4
he first thing Artie shoplifted in his fifty-seven years of life was a comb.T A man’s thin, plastic, almost bendable small comb, with a small price tag stuck on the side of it. This was in the drugstore in the next town over from where Artie lived. He’d had no intention of stealing it. But the comb was in a little area near travel-size toothpastes and powders and small deodorants, and Artie kept standing there gazing down at the combs, and he picked one up. Looking around casually, he thought that he was not being watched, and so he squinted at the comb and picked the price tag off it. The price tag split into tiny quarters, but still, it came off, and Artie walked away, and as he turned the corner of the aisle he slipped the comb into his pants pocket.
MEMORIES BEGAN TO pop up like mushrooms after a fall rain. For example, one late summer afternoon when Rob was about twelve, he and Artie were kicking a ball near the playground in the middle of town and Reginald MacDonald had suddenly appeared and watched them. “Like this!” Artie had yelled at Rob, showing him how to get the ball behind his foot, but Rob couldn’t manage it. And Reginald MacDonald had said, “Cut him a break, Artie. Maybe he’s not going to be a soccer player.”
—
ANOTHER MEMORY: Reginald MacDonald standing up after Rob’s high school graduation speech. Rob had been valedictorian of his class, and Reginald had stood up and cheered. Artie remembered this now: how he had turned slightly and seen that man standing up and clapping hard.
—
AND HIS WIFE saying rather recently that Reginald had married Flossie because Flossie had lied about being pregnant. How would Evie have known that except through Reginald?
And how Evie knew what Reginald had said on his deathbed.
He thought of the different dinners the two couples had had throughout the years until that last one when Rob called Sophie a prissy little prick. Artie remembered now that Reginald used to smile at Evie in a way that made Artie happy; she had been liked and this was a good thing. Artie had liked Flossie, and Reginald had liked Evie, and so it worked out. Artie had thought this. Now he thought again of Danny Marino’s father weeping on the edge of the bathtub. What had the man said that day? Something like: How did I not know this was happening? I thought everything in my marriage was good.
Something like that the poor man had said.
—
HE REMEMBERED BUMPING into Reginald at the post office after Rob’s accident, and how Reginald had approached him with great seriousness, asking him
how Rob was holding up.
Jesus.
—
AND THEN—THIS SEEMED to come to him with clarity—he thought of how often Evie had mentioned Reg since his death. Had she been missing him? Yes, of course she had. He thought of how Francesca said that perhaps Evie had been a little bit in love with Reg on and off as they both watched Rob growing up.
Reg had said in his letter that Rob’s mother had been to see him recently on his “godawful deathbed.” So Evie had of course felt a real sadness, had been living with that deep sadness as she lived alongside Artie, and Artie thought then of his own loneliness—enough that he had wanted to die!—which he had attributed to Flossie’s leaving town. But it was, he thought now, his wife who had left town. Left him.
—
FOR ARTIE IT WAS as though he had lived these many years looking at things from one angle, and now it was as though someone had turned him partly in a different direction and everything—everything—looked different.
“WHERE DID THIS come from?” Evie was squinting and holding out the comb that Artie had stolen a few days earlier.
Artie walked to her; they were in their bedroom. “Where’d you get it?” he asked her; he had broken out in a sweat.
“It must have been in your pants, I found it on the floor of the closet.”
“Oh yeah, a student left it in the classroom.”
“Do you want it?” Evie asked skeptically.
“No, God no.” Artie took it from her and tossed it into the wastebasket next to the bed. And then, to cover his state of anxiety, he said casually, “I lied to the class the other day.”
“You did?” Evie was applying her face cream, gazing at herself in the mirror across from the bed.
“They wanted to know if world peace was possible and I said yes, and that it was up to them.” Artie pulled on his pajama bottoms.
“Artie, you already told me that.” Evie stopped, with her hand on her face
cream. “Are you losing your mind?”
“Maybe,” he said.
But she continued to look at him for a moment. And then she got into bed.
TWO DAYS AFTER his visit with Rob, Artie took his phone during his free period, and he walked out to his car and got into it. Sitting there, he texted his son. A light rain was falling, and Artie looked around: The teachers’ cars were lined up in front of little white signs: RESERVED FOR FACULTY. And a little way away were many students’ cars all parked. As Artie sat there, he saw through the trees, which were almost all bare now, the water, far away but always there.
Rob got right back to him: Yeah, call me, Dad! So Artie called him and said, “Rob, help me out with Carl Jung, I’ve been googling him and I can’t figure out his position on free will. I mean, one thing says that free will is ‘what he does most happily’—what does that mean?—and something else says that Jung thinks the phrase ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way’ is a delusion of modern man. I’m confused.”
Rob laughed and said, “I know. He’s a confusing guy.” And then Rob went on to talk about Jung’s theory of the unconscious and Artie sort of understood. It took Rob quite a while to get through it all, he was speaking with excitement.
“You’re not supposed to be working now, are you?” Artie was concerned about this. He watched out his window as a student drove into the student parking lot and got out of his car.
“Don’t worry, Dad. All over it.” After another moment Rob said, “I thought you were calling me to tell me you’d told Mom.”
“No. No, I haven’t.” Artie hesitated and then said, “But you can tell her
any time you want to.”
“I don’t want to. Not now anyway.”
“Tell me more about this Carl Jung guy,” Artie said, looking straight ahead through the trees at the water far away, and so his son told him (and this really made an impression on Artie) that Carl Jung had had a near-death experience in 1944, and way before any satellite had ever taken a picture of the Earth, Jung had visualized the Earth from far away, and everything he reported that he saw turned out to be right. But this was the part that got to
Artie: Jung had seen, during this near-death experience, that his young doctor was going to die, and when Jung came back from being nearly dead, he tried to tell the doctor that, and the doctor was not interested, but two weeks later this healthy young doctor died of septicemia.
“Amazing, right?” Rob said, and Artie said: Yeah, it was.
As he walked back, it was raining harder, and Artie moved as quickly as he could, taking out his pass to swipe himself into the building and then shaking out his coat when he got back to the teachers room.
WHEN HE GOT home from school that day, Artie saw that the bushes around their house were now wrapped in what looked like off-white sailcloth, stapled perfectly up the sides; the gardener had come. He pulled into the driveway slowly, and the sense of confusion—or wonder—that he had been living with these past few days seemed to increase. What was it about the bushes wrapped in their cloth coverings that made him more confused? Perhaps because for years now this had happened to them toward the end of every autumn? Gazing at them, Artie had a sense of time going by. Twenty-seven years ago, his son had been born.
That night he said to Evie, “How long have we been having the bushes
covered?”
“No idea,” she said. “Forever?”
“SAY,” ARTIE SAID to Ken Moynihan the next night as they sat together at Spud’s. It was dark out now, and the water could be seen only from the lights in front of the restaurant; a few waves were lapping at the dock. “So, say,”
Artie said again. He thought he sounded like his father. Ken looked at him, raising his eyebrows. “Turns out my son is not my son.”
Ken stared at him. “Repeat that,” he said, and Artie said, “It turns out my son had a different father. All these years I thought he was mine.”
Ken reached over and stopped Artie, who was about to poke at his salad with a fork. “Hold on,” Ken said. “Now just hold on and stop eating, for Christ’s sake. Your son is not your son?”
“That’s right.” Artie set the fork down and then put both his hands in his lap. Ken kept watching him, and Artie finally raised his red wine to his lips and took a sip, placing the glass carefully onto the white-clothed tabletop.
“Whoa. Whoa.” Ken stared at him.
And Artie told him the story.
Ken barely ate as Artie was talking; he looked straight at Artie the whole time. “I cannot believe this,” he finally said, and Artie said, “I know. Me neither. I thought that telling you would make it true.”
“Oh, I think it’s true, DNA doesn’t lie, but I only meant it sounds unbelievable.”
“I know.” Artie wiped his mouth on his napkin and said, “But my son and I love each other as much as we ever did.” He paused before adding, “Maybe even more, if that’s possible.”
“Of course you do. Of course you do.” Ken nodded energetically. Then he said, “What about your wife?”
“Yeah.” Artie glanced down. “I haven’t told her yet that I know about it.
Not sure when I will. And Rob’s not sure about telling her either.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Ken said. “Jesus effing Christ.”
Artie pushed back his plate. “Well, you’re the only person I’ve told, so thank you for receiving it.”
“Thank you for sharing it.” Ken added, “My sister-in-law always says ‘Thank you for sharing.’ ” He rolled his eyes. “But I really mean it. Thank you for sharing this, Artie.”
The election came and went. Half of the country was stunned, the other half jubilant.
ON THE MORNING after the election, as Artie walked through the living room on his way out the door, he had a very clear and sudden image—this came to him so sharply that he stopped walking for a moment—of a large steel door in front of him that was sliding down from the top of a massive doorway, as large as a wall, and as it reached the bottom, the strip of light that shone from underneath the huge steel door was gone.
He was stupefied, although he had predicted the outcome of the election.
A text came from Rob: Dad, we’re fucked. And Artie wrote back: I think we are.
Evie said, “Well, it’s bad, but we’ll just have to wait and see what he does.”
—
LATE THAT NIGHT Artie sat down at the piano, and he began to play a tune he had kept hearing in his head. It was slow and sad, and as he played he understood that it was two things: a requiem for the world, and a love song to his son.
Through the window only one light could be seen on the bay.
A FEW DAYS LATER Artie was sitting in the teachers room when he saw Rob’s name appear on his phone, and he said “Oh, excuse me” to Anne Merrill, and he walked out and said into his phone, “Rob!”
Rob said, “Hi, Dad, are you free now? I just wanted to know how you’re doing with the election and stuff.”
Artie’s face broadened with pleasure—he was talking to his son—as he walked through the gym where a whistle blew, holding his phone to his ear.
“How am I doing? Makes me sick, the whole thing,” Artie said.
“Yeah, me too. Francesca wept for thirty-six hours straight, I mean straight, I was really worried about her. Then she stopped and said, ‘I’m going to get a manicure.’ She never gets a manicure, you know, she’s afraid of getting an infection because she depends so much on her hands, of course, but she went off to some expensive place and got one.”
“Good for her,” Artie said, and Rob said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Artie was going to ask about Rachel, but he did not.
“What’re we going to do?” Rob asked, and Artie said, “I suppose we’ll
live through it.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.” Artie walked through the back door of the gym and went outside. It was cold, but he did not care; he would have stood in a blizzard just to talk to his son. He said, “When this lunatic was running for president the first time, your mother and I would watch their party’s debates, and one night he said about one of his competitors onstage with him—or maybe he said it after the debate, I can’t remember—but at some point he said, ‘He looks like a girl,’ and what I remember, Rob, was that every time afterward— every time—I saw that other man I saw him as a girl. And it struck me then: I thought, if he can do that to me, think what he can do to others, and that’s when I realized: He has a particular kind of evil genius.”
“He’s an idiot,” Rob said.
“He is,” Artie agreed. “But he is also an evil genius.”
“It’s Musk I’m worried about,” Rob said.
“You should be. I’ve been reading his biography, and he is very, very smart and very, very crazy.”
“You’re reading it? I just read it too!” Rob added, “His father is awful.”
“Awful,” Artie agreed. He looked around. It was a barren scene with the sky low and gray, and the trees had no leaves. Even the cars in the parking lot looked desolate.
After a pause, Rob said cautiously, “Dad?”
“What is it, son?”
“Am I an asshole?”
Artie laughed, he really laughed. “Not remotely,” he said, “not remotely are you an asshole. Why in the world would you ask that?” But he felt he knew why.
And Rob said, “Because Reginald was a complete asshole.”
“Well. He wasn’t your father. I was.”
IN CLASS THESE DAYS, Artie looked at his students differently. He had always cared for them—deeply—but as their faces turned to him now, he could have wept with simple unadulterated love for them. They seemed innocent in a way that almost floored him. The few young fellows who had spots of acne on their foreheads and cheeks, the girls who looked at him with tired expressions (some of them) or with makeup on their faces (some of them) or with a sweater that was too tight and kept getting tugged down (poor Rhonda Lazarre). He sat at his desk and gazed at them, and they watched him with expectancy.
Willoughby said one day, “You know what you were telling us about
Nazi Germany a while back?”
Artie nodded.
“Do you think the same thing could happen here?”
Artie did not answer for a moment, and then he said, “Well, we hope not.”
Tamera said, without raising her hand, “It will be the illegal immigrants this time, not the Jews. He says he’s going to round up all the illegal people in the country. The ones with brown skin.”
“Oh, stop it,” said one guy in the back who seldom spoke. “Jesus, they should be sent back.”
But the class watched Artie. Their young expectant faces— “We’ll see what happens,” Artie said. He stood up slowly. “Now let’s get to work,” he said, adding, “And let’s remember the progress we have made as
a country. We no longer buy people. We no longer have black people arriving in shackles at the town square where white men go and look at their teeth and their hands and decide whether to buy them.”
But he thought that the class did not go very well. He did not have the energy that would in turn get them energized.
WITH THE ELECTION now over, Artie watched his mind. He watched how his mind went toward the fact of it, and then withdrew from the fact of it. It was interesting.
“Not that interesting,” Rob said, and Artie agreed.
A WEEK AFTER the election, as Evie prepared dinner and Artie read the news on his computer, he decided: I’m going to tell her I know. He closed the lid on his computer and thought about this. He would wait until after dinner, after he had cleaned up the kitchen—he would make sure to do that before they sat, as they so often did, in the living room. He would say the words, kindly and slowly: Evie, I found out about you and Reginald and Rob. So
let’s just move forward from here.
Move forward from here?
No, he would not say that part.
He would just wait and see what she said.
—
BUT INSTEAD, THEY HAD a fight. He had been so nervous about telling her that he did not in fact clean up the kitchen, and as they sat together in the living room after they ate, Evie, with a glass of wine in her hand, tried with one foot to pull the small ottoman over to her, and Artie stood up and went and took the small ottoman and placed it beneath her feet.
“Why, thank you, Artie.” She smiled at him.
“You’re very welcome,” he said, sitting back down in his big chair by the window.
“You’re a good husband,” she said. And he just nodded. Then Evie shook her head slightly and said, “I’m glad I never listened to my father.”
After a moment, Artie said, “Your father? Why, what did your father have to say?”
“Oh, you know—” Evie waved a hand listlessly through the air.
“No, tell me,” Artie said.
“Artie, you know this.”
“Know what?”
“My father never really liked you.” She put her hand to her mouth as though to stop what she had just said, but she had said it, and Artie felt a small electrical jolt go through him. He watched her.
Artie finally said, “I never knew that.”
“Oh, you know.” Evie tossed her head and said, “Come on. I mean—”
“What? What is it you mean?”
“Artie. When he first met you, he naturally had some doubts. That’s all.
You know that.”
And then Artie heard himself say, quietly, “Not sure I ever liked him either.” Absolutely no part of him knew that he would say that.
Evie’s eyes opened wide. “What?” she asked.
Artie sat forward.
“Did you say you’re not sure you ever liked him either?” Evie asked him.
“I did. I did say that.” Danger rumbled through Artie. He sat back. And then sat forward again.
They locked eyes, and as they were gazing at each other intently, Artie thought: You are a liar, Evie. And then he thought: Don’t say that to her. And he did not.
“And why did you not like him?” Her voice was cold now.
“Because, as you just said, he did not really like me. And a person knows these things. Without knowing it, I knew it.” Artie added, sitting back: “Also, he was vulgar.”
And that was that. She became almost insane with anger. In a way, Artie did not blame her. The entire thing was so unexpected. But she stood up, slopping her wine from its glass, and she said many things. She said that Artie would never be where he was if not for her father, she said that her father had said to her, Come on, Evie, you can do better than that. She said many things that Artie heard as though through a clattering windstorm.
Finally she said, sitting down once again, “What do you mean he was
vulgar?”
“Dunno.”
“Yes, you do. Tell me why you think my father was vulgar.”
A deep sickness sat within Artie. He thought: I want to go home. He did not know what he meant by that, but he could not stop thinking it. He finally said, “Because he had so much money.”
“That doesn’t make a person vulgar, Artie.”
He understood that he was going to have to see this fight through, and he felt an exhaustion wash through him. “I shouldn’t have said it,” he said.
“But you did say it. You did say it, Artie. And what did you mean?” She was very, very angry with him.
He let out a huge sigh. “Evie, you said he never really liked me. It upset me, so I responded.”
“You said you knew he never really liked you and then you called him vulgar!”
Artie felt a vast confusion. “I said I knew he never really liked me?”
“Yes, you did. You said that less than two minutes ago. You said people always know these things and you knew that about him, and so you didn’t
like him either.”
“Right. That’s right.” Artie nodded.
“And then you called him vulgar. Unbelievable. And I asked you why you thought he was vulgar.”
It seemed to Artie that only her face was leaning toward him, but she was sitting forward in her chair, with her arm on the chair’s armrest, holding her glass of wine. It was true that her face was flushed and pointed at him—and very angry.
They were silent for a few moments, and then Artie said, “The way he dressed.” Because he pictured his father-in-law, a tall man, always dressed so well, so properly, either in a suit and tie, or on weekends with a buttoned-up sweater and his nice brown leather shoes. Artie glanced down at his old man black sneakers that were on his feet right now, although Evie was always telling him to take off his shoes when he came into the house.
“Ah. He intimidated you, is what you are saying.” Evie said this with finality, as though she had figured something out. She sat back in her chair.
“I guess.” Artie did not remember ever being intimidated by the man. He thought: Do not apologize. Do not do that.
But he did. He said, “Sorry, Evie, I was just taken aback.” He rose and went into the kitchen, and he did the dishes with more noise than usual, he was that angry. When he was finally done, he went back into the living room and Evie was sitting exactly as she had been.
“I’m going up to bed,” he said. And she surprised him by saying—not unpleasantly—“Okay, me too.”
As he looked at the page of his book on Elon Musk, she came out of the bathroom with her jar of face cream, and she said, without a whole lot of expression, “Okay, I’m sorry I said what I did.”
He put the book down and watched her.
She stopped with her face cream for a moment, looking over at him, and
said, “I said I was sorry.”
“Me too.”
BUT THAT NIGHT began Artie’s almost constant thoughts of his own father.
They came to him most thickly as he was getting ready for bed, and then they got into bed with him, and the sadness he felt was almost warm, as though the quilt that covered him was his father, his love for his father, although the sadness remained very real. The sadness was this: After Artie married Evie, Artie’s relationship with his father—with both his parents—changed at a very fast pace. He tried now, in his later years, to understand this, and he could
grasp only bits of it. But his in-laws had liked him (he had always believed this to be true, in spite of what Evie had said during their argument), and he had been grateful for that, and they had taken him and Evie to a variety of places around the world—and all of this had made Artie’s young head spin.
But he saw now that his father had understood what Artie had not understood back then: that Artie had been removed from him.
—
QUIETLY A SMALL SICKNESS came to him as he remembered the first time his parents had met Evie’s parents. His future father-in-law had suggested that they meet at a small diner in Boston, and they had—and it was smart of the man, because Artie could not imagine his parents setting foot into the home of Evie’s parents. But Artie could only, now, vaguely remember that date in the diner. He had not been embarrassed. He had worried that his mother might be “off” that day, but she was not. She had sat and talked mainly to Evie, and also to Evie’s mother, and Artie’s father-in-law-to-be had spoken with Artie’s father. What had they talked about? Artie could not remember.
But he remembered that his father had kept up his part of the conversation, had sat up straight and laughed with the man. Artie had understood (of course) that these two couples were very, very different, but he was young and newly in love and he did not know all the ramifications.
—
ARTIE’S FATHER WAS the son of a German immigrant who had come over after World War I, settling in South Boston, and Artie’s grandfather had spoken of how difficult it had been to be German at that time, and to also have been a German veteran of that war. And then to live through the Depression—but he had done it, managing to find employment in a local butcher shop. Artie’s father had had two much older brothers—both long dead by now—who lived in Jamaica Plain when Artie was growing up, and Artie remembered visiting them, playing with his cousins—who were much older as well—but in fact they had never felt a part of Artie’s own little family. His cousins had
eventually all moved across the country—Seattle, Kansas, St. Louis; he was out of touch with them, if he had ever been in touch with them.
—
IN THEIR SMALL APARTMENT in the basement of that three-floor walk-up (six apartments in each building), there had been constant noises. The floors were wooden, and the family above them, the Albizzis, could be heard all the time; during the summer through the open windows Artie could hear dishes being done, toilets flushing, sometimes yelling occurred, and a variety of cooking smells, mostly garlicky odors, were always around. And also, Artie learned about sex by hearing it through the ceiling. When he first left his home to go to college, he could not believe the silences that surrounded him, even in a college dormitory.
—
HIS FATHER HAD carried on his belt a ring with many keys—one for each of the eighteen apartments he was in charge of—and the owner of the three buildings, who did not live in Revere and seldom showed up, would call him sometimes about the Grecos, who lived in the building next to theirs. The owner wanted them thrown out because their apartment was always such a terrible mess, and Artie’s father had somehow (Artie could not remember the specifics) negotiated the situation with finesse. The Grecos stayed.
—
ONE AFTERNOON (Artie and Evie had been married about six years by then, still childless), Artie’s father telephoned just as Artie got home from school. (Artie’s father was retired by then; he’d had an accident on the job, his back going out.) Artie’s father had telephoned him and said, quietly, “Hi, Artie.”
Pause. “You know, I’m feeling kind of depressed.”
And Artie, who was worried about his wife’s not getting pregnant, said, “Come on, Dad. We all have days when we’re feeling down.”
He had said that! He had said that to his father that day. And his father had said, “Okay, son. But I miss seeing you.”
—
HAD HIS FATHER had any friends?
Artie knew only that people had liked his father; even with most of the people in Revere being Italians, it seemed to Artie that no one had held his father’s German background against him. There was one man Artie particularly remembered, a retired policeman who lived nearby. On hot summer evenings, he and Artie’s father would sometimes sit on the sidewalk together in metal folding chairs. But Artie could not really remember much more.
This fact left him with practically a visceral sense of longing. Who had his father been?
A LITTLE BELL tinkled as Artie stepped over the threshold of the men’s carpeted clothing store. There was almost a sense of stepping inside a small church, it was that quiet. One man stood near the counter, and Artie sensed that the man, who was older-appearing than Artie, was the owner. (The man, Charles Schwartz, was older, and he was the owner of the store.) They greeted each other and commented on the weather; it was dark quite early now, and they both agreed that they did not care for that.
“What can I help you with today?” the man asked. Wearing glasses with modest brown frames, he had a pleasant, yet almost steely, aspect to him, a small man. He wore an impeccable dark suit and a blue tie, and somehow Artie found this touching, as though from days gone by.
The town this store was in was three towns away from where Artie lived; it was a wealthy town, with many large and very old wooden houses, not unlike parts of the town that Artie lived in, where the large wooden houses were so old that their fronts went right up close to the sidewalks. The
downtown area was pristine, with a square in the middle and a large brick post office.
It was Wednesday, which meant that Evie was working late; this was two days after they had had their fight. Artie needed a new shirt. Evie was the one who tended to notice when he needed a new shirt, but she had said nothing recently about his shirts that had fraying cuffs or collars—and so he had gone three towns away to enter this men’s clothing store that had painted on its front window the simple word SCHWARTZ’S. He had been here before, but not for many years.
“I need a shirt,” Artie said. The owner showed Artie some options and, after a moment, suggested that he try one on, and so Artie walked into the dressing room and pulled the curtain closed and took off his own shirt and put the new shirt on. As he looked in the mirror, a deep sadness came to Artie. He looked like his father; he could see this now. His pale brown hair was full, and his eyes peered back at him through his large glasses. And his stomach was getting as big as his father’s stomach had been throughout Artie’s life.
But in spite of his stomach, the shirt fit, it was okay, and Artie took it off and went and bought it. The owner folded the shirt carefully, placing it into a paper bag that had twine handles and the name of the shop printed on the side. Artie thanked him and turned to go.
Another man and his (apparently) wife had come into the shop and were speaking now to the owner, and Artie stopped close by the front door where there were dress shirts placed in a semicircle on a little table there, they were nicer shirts than the one he had just bought. He peered through his glasses and found two in his size and turned back around, holding them in the air, saying to the owner, “Mind if I try these on as well?” And the man looked over from where he stood with the couple and said, “Oh, go right ahead.”
Back inside the dressing room Artie stood. But he did not try on the other shirts. After a few moments he heard the couple leaving the store, and everything got quiet. He slipped the two shirts into the bag on top of the one he had just bought earlier, and then he sat down on the little bench behind the
curtain. What am I doing?, he thought. But his mind felt blurred, as though he were not really present.
After a moment he stood up and walked out of the dressing room, nodding at the man behind the counter, and the man said, “How did they work out?” And Artie said, “They didn’t. I left them in the dressing room, sorry.” And the small and slender man in his nice dark suit said, “Don’t worry, have a good day then,” and Artie said, “You too.” He still felt a sense of being bizarrely far away. As he stepped through the shop’s front door, a loud buzzer went off, and Artie experienced both an immediate terror and bewilderment, and it was not until he saw the man, who had been behind the counter, approach him that Artie had the full understanding of what had occurred. He had just been caught shoplifting.
—
THE OWNER, this Mr. Charles Schwartz, walked over to Artie and stood looking at him. Then he reached high up by the side of the door, touching something, and the horrible buzzer stopped. “Come with me, please,” he said, and Artie followed him to the back of the store. They stepped into a room that looked as though it was a storage place; a few boxes were lined up on a shelf, and an ironing board was out. The owner nodded toward a wooden chair, and Artie sat down. Artie’s face was very moist with perspiration, and he was aware of his heartbeat, which seemed extraordinarily fast. This older man, who wore his dark-framed glasses, this man looked at him with piercing eyes from behind those glasses; there was nothing special about the man’s eyes, later Artie could not even recall the color of them, but they looked deeply into Artie, searchingly, and Artie felt this and did not look away.
And then the man said, “Do you mind giving me your license for a moment?”
Artie fumblingly took his wallet from his pocket, he saw that his hand was shaking as he tried and then did get the license from it, and he handed it to the man. “Thank you,” the man said courteously, and then added, “Stay right here for a few moments, and I’ll be back, okay?” Artie nodded his head.
The man reached down and took the bag from next to the chair where Artie had placed it, and then he left Artie alone in this storage room. As he sat there, in the chair, Artie felt a sense of such severe disorientation that he wondered if he had had a small stroke.
Bizarrely, he recalled—as he sat there, his palms sweating as he held his hands in his lap—an elderly couple he had seen at the Bangor airport in Maine the previous summer; he and Evie had been returning from a vacation.
The old man was very large and had suspenders that ran a little crookedly up his back, and the woman was not as big, but she was not small, and oh, she loved that very large man. Artie had watched her walk slowly across the floor to him with a cup of coffee and a sandwich, he had watched while they shared the sandwich, he had watched while she reached behind the huge man to arrange his suspenders; she smoothed them down his massive back. And then she leaned her head against his shoulder, and this is what stabbed Artie now, their innocence, and how badly he wanted—as that elderly woman had —to lean his head against a loving person, to be innocent and incorruptible.
—
HE STAYED SITTING, then wiped his face with one hand. On a small table near him was a box of Kleenex, but Artie did not dare take one, he was afraid he was being watched on a camera, and he did not even dare look around to see if this might be true. He just sat. And then—horribly—he felt his lower lip tremble. He could not control it. It kept shaking downward.
—
MEANWHILE, CHARLES SCHWARTZ, owner for thirty-seven years of this small men’s store, sat in an office right next to the room in which Artie was sitting.
Charles Schwartz had seen many things over his lifetime, many people he had dealt with in this store. Then, as he googled the man’s name, Arthur Dam, he saw a number of things about him being Teacher of the Year five years ago, and then Charles Schwartz ran another search on him, and he was
not surprised to find that this Arthur Dam had no criminal record at all. He sat for a few moments and then returned to the man.
Charles Schwartz sat down in a chair, moving it close to the one that Artie sat in, and gave him back his license. Artie returned it to his wallet, and Charles Schwartz was struck by the intense pain on this man’s face. He said quietly, “Mr. Dam. I’m going to let you go now, okay?” Artie just watched him.
They sat in silence for a few moments, and the man—this Mr. Schwartz —said, “In my time I’ve seen this kind of thing, and it often comes after a loss of some sort. I’m not going to ask you one thing about your life, okay?
You just get up and leave—oh, here, with the shirt you bought—” He removed the two stolen shirts and handed the bag back to Artie. “And then when you come back in someday, you just pay for whatever you get, okay
then?”
“Okay.” Artie said it very quietly.
Artie stood, but his legs were shaking, and he sat back down. “Would you like some water?” the man asked, and Artie whispered, “No thank you.”
And then Artie stood again and moved to the door, and the man followed him and opened the door for him, and then he said—Artie would never forget this —he said to Artie with great kindness in his voice, “You take care now, okay?”
Artie walked to his car and drove away. He had to keep pulling over until he could stop shaking, but cars honked behind him each time, the streets were crowded.
—
WHEN HE ARRIVED HOME, he took out the plate of food that Evie had left him in the refrigerator, but he did not microwave it, he sat at the kitchen table and ate cold fish. His mind felt not right. After he finished, he scraped the remains into the garbage and then sat back down at the table. Then he moved into the living room and sat there in the dark. It was not until he saw Evie turning in to the driveway that he got up and switched on a light.
Evie said, as soon as she stepped through the door, “Artie, are you okay?
Why was the house dark?”
“Taking a nap,” he said.
“You were?” She hung her coat up and came into the living room.
Artie said, “I went to buy myself a shirt.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, I just thought I needed a shirt, so I went to that place—” And he named the store, and Evie said, “Wow, good for you.”
As Evie put her own plate into the microwave and then sat and ate her dinner, Artie sat at the kitchen table across from her. He asked how her day had gone, and she told him, and he was so grateful for her chatty presence that he could not believe it, he could not believe anything. Including the fact that apparently, to his wife, he appeared as normal as ever. He felt again (almost) as though he had suffered a stroke, that something marked him now as very different. That she could not seem to see this astonished him.
IT WAS ANNE MERRILL who first noticed a change in Artie. She had the same period off that Artie did, and even though the time of that changed each day she watched how Artie would take his phone and leave the teachers room.
Not every day, but certainly far more often than he had in her memory.
When she spoke to him, he seemed not fully there.
Anne’s daughter, who was twenty-four years old, had recently completed a rehab program, and it seemed to have worked, but her daughter was being cool to her mother now, and when Anne tried to ask her about it, her daughter said, “Mom, I’m trying very hard not to use again, so please don’t stress me out.”
And so, as Anne moved through the shadows of her life, she really missed her old friend Artie.
—
EVIE HAD FELT BAD about her fight with Artie. She had no idea why, after all these years, she had told Artie that her father had not really liked him. Her father had liked him once he was more fully aware of who Artie was, but it was true that her father had once said to her, “Couldn’t you do better than that kid?” Still, she should not have said it, and in truth she was (slightly) surprised that she had. What was most on her mind at the present time was a client of hers who, after ten years of marriage, had had an affair and now wanted to confess it to her husband, and Evie was counseling her not to do so, asking the client what she hoped to accomplish by telling her husband about this. To live honestly, the poor anguished woman had answered. Evie was trying to let her know that living honestly comes in many different forms.
—
RHONDA LAZARRE SUFFERED privately because her mother had caused the police to be called recently; her mother had gone into a dress shop in town and threatened the owner, also screaming that the owner was a whore.
Rhonda could have died from the embarrassment of this. But she thought of Mr. Dam telling her that his own mother had been crazy, and how he had told her that her sads would come and go, and that she was going to help people someday; she took solace in this memory of him.
—
DANNY MARINO WAS so sickened by the situation with his parents that one night he left the table and said, “I cannot eat. I can’t eat because you guys are killing me. You’re just fucking killing me!” He had expected his mother to say something immediately about his language, but he was surprised that he was met with complete silence from his parents and his two younger brothers.
He went into his room and lay down on his bed and thought: I wish I was dead.
