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

by Brock Clarke

  “He said that we didn’t belong together anyway, and good riddance. He said I was much too beautiful to be with a man like you.”

  “Hey, Anne Marie, I’ve said the same thing. Many, many times.” And I had. But it was different with Thomas saying it. When I said Anne Marie was too beautiful for me, it was as if only I knew and saw the truth. Now that Thomas had said it, though, I could see us as everyone else no doubt did: we were the couple that no one could figure out. What does she see in him? That was the unanswerable question.

  “Listen,” I said. “I know you don’t believe me. But don’t trust this guy Thomas; he’s bad news.”

  “You’d know,” she said.

  “I would?”

  “Bad news knows bad news,” she said. I could hear her light up another cigarette, which meant that she was on track to smoke more than her daily three. She didn’t like to smoke around the kids, and so I thought maybe I could talk to them while she finished her smoke. I’d lost her; it felt that way already. But I hadn’t lost the kids yet, I didn’t think. Apparently this is what you do when you lose someone you love: you scramble to make sure you don’t lose everyone you love.

  “Hey,” I said, “are the kids around?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I talk to them?”

  “No,” she said.

  After that, silence opened up between us, big and yawning and much wider than the actual two miles between the gas station from which I was calling and our home to the west. The gap was so big that it felt as though there were nothing I could do to close it, nothing at all. It was the worst feeling in the world. Think of when California finally breaks off from the rest of country, and the people in Nevada watching it happen from their new coastline. That’s what I felt like.

  So what did I do? Did I finally, out of desperation, do what the bond analysts told one another to do? Did I tell Anne Marie the truth? I didn’t. It would have been like reaching inside of me and yanking out one of my organs—my liver, my spleen, or one of their vital neighbors—and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. But I could tell Anne Marie what she thought was the truth. This is what I decided, right there on the phone: that I would tell Anne Marie I’d had an affair with Thomas Coleman’s wife. After all, wasn’t it better to be a philanderer than an arsonist and a murderer? Wasn’t I catching a bit of a break here, that my wife was convinced I was a philanderer and not something much worse? Wasn’t it better—if your wife thought you were a philanderer and wouldn’t be convinced otherwise—just to go ahead and admit to her truth, so that you could then apologize and beg her forgiveness, and then she could get on with the business of forgiving you and things could get back to normal? This was my thinking when I admitted to Anne Marie, “OK, yes, I cheated on you. I am so sorry. Please let me come home and we’ll talk this over.”

  I could hear Anne Marie suck in a breath, one, two, three times, as if she were inhaling the words love, honor, and cherish before exhaling loudly into the receiver, releasing those words into the mysterious fiber optics between us.

  “Good-bye,” she said. “Don’t call back. I’m serious. Don’t come home, either.” She paused dramatically again, sucked in one more breath, and then said, “You’ve really fucked things up this time, Sam.”

  “Wait …,” I said, but she didn’t and hung up.

  I stood there in the gas station. It was a big one, right off the highway, with too many pumps. Suddenly the place seemed full of families, parents and their children, and there were a few extended families, too, grandparents with weak bladders who’d requested the pit stop, all of them so grateful to have a brood of their own. I hated them, the way you hate the morning after a night of not sleeping, when it comes up both blurry and sharp at the same time. It made me want to howl—howl about the world that wasn’t mine anymore and how I hated it, howl about the truth and how I wasn’t brave enough to tell it—and so I did exactly that: I howled right there in the gas station and was given a wide berth by the other gas pumpers.

  But the howl had a fortuitous effect: it summoned the gas station attendant. I stopped howling long enough to tell him about locking the keys in my van, and he unlocked the door with his ingenious thin slice of metal. I paid him, climbed in, started the van, and then sat there. I had a full tank of gas and nowhere to go. Nowhere to go! I started howling again, except the windows were rolled up and so it was as though I were howling in my own crypt, with the engine running. Oh, that was loneliness! I empathized with Thomas Coleman right then, even though he’d made a ruin of my life. Because the loneliness I felt was the loneliness of someone all alone, the loneliness of an orphan.

  Except I wasn’t one. That thought stopped my howling, because after all, I had a father, a mother, too, and as far as I knew they were alive, which was a plus. So I would go to them, even if they didn’t want me. Besides, I had nowhere else to go.

  5

  That’s how I came to be driving on Amherst’s streets for the first time in five years, even though I lived only two miles from the center of town. I’d learned that I could drive the spur around town on the way to work, and Katherine’s school, which was called Amherst Elementary, was actually a new, sprawling red brick building outside of Amherst, and all the necessary superstores we shopped at weren’t in Amherst, either; they were on Route 116, which is to say they weren’t really anywhere. This is how it is these days: you can live in a place without having to actually have a life there.

  And there was that voice, back as loud as ever, asking, What else? What else? The van was awfully quiet and lonely without the kids making noise and Anne Marie telling them not to, and so to fill the loneliness I listened to the voice carefully, maybe too carefully, and didn’t pay enough attention to my driving, and that’s how I ended up ramming into a K-Car in front of me. Luckily, it was a gentle ramming: the old lady driving the car wasn’t hurt and neither was her car, really, and after some initial confusion she seemed to remember that the bumper had been loose and hanging off the frame before I’d rammed it. I had, however, knocked over a few bags of vegetables and fruit in the backseat, and so I crawled into her car and tried to put the produce back in the bags. The bags were broken, though, and the produce ended up rolling all over the backseat and floor. Still, the old lady was very sweet about it, and even though I was pretty sure I remembered her from my younger days, she didn’t recognize me as the boy I’d been, the boy who burned down, et cetera, which I thought was promising indeed. We exchanged information—which by law we were required to do—and then parted ways. All in all, it was a very pleasant, civilized accident I got into on the way to my parents’ house. As the old lady pulled away, I had a vision of the fruit and vegetables happily rolling around her backseat, and I remembered that my father was a big fan of fresh produce and had once even started up a garden, which didn’t work out the way he’d planned.

  And so, a few facts about my father and then his failed garden. My father was an editor for the medium-size university press in town. He mostly edited books on American history, but his subspecialty was the relationship between popular music and American culture. In addition to his books, my father also covered the area’s annual squeeze-box festival for the local newspaper.

  “Sam,” he once asked me, “do you know why the accordion is so important? Do you?”

  I was seven at this point. I didn’t know anything about anything and told my father as much.

  “Because it is part of the history of music and immigration,” he said. “The Acadians played it, and when they moved from Canada to Louisiana, they brought their squeeze-boxes with them. The accordion is their instrument. It is their gift to the world.”

  “It hurts my ears,” I told him.

  This simple, seemingly innocent comment pretty much ruined my poor dad. He couldn’t stand knowing that his son did not admire his occupation. I was seven, let me remind you, and knew nothing about the relationship between a man’s lifework and his sense of self-worth, and my father should have ign
ored me. But he didn’t: instead, my father left the editing and musicology business and searched around for something else to do, something I might respect him for. Somehow he decided that I would respect him if he became a farmer. Amherst is not exactly the country, but my father turned our half-acre backyard plot into a minibreadbasket anyway. For six months—May to October—my father grew beets, zucchini, tomatoes, pumpkins, garlic. Our backyard was teeming. But we never ate any of it, because my father wouldn’t let us. He said we couldn’t “reap the harvest” until the time was right.

  “When will the time be right?” I wanted to know.

  When I asked this, my father looked at me in complete surprise, as if he were hoping all along that I would tell him when he should pick his vegetables. I was eight by this time, but even I could tell that my father didn’t know what he was doing, and also that he was in some real emotional trouble. Or maybe he didn’t want to harvest his crops because he was afraid that the vegetables would somehow be wrong. Anyway, that night my father told my mother (and later she told me) that he needed to go out in the world and find something worth doing, something that would make us—her and me—proud of him.

  My mother apparently told my father in response that if he sliced himself open, stuffed himself with his accordions, concertinas, and rotting vegetables, and then hung himself on a pole in the middle of his miserable little garden, then he would probably make one impotent, homely-looking scarecrow.

  My father left the next day and didn’t come back until three years later and then was rehired by the university press when he did. But right after he left, my mother starting telling me stories about the Emily Dickinson House and the terrible mysteries therein, and if those stories were supposed to lead me, eventually, to break into the Emily Dickinson House in the middle of the night and accidentally burn it down and kill Thomas Coleman’s parents in the process—if my mother’s stories were supposed to do all this and send me to prison and thus take away ten years of my life—then they did what they were supposed to.

  I got angrier and angrier in the car, just thinking about all this bad family history, and by the time I got to my parents’ house, I was ready to take my anger out on someone or something. So I took it out on the front door. I banged on the door and banged and banged until my fist hurt. No one answered, so I yelled out, “It’s me! Sam! I’m home!” Still no one answered, and my anger turned to dread, that sort of dread you feel when you go home and wonder whether everything has changed or nothing has.

  Then I opened the door—it wasn’t locked—and found that everything had changed: it looked nothing like the house I remembered. The house I remembered had the neat sort of disorder peculiar to the well-read and overeducated: in the house I remembered, there were books and magazines everywhere, but everything else—dishes, glasses, clothes—was in its proper place. This house, on the other hand, looked as though it had been strip-mined by Vikings. There were empty bottles—gin bottles, beer bottles, red wine bottles—scattered everywhere. There were even empty peach schnapps and wine cooler and white zinfandel bottles here and there—in between couch cushions, in the fireplace, on top of the microwave—which made me wonder if my parents had been drinking in the house with high school girls or sorority sisters. My parents had once been big believers in natural woodwork—the wainscoting, banisters, overwide windowsills—but now the wood looked pale and sickly, as though it were turning into linoleum. There were ashtrays on nearly every surface—the kind of shallow, thin metallic ashtrays that you could only get by stealing them from diners and restaurants—but since all the ashtrays were overflowing, some of the bottles had cigarette butts soaking in the remaining drops of booze. There were stacks of dishes in the sink and piles of pots and pans on the stovetop, and none of them had been washed; the food had been caked and dried on them for so long that the spaghetti sauce and the flecks of vegetable and meat matter looked as natural a part of the pots and pans as the handles and the lids. The pantry shelves were totally empty except for those things—confectioners’ sugar, toothpicks, tiny marshmallows—that you couldn’t ever get rid of, plus boxes and boxes of these candy-bar-looking things. They were called Luna bars, and I assumed they were some sort of health food for women because the boxes featured highly stylized drawings of women jogging around the moon. The only items in the refrigerator were a half-empty two-liter bottle of tonic water and a jar of light mayonnaise that had probably been there for several presidential terms. The whole house smelled like a perfumed dog, even though my parents had never, to my knowledge, owned a dog, and my mother, to my knowledge, had never worn perfume. There was an exercise bike stationed in front of an enormously big and impossibly thin TV, which was perched on the middle shelf of an otherwise empty bookcase—empty of books, and empty even of other shelves. That was the biggest change: in the house I remembered, there were books everywhere, but now I couldn’t find a one, not even a TV Guide. I had even begun to wonder whether I was actually in the right house when I heard a noise—a grunt or a squeak—coming from the guest room. I followed the sound. That’s when I saw my father.

  He was an invalid and in bad shape; this was obvious at first glance. His face was shrunken and drawn back, and he had a plaid wool blanket on his lap. When he saw me, my father made a kind of wounded-animal noise that I took to mean one-third surprise, one-third Welcome home, one-third Please don’t look at me, I’m hideous, and the blanket slid off his lap and onto the floor, kicking up a good amount of dust that floated there in the sunlight like something beautiful and precious and then sank to the wide-planked pine floor.

  I returned the blanket to his lap and asked, “Oh, Dad, what happened to you?” even though it was obvious what had happened to him: he’d had a stroke. There is no mistaking a stroke victim, even if you haven’t seen one before, which I hadn’t. I didn’t know what else to say, so I repeated, “Oh, Dad.” He seemed to appreciate my awkward position, because he made the wounded-animal noise again, but this time it was much more soothing, and I was calmed by it.

  “Don’t say another word,” I told him. “Relax. Let me do the talking and get you up to speed.” I told him about college and my switch from English to packaging science, and I told him about Anne Marie and Katherine and Christian and about my job at Pioneer Packaging and our house in Camelot and how much I missed him and Mom. I didn’t tell him, though, about the voice that asked, What else? or Thomas Coleman or Anne Marie’s kicking me out, because I figured he already had enough to worry about. But even so, this story must have overwhelmed him a little in its detail and scope, because by the time it was done he seemed to be asleep. I shook my father by the arm, gently at first, but then harder and harder until he woke up with an alarmed snort. From then on I asked only short, factual questions, like “Where’s Mom?” to which he responded in a two-syllable grunt that I took to mean, She’s out.

  We sat there for a while in silence. It got darker and I turned on the light. I didn’t feel the need to talk, maybe because whatever I might have said wouldn’t have been as smart as the silence. My father had a holy-man quality to him: he struck me as having the sort of deep wisdom cripples seem to get with their crippling, and I was prepared to sit there and soak up whatever knowledge he might emanate. It was nice. But the place really was a mess. Even my father’s bedroom was littered with beer cans and empty wine bottles, and there were even a few boxes of wine, the sort that comes with its own spigot. I was certain they were my mother’s because she would always have a drink with dinner and my father never did. Besides, I couldn’t imagine him drinking anything now without a straw and I didn’t see any of them scattered around.

  And on the topic of my mother, where in the hell was she? Where did she get off, leaving my crippled father alone in his condition and not even cleaning the house before she left it? Did her crippled husband not deserve a little more dignity, a little less filth? The more I ruminated on it, the more I realized how typical this was of my mother. She, as mentioned, was always the hard-hea
rted one, and even when my father left us for those three years, she didn’t shed a tear. My mother wasn’t exactly the welcome wagon when my father came back, either, and my old man really wore himself out trying to get back in her good graces. Thinking about it now, I decided there was a direct connection between his stroke and that difficult time, too. And then there were those Emily Dickinson House stories she used to tell me, the ones that ruined so many lives, and I was really getting worked up about her, my callous mother, who had now apparently abandoned my father in his time of need. Where did she get off? I might have said this out loud, because my father nearly raised his eyebrows at me and for a second I thought he was going to chastise me for being rude to my mother, but instead he said, “Man.”

  “Man what?” I said.

  “Grown,” my father said, or that’s what I thought he said, and then he raised his finger as if to point at me. Or that’s what I thought he was doing. The finger made it only about an inch off his lap and then fell back again. Of course, this could all have been a big misunderstanding. But then again, maybe misunderstanding is what makes it possible to be in a family in the first place. After all, when I was eight I understood my father all too clearly: he was scared, and so he left us. My mother was lonely and angry at his leaving, and so she told me those stories about the Emily Dickinson House. I understood that, too. Maybe we had understood too much about one another; maybe if we’d misunderstood one another, then we’d have been more of a family. Maybe if we’d been more of a family, I would have seen my father in the last ten years and he wouldn’t have to marvel at how much I’d grown. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  “I am a grown man,” I said to my father. And then, remembering Terrell in prison, I clarified: “I’m a grown-ass man.”