An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

  “She’s upstairs, working out.” It was that time of day. Anne Marie would be upstairs in our bedroom, in her exercise outfit, all spandex and white strips of flesh and hair piled high and beaded sweat on her upper lip, watching television and pedaling the hell out of her stationary bike. At times I wondered how much longer it would stay stationary if she kept pedaling it that hard. My heart took a sad tumble at the thought of telling her about my true self; and then, since I’m not afraid of the big questions, I wondered if she would have been happier with someone else, someone who wasn’t a bumbler like me. There had been no shortage of bumbling in our time together. For instance, there was the time when we had dinner with a guy I worked with and his wife, and we got around to talking about Jews, or the Jewish religion at least, and Anne Marie asked the woman (she was an American) if she was Jewish, and she wasn’t, and then I said to the guy I worked with, “I know you’re not.” I said this because he was German, actually from Germany—his name was Hans—the implication being that since he was a German he must be a Nazi. Anne Marie pointed this out later on. As I told her, this wasn’t my intention, but our guests may have taken it that way: they left in a big hurry, even before dessert was served. After they left, Anne Marie got exasperated with me—exasperation, that testy cousin of resignation, which is what Anne Marie seemed to feel about me most of the time. I apologized to her. But in my defense, guess what: I found out later that the guy wasn’t. Jewish, that is.

  But I suppose that wasn’t the point. Was Anne Marie happy? Had I ever made her happy? Or did I only make her busy: running the kids here and there, going to work, doing the things that needed to be done around the house that I didn’t do—which (except for the lawn and some bedtime TV watching with the kids) was pretty much everything—and cleaning up my accidents, so many of them that she didn’t believe they were accidents anymore? I was one of the things that kept her busy, all right, me and her stationary bike. Did she recently seem less miserable and weepy than she’d been because she was happy or busy? Did I make her happy, or just busy? Or was there a difference?

  “Earth to Dad,” Katherine said. She was tall enough to reach up and knock on my head, as if checking to see if I were home, and she did just that, striking me on the forehead, but softly, so that it barely hurt and only for a second. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s your brother doing?”

  “He’s watching TV in his room.”

  I could picture Christian watching television (all of us had televisions in our bedrooms, plus one downstairs, plus one in the finished basement—we were like mission control with our many monitors). When Christian rode his scooter, he made happy sounds the way he had when he was a baby, noises that sounded like “Whee.” When he watched television he looked confused and angry at what he was seeing, like a dumb bully. I wished he were riding his scooter, even in the house, which we don’t normally allow, so I could picture him doing that instead of looking dumb and brutish in front of the television. I also wished I could give Christian and Katherine something to remember me by; this was a parental wish, I recognized it. For instance, my mother, during my father’s absence, gave me the stories about the Emily Dickinson House so that I’d have something besides a runaway father. And I still have them; I’ve kept them all this time, in my head, because they were good stories.

  My mother always talked about the Emily Dickinson House in terms of last gasps, of children vanished and sadly forgotten, of the last drop, drop, drop of bodies, big and small, new and used, down a lonely and unforgiving chasm. When I was nine years old, for example, she told me increasingly long and horrific stories about strangers, out-of-towners: men with shady pasts, faded jeans, outstanding warrants, and Marlboro whispers. They arrived as hitchhikers or bus riders, looking for a place to sleep, a place to work, not voting, not paying taxes. For them, the Emily Dickinson House didn’t loom or threaten but existed only for their temporary use: another big old house with easy locks, daytime-only occupancy, and a dust problem. Their forced entries were casual, experienced, which made their disappearances (according to my mother’s stories, you could barely hear their howls over the creaking of that venerable hell house) even more awful: because these men had known bad things out there in the world and had survived them, but they couldn’t survive the house. That’s how bad and interesting the house was, and it was right down the street, too. And there was my father, who did not smoke and wore khaki pants and not blue jeans and had never known trouble before: he wouldn’t even make it back to Amherst and the Emily Dickinson House; he’d be swallowed up by the world before he made it home. When I say I was afraid for these outlaw men of my mother’s stories, I was really afraid for my father, who I believed was out there alone in the bad, bad world. My father was what my mother’s Emily Dickinson House stories were about, really, which is why I thought about them, and it (the Emily Dickinson House) and my mother and my father, so much way back then, and why I still did, and do.

  But enough. There were many, many more stories, and they were my mother’s gift to me, and look where that gift got me—that’s the point. I didn’t want to leave my kids anything like that; but neither, I was realizing, did I want to give them the truth, which was dangerous and might end up hurting all of us and helping no one. While I was thinking of something safer to give them, Katherine opened the refrigerator, reached in, took out a tall Styrofoam cup, and began sucking loudly on the straw coming out of its lid.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “A smoothie,” she said.

  “Is that like a milkshake?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What makes a smoothie different from a milkshake?” I asked.

  Katherine thought about this for a moment, and then said, “It’s smoother.”

  “Good,” I said, and meant it. I had come home intending to give my family the truth. But instead I had given my daughter a nice, factual conversation about smoothies, something not to remember me by, and maybe this is the most we can do for our children after all: give them nothing to remember us by. “Good,” I said again.

  “What’s good?” Anne Marie said, coming into the kitchen from behind me. I turned to face her. Her hair was wet; she’d obviously just taken a shower. It was funny: she never blow-dried her hair, even though it was rope thick and long enough for Rapunzel to be jealous of—even so, she never owned a hair dryer, and still her hair managed to dry. I often imagined, in my spare moments, that her hair had its own heating coils, firing from within, and just looking at her I felt my own heating coils firing from within, the flames coming up through my legs and private parts and chest and into my face. I had to resist the urge to tackle her right there, out of love and desire. I had done this once, in the Pioneer Valley Mall, in a shoe store, where Anne Marie was trying on a pair of black knee-high boots, turning this way and that like the model she easily could have been, and my need for her was so big that there seemed no way to do justice to its enormity except to tackle her. So I did, scattering boxes and display tables and other customers. After we’d cleaned up the mess and apologized to the manager and bought the boots, Anne Marie had made me promise never, ever to do it again. So instead I said, “Smoothies.”

  “Smoothies what?”

  “Katherine is drinking one. We were just talking about how a smoothie isn’t a milkshake.” Anne Marie looked at me quizzically, as if I were speaking one of the many foreign languages I’d never learned to speak. So I clarified. “They’re different.”

  “How was your day?” Anne Marie asked. “Anything special happen?”

  This was the moment, of course, for me to tell her the truth. It was there in front of me, like another family member in the room. I thought of the bond analysts, could see the pages of their memoirs flapping like gums, telling me: Tell the truth, tell the truth; you will feel better, dude. I could do it, could I not? I would tell Anne Marie about the Emily Dickinson House fire and the Colemans and my time in prison; I would tell he
r about my parents and how I’d hurt them so, and how they sent me off to college because of it: I would tell her about how Thomas Coleman had just come to see me. I would tell Anne Marie that I’d lied to her out of love and fear of losing her, and now I was telling her the truth out of the same fear, and that if she’d please, please forgive me, I’d never tell her another lie again.

  So what did I actually tell Anne Marie? I told another lie. Because this is what you do when you’re a liar: you tell a lie, and then another one, and after a while you hope that the lies end up being less painful than the truth, or at least that is the lie you tell yourself.

  “Nothing special,” I said. And then, before she could ask me another question to which I’d also have to lie, I told her something true: “I love you so much, Anne Marie. You know that, right?”

  She smiled at me, put her hand on my cheek, which was her favorite fond gesture, and said, “I do know that. I do.”

  “I’m starving,” I said. “Let’s make dinner.” We did: Katherine shredded the lettuce, washed it under the faucet, then put it in the salad spinner, which she spun violently, switching hands when one got tired; I set the table, putting the utensils where I thought they should go; Anne Marie made the actual meal, which I don’t remember specifically but I’m sure consisted of most of the important food groups. Christian came down, still logy from his TV watching, and managed to do his part, too, which was to sit in his chair and stay out of everyone’s way.

  While we made dinner, the kitchen was filled with the usual chatter: Anne Marie talked about the book club she’d just joined, Katherine the soccer team she was the star of, Christian the cartoon he’d just watched and partially understood. Me, I didn’t talk much, mostly because there was that voice—What else? What else?—booming in my head, the voice I hadn’t heard in so many years. I was distracted by it, didn’t understand what it was doing there. I had what I wanted, it was with me, in the room, including the room itself. Was it possible that we hear that voice not when we want something else but when we’re in danger of losing the things we already have? The voice was so loud that I smacked myself on the side of the head to get rid of it, which Christian saw and imitated, and then, because he’d hit himself too hard, started crying and I had to comfort him, which at least helped me forget about the voice for a second.

  Finally we all sat down. After the day I’d had, it seemed to me something like a miracle that we were all eating at the same table, the way a family is supposed to. A miracle is something to be commemorated in prayer, they taught us that in college, except I didn’t know any prayers, had forgotten the few the nuns made us memorize. So I simply said, “I am the luckiest father and husband in the world.” I was, too; I had been lucky for ten years, and I was lucky for four more days, and then my luck ran out and I did something I shouldn’t have.

  4

  I went out of town on business. My bosses sent me to Cincinnati, where I was to pitch a revolutionary kind of sausage casing to the people at Kahn’s. All told, I was gone for less than thirty-six hours and everything went well (the casing pretty much spoke for itself and did all the work). The only hitch was that after I’d flown into the airport, gotten my van out of long-term parking, and driven to Amherst, I stopped to get gas only two miles from my house and managed to lock my keys in the van while doing so. I didn’t want to pay someone at the gas station to jimmy the lock, so I called Anne Marie to ask her to drive over a spare key.

  Anne Marie answered the phone. It was Wednesday afternoon, four o’clock or thereabouts. She smokes a cigarette in the morning, another before dinner, and a third last thing at night, and she must have just smoked one, because her voice came at me like a distant train, a lovely, throaty rumble bearing down on me through the receiver, and it made me happy and hopeful just hearing her say, “Hello?”

  “Hey, Anne Marie, honey,” I said, “it’s me, Sam.”

  “Sam,” she said, “are you having an affair?”

  That question stabbed me and changed my mood immediately. Oh, happiness can turn to despair so quickly it’s a miracle we don’t pull a muscle or wrench a neck with the suddenness. I was about to say, No, of course not, don’t even think it, when it occurred to me that by not ever telling Anne Marie what I’d done to the Emily Dickinson House or Thomas Coleman and his parents, I was having an affair of sorts, an affair with all the betrayal and the guilt if not the woman and the sex. Yes, I was in bad shape, my mind a clogged drain, and so it’s possible that I didn’t respond to Anne Marie for a few seconds or even half a minute, and finally she cried out, “You are having an affair, you are, it’s true!”

  “It is,” I said, and this was more bumbling on my part. I meant my response as a question, but maybe it sounded otherwise, like a statement, a confession, because Anne Marie started crying harder.

  “No, no,” I said, snapping to a little. “Of course I’m not having an affair. Why would you think that?”

  “Well, for one,” she said, “you went out of town on business.”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s true, I did. I told you that. You knew that.”

  “Sam,” she said, in that righteous, cocksure tone we use when we’ve known someone too well for too long, “I thought about it while you were gone. You’ve not once been out of town on business in your life.”

  This wasn’t true, exactly. My first year at Pioneer Packaging, I was sent to do a product demonstration, and the thing I was sent to demonstrate was that unbreakable mayonnaise jar. I demonstrated the hell out of it and wouldn’t rest until I’d dropped it from places low and high, bounced it off concrete and blacktop. Before I knew it, I’d taken up the better part of the day, and the potential clients were a little tired around the eyes and they didn’t buy the product, either. From then on the higher-ups at Pioneer Packaging always sent other people out into the world to meet clients and attend conventions, while I stayed around the plant. So as with the adultery, Anne Marie was wrong in letter but right in spirit, and the more I thought about it, the more this true story of mine sounded like a lie. But still I persisted.

  “But it’s true, it’s true,” I said, and started telling her about the sausage casing I’d designed, how it preserved the integrity of the meat in a way that no other casing ever had, but Anne Marie interrupted and said, “You’re lying. I don’t believe you.”

  “Anne Marie,” I said, “honey, you’ve got it all wrong. All of this is just a big mistake. I love you so much.”

  “You just shut up,” she said. “He told me you’d say that.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Who did? Who said I’d say what?”

  “The man whose wife you’re sleeping with. He told me that you’d say it was all a big mistake. That’s the other reason I know you’re having an affair. Because he told me so.”

  “Who is this guy?” I said, grateful that I had another lying man to focus on. “What’s his name?”

  “I’m not going to dignify that with a response. You know who he is.”

  “I don’t, I don’t,” I said. “What’s his name? Please tell me. Please.”

  And maybe I sounded sincere; I mean, I was sincere, but maybe I actually sounded that way, too. You can never tell how you sound over the phone, that evil piece of machinery, and I would stop using one, we all would, if only there weren’t these great distances we need to put between us and the people we need to talk to. Still, it’s possible that I truly sounded sincere. Or maybe Anne Marie was holding out hope that I wasn’t the cheater and liar she now believed me to be. Because she told me his name, as if maybe I didn’t know. Which, it turns out, I did.

  “Thomas,” she said, and her voice sounded kinder, softer, more hopeful than before. “Thomas Coleman.”

  “Oh no. Shit,” I said. This, of course, was the wrong thing to say and did nothing at all to convince Anne Marie of my innocence.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, her voice hard again, the way it gets after you’ve cried and then discovered you’ve been crying fo
r a good reason.

  “He’s lying,” I told her. “Don’t believe a word that guy says.”

  “He said you’d say that, and so he asked me to ask you why he would lie.”

  Oh, that hurt! Thomas had outsmarted me, and it felt bad. It’s a painful thing, finding out that you’re dumber than someone else. But then again, there is always someone smarter than you; you’d think we’d die from the constant pain of our mental inferiority, except that most of the time we’re too stupid to feel it. Yes, Thomas Coleman was smarter than I was, I knew it, and now my wife knew it, too.

  “That’s what I thought,” Anne Marie said again. “He also said that you’d say the whole thing with his wife was an accident, that you’d never meant for it to happen.”

  “That sounds like me,” I admitted. You had to hand it to Thomas: he really knew me, inside and out, and how to use that knowledge against me. I had no idea why he’d told Anne Marie I was cheating on her, rather than telling her the truth about my burning down the Emily Dickinson House and killing his poor mom and dad, but no doubt there was a reason, a good one, and he was smart enough to know it and I wasn’t. How did he get so terribly smart, so determined? Maybe it was the pain I’d caused that made him that way, and if that were true, then I’d sort of had a hand in it, in making him as smart and devious as he was. I was really starting to dislike the guy. But I also felt a little proud, like Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his monster turned on him, because, after all, it was Dr. Frankenstein who had made the monster strong and cunning enough to turn on him.

  “You know what else he said?” Anne Marie asked.

  “Tell me,” I said. I didn’t want to know, of course, but she was going to tell me anyway, so why not invite in the inevitable, which is why, in the movies, vampires have to be asked inside by their victims and always are.