Page 52 of The Things We Never Say

He told her again, briefly, how it had happened. But he did not tell her much of anything else. He did not tell her about Rachel or Francesca or Rob, and when Flossie asked again “How’s Evie doing?” he said again that she was fine. He did tell her about Ken Moynihan, and about coming to Spud’s with him, and she said, as she had said on the phone, that this made her jealous. And she drank. She drank a lot. “Yes,” she said whenever the waiter came by, “I’ll take another glass.”

—

Their old spontaneous friendship seemed gone. How could it not be, with what Artie now knew about Reginald? “How’s Sophie?” he asked, and she waved a hand back and forth and said, “Oh, she’s a pain in the ass.” And Artie just nodded. She wore no nail polish, he noticed; her fingernails looked slightly dirty to him, but that could not be true.

And then, when dessert was almost over, Flossie ducked her head down and said, “Sophie hates me because of that stupid affair I had twenty years ago.”

“What affair?”

She looked at him with her painted eyebrows shooting up and said, “Oh come on, you had to have known about it, everybody else did.”

“I didn’t know. What affair?”

And she told him that the man was Ed Merrill, Anne’s husband, and he said, “I never knew that.”

Flossie looked down at her hand and said, “I was lonely. That’s the whole reason. I was just lonely married to Reginald. But God, I still miss him so much, every day I miss Reg, he was smart, Artie, you know he was a really smart man!”

Artie sat back and said, “I suspect you’ll miss him for the rest of your life, why wouldn’t you?”

“Thank you, Artie,” Flossie said. “Thank you for understanding that.”

“And I understand you were lonely. So there.” Artie thought about it, and decided that he would not ask, except she answered his (unasked) question and said, “And when Reg found out about my affair with Ed he told our daughter, she was ten years old! But he told her, and it turns out—now that her dearly loved father is dead—that she’s never forgiven me.”

Artie took a deep breath. “Forget it,” he said, waving a hand, and he understood that he was saying this to himself. All of it tired him, the whole thing. Flossie and Reginald and Sophie and even Evie. They all tired him. Except Rob did not tire him, nor Francesca; he felt the keenness of love for the young man that he had always felt, and for his son’s wife as well.

And then Flossie leaned forward and mentioned the new president. She said, “You know, Artie, I’ve been thinking about him. Maybe it was good he got elected. Maybe he will shake things up.”

Artie looked at her. She was drunk. She shook her fists, and her large body wiggled. “Shake things up,” she said, and laughed.

And Artie, he never later understood why, began to laugh as well.

“Shake things up,” Flossie kept repeating. “Shake it all up.”

“Oh, he will,” said Artie, and she laughed louder.

“Artie, I’m so glad you’re still jovial,” Flossie said. “I have been worried about that.” And she began to laugh even more loudly now.

As Artie laughed, he felt it coming up through him, the emotion that was not remotely laughter but appeared that way, and he could not stop.

“You’re killing me!” Flossie said, tipping back her head, and he saw then that she was fully drunk. His laughter—only it was not laughter, it just sounded like laughter—was many things, a knowledge that the world, his country, would never be the same, not in his lifetime, that he loved his son, and that he no longer loved “poor old Flossie,” as his wife had called her. It came to him that he had once thought he could be himself with Flossie. But that self—himself—seemed far away now, so much had transpired. He understood fleetingly (and correctly) that he would never again be thinking of ending his life—in spite of the variety of sadnesses he felt. (And would feel in his few years to come.)

Tears came from Artie’s eyes as they laughed, and the laughter was an awful sound. People at the nearby tables turned to look. But Artie could not stop. And he thought of his sister then, in the cellar of their childhood apartment, with the confectionary sugar all over her face. Just looking for something sweet.

What are we going to do now, Mama? What are we going to do now?

And still it rose up from inside him, his awful laughter, which was not laughter, while tears came down his face, and the surf kept pounding up over the rail, splashing onto the windows.

Epilogue

That summer, and the next, Artie took his sailboat for rides; he would glide over the waves if it was windy, or he would go gently if there was only a breeze. But he was alone, Rob was never with him, except for one time during that second summer when Rob and Francesca had come back to visit. As Artie rode over the water alone his mind became blank, and he was grateful for that. But as soon as he tied the boat back up and returned into his life, the quiet dread rose within him.

Artie had watched as the new president sneeringly humiliated the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office. He listened with horror as the man said he would like to make Gaza “the new French Riviera.” He watched as the president deported people to foreign prisons and arrested students who had spoken out against the war in Gaza, students who could have been Artie’s a few years earlier, just taken off the streets. He watched as the president hung an enormous billowing photo of himself outside the Department of Agriculture building, and as he gave a military parade on his birthday. He watched as a prison was opened in Florida, “Alligator Alcatraz,” where people were held in cages and the mosquitoes were so bad that some of the guards quit. He watched as people in Gaza starved and the United States did nothing about it.

Every day brought something new. On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide.

—

One day a letter arrived from Brussels; it had no return address on it. Inside was a piece of paper with Rob’s handwriting: Get burner phones to call me with.