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

by Brock Clarke

  Maybe one day I’ll know the answers to these questions, but for now I tell lies about my father and pass them off as the truth, and this makes the bond analysts happy. But it also fills them with nostalgia: when I read to them from my arsonist’s guide, I can see the bond analysts gaze longingly into the distance, as if my memoir is a ship at sea, and their bonds are the shore.

  To be honest, though, I’m not just writing one book; I’m writing two of them. Both books begin with “I, Sam Pulsifer …,” and then one of them tells the story you know by now, and the other one is my arsonist’s guide; one is the story of the one house I actually burned and the ones I didn’t, and the other one is about how I did burn those houses and the details and lessons therein. I plan on calling the story you know a novel, and the arsonist’s guide a memoir. Why write both books? Maybe I just want the best of both worlds, which is exactly what both worlds usually don’t want you to have, and the bond analysts aren’t entirely sure they want me to have it, either, which is why they insist I call the story that includes them a novel and the story that doesn’t a memoir. They tell me, “You need to protect the innocent, dude,” which is what the guilty always say when they need to be protected.

  And then there is Thomas Coleman. He’s living with Anne Marie and the kids now, but when he visits, he and I never talk about them. He comes by himself, every other week. Thomas has put on some weight: I can see the buttons on his shirt strain a little with his new gut, can see his shirt collar creep up and crowd his jowls, too. He always comes on Monday, always with a red face, always with that suburban man’s weekend yard-work tan, and I can imagine him on my self-propelled mower; no doubt he keeps his shirt on, and no doubt the other Camelotians like him for that. But we don’t talk about any of that stuff, either. We don’t talk about whether he knew, or suspected, that Deirdre had set those fires. We don’t really talk about anything at all when Thomas visits: we sit there in silence, just two ordinary men with fires and dead parents in their pasts, and a common family in their present, and who knows what in their future, and hearts with holes in them, holes that are in various stages of excavation and filling. I don’t understand why he visits me; when he does, I am sorry to see him come, and then I’m sorry to see him go. I don’t understand that, either.

  Then there are Anne Marie and the kids. Sometimes Anne Marie brings the kids with her and sometimes she comes by herself. When all three of them are there, I talk to Katherine and Christian about their days and what goes on in them. Katherine is fifteen years old now, beautiful and tall and dark haired like her mother and something of a model citizen, too. Last week when they visited, I learned that she’d just been chosen to go to Girl’s State.

  “I’m so proud of you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “What’s the difference between Girl’s State and Boy’s State?” I asked her.

  “You must be kidding, right?” she asked back, and I said, “Yes,” because I must have been.

  Christian is twelve years old, smack in the middle of the age of balls and bats. It’s not clear he can speak about anything else, and because we have so little time together, I don’t ask him to. Recently he’s become obsessed with athletic footwear and its latest innovations. For basketball, Christian told me last week, the soles of his shoes are filled with air; for baseball and soccer, his shoes have spikes that are made of something that isn’t metal and isn’t plastic, either.

  “What are they made of, then?” I wanted to know.

  Christian thought about this for a minute, hard. He has a head like mine, outsize for his body and a little blockish, and I could see it begin to corkscrew with the effort of his thinking. Finally he gave up and said, “Something safe.”

  “I hope so,” I told him, and then, because I could sense the guard behind me about to remind us of the time and how we were out of it, I told them both, as I always do, “I love you,” and they both nodded, as they always do. A nod means, Yes, we love you, too, Dad, among children who are too shy to tell their father that they love him even though there are so many reasons not to. Everyone knows that the nod is the same as an “I love you, too.” This is the most common kind of knowledge. Is it not?

  When the kids are around, Anne Marie and I don’t talk much. But when she comes by herself, as she did yesterday, we have plenty to say. They’re things we’ve said already, many, many times, although the questions don’t seem to lose their interest because of the repetition. I ask if she’s OK, if she has enough money, and she tells me yes, yes, she’s fine. I know they’ve promoted her to full-time manager at the home-supply superstore, and so I ask her about that, and she tells me about lumber that was supposed to be pressure treated and wasn’t, or that wasn’t supposed to be but was. I ask her if Thomas is still living at the house, and she tells me that he is, and I ask her why, and she tells me the truth: “Because we have a lot in common.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’ve hurt both of us a lot.” I don’t say anything more to this, because I know there is nothing a victimized woman loves more than a victimized man, and because I also know that what she says is true. She doesn’t ask me about the fires themselves or the people who died in them, about why I did what I did or why I did what she thinks I did—maybe out of kindness, maybe out of sadness, or maybe because she can’t stand to think about them more than she already has and does. I will never tell her the truth about those fires, because that would mean I’d have to admit that I lied to her, again, again, and I know how much that would hurt her, and maybe this is what it means to take responsibility for something: not to tell the truth, but to make sure you pick a lie for a good reason and then stick to it. In any case, we don’t talk about any of that. It’s safer to talk about Thomas, and so that’s what we do.

  “He’s really good to the kids, Sam,” Anne Marie says.

  “I’m glad.”

  “He’s good to me, too.”

  “OK,” I tell her.

  “I’m sorry,” she always says, and I always ask her what I asked my mother that first night I moved back home, seven years ago now: “What happens to love?” I asked her, my mother, and now I ask Anne Marie.

  “I don’t know,” Anne Marie says, just telling the truth, that being just one of the many enduring qualities that makes me love her, still, still.

  “I still love you,” I tell her.

  “Well, me, too,” she says, by which she means, I think, that love endures, but that it isn’t everything, and it isn’t ever what we want it to be, which was probably what those books my mother made me read and then got rid of were trying to tell me, and us, which was just one of the reasons she got rid of them.

  Speaking of my mother, she doesn’t visit me much. The prison is two hours northeast of Springfield and hard to get to if you don’t have a car, which my mother doesn’t anymore. She doesn’t have a license, either. My mother lost both in a drunk-driving accident, two weeks after I came here. She’s moved out of her place in Belchertown and into my old apartment, the one above the Student Prince, so she can walk to work and not drive and still drink.

  So my mother doesn’t visit me much, but she does take the bus up at least once a year, for my birthday. I turned forty-five just last week, and she brought me a present: a worn, creased, used-up copy of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.

  “Happy birthday,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “How did this thing get so beat up?”

  “I have no idea,” she said, but she did have an idea, and so do I. My mother is reading again, the way you always return to something you’ve quit, like drinking, which my mother hasn’t done. Quit, that is. I know that, too: I can always smell the Knickerbocker on her breath, her clothes, coming out of her pores. But I don’t tell her what I know, and I don’t tell her that I’ve already read and reread the book since I’ve been in prison. It’s about a utopian community, about how a group of people in Massachusetts tried to become one big, happy family and faile
d completely.

  “Thanks a lot,” I told her. The guard came over and made sure I hadn’t been given contraband, saw that it was only a book, and then left us alone. Once he was gone, I asked my mother, “Do I look forty-five?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Do I look sixty-six?”

  I didn’t answer. To be true, she looks older than sixty-six. She’s still thin but looks stooped and wizened now, not fit at all. Her hair is mostly gray, and her face looks grayer, too, and lined with deep wrinkles, the sort no cream can make vanish. She looks like an old woman who was once beautiful. Maybe it’s all the drinking that’s aged her so. Or maybe it’s my father: not necessarily that she killed him, but that she hoped once she’d killed him, things would change and she would stop loving him so much, stop hating him so much, stop missing him, stop feeling so lonely, and she hasn’t. But my mother never talks about my father, and I don’t ask her about him, either. And for that matter, my mother has never asked me about Deirdre. She knows that Deirdre killed herself. But she’s never asked me for details, never asked me why I was with Deirdre that night in the first place. She’s never asked how I feel about Deirdre’s being dead, about my not saving her. You never ask your son how he feels about the suicide of his father’s lover, just as you never ask your mother how she feels about killing your father, just as you never answer your mother when she asks whether she looks her age.

  “You never answer your mother when she asks whether she looks her age,” I told her.

  “I suppose that’s going in the arsonist’s guide, too,” she said.

  Because my mother knows about the arsonist’s guide, and the other book, too. I’ve told her all about them, let her read the rough drafts of some of my chapters, too, and already she’s started giving me advice: about what in the books seems softhearted and softheaded; about whether I’m as big a bumbler as I say I am, or whether I’m an even bigger one. But mostly she doesn’t seem to know what to say about the books. Maybe that’s why she’s started reading books in general again, so that she’ll know what to say about mine.

  “I have to go,” she said, getting up from her chair. “My bus leaves in a half hour.”

  “OK.”

  “Are you behaving yourself?”

  “I am.”

  “Please behave yourself, Sam,” she said. “I want you to come home to me.” Then my mother stood up, kissed me on the cheek, and left me sitting in the visiting room until, maybe, my next birthday.

  Because this is what my mother seems to want, more than anything: she wants me to come home to her. My mother knows that if I behave myself I’ll be out in a little more than thirteen years. And when I do, she wants me to move in with her, into her new and my old apartment. There is a job waiting for me at the Student Prince—she’s already cleared it with Mr. Goerman and Mr. Goerman’s son, who was the bald, mustachioed bartender, apparently. I have a job washing dishes and busing tables, if I want it. My mother tells me that I could drink for free, which I admit, after twenty years of not drinking, would be a plus. I’ve made my mother no promises, but who knows? I’ll be finished writing my books by the time I get out of prison, and maybe then I will be done telling that story for all time. And after you’re done telling your story for all time, then who knows what happens next? Maybe I’ll do what my mother wants: maybe I’ll move in with her and take that job at the Student Prince. Maybe then we’ll be happy. Maybe we’ll live our lives quietly, and maybe we won’t ever need to talk about the past, about the loves we’ve lost or the people we’ve killed or the fires we’ve set. Maybe we’ll be like normal people, people who, after a long day’s work, want to do nothing else but have a drink and read a book. And maybe, then, I’ll be able to tell that story.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the following people, places, and things:

  The very helpful and superbly titled A Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Miriam Levine.

  The great Student Prince Restaurant on Fort Street in Springfield, Massachusetts.

  The Giustinas of Springfield and the Clarkes of Mashapaug, wherever you happen to be and under whatever aliases you happen to be traveling.

  The Taft Fund, the Ohio Arts Council, and the University of Cincinnati for their financial support.

  The editors of and at New England Review, Vermont Literary Review, failbetter, and Sarabande Books, who first published sections of this novel, often in dramatically different form.

  Rupert Chisholm, former bond analyst.

  Chuck Adams, Brunson Hoole, Michael Taeckens, Craig Popelars, and the rest of the good people at Algonquin, and my agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman.

  And finally, to all my usual aiders and abetters: you know who you are.

  AN

  ARSONIST’S GUIDE

  TO WRITERS’ HOMES

  IN NEW ENGLAND

  A Conversation with the Author

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR

  Sam Pulsifer: First, thank you for giving me the last name Pulsifer. I like the way it has the word fire in it, because there are fires in the book, of course, and also Lucifer, or, at least, Lusifer. Very clever.

  Brock Clarke: Huh? I didn’t intend that at all. It never occurred to me until you mentioned it.

  SP: Why did you name me Pulsifer, then?

  BC: Because I’ve only met two families with that last name, and they’re both from New England.

  SP: That’s your reason? That’s a terrible reason.

  BC: I know, I know, it’s pathetic.

  SP: And you say I’m a bumbler.

  BC: Let’s move on, OK? Ask me something else.

  SP: Where do you get your ideas?

  BC: From all over. From other books, from overheard bits of conversation, from road signs, from friends, from enemies. But actually, those aren’t ideas: they’re material. I get my ideas from the same place everyone gets them: we have a library full of the things we care about, passionately—in the case of An Arsonist’s Guide, I care passionately about books, about family, about New England—and we borrow from the library, transform (or, to push the library metaphor too far, deface) what we’ve borrowed to fit the needs of our characters, our places, their stories, until that which we’ve borrowed looks and sounds and feels somewhat different than what we originally borrowed. And then we call that thing a book.

  SP: Hey, I went on Amazon.com and read some of the reviews that readers have written about the book. A lot of them love it and say great things about you. Others, though, really, really hate it, but usually instead of attacking you, they say hateful things about me, about how I’m a loser and they can’t “identify” with me. You were the writer here—why are they attacking me, and why did you make it so people would hate me?

  BC: It’s funny. I don’t think you’re an unlikable character at all. Sure, you do some questionable things, but I think, I hope, you’re entertaining while you’re doing these questionable things. And some of them, after all, you do out of love, just as some of them you do out of fear, jealousy, self-interest. These are exactly the qualities I like in literary characters, and in people, too. I like characters and people not because they’re good, but because they’re complicated, because they’re conflicted. No, I wouldn’t say you’re unlikable. I’m actually quite fond of you.

  SP: I think you like my mother and father better than me.

  BC: I like you all the same, Sam. I like you in different ways, for different reasons, but I don’t like any one of you better than the others.

  SP: Why did you put me in prison, then … twice?

  BC: It made sense, dramatically speaking. Plus, you had it coming. You seemed to realize that.

  SP: My mom and dad have a pretty rough time of it in the story, yet both of them come across almost more sympathetically than I do—and my dad cheated on my mom, which set all the bad stuff into motion, and then my mom caused the big problem at the end of the story. It’s because of her I ha
d to go to prison again. Do you think that all children have to suffer for their parents’ sins, or is it just me?