Page 38 of The Things We Never Say

“Why do you have that?” Danny seemed genuinely to want to know.

“To tell you the truth, I barely remember, it’s been there for years. I think it’s from when I had an infection on my finger and my wife gave it to me to keep here. Well, anyway. Now it’s going to come in handy.”

“We’ll need a piece of cloth too,” Danny said. “Wait, want me to go get some toilet paper in the bathroom? Or maybe paper towels?”

Artie hesitated. “Not sure they’ll work, but let’s try them.”

But then Danny peeled off his long-sleeved sweater, and then he peeled off his T-shirt; his tiny pink nipples stood out against his very white skin, and Artie was struck with the innocence of the boy’s long young chest, as though he were looking at a baby. Danny put his sweater back on. “All right then,” Artie said.

Out into the hall they went. “What are we going to say if we get caught?” Danny looked at Artie with real worry.

“We’re going to say this: You came to talk to me, and when we left the room we saw this written, and now we’re removing it, and you were good enough to offer your own T-shirt to do it.”

It took a while, but it worked. Danny’s T-shirt was soaked and streaked with blue from the magic marker, and it smelled sharply of medicinal alcohol, but the letters were gone.

“Good job. How’re you getting home?”

“Walking, I guess.”

“Do you want a ride?”

“Ah, no. Thanks, though. I’d like to walk.”

“You don’t have a jacket? It’s cold out.”

“I have a jacket, yeah, it’s downstairs in my locker, I’ll get it.”

“Okay,” Artie said. “Now listen to me. Next time you want to say fuck you to the world—and believe me, you will—you do it up here.” Artie tapped his own forehead a few times.

“Yuh. Got it.” Danny hesitated, and then he said, “Okay. Ah, thank you, Mr. Dam.”

“You’re welcome, Danny. You’re entirely welcome.” Artie spoke the words quietly, and then Danny turned and walked down the hall; after a moment, Danny turned partly to look back at him, but he did not turn all the way around.

Artie waited a while and then headed down to the teachers room to get his coat. But at the last minute he just walked out the door. He did not want to see anyone.

Danny Marino remained in a state of private ecstasy for days to come. Damn-dam wanted to say fuck you to the world! Damn-dam wanted to! Why? Danny did not know, but he believed him, and he thought that no one would think that of cheerful Mr. Dam. But it was true, and in this way Danny discovered the secrets of adults: that they had them, and they were serious and sad. And this brought him tremendous comfort as he watched his parents going through their upheavals.

Even after the poignancy of the event passed—and it felt so private that for a year Danny shared it with no one—he still carried with him that knowledge, that this teacher, Mr. Dam, had ushered him kindly that day into the world of adults, and it changed him, it did.

—

Rob Dam also felt a tremendous sense of relief, he was astonished at the relief he felt now that his father knew that awful secret. It made him feel that he could see the world more clearly, he could see Francesca as she sat at her piano, he could see the people he passed on the sidewalk. But he was not sure these days how he felt about Rachel. They had gone to the apartment of a friend of Rob’s, and she had admired a small poetry book the friend had, and then, so strangely, Rob’s friend called the next day and asked if Rachel had somehow mistakenly taken it with her. When Rob asked Rachel about it, she got angry and said, “You mean he thought I stole it?” And that had made Rob feel very uneasy. He told Francesca about it, and she had been thoughtful, sighing with sympathy and saying, “Babe, I just don’t know what to tell you.” So Rob was not sure at all where his life was going, but he did not feel that deep and horrible fear he had felt before, when his father had not known the secret. When he thought about his mother, he was able to almost shrug, because—he realized this now—it was his father he had wanted to tell, his father who had been wronged, and his father had taken it so well, so well…. So well, his father had taken this news.

—

Rhonda Lazarre slept with the pillowcase by her face every night. She had to be careful that her mother did not find it, because Rhonda felt that it was the most precious thing that she—Rhonda—had ever owned. And so she finally put it in the far back of her closet, but every night before she went to bed she brought it out and held it to her face. She loved that man. Mr. Wonderful Dam.

—

Evie, barely noticing it, felt a lifting of her own spirits. As though the shadows—which she had not even known she lived with—had lightened a bit. She no longer was pulled into those brief but deep pockets of grief she had felt after Reginald died. She went about her life as she had now for years, she enjoyed being with Artie in the evenings, getting into bed after putting on her face cream, pulling the quilt up and turning to him. She had found her husband not to be quite so soft these days. In fact, there were times, to her surprise, that he seemed (almost) quietly arrogant, and she was aware that she liked that. She was going to surprise him and take him to London for Christmas.

—

(In three and a half years’ time, weeks after Artie died of a heart attack in his sleep during a heat wave in which they’d lost their power—he had not been well for a number of months—Evie would find in his mother’s jewelry box in the attic all the notes from Artie’s students, and as she went through them one by one, she found a printed-out photo of Artie with two students at graduation that was dated two years before, a strange-looking girl and a handsome boy, and on the back was written “Rhonda Lazarre and Danny Marino,” and they had their arms around Artie, who had his arms around them, and they were beaming into the camera. As Evie squinted at the photo, she saw—she thought she saw—that Artie had been crying. What a man he had been! Wait!—Wasn’t Rhonda Lazarre the young woman who had approached her and wanted to speak at the funeral? She had said something like: Mr. Dam meant a great deal to me, and Evie had said: He meant a great deal to many people, and she had refused the girl’s—the young woman’s—offer to speak. Oh dear.

(And then Evie picked up a folded piece of paper and, unfolding it, read the letter from Reginald written to Rob almost four years earlier, and she was stunned. She sat stunned for a very long time, and then she got up to call Rob, who was living in Brussels and had already returned there after the funeral. It was a phone call she would never forget. Her son had not taken her side; she felt an enormous devastation.

(As is true with some widows who could have been kinder to their husbands during their lifetimes, Evie spoke afterward of Artie always in terms of his being a saint. He was a saint, she said this again and again as she lived the rest of her life, never marrying again. An absolute saint, she said.)