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

by Brock Clarke

  Then my father lifted his hand and made his shuffling way out of the dining room. His hand was replaced by Deirdre’s face: she leaned over me, with her chin practically on my left shoulder. She was too close to actually see, to focus on, and I wondered if anthropologists and people from other planets knew this: that it’s better to look at alien cultures and worlds from afar, because if you’re too close, you don’t see anything but pores and the makeup that people use to try to cover them, and you don’t smell anything but warm hair and toothpaste, which was what Deirdre was to me that morning as she whispered, “Your father and I have been happy for a long time. And then you came back. You should never have come back. Don’t you dare judge us.”

  Then she was gone, too. I heard her slam the front door on her way out of the house. I waited several minutes so that I wouldn’t have to see my father and Deirdre outside, in my father’s car, arguing or commiserating or consoling. I drank my beer slowly, then walked into the kitchen and put the can on top of the refrigerator, where my father put his beer cans when he was conscientious enough to put them somewhere other than where he’d finished drinking them. Then I opened another beer. There was an ugly gnawing in my stomach, which I pretended was still hunger. The only thing to eat in the house was one lonely piece of white bread: I slipped it out of its plastic sleeve and chewed it slowly and thoughtfully, like an especially contemplative cow. Then, after I was through with the bread, after I’d given my father and Deirdre more than enough time to get away, I put my open beer into a paper bag and grabbed the last six-pack out of the fridge. I was going to need whatever courage the beer might give me, plus some. Because now that I’d seen my father with his Deirdre, I was going to have to go talk to the people who’d seen me with my own.

  21

  It was snowing in Camelot when I arrived. This snow was different from the snow in New Hampshire: it was less intense and deadly and beautiful, just scattered big flakes floating earthward, like confetti separated from the rest of the parade. There was no wind at all; it was cold, not painfully cold but rather the kind of brisk, bright, invigorating cold that made you think cold might not be such a bad thing after all. The sun kept peeking out from behind the clouds, making the clouds and the snow seem more brilliant than they would have been on their own. There were no cars in any of the driveways, no children playing on their pressure-treated wood play sets, no one shoveling their front steps. It was lunchtime on a weekday. There is no quieter time and place than weekday lunchtime in Camelot, but this seemed even quieter than normal. I felt as if it were years in the future and I were pulling into some sort of subdivisional preserve, not a place where people currently lived, but a place designed to show busloads of field-tripping schoolchildren how and where people had once lived before they moved somewhere else.

  I say there were no cars, but this wasn’t entirely true. There was mine, of course, and in my driveway, there was my father-in-law’s car and Anne Marie’s minivan. Thomas Coleman’s Jeep wasn’t in sight. Katherine would be at school; Christian would be eating lunch. He was the sort of boy who ate intensely, and so he wouldn’t be able to pay attention to anything except the sandwiches and milk he must finish. This would be my time: if Mr. Mirabelli had told Anne Marie what he’d seen, then I’d explain myself, I’d explain everything; if he hadn’t told her, then I’d tell her myself. I drank the rest of my beer, threw the can toward the back of the van, got out, and marched to the front door. This was my last chance: I knew this was my last chance because my face didn’t flame up but instead was ice cold, as though it were preparing itself to be another kind of face for another kind of life.

  I knocked on the door and waited. The snow stopped falling for a moment, as though in anticipation; the sun shone on me the way the sun never had before, just like in the Bible, when the weather is there to emphasize human drama and not just to grow and kill crops.

  Then the door opened. Thomas Coleman stood in the doorway. He was wearing leather sandals and a pair of black-and-white-checked baggy pants that weight lifters might wear over their spandex singlets during the Mr. Universe competition in San Diego. He was bare chested, his chest bony and flat and basically just a higher version of his stomach. His nipples were surprisingly large and choked with impressive, dark brown thatches of hair. He was wearing a white towel on his head, a thick piece of rope holding the towel tight to his skull. Thomas smiled and took a step toward me, and I hit him in the jaw as hard as I could, which admittedly wasn’t very hard: my fist hit his jaw with a thud instead of a crack. Thomas fell back into the doorway and onto his ass; he sat there rubbing his jaw but still smiling at me. It was the first time I’d ever punched anyone, and it was the most unsatisfying feeling in the world, and I knew immediately it is better to be wounded than to wound, which is yet another truth I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide. Gandhi knew this, too, until someone wounded him to death, which goes to show that there is always an exception to the rule, which makes you wonder why we have rules at all.

  Thomas scrambled to his feet, then stood there, still smiling, his arms crossed over his bare chest, and I finally considered his strange getup.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” I asked him.

  “Boola, boola, boola,” he said.

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Boola, boola, boola,” he said again, as though he were a Muslim calling other Muslims to prayer.

  Which was exactly what he was supposed to be, I should say that now, and I knew exactly what was going on. The Mirabellis are a sentimental, rearward-looking brood, which is not only to say that they find comfort in the past, but that they re-create those comforts whenever they might most need them in the present. For instance, Anne Marie had a considerable stretch in her childhood when she went everywhere in her tutu, to which she was greatly attached. When we first moved to Camelot, and Anne Marie was having such a hard time with the thinness of the walls, her parents showed up one night wearing tutus, and this somehow made Anne Marie feel better, as though the thinness of the walls could be redeemed by the thickness of the past. As though it wasn’t enough simply to remember the past; as though one had to re-create it in order for it to do any good. Then there was the time, right before Katherine was born, when Anne Marie had some complications in the pregnancy, some hiccup in our girl-to-be’s heartbeat, and Anne Marie had to be hospitalized for a few days. To buck her up, and because Ben Franklin had always been by far Anne Marie’s favorite founding father in grade school, Mr. Mirabelli had visited her dressed as Ben Franklin, complete with the spectacles and knickers and kite and almanac, and Mrs. Mirabelli had dressed, on alternating days, as Mrs. Franklin or a bawdy French dame. There were too many of these childhood moments to count, and one of them was the Mirabellis’ only trip abroad, to Morocco, where they had heard Muslims calling to Muslims, which brings us to this lunchtime in Camelot. I’d always been included in these reenactments—had worn a tutu and dressed up as either Sam or John Adams, the stouter one—until now.

  “Out of my way,” I said, then charged past Thomas and into my house, through the empty living room and into the dining room. The table there was much lower than normal and was balanced on four of Christian’s building blocks, its legs removed and stashed in the corner of the room, like kindling ready for the fire. The normal tablecloth—white, lace—had been replaced with a tablecloth with some complicated pattern meant to seem Middle Eastern. There were covered serving dishes filled with something I guessed would be almost edible (the Mirabellis weren’t known for their skill around the kitchen). Mrs. Mirabelli was the only person in the room besides me; she was, despite her arthritis, sitting crossed-legged on the floor and was wearing a white homemade burka, which was clearly just a bedsheet with a hole cut in it in such a way that it covered her hair and ears and then extended southward. She had unstitched and then restitched a lace napkin or handkerchief for a veil; when she heard me come in, she lifted her homemade veil, looked at me in the way you might expect a mother-in-law to look at h
er wayward son-in-law—a look that was somewhere between pity and poison—and then dropped the veil again.

  “Well, look who’s here,” my father-in-law said as he walked into the room. Mr. Mirabelli was dressed like the underground leader of a radical Islamic faction: he was wearing a green army jacket, a long white gown he might have stolen from a hospital, and a red-and-white-checked scarf wrapped around his head and flowing down his back. All he lacked was the Russian-made machine gun, for which, considering the circumstances, I was grateful. My father-in-law had his left hand on Christian’s shoulder. Christian was dressed like Thomas—sweatpants and no shirt—except that the towel was in his left hand and not on his head, as though he refused to commit fully to the costume. Or maybe it was just that he’d spilled something, as he was inclined to do, and had used the towel to wipe it up.

  “Hey, bud,” I said to him. Christian smiled at me uncertainly; he raised his hand to his hip, gave me a shy, surreptitious wave, then took his seat next to his grandmother.

  “Hello, Mr. Mirabelli,” I said to my father-in-law, as though I were introducing myself for the first time. And as far as my father-in-law was concerned, I was.

  “Coleslaw!” Mr. Mirabelli said, then sat next to Christian. Christian gave me a sudden look of blank panic, the way children do when they don’t know whether something is supposed to be funny or frightening.

  “Who?” I said. “What?”

  “Please join us, Coleslaw,” my father-in-law said. “It’s dinnertime.”

  “Boola, boola, boola,” Thomas said as he entered the room and sat at the end of the table, where I normally sat. It was hard to miss the symbolism, and I didn’t; but I couldn’t focus my full attention or outrage on it just then, either.

  “Did you just call me Coleslaw?” I asked my father-in-law. If this was my nickname, I’d never heard it before. The Mirabellis had never been much for nicknames, not even shortened versions of their own names, maybe because Anne sounded all wrong without the Marie, and because Mrs. Mirabelli’s name—Louisa—would be a man’s if you shortened it, and because Mr. Mirabelli’s name was Christian, and if you shortened that, it might be seen as disrespectful to his Savior.

  “What else would I call you besides Coleslaw, Coleslaw?” Mr. Mirabelli said. He gave me a big, mirthless smile and then gestured toward a place at the table, opposite them, complete with plate and fork and napkin. I guessed the place setting had been intended for Anne Marie and not for me.

  “Where’s Anne Marie?” I asked, dropping to the floor with a creak of knees and a crash of ass. As I did, the gas fireplace in the room suddenly flared to life, as though my sitting down were Moses and it was the bush. Mr. Mirabelli held up the remote control that worked the fireplace, tucked it inside his green army jacket as though it were his sidearm, and then said, “Pass the couscous, please, Coleslaw.” The couscous—which was actually rice, Uncle Ben’s, the five-minute kind—was closer to Thomas than to me, but I did what I was told: I got on my knees, put my left hand on the table for balance, and then reached across with my right. But my weight was too much for the quadruple amputee the table had become: before I’d reached the couscous, my corner of the table slipped off its supporting building block and onto the wood floor, causing the plates, serving dishes, glasses, everything except the couscous, to come rushing at me as though I were the castle and the table settings the siege.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, fumbling around until I found the building block, stuck it under that corner of the table, and then pushed the dishes, glasses, et al. back from where they’d been displaced.

  “No problem,” Mr. Mirabelli said. “That’s life in the Casbah!”

  At this, Thomas said a few more “boola, boola’s” and Mrs. Mirabelli rang her finger cymbals and then fondly recalled the time in Morocco when Mr. Mirabelli had paid too much money for each family member, one by one, to ride on what had been advertised as a camel but apparently wasn’t.

  “I’m so sorry for everything” I said, once the hilarity had died down a little. I said this to Mr. Mirabelli, but loud enough for everyone to hear, in case Mr. Mirabelli had told them what he’d seen me do in New Hampshire. And in apologizing for everything, I was also apologizing to everyone except Thomas, who was sitting at his end of the table, spooning the rice into his mouth, a pleased look on his face. I was wishing now that I’d asked him a few questions—about what he’d told the Mirabellis, about what they knew and didn’t know about my past and present—before I’d rushed into the house.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Coleslaw,” Mr. Mirabelli said pleasantly.

  “About what happened in New Hampshire,” I said. Because I figured that this was part of his plan: he’d get me to admit to the bad things I’d done rather than have him say them for me. This was a parental tactic: whenever Katherine or Christian did something wrong, we always made them identify their crime themselves, which then served as the appetizer to the main course of their punishment.

  “New Hampshire,” Mr. Mirabelli said. “It’s funny you should say that, Coleslaw. I once followed a guy to New Hampshire.”

  “Thomas told you where I was going,” I said, then shot what I hoped was an angry look at Thomas. Thomas didn’t seem to care what was going on around him, though. He maintained a look of perfect contentment, obviously so happy to be allowed just to sit there at the head of the table and say, “Boola, boola, boola,” at the appropriate moment and to act as though he belonged.

  “I don’t need anyone to tell me how to follow a guy,” Mr. Mirabelli said. I remembered now that my father-in-law had been a claims investigator for thirty-plus years and had followed people for a living. No, Mr. Mirabelli wouldn’t have needed Thomas’s help to follow me up to New Hampshire, but I bet Detective Wilson would have needed the help. And I bet Thomas had given it to him.

  “It was cold in New Hampshire,” Mr. Mirabelli said. “I didn’t like it much.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You know?” he said. “How do you know, Coleslaw?”

  “I know that’s where you saw me kiss that woman.”

  “You kissed a woman, Coleslaw?”

  “I don’t even know her name,” I admitted.

  “Doesn’t matter to me who you kiss, Coleslaw.” Mr. Mirabelli said this in a way that sounded so nonchalant that it couldn’t possibly have been nonchalant, as though Mr. Mirabelli had practiced saying it in the mirror before I’d arrived. “Does it matter to anyone else who Coleslaw kisses?”

  Everyone, even Christian, shook their heads to indicate they didn’t care who I kissed, which, under other circumstances, might have been nice of them, might have felt liberating. Thomas helped himself to another heaping spoonful of rice. Mrs. Mirabelli lifted her veil, reached out for a platter of what appeared to be wet garbanzo beans, scooped up three beans, and then, maybe thinking of her figure, put two of them back on the platter and one in her mouth, which she gently sucked on as if it were a delicate gum ball. Christian sat there, slack jawed, towel in his hand as though ready to wipe the drool that might come from his slack jaw.

  “As far as we’re concerned,” Mr. Mirabelli said, “you can kiss whoever you want, Coleslaw.”

  “Except us,” Mrs. Mirabelli said.

  “You can kiss anyone but us, Coleslaw,” Mr. Mirabelli said. “There are apparently some limits to who you can kiss, Coleslaw.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that name?” I asked him. I glanced again at Christian: his towel was now somewhere out of sight, and he was still wearing that slightly bewildered look, as though things were happening in a place where he could see and hear them but not understand them.

  “I don’t know what else I’m supposed to call you, Coleslaw,” Mr. Mirabelli said.

  “My name,” I said. “Sam!”

  “Who?” Mr. Mirabelli asked, and then looked one by one at Thomas and his wife and his grandson, and each of them in turn asked, “Who? Who? Who?” like inquisitive owls, even Christian, alth
ough I couldn’t and didn’t blame him, because what kid doesn’t like to make animal noises? By the time the table was through asking who “Sam” was, I was starting to wonder myself. Which, I was now understanding, was the point—that I was no longer a son-in-law to them but was only a stranger with a strange name—and as with all points, I found myself thinking fondly of the time, a few moments earlier, when I didn’t understand it.

  “Where is Anne Marie?” I asked. “I need to talk to Anne Marie.”

  “We were just talking about her before you got here, Coleslaw,” my father-in-law said.

  “What were you saying about her?”

  “That she’s tough,” Mr. Mirabelli said.

  “She is,” I said, agreeing with what he’d said, but not at all liking the sound of it.

  “She got some bad news today, Coleslaw,” he said, and of course I knew exactly what the bad news was and who was the one who’d given it to her. “She got some very bad news. But she’s tough. She’ll get over it. She’ll move on. She already has.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked into the kitchen, yelling, “Anne Marie! Anne Marie!” but there was nothing in there but the adobe tile and casement windows and restaurant-quality galley stove and titanium refrigerator-freezer. I walked back through the dining room and headed toward the stairs. “Anne Marie!” I yelled as I walked up the stairs, and then I yelled it again as I wandered through our bedroom, the kids’ bedrooms, the hallway bathroom, the guest room in which no guest had ever stayed, the bathroom in the hallway, back into our bedroom again. I even pulled down the ceiling door to the attic crawl space and yelled, “Anne Marie!” into that and was answered by a shower of pink insulation dust, which I guess was the house’s way of telling me, She’s not here. Your wife is not here.