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

by Brock Clarke

  “I think you do,” I said. I remembered what Detective Wilson had said the day before, when he’d seemed so confident, and so I tried to mimic him. “I don’t know who it is yet,” I said, “but I bet you do. And I bet I’ll find out.” I patted Thomas on his frozen shoulder, then walked around to the driver’s side of the van, and Thomas followed me.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

  “I’m going to my mother’s apartment to talk to her and Anne Marie.”

  “Jesus, Sam,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “It’s too late.”

  But it wasn’t too late. I had an idea that it wasn’t too late. “Why did Anne Marie take your Jeep to my mother’s house instead of her van?” I asked him. “I’m just curious.”

  “My Jeep was blocking her in,” he said. “It was easier for her just to take the Jeep.”

  “Why didn’t you go with her?”

  “She said she wanted to go by herself,” Thomas said, not able to keep the resentment out of his voice. I knew then that he had wanted to go with her, and she wouldn’t let him, and that he felt a little lost and abandoned because of it, the relationship between man and woman being like that between man overboard and life raft.

  “It’s not too late,” I said.

  “It is,” Thomas said. “You should just give up.” He suddenly turned away from me and ran to the house, brushing the snow off his head and shoulders as he ran.

  Thomas was right: I should just have given up, and that’s another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide. Unlike other guides—those guides that tell you not to give up on this or that, never to give up, good things will happen if you just don’t give up—I’ll tell you to just give up, immediately and without a struggle, surrender being our most underrated reaction to difficulty.

  But I didn’t know that then, and so I didn’t listen to Thomas. I didn’t give up.

  22

  As part of my arsonist’s guide to writers’ homes in New England, I might include a chapter on how it feels to see your mother standing in the street outside her apartment and talking with your wife, your wife who up until now and for years and years has believed your mother to be dead, dead and in the ground, in the ground and so unable to tell your wife all the things about you, her husband, that you didn’t ever, ever want her to know.

  It feels bad. Not very good at all. The sight of them together took my breath away, and so I had to stop the van a block away from where they were standing, just to get it back (my breath, that is). My mother and Anne Marie were standing next to my mother’s car and saying good-bye, that was clear: they hugged several times in the minute I sat there, watching them. Anne Marie grabbed my mother’s hand with both of hers, held it, and said something and then something else; then they both doubled over, laughing. When they were done laughing, they hugged again and held it. I counted to ten, and still they hugged. It was snowing heavily now, and the air was so thick with the stuff that the streetlights had kicked on, even though it was barely three o’clock. The street hadn’t yet been plowed, and the snow was perfect in the way of unplowed snow. It was the kind of snow that made you wish you had a sled, an old one with metal runners, and it was also the kind of snow that made you forget that you were the kind of person who wouldn’t ever take care of the runners and they would rust and soon the sled would be useless, which is another way of saying that it was the sort of snow that tricked you into thinking things were better than they actually were. Because just then, my mother and Anne Marie broke their clinch, and my mother noticed my van, idling just down the block. I waved to her through the windshield. She shook her head, said something to Anne Marie, and then hopped into her car and drove off in the other direction. Anne Marie turned around, saw my van, and walked toward me. I got out of my van and walked toward her. I was still wearing the clothes Peter Le Clair had given me a day earlier; Anne Marie was wearing one of those fleece vests that are really soft but somehow also water resistant, the sort of vest that’s so comfortable it makes your torso sleepy and your arms jealous of your torso, and wide awake and angry because of it, which is by way of explaining that once Anne Marie was in range, she hit me, the way I’d hit Thomas a few hours earlier. She had gloves on, plus she had zero experience as a fighter, so the punch didn’t have much force behind it and barely hurt, but still I fell to the ground, because that’s surely where I belonged.

  “It is better to be wounded than to wound,” I told her.

  “The hell it is,” she said. “Get up.”

  I did as I was told. I had been in Peter’s clothes for almost a day now, and in my own clothes for even longer: I smelled of woodsmoke and bar smoke and beer and human sweat and fear and the several layers of wet clothes that kept the smells close by.

  “My father said you kissed a woman in New Hampshire,” Anne Marie said, her voice even. Maybe she’d been practicing in the mirror, too. “Is that true?”

  I admitted that it was and then told her the whole story. I didn’t leave anything out, not one significant detail, not even the groping. And then I went further back and told her everything else I hadn’t told her about my past, all the things she knew by now, although not from me. I’d left too many things out for too long. Anne Marie’s facial expression didn’t change once during the telling. She didn’t frown, twitch, or grimace, even when I said that I loved her and that my kissing that woman was the first time it had ever happened and that it would never happen again. At the end of my story, I said, “That’s it,” and she nodded. That was all. It was the greatest feat of strength and control I’d ever witnessed, to listen to the story—the story of how I’d lied to her for ten years—and then do nothing but nod in response. If listening stoically to the story of how you’d been betrayed by your husband had been an Olympic event, Anne Marie would have gotten the gold. It occurred to me then that I wasn’t worthy of her—I’m sure this thought had occurred to her as well—and that Thomas wasn’t, either.

  “Thomas said he spent the night at our house,” I said. “Is that true?”

  “Yes,” Anne Marie said. “He’s spent more than one night.”

  “On the couch?” I asked.

  Anne Marie didn’t answer. She reached inside her vest, pulled out her pack of cigarettes, took a cigarette and a lighter out of her pack, and lit the cigarette, all without taking her gloves off. I realized right then that Anne Marie was a capable woman. I’d never thought of her that way before. There were so many other questions I wanted to ask her—what had she and my mother talked about? for instance—but I didn’t, because I now knew she was a capable woman, and capable women don’t answer questions from people who have no right to ask them. This will go in my arsonist’s guide, too.

  “Where did my mother go just now?” I finally asked, picking what I hoped was an innocuous question that Anne Marie would be willing to answer. She did.

  “She went to work.”

  “Work?” I said. “Where’s that?”

  Here something odd happened: the smoke poured out of Anne Marie’s mouth and she smiled at me, like a softhearted dragon. “You’ll never guess where she works,” Anne Marie said.

  “I probably won’t,” I admitted.

  “She works at the Student Prince,” Anne Marie said. The Student Prince was the German restaurant in Springfield that Anne Marie and I had lived above when we were first married. I knew now why she was smiling at me: she was remembering that happy time, our first child, our first home, the early, best stages of our love. This is not to say that love endures, but that the memory of it does, even—or especially—if we don’t want it to.

  “What a coincidence,” I said.

  “It’s not a coincidence,” Anne Marie said, and then before I could ask her what she meant, she threw her spent cigarette in the snow and said, “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

  “OK.”

  “Your mother’s a good woman, Sam,” she told me. “She deserves better than your father.”

  “I know.”<
br />
  “She deserves better than you, too.”

  “I know that,” I said. For the first time, I was thinking of what I’d done to my mother and not what I thought she’d done to me. She deserved a better son than me, a better person than me. This is another way you know you’ve become a grown-ass man, when you realize—too late, too late—that you’re not worthy of the woman who made you one. Of the women who made you one.

  “Your mother is afraid that you set fire to those writers’ houses,” Anne Marie said, and then she named them: the Bellamy and Twain houses. She didn’t mention the Robert Frost Place. This probably meant my mother had stopped following me after she’d seen me kissing the woman in the bar, which was too bad: if she’d followed me to the Robert Frost Place, then she’d have known I didn’t torch it, and she’d also have seen who did. “She’s worried about you.”

  “I didn’t set fire to any writer’s house,” I said.

  “Except for the one,” Anne Marie said.

  “And that was an accident,” I said.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she said.

  “A woman set fire to the Bellamy and Twain houses,” I went on.

  “What woman?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure Thomas has an idea.”

  “Sam …,” Anne Marie said. I could hear the exasperation in her voice, so beautiful and familiar, but sad, too, like hearing church bells right before your funeral. I should have stopped talking right then, but I didn’t, and my words were like the snow, which kept falling and falling even though too much of it had fallen already.

  “And then the bond analysts burned down the Robert Frost Place.”

  “The what? And who?” Anne Marie said, and then before I could answer, she said, “Forget it. I don’t want to hear about any fucking bond analysts. I don’t want to hear about anything anymore.”

  “But Anne Marie,” I said, “it’s true.”

  “Oh, Sam,” Anne Marie said. “Why don’t you take some responsibility for once?”

  “For burning down those houses?”

  “For everything,” she said. Then she turned around and walked through the snow back to Thomas’s Jeep. I didn’t chase after her, didn’t call out to her, didn’t tell her to come back, come back. Talking had gotten me into nothing but trouble. Maybe the best way to get Anne Marie to come back was just to stand there in the snow and not say anything and wait for her. It worked, too. She spun her wheels in the snow, did a ragged three-point turn, and pointed the Jeep in my direction. Come back to me, I said in my head. Come back to me. And she did. Anne Marie pulled up right next to me, reached across the front seat, rolled down the passenger side window, and said, “You’re going to go see your mother, aren’t you?”

  I admitted that I probably was.

  “Then you should go home and change first,” she said. “Shower, too. You look terrible, Sam. You don’t smell so good, either.” And then she rolled up the window and drove away.

  23

  As everyone knows, you can’t go home again. That famous book told us so, even if it took way too many pages to do it. But what that book didn’t tell us, and mine will, is that you can’t go home again even to change your clothes and shower before meeting your mother at the Student Prince, because if you do, you’ll find Detective Wilson sitting at your dining room table, waiting for you. He was baggy eyed and armed with another large coffee, the way I was baggy eyed and armed with another large beer, which is just further proof that all men are but slight variations on the very same theme.

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me,” he said.

  “I’m not,” I said. Because I wasn’t: after all, there had been so many non-Pulsifers showing up at my home the last few days that I’d have to expand the definition of home to include people who didn’t actually live there, in addition to the people who were supposed to live there but didn’t. “I’m not surprised at all,” I told him. I raised my bagged beer in toast, then sat down across the table from him. Between us was a bulky manila envelope that I figured was mail for one of my parents.

  “You’ve been busy, Sam,” Detective Wilson said. He took several envelopes out of his jacket pocket, withdrew pieces of paper from each envelope, and then spread them on the dining room table, covering the manila envelope. The pieces of paper and the envelope looked dirty, torn, abused, and I was pretty sure I knew what they were without reading them, even though I did read them, if for no other reason than to buy myself a little time. They were the rest of my father’s missing letters, from people who wanted me to burn down these writers’ houses: Edith Wharton’s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, as well as a replica log cabin at Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. The letter writers had gotten what they wanted, too: someone had burned down all those houses the night before, one after the other, and someone had then left the pertinent letter near the place where the house had just been. Detective Wilson told me this as I pretended to read the letters. I knew the bond analysts had done the burning, of course—I could picture their route south from New Hampshire and east toward Boston as they burned, could hear Morgan saying, He’ll be sorry, as he produced and planted the letters. I should have told Detective Wilson about the bond analysts; I should have produced Morgan’s book and the postcards and then explained their reasons for burning these houses and framing me. Then I would have gone on and admitted to Detective Wilson that I didn’t know any of the bond analysts’ last names except for Morgan’s, nor did I know exactly where in Boston they lived. But Anne Marie hadn’t wanted to hear about the bond analysts, and I could imagine Detective Wilson reacting the same way, could imagine him agreeing with the Writer-in-Residence: he would clearly think the whole thing was a cheap trick, and that the bond analysts didn’t sound like real people. So instead of telling him the whole truth, I told the simplest part of it—“It wasn’t me”—and then slid the letters back toward him.

  “Yes, it was,” Detective Wilson said. He put the letters back in their envelopes and returned them to his coat pocket. I looked down at the table where the letters had just been. There was that manila envelope. I looked at it rather than at Detective Wilson and noticed what I hadn’t before: in the upper left-hand corner, in official letterhead style, it read: “Wesley Mincher, English Department, Heiden College, Hartford, CT 06106.” There was no postmark on the envelope, no proper mailing address, either, but there was, in the middle of the envelope, in big block letters so you couldn’t miss it, my name: “SAM.” I looked back at Detective Wilson, and while I was doing so, I reached down and turned over the envelope so that my name was facing the table and not me or him.

  “No,” I said, “it wasn’t.”

  “Of course it was, Sam,” he said, and then patted his coat pocket where the envelopes were, the incriminating letters inside them.

  “If it were me,” I said, “then why would I leave the letters behind?”

  It was clear that Detective Wilson hadn’t thought about this, hadn’t thought about the evidence except that it existed and that it proved what he wanted it to prove, evidence—as I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide—being just a more concrete form of wishful thinking. “Because you wanted to get caught,” he said weakly. He hit his coat pocket, but harder this time, as though punishing the letters for letting him down.

  “Why would I want to get caught?”

  “Maybe you left the letters by accident,” he said.

  It made me feel so good to hear someone else say “accident” that I nearly forget about all of my own, which is why I then had another one. An accident, that is. “Come on. You can do better than that. I burned down five houses and then accidentally left letters at all of them?”

  “I only named four houses,” Detective Wilson, recouping quickly.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But you’re right. There was a fifth house torched last night.” I knew which one it was and so didn’t bother to listen to him say it. I did, ho
wever, think of Peter Le Clair’s letter in my pocket, could hear it calling to its siblings in Detective Wilson’s pocket across the table. “I didn’t find a letter there. But I know it was you who burned that house, too. Do you want to know how I know?”

  “No,” I said. After all, I knew everything Detective Wilson was going to tell me, knew what Thomas Coleman had told him, knew that he’d driven to New Hampshire to find me. What I didn’t know was what was in the manila envelope, and how it got on my table in the first place, and whether Detective Wilson had already looked inside.

  “Are you listening to me?” Detective Wilson asked.

  “No,” I said. “Should I have been?”

  “Yes,” Detective Wilson went on. “I was telling you how your Thomas Coleman called me and said you were about to burn down the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.”

  “How did he know that?” I asked him.

  “That’s not important,” he said, and when Detective Wilson said that, I was sure he didn’t know the answer, “not important” being just one of the things we call that which we don’t know. “What are you smiling at?”

  “I’m not smiling,” I said, although I was. Clearly Detective Wilson hadn’t followed me to New Hampshire, which had been my big fear; clearly he hadn’t seen me at the Robert Frost Place, at the bar, at the fire. And since he didn’t have the letter, he clearly didn’t know it was Peter who’d written to me, Peter being one of the other people who’d say with certainty that I’d burned down the Robert Frost Place. That was what I was smiling at, even though I said to Detective Wilson, “I’m not smiling.”

  “Ever since you came back to your parents’ house,” Detective Wilson said, “there’s been trouble.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You should never have come back,” he said. Detective Wilson said other things after that, but once again I wasn’t listening to them. I was thinking about what he’d just said—You should never have come back—and how Deirdre had said the very same thing earlier that day. As every detective knows, the rhetoric of crime and the rhetoric of crime solving are the very same, and if Detective Wilson were trying to solve the crimes, did that mean that Deirdre had committed one of them? Had she been the one who’d burned the Edward Bellamy House, or tried to, or the Mark Twain House, or tried to, or both? Was she the other woman my father told me I should be looking for? Was she the other woman, twice over? Suddenly I had a hunch—hunch, I discovered, being exactly the wrong word, because once I’d had the hunch, I suddenly found myself sitting ramrod straight, with perfect military bearing, not hunched at all.