An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (11 page)

Because drinking was another thing I’d bumbled and wasn’t much good at. All the beer flooded out of me, and all my failures flooded back in, as if in retaliation for my thinking I could forget them: those letters, my wife, my kids, my job, my parents, Thomas Coleman, his parents, their deaths, my life! They were all speaking to me, their voices shouting over the sounds of my retching, a regular chorus of recrimination bouncing off the porcelain and tile. And then there was another voice, a voice that had a hand, a gentle hand on my back, and was saying, “It’s OK, it’s OK.”

“It is?” I asked.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” she said.

It was my mother. And because it was my mother, I felt I could say anything and not be too ashamed of it, and so I said, “Oh, Mom, I’m scared I’ve lost them forever. I miss them so much.”

“I know you do,” she said.

“Is that an old story, too?”

“Yes,” my mother said. “The oldest.”

“Stories,” I said. “It feels like I don’t know anything about them. Please teach me something about these stories.”

“I already tried to,” she said, and then she led me to bed, which is where I made up my mind: I would have to learn something about stories, and fast. My mother wouldn’t teach me; that much was clear. My old dad was too far gone to do me much good; that was clear, too. I would have to go somewhere else to learn, and I thought I knew where.

I would go to a bookstore. I couldn’t go to a library, I knew that, because libraries demand quiet and decorum and I wasn’t exactly wired for that: as a child I’d been shushed to death too many times by too many bony librarians in their cardigan sweaters, and I wasn’t going back, the way the intelligent bull never goes back to the china shop after that disastrous first or second or third time. But I didn’t recall bookstores’ requiring any such absolute delicacy, although it’s true that I hadn’t been to one in twenty years.

But first I had to do something about my hangover. The story of one’s first significant hangover is overlong and familiar and I won’t add to it here except to say that it felt as though someone had taken their diseased head and switched it with my healthy one. I got out of bed, hopped in the shower, which didn’t make my hangover go away but did wet it down some. Someone — my mother, I assumed and still do — had taken my suitcase (the one I’d taken with me to Cincinnati) out of my van and put it in my room. I unpacked the suitcase, got dressed, and went downstairs. The house was empty — you can always tell when a house is empty, especially if you yell out several times, “Hello! Mom? Dad? Anyone here?” and then check each and every room for signs of life. They were both gone, all right. I had once again woken up late: it was just past noon. My mother had gone to work, no doubt, but where was my father? Had the university press kept him on out of pity so that he’d still feel somewhat normal? Oh, I missed Pioneer Packaging right then, missed the feeling of normality it gave me. Because isn’t this what work is good for? Not so much a way to make your money, but a way you can feel normal, even (especially) when you know you are not? I had those hungover, jobless blues, all right, and maybe my father knew I would, because on the kitchen table there was a tall glass full of something dark, murky, and potent and next to it a note, in his handwriting, handwriting that was a little shaky but definitely still his — I recognized it from those many postcards he’d sent me — that said, “Drink me.” Like Alice, I did. For a second I felt much worse, and then the second after that I felt much better. Whatever the cure for drinking was, it was much like drinking itself, which I suddenly felt ready to do more of, right after I went to the Book Warehouse.

The Book Warehouse: I’d driven past it many times. It was maybe a mile from my house, right on Route 116. I knew that Anne Marie and the kids went there all the time: for story hour, story circle, story time, story share, and other story-related activities, all, apparently, with their own separate purpose and function. But I’d never been there, and how was that possible? This was the question I asked myself as I pulled into the enormous parking lot, next to a series of other enormous parking lots serving adjacent superstores. How had I, who’d lived near this place for years and years and whose life had been ruled by stories and books — how had I not once entered its doors? I was like the ancient fisherman who’d never been swimming and who, on the verge of taking his invigorating first dip, wondered what had taken him so awfully long.

The Book Warehouse was big. That was the first thing I noticed. Plus bright. The bookstores my mother had taken me to when I was young smelled like the back of a damp storage closet and were dim and narrow and filled with towering, overflowing bookshelves that leaned over the aisles and obscured the flickering overhead lights. The Book Warehouse was nothing like that. No, when you walked into the Book Warehouse it was like walking into an operating room, with cheerful music piped in and purple banners hanging from the ceiling that told you to
READ!!!
Except there weren’t any books, not that I could see, because when you entered the store, you walked right into a café. There isn’t much to say about the café itself. I don’t remember what it looked like, really, or whether they served food there, and if they did, whether there was anyone there to serve it to you. It was the sort of place where you entered and seemed to pass out for a second and suddenly you came to and were holding a cup of coffee. It was West African native dark bean coffee. I don’t know what that meant, exactly, but the coffee was excellent and came in an attractive ceramic mug with good heft and balance to it. I remember that much.

It was three in the afternoon at this point, and the café was empty except for a group of women, mostly, sitting around in a circle in their comfortable chairs sipping their coffee with their books on their laps. These women looked like our female neighbors in Camelot, with their severe, sensible haircuts and expensive casual clothes that were baggy enough to hide how thin they either were or weren’t and shoes that were somewhere between clogs and running sneakers and that in any case had very good traction. I’d never really thought about this kind of female Camelotian, pro or con, but Anne Marie hated these women before she started to become one of them. And because I was married to Anne Marie and was on her side, I’d hated them, too, although without much feeling or reason. After all, were they so different from me? What was wrong with them? Was that same thing wrong with me? How could the books help make us all better? I decided to sit down, inconspicuously eavesdrop on their conversation about the book spread-eagled in each of their laps, and find out.

They weren’t talking about the book, not exactly; that’s the first thing I found out. Instead, they were talking about how they felt. When I sat down, one woman with a flowing tan barn coat and dark circles under her eyes was talking about how a character in the book reminded her of her daughter.

“Oh, it was heartbreaking,” the woman said. “It made me cry.” Speaking of that, she started crying right then, and since crying is as contagious as laughter or the worst kinds of disease, I nearly started crying, too. But I got hold of myself and managed to choke back my tears, and finally the woman did, too — her sobs became whimpers that became sniffles that became brave, quivering sighs. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, wiped the hands on her barn coat, and again said, “It made me cry. I loved it. That’s all I have to say.”

“Wait a minute — hold on,” I said. I had all these questions already. What exactly in the book reminded the woman of her daughter? And why did this make her cry? Did she, the woman in the barn coat, cry in great, shameless, heaving sobs in public places, or quietly, behind a closed bathroom door with the water running so that no one could hear her? I remembered my mother assigning me books and asking me, after I’d read them, to tell her about them. Details, she always wanted details and more details, and apparently I was my mother’s son, more than I wanted to be, because now I wanted details, too. But I’d said too much already, this was obvious: the other women, mostly, were glaring at me as if I’d murdered both the woman and her daughter with my outburst, and the woman herself looked as though she were on the verge of another crying jag. “Sorry,” I said, then sank back into my chair and pledged to listen quietly, very quietly, and with my mind as wide open as possible.

So I listened and learned some things. Another woman wearing a matching sky blue velour sweat suit insisted that anger could be a good thing, a positive thing (she did not say what, if anything, this had to do with the book); a man (he was the only other man there; I thought this near-total absence of men meaningful, even though I couldn’t be certain of what it might mean) in his fifties, wearing a shiny warm-up jacket scarred with multiple zippers and Velcro patches, said that he read the book in one sitting and then immediately went and hugged his father’s gravestone. The man explained that he had hated his father for years for reasons he couldn’t quite remember, and that he had also hated his father for dying on him before they could talk about the hate and the mysterious reasons behind it. “I felt lost, so lost,” the man said, “and it was my father’s fault.” In his resentment the man had let his father’s gravestone fall into something of a ruin. The man said that he hugged the gravestone for a long, long time, just so that his father would know that he loved him and that all was forgiven. “I got all dirty from hugging the gravestone,” the man said, “but I don’t care. It felt good to get dirty.”

“Bring on the
dirt
,” one of the women said. She was a white woman wearing wide-wale corduroys and penny loafers and she had the most severe of all the severely blunt, sensible haircuts, but she said, “Bring on the
dirt,”
in a vaguely black-gospel fashion. This clearly gave the lone black woman in the group some pause. The black woman cleared her throat and got up to get some more coffee and left her book on her chair unattended. I made sure no one was looking, then picked up the book. On the front cover was a drawing of a coffee cup, the coffee steaming from inside. The title of the book was
Listen
. On the back cover was a picture of the author, a benign-looking, bearded man with a long-billed fishing cap, sitting in an Adirondack chair, drinking a cup of coffee. On the inside back cover was a list of topics for discussion, and the number one topic for discussion was “How does this book make you feel about the Human Condition?”

It made me feel good, all right, about the Human Condition and about the women (mostly), too. I hadn’t read the book, of course, but as far as I could tell, neither had anyone else, and besides, that wasn’t what it was there for: the book was there to give the women (mostly) a reason to confess to the feelings they’d already had before reading the book, which as far as I could tell they hadn’t actually read. The confessions made everyone feel better, I could tell, because the café was now filled with their bright, non-book-related chatter. The book had made them happy! This was a revelation to me because I remembered how unhappy reading books had made me back when I read them — they were full of things I didn’t entirely understand and never would, and they made my head hurt. Books had made my parents unhappy, too, even though they professed to love them. My mother, for instance, taught
The Scarlet Letter
every year, and every year after she read and taught it, she looked miserable and depressed and
angry
about Hester Prynne and her A and her Dimmesdale, as though she would like to take the book and beat herself over the head with it and then go out and find the Human Condition and beat
it
over the head, too. The look on my mother’s face had told me that she was certain that the Human Condition would have been grateful for the beating.
Put me out of my misery
, would have been the Human Condition’s sentiment, according to my mother.

But that happened only if you
read
the book, or if you read certain kinds of books. The women (mostly) had put aside the book and were now talking about ordinary, worldly things — money, clothes, food — and they seemed happier now that they’d confessed and unburdened themselves. It wasn’t just that they were happier, either: they seemed
lighter
, and if it weren’t for gravity I was sure they’d have been floating up somewhere near the ceiling with their cups of coffee. Their voices were optimistic and clear and not at all afraid or weepy anymore; they were the kind of voices that made you forget that there was pain and longing and fear and dishonesty in the world, and for the moment I forgot all those things existed for me, too.

There was only one more matter I needed to clarify. I walked up to the woman who’d said, “Bring on the
dirt,”
pointed at her copy of
Listen
, and asked her, “Is this book true?”

“It’s a memoir,” she said.

“OK,” I said, not really sure whether that meant yes, it was true, or no, it wasn’t. The bond analysts had been working on their memoirs in prison, but I hadn’t been sure whether they were true or not, and for that matter the bond analysts never seemed too clear on the distinction, either, and had spent many hours engaged in debates over the relationship between creative license and the literal truth. I knew better than to press the issue further, because when I’d done so with the bond analysts, when I asked them whether they were telling the whole truth in their memoirs or not, they laughed at me as though the question was just another addition to the house of my bumbling. So instead I asked the woman if she liked the memoir.

“Oh yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s so useful,” she said without hesitation.

“That’s all I needed to hear,” I told her, because now I knew the answer to the judge’s question: books were useful, they could produce a direct effect — of course they could. Why else would people read them if they could not? But if that were the case, then why did my mother get rid of her books? Was it that some books were useful and some were not and weren’t doing anyone any good and so why not get rid of them? Clearly my mother had read the wrong books. But I would not make that same mistake.