ocean itself had suddenly risen up, the whole world became an ocean overwhelming them with huge waves that swept over them and pulled them under, and they were all gasping and choking in the water. Within a year Evie started classes to become a family therapist—“I have to do something!”—and to Artie his wife became far more officious than she had been before the accident occurred; in his mind she had been a warmer person preceding this terrible event. It took years for them to reconfigure themselves, and they had.
But as these years went by, Rob—who had graduated from high school one month before the accident occurred—became a different person. Once a happy child filled with energy (he had often gone out on the sailboat with Artie), he had turned quiet, and at college in Cambridge—he had gone to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—he had not made many friends. He lived now in Somerville, about an hour away from his parents, working as a software engineer for a company that had contracts with the Department of Defense, and he made more than twice as much money as Artie made. Two years ago, he had married a woman named Francesca, a concert pianist who played throughout Europe; she was nine years his senior. While Evie loved their daughter-in-law, Artie found her to be a slightly odd woman, somehow unknowable, and his son, he thought, had become a person who remained deeply inside himself. But for Artie the worst thing of all had happened and it was this: Rob had distanced himself increasingly from his father. Artie kept trying to think when this had happened, and he felt that it was far more acute this past year. And all Artie could think of was the funny, happy child Rob had been.
Not a day went by that Artie did not think about this situation with his son. Was this an ongoing aftermath of the accident? Was it Rob’s marriage?
What had caused this distance to increase? Artie was thinking about this now as he drove home from school. The streets had odd angles and there were many streetlights as he passed by large old wooden houses painted deep blue or maroon or off-white; these houses sat very close to the old sidewalks. He stopped at a stop sign in a neighborhood lined with smaller wooden houses,
and then he carefully pulled out. He had a real fear of hitting a child coming home from school.
—
“YELLED AT THE class today,” he told his wife when she got home from work; she was a full-time family therapist these days. She took her coat off and looked at him with surprise. “You did?”
Evie had a beautiful head of white hair—it had turned white early because she had been a redhead, and it fell to the top of her shoulders, dipping down now slightly in the back as she reached into the closet for a hanger.
He told her about Danny Marino making fun of Rhonda Lazarre. Evie didn’t say anything at first, but then she smoothed down her pale green sweater and said, “Well, that’s good, Artie. I hope this Danny Marino fellow remembers it for the rest of his life.”
Artie sighed as he sat down in the living room. “I don’t know,” he said.
“What don’t you know?” Evie had followed him and sat now across from him in an old dark brown velvet chair.
“I never yell at the class. But it seemed—I don’t know—like I should. I couldn’t help it. That poor Rhonda.”
“Well, I support you.” Evie gave a nod and then told him about her last client, how the mother was impossible with her adolescent child. Artie nodded just slightly as he listened. Evie took her work very seriously, and he admired her for that. The tales of woe she often brought home seemed to him to require a distance that apparently came naturally to Evie. She was a professional, after all.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.)
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
“You going out for a sail, Dad?” Rob asked his father this.
“I was. But I’d much rather visit with you.” Artie placed his rubber boots back on the garage floor. He knew that Francesca was in Florence, but he asked about her anyway.
“In Florence,” Rob said. “Doing great.” Then Rob said, “Go, Dad.
Seriously. Good day for a sail. Go. I’ll be here when you get back.”
Artie shook his head. “Not every day my son comes for a visit.”
Rob gave his father’s arm a gentle shove. “Dad, go. I mean it.”
—
ONCE ON THE WATER—he had taken the dinghy and gotten into his sailboat and tied the dinghy to the mooring—Artie thought: This is a beautiful world.
Because it was. The wind flowed gently against the sails, and the water lapped gently against the sides of the boat, and the islands nearby were hit by the late morning light, their rocky ledges brightened by it, sort of quietly
magnificent. Artie did see all this.
But it left him unmoved.
He kept thinking: Look at this, Damn-dam, look at this! But he thought: I have seen it all before, and whatever exaltation was available to my heart is available no more.
He turned the boat around and headed home.
AS HE ROWED the dinghy back to the wharf, the sun sparkling on the water, it came into his mind unbidden: a memory of his wedding day.
It was Evie’s parents who had suggested that they go ahead and elope. “It will just save you so much fuss,” Evie’s mother had said, and Evie’s father had sat there in the living room wearing his buttoned-up cardigan, and his perfect slacks, on his feet were brown leather shoes, and his glinting eyes were on Artie. Only years later did Artie understand that they had already told Evie to do this, and that she had already agreed. And so when Evie looked at him that day and said, “Let’s do that, Artie!,” Artie had said okay.
Although he did say—in that same conversation—that it might hurt his parents for them to do so.
But in that way, it had been decided: a quick civil ceremony at the courthouse with both sets of parents and both sisters. Evie’s father took the small party to lunch afterward at an Italian restaurant in Boston, and even then, Artie understood that his parents had been very uncomfortable; his father smiled continually in a fixed way, his mother seemed faintly stunned.
And poor Maria was awkward as well. But through the haze of his happiness, Artie did not fully get it—except that he sort of did. He understood
instinctively (Why? What did Artie know at that point about such things?) that the suit his father had bought especially for the wedding ceremony—the first suit he had ever owned—was a powder blue color, and that his mother’s dress, also bought for the wedding, was not expensive at all and this showed in the way it fit her thickened waist, and Artie did remember seeing his mother’s shoes, glancing down at the sidewalk as they walked to the restaurant and seeing his mother’s scuffed white patent leather shoes, low- heeled, and her ankles very swollen.
So there was that. A humiliation that Artie to this day did not feel, and this is because he had loved his parents and believed in their goodness, in spite of his mother’s problems, or maybe because of them; they were good people, and he did not ever feel ashamed of them. If anything, what began that day was a tiny, tiny little thought: His in-laws were vulgar.
But they were not. They were just very different, and when Evie’s sister was married a few years later in a lavish wedding to a young man of her own station, Artie only said to Evie, “Boy, I’m glad we didn’t have to go through all that,” and Evie said, “Right? Me too.” (Evie’s sister was divorced ten years later, with three small children, but she was already living in Colorado then, and she and Evie had drifted apart.)
—
AND NOW AS Artie climbed from the dinghy to the wharf, the oars clanking as he pushed them back into the dinghy, he thought again about free will. When had he started thinking about this so much? With the upcoming presidential election? He could not say, but it would fly through his mind as it did now, wondering if it were all preordained somehow, including his marriage to Evie. Also, because he had studied history, he was aware that in all of human existence there had never been a time when people were not killing one another, and why he had not been affected by this as strongly throughout his life as he was these days he could not understand.
Walking back across the wide expanse of his green lawn, he waved to Endicott Peabody, who lived with his wife on their private road as well.
Endicott was retired now, and he was picking up a bag of golf clubs next to his house as he waved to Artie. Artie could not stand the man, he had never been able to stand him; the Peabody children had all gone to private boarding school; at a dinner party one night, years earlier, Artie had heard Endicott say, “They certainly aren’t going to go to our public school,” which had really bothered Artie.
But Artie did not give Endicott another thought now; he was thinking: Just get the job done. Who would think that dying would be so hard?
—
IT WAS AN accretion of loneliness; he understood this as he took off his rubber boots back in the garage. It was not the dread of the upcoming presidential election, which did, in fact, make him feel as if a noose was tightening each day around his neck—no, it was not the election. It was loneliness. He thought it had started after Flossie had left town. He never would have thought that poor Flossie had meant that much to him. She hardly ever called him from Ohio, and when she did it was often late at night and Evie would be there with him. Flossie would mention the upcoming election sometimes— they had agreed about politics, it was a bond. But often Flossie had been drinking and she would say, “Reginald wasn’t the only asshole in my family.
My daughter is too.”
And Artie was not able to laugh with her; in fact, she was never laughing when she told him this.
ROB AND EVIE were sitting at the kitchen table; Evie must have made some lunch, because there was a slice of bread on the table and the mayonnaise jar and a knife, and they were talking quietly when Artie came in. It seemed to him that they were both surprised to see him.
“You’re back.” Evie stood up.
“How was it, Dad?” Rob asked, running a hand over his shaved head.
“Perfect.” Artie pulled out a chair and sat down. He looked between his wife and son and said, “What’s going on?” Behind Rob a sheet of sunlight came through the large kitchen window. Artie turned his chair slightly to get out of the glare.
“Nothing,” said Evie, sitting back down at the very same time that Rob said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“What is it?” Artie leaned his thick arms forward on the table and gazed at his son’s face. He thought that the kid looked clear-eyed.
“Okay, well, first: Francesca and I are through.”
“Through?”
“Yeah, now don’t get upset. She’s cool with it and so am I. We’re mostly just really good friends at this point, and she’s always traveling, and she’s not a bit surprised by this, so don’t worry about her.”
Artie glanced at Evie, who was watching their son. Rob’s face had a glow that for the first time Artie thought was not unlike Evie’s glow, meaning that Rob’s skin was good and there was a light coming from it
today.
Rob said, “And I’ve met someone else.”
After a moment, Artie said, “Someone? You mean a girl?”
“A woman.” Rob smiled, showing his perfect teeth. “They’re called women these days, Dad. And I’ve met one.”
—
A LOUD KNOCKING on the front door interrupted them, and when Artie went to the door, he found a man standing there. “Plumber” was all the man said. He was tall and wore a dark blue shirt that had “Tom” stitched on it; he looked middle-aged and very fit. “I thought I’d fix that faucet now. You were good not to bother me about it and I have a few minutes, so let’s take a look.” Artie almost said “My son is visiting,” but the plumber looked so hopeful that Artie said, “Okay then, let me show it to you.” Adding, “Thanks for coming on a Saturday.”
Tom followed Artie into the spacious downstairs bathroom; he was holding the handle of a large box that presumably had his plumbing stuff in it, and he set it down on the floor and looked at Artie with what Artie thought was suddenly a mournful expression. Artie held his hand toward the dribbling faucet. “There you go,” he said, and Tom sighed and said, “Okay.” He rolled up the sleeves on his blue shirt, and Artie left him to it.
—
BACK IN THE KITCHEN, Artie said to Rob, “So who is this new woman?,” sitting down once again across from his wife and son.
The new woman was named Rachel, and she was Rob’s age. She worked as a social worker at a hospital in Boston, helping people get their needs cared for when they left the hospital. (She wanted to have children; Francesca did not.) Rob had met her at a choral concert he had gone to with a friend.
Rachel was standing in line at intermission for a glass of wine and Rob was standing behind her, and he began to speak to her. “It was like I just knew she was the one for me,” he said now to his father.
“Well.” Artie nodded. “Well, well, well. You brought a lot of news with
you.”
“Good news,” Rob said.
“Very nice news,” Evie said. “I’m dying to meet this Rachel woman.”
She turned to Artie. “I know you loved Francesca, but it never really made sense.”
“I never loved Francesca.” Artie said this without thinking.
“You didn’t?” His son and wife spoke this together.
—
“EXCUSE ME?” called a voice from the bathroom, and Artie held up a finger toward his son. “Hold on to that,” he said, adding as he stepped out, “It’s not that I didn’t like her, there was just something about her that was sort of—I don’t know—standoffish or something. You two never quite made sense, like your mother just said.”
When Artie returned to the bathroom, the plumber, Tom, was sitting on the edge of the bathtub—he was just sitting there, and when he turned to Artie, Artie saw that the man had a look of anguish in his eyes.
“You okay?” Artie said with hesitancy. “Everything okay in here?”
The man wiped his arm across his eyes and said, “Yeah, yeah. I think I fixed it.”
Artie looked at the faucet; the leak had stopped.
“You just needed a tightening on the bottom,” Tom explained. He moved over, as though to make room for Artie on the edge of the bathtub. But Artie continued standing. He looked under the sink for a moment and said, “I thought I had tried that.”
The man did not speak. But Artie heard him make a sound and turned back toward him. “What’s wrong?” Artie asked this quietly.
“My wife.” The man’s chest began to shake—he was a large man—and he once again wiped at his face with his sleeve. “Christ, she’s having an affair.”
“Oh no,” Artie said, more quietly than before.
“I just found out a few days ago, and, man, I can’t believe it. She’s working today, and I was going crazy alone in the house. But, see, I thought everything was okay. What the fuck is wrong with me that I thought
everything in my marriage was okay?”
Artie sat down next to the man.
“This ever happen to you?” Tom asked, looking at Artie with intense pain on his face.
Artie gave a small shake of his head. “No, but I can imagine how tough it must be.”
Tom said, “I could tell you got no problems.” He glanced around. “I mean, look at this house you live in.”
“This was my in-laws’ house. I grew up in a basement apartment in Revere. My father was the super of the place. Three buildings my father was in charge of.”
“Yeah?” said Tom, looking at him, but Artie could tell that Tom did not care about Artie’s background. After a moment, Tom stood up. He said to
Artie, “What do you do?” And Artie told him that he taught history at the local high school.
“Yeah?” The man turned to him. “I have a son who goes there. Danny Marino.”
“I know Danny.” Artie paused. “Nice kid.”
“That’s my oldest son,” the man said. “You think he’s okay? Turns out he knew about my wife’s affair. Jesus.” And the man picked up the box of whatever it was that was his plumbing gear and started to leave.
Artie said, “Thank you for finding the time to come over.”
The man turned in the door of the bathroom. “My son—he means the world to me,” he said. And Artie said, “I understand. I have a son.”
The man hesitated, and then he walked through the bathroom door, and Artie followed him to the front steps of the house. “Good luck to you,” said Artie, and the man said, “Okay, thanks.”
—
“I’LL BRING HER by in a couple of weeks,” Rob said. He stood up to leave.
“Nice to see you both.” Evie gave him a kiss and Artie briefly put an arm across his son’s back, and then Rob left the house.
“I didn’t know that you didn’t like Francesca,” Evie said to Artie. She started to put away the bread.
“It’s not that I dislike her, I just always found her to be…strange in some way.” Artie felt a sense of disorientation. The plumber had disturbed him, and Rob was different, almost happy. Almost. “But Rob seems good, don’t you think?”
Evie turned back to get the knife and walked over to drop it into the deep stainless steel sink. The sun had moved slightly and was now slanting across the white tiled floor. “Yes, but he called and told me he wanted to talk to me privately. He seemed very stressed about it. Very urgent somehow.”
“Well, I imagine he was stressed about how you were going to react to
the news about Francesca.”
Evie did not answer.
—
LATER THAT NIGHT Artie looked at the essay that Danny Marino had written on the first day of school. “People suck,” Danny had written. “Everything in this world is a big stinking lie.”
AND THEN ON that Tuesday night this happened: Artie and Evie, after their dinner, moved into the living room. Evie had had two glasses of wine with dinner, which she frequently did, and Artie, who almost always abstained, had left his one glass unfinished. He said to her, as they sat on opposite ends of the couch, “I had a memory of my mother this morning.”
Evie raised her eyebrows. “Tell me.”
He said, “She was giving me a bath one night and she told me that some
mothers killed their children.”
“Jesus,” Evie said.
“And I said to her: How? And she said they usually drowned them in the bathtub. And I said: Why? And she said: ‘Because the mother thought they would be better off without them.’ ”
Evie’s eyelids drooped. She said, “That’s awful. But I’m exhausted from work, I’m sorry.”
Artie rose and said, “You rest.” He dimmed the lights in the living room and went upstairs to their bedroom. As he lay on the bed it came to him with utter clarity: I am lonely enough to die. He remembered that his wife had loved some book—oh, years ago now—about a crotchety old woman from Maine, and he had read the book reluctantly only because his wife had liked it. He’d forgotten about it until now. In the book the awful old woman’s father had killed himself when the woman was younger, and now that she was older, the woman thought: People die of loneliness. It happens all the time.
And he thought: Yes, that was correct. People do die of loneliness, and I am—or will be—one of them.
—
WITHIN FIVE MINUTES his wife came upstairs and said, “I’m all awake now.”
But it was too late.
He had to get the job done; he would wait to make sure that Rob’s new girl was a good one. And then, one way or another, it was time he left this life.
YEARS EARLIER, Evie had had a hard time getting pregnant. At first it had been a joke between them, they were trying too hard, and then it stopped being a joke and Evie became very upset. Off they went to their various doctors, and they were both declared fit to reproduce, although one doctor had told them —Artie could never really comprehend this—that sometimes for no apparent reason a man’s sperm and a woman’s egg were incompatible. The term was “immunological infertility.” They kept on trying. Artie mentioned adoption and was surprised at Evie’s adamant rejection of that idea. When he raised the subject of in vitro fertilization, she was also adamantly against that, saying that the drugs she would have to take would be too dangerous.
At one point during this stressful time, Artie took Evie to London for Christmas. She had often spoken about going there as a child with her parents and sister, and so he surprised her and took her there. It was on the plane over that Artie began to get a dark sick feeling. His wife was very unhappy.
Fleetingly it went through his head that she was thinking of leaving him.
Where did that thought come from? She was mad at him that first day there because he did not know London, and he ended up taking her to a little hamburger place that she positively hated.
—
ABOUT A MONTH after that trip she discovered that she was pregnant, and how that woman glowed. She was absolutely radiant as she went through her days.
AT SCHOOL a few days later, Artie made a mistake. Rhonda Lazarre had taken a long time packing up her books and Artie was ready to leave the classroom, but he waited while she stuffed one more book into her knapsack. Artie said, “Are you okay, Rhonda?”
She looked at him. “I have the sads,” she said.
He waited and then he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Do you ever get the sads?” she asked him, and even though a warning signal flew up inside him he said, “Yes.” He added, “On occasion.”
She gazed at him from behind her glasses, which slanted slightly to one side. She puffed out her cheeks and gave a huge sigh; her mouth made a long raspberry sound. Tugging down on her gray sweater, which was too small, she said, “My mother’s crazy.”
Artie knew this to be true. Most people in town knew of the Lazarres and the woman who often walked around in public in her pajamas, frequently getting into arguments with shopkeepers.
“My mother was too,” Artie said. As he spoke the words he felt a strange sensation in his head, as though he was separate now from his body, only not quite.
Rhonda’s expression became eager. “She was?”
Artie nodded.
“Like in what way was she crazy?”
“Oh.” Artie gazed out the window. “She just had some real mental issues.
She had to be institutionalized a couple of times.”
“Jeez.” The girl said this slowly, and Artie moved toward the classroom door. Rhonda tugged again on her sweater, then pushed her glasses up with the back of her hand. She said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Dam.”
“People go through things,” he said, looking back at her. “Your sads will come and go.”
He held out his hand to indicate that she should walk through the door, and she went past him. “Okay, thanks,” she said.
No. It had been wrong of him to tell her about his mother. It left him in a state of even more heightened anxiety.
—
“NOW YOU’RE JUST getting hostile,” his wife said to him that night as he was talking to her about Rhonda Lazarre.
Because he’d said, “I can see you’re not interested in what I’m saying.”
He had seen in her eyes—after their being married for so many years—that she was no longer interested.
The pain he felt was almost physical, he was that sad.
“WHAT ARE WE going to do now, Mama? What are we going to do now?” This is what Artie’s sister had said, again and again, in the hospital the last week of her life.
Maria had not married until she was almost thirty. Artie and Maria’s parents had both died the year of her marriage—their father of a heart attack and their mother, six months later, of a stroke—and Artie was glad that Maria had her husband, a firefighter named John Flaherty, a man Artie had always liked; he was decent and straightforward. For a firefighter he was surprisingly small, but he was wiry, and he exuded a sense of protectiveness (this is what Artie had always felt), and Maria had gotten pregnant soon after the death of their parents—so excited, she was.
She had confided to Artie, “I’m awful glad to have Daddy’s genes come down through me. Of course, you haven’t had kids yet—I’ll be real happy for you when you do, and don’t forget that Mama didn’t get pregnant with me for a few years, so you and Evie will eventually—but with this child at least we know that his genes have come through.”
Maria’s child was stillborn, and in the hospital she suffered a brain aneurysm that—most surprisingly—she did not die of for almost a week.
Artie and John had taken turns sitting by her bedside as she lay in the hospital.
“What are we going to do now, Mama?” Maria had asked this again and again. Turning her eyes to look at Artie, and then at the ceiling, she would say, “What are we going to do now, Mama?”
In his state of dismalness, Artie remembered this, his sister’s last words: What are we going to do now?
—
AND HE REMEMBERED also how as a child, so pale (like their Irish mother), Maria, two years older than Artie, had been prone to weight gain, and their mother—he often thought this—had been very hard on her. It may have been no more than the fact that Maria was a girl, or it may have been that Maria was not what their mother had wanted for a daughter. In any event, their mother had been harsh with Maria, frequently criticizing her, just as she had with Artie but it had rolled off him more, and also, he had learned by watching his older sister and realizing when their mother was going to have one of her “spells,” where she screamed at them uncontrollably and then ended up in tears, and he would be able to dodge her at such times. Artie’s father would say when these spells were looming, he would say to both his children, “Mom’s tired,” before leaving for work at one of the buildings, and Artie would know to watch out. But even with the warning, poor Maria would often step right into it, not disappearing into her tiny bedroom but trying instead to please her mother, which was the opposite of what was needed at such times. And Artie would see their mother’s arms flailing at Maria and a sickness would fill him, as the girl’s pale skin became splotchy and then, later, yellow with bruises. Their father was always out of the apartment when such episodes happened.
—
BELOW THEIR BASEMENT (garden) apartment—where through the back door there was no garden, only a space filled with old air conditioners and a few spare tires and ancient heating units that had been stored there seemingly forever—was another basement, they referred to this as the cellar; it was big enough to stand up in, filled with furnaces and oil burners, and it always had the smell of oil; but in that cellar Artie’s mother had her clothesline, and even though it was often damp down there, the clothes—he remembered his
father’s underpants and Maria’s blouses—would be hung on the clothesline with wooden clothespins. Also in that cellar Artie’s father had built a series of shelves that extended beneath the wooden staircase, and on these shelves were kept extra flour sacks and extra boxes of confectionary sugar, but mostly it was cans of tomatoes and corn and beans. Often Artie’s mother would send Artie down near suppertime to get one of these cans.
When Artie was really little he would play down there—sometimes with Maria, but as she got older she would not join him—but they would, as small children, sometimes play “grocery,” and they would line the cans up on a board and take turns being the checkout person, the other putting the cans into a bag.
Around the time Maria had just started to have small breasts protruding from beneath her sweaters (Artie would look away from her, because they somehow made him ashamed), Artie went down into the cellar one day and he was surprised to find Maria there. She was standing beneath the stairs where the extra food was, and he said “Maria!” because she had startled him.
And what he always—for the rest of his life—remembered was this: The young girl was standing with her face alarmed and guilty and pale, always so pale she was, and in her hand was a box of confectionary sugar, and he could see that she was holding a spoon, and her mouth had the white powder of this sugar around it. She had been eating the confectionary sugar.
He could not remember that she said anything, just the look of vast guilt and fear on her white-streaked face, and he had gone upstairs and never told anyone what he had seen.
But the memory of her eating that sugar came to him these days, as it had infrequently throughout his life. As he thought about this, he understood that the poor girl had just desperately wanted sweetness in her life.
THE NEXT NIGHT as they ate their dinner, Evie laughed and said, “Remember the last time we had dinner at Flossie and Reginald’s?” She wiped her mouth and took a sip of wine.
“Not really,” Artie said.
“Sure you do. Sophie was so awful to Rob. Come on, you remember.”
The two couples had—for any number of years—occasionally socialized, and now Artie recalled—vaguely—the night that perhaps Evie was referring to. “You mean when Rob called Sophie a prissy little prick?”
“Is that what he said?” Evie took a bite of food from her plate.
Artie now remembered the four of them eating at the table at Flossie’s, Flossie on her way to being drunk, as she often was. The MacDonalds’ house had not been as nice as the Dams’ house, and they sat in the small dining room that overlooked the woods out back. The children—how old were they? ten, maybe?—had gone off together, having finished their dinner, while the adults continued to sit with dessert. Reginald sat at the head of the table, so tall and superior-looking, and Flossie said something about “You want to know why I married Reginald?” And she laughed. Something green (in Artie’s memory this was true—lettuce, perhaps?) was stuck in her teeth.
“Because he asked me!” And she laughed, and Reginald looked at her coldly.
And then Sophie came running down the stairs and said, “I’m sorry, you two, but I can’t stand your son,” and they were all tremendously startled.
Reginald stood up.
“He was right.” Evie said this now. “Sophie was a prissy little prick. I never liked her.”
“I know that,” Artie said. He thought of Reginald that night walking across the floor as Rob came slowly down the stairs, and Reginald said quietly to Rob, “Are you all right?”
And Rob replied, also quietly, “Sophie’s a prissy little prick.”
Artie thought that this was what had happened: Reginald had put his hand on Rob’s shoulder and said, “She can indeed be.”
“Mom! Did you hear what Dad just said?” Sophie had screamed this, and Flossie, wiping her mouth with a napkin that was already stained with her lipstick, stood up from her chair uncertainly.
That was all Artie could remember.
“Those kids never got along. Even when they were little. But after that night we sort of decided we didn’t have to see them again. I mean, together,”
Evie said, putting her hands down on the table and gazing out at the water.
“What made you think of that?” Artie asked.
“No idea.”
He thought about Flossie, out in Ohio now, living near Sophie. “I think Sophie’s still that way. Flossie doesn’t seem very happy.”
“Flossie was never happy,” Evie said, and Artie was surprised by this, but he did not answer. “Reginald only married her because she claimed to be pregnant, and she wasn’t. She lied. But there they were, stuck together.”
“Really?” Artie looked at Evie, who was once again sipping her wine. “I
never knew that.”
Evie shrugged.
THAT NEXT SATURDAY the sky was once again a terrific blue; white clouds rolled past, puffy-looking like enormous cotton balls. Artie put on his rubber boots and walked across the lawn down to the wharf, where he started to untie the dinghy, but it was colder than he had expected. He turned and walked all the way back to the garage and put his old coat on over his sweater.
Rowing out to his sailboat in the dinghy he saw that the current was faster than he had anticipated, there had been a full moon recently; it was an outgoing tidal current. The air was sharp against his face. Whitecaps appeared, and the water was moving quickly. He only noted it.
As Artie tossed the dinghy line into the sailboat and then moved to start hoisting himself from the dinghy into the back of the boat, his foot in his rubber boot slipped, and as he tried again his foot did not make it fully onto the sailboat; he saw the rope from the dinghy slipping quickly off the sailboat, and the dinghy, so quietly and suddenly, rocked precipitously and then floated away in the current. Artie was in the water, clinging onto the back of the sailboat! His rubber boots were filling with water. He tried to hoist himself up, and he could not. In just a few moments he had to let go of the boat, and sinking into the water he began to travel down the cove, the
dinghy bobbing far ahead of him now. The water was so cold he felt as though he had been dropped into a test tube of acid. And he could not stop thinking: But this was my dream.
It felt very slow-motion and he could not believe it, but he understood that it was real.
He thought, I have to get my boots off, and when he tried, reaching down, he started to sink. When he tried to kick them off, they would not come off.
He began to swim a breaststroke, but he became exhausted right away, and he could not seem to make progress against the current, which was moving away from the shore. So he stayed with his arms spread out on the water. He saw a red buoy coming near him and he reached for it, but it was not close enough and then it was past him. He laid his head back on the water, looking up, breathing through his mouth. But he understood that he would not last much longer. His boots, filled with water, weighed him down, as did his sweater and his coat. He thought: This cannot be happening. This cannot be true, please let this not be true. Even as he knew that it was. He stared up at the sky. Oh, it was beautiful! White clouds moved far above him, momentarily blocking the sun, and then the sun came out again. This had been his dream: floating out to sea in the water with a blue sky and white clouds above him. But his mind was both stunned and very clear, and he thought again: This cannot be happening. Even as he understood that it was.
—
IT WAS A motorboat he heard, and lifting his head he watched as it came closer. In it were a man and a younger man, both yelling at him as the boat sped toward him. It arrived next to him, and the man stopped the boat, which floated alongside Artie, and the younger man threw him a life jacket, which Artie grabbed with both hands. And then the older man, who kept saying things to Artie that Artie could not understand, threw him something else. It was like a big sling, and Artie tried to nod. He understood that he was to get his arms through it, but he could not, and the life jacket bobbed away.
“Hang on to it!” This is what Artie thought he heard the man yell. And Artie hung on to the sling and felt his body moving until it was right alongside the motorboat.
And then Artie felt that he was inside a dark tunnel, and the tunnel was getting smaller, swirling around him faster and faster.
