Page 29 of The Things We Never Say

“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.