An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (20 page)

“Mr. Pulsifer has something to tell us regarding the Mark Twain House, Wesley,” Lees Ardor said gently, so gently. You could feel the fondness pouring out of her the way those tears had an hour earlier.

“The so-called hillbilly of the Appalachians speaks an English closer to true proper English than any Yankee who went to Harvard.”

“He says he wasn’t the one who burned down the house, or tried to.”

“My mother could make a poultice out of the sap of a piney tree that could take away your toothache before you even knew you had one, buddy-ro.”

“He says he wasn’t the one we paid three thousand dollars.”

“Our Bobby Lee kept a lock of his daughter’s hair in his saddlebag. It was magic, that lock of hair. It protected him from the minié balls.”

I just stood there, feeling sleepy in that dim light, enjoying the show. The two of them could have talked like this for hours, I bet, their meanings barely intersecting, until they arrived, always, at the end of the evening, at the necessary common ground.

“I believe him, Wesley,” Lees Ardor said. “I think he’s telling us the truth.”

“Then I believe him, too, my love,” Mincher said. He reached over and held out his hand, and she took it. They held hands for the rest of my time there, as though I weren’t there at all, or as though I were there only to bear witness to their hand-holding.

I got exactly one piece of evidence that day, but it took hours and hours to get it. Mostly, Mincher told me the story of how they first met. They had been on the faculty at Heiden together for eight years, but they had never really noticed each other because they had each been walled up in their own ghetto of resentment, unable to see anything outside the walls. Lees Ardor was the only woman in the department, which was perhaps (she admitted) what made her say “cunt” so often. As for Wesley Mincher, he was the only southerner on the faculty — the only one who had a bachelor’s degree from Sewanee and a PhD from Vanderbilt as opposed to Amherst and Harvard — and it was difficult for Wesley Mincher to see anyone else in the department over the high ramparts of his defensiveness. That was his phrase — “the high ramparts of my defensiveness” — and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts.

Anyway, it was Mincher who noticed Lees Ardor first, at a faculty meeting, the subject of which was a conference to be held at Heiden dedicated to the topic “Mark Twain: The Problem of Greatness.” At the faculty meeting there’d been a long discussion on plenary and breakout sessions and keynote speakers, and at the end of all this, Lees Ardor had said, loudly, “Mark Twain is a cunt.”

Her colleagues, of course, had heard Lees Ardor say this kind of thing many times before, and her ability to shock them, as with her students, was close to nil. They ignored her, but Mincher did not. There was something lovely, fragile, and mysterious about the way she said, “Mark Twain is a cunt,” and after the department meeting was over, Wesley Mincher chased down Lees Ardor in the hallway and asked, “Do you have any interest in drinking red wine with me and talking about Confederate currency and maybe looking over my rare lithograph of the Confederate mint in Richmond, Virginia?” To her own great surprise, Lees Ardor said, “Yes” (she did not remember, she admitted to me, the last time she had said yes to anything). Over the course of the next six months, Lees Ardor said yes many more times to Wesley Mincher (she blushed when he said this, but she wasn’t displeased, you could tell), until finally he asked her why she’d said what she said about Mark Twain.

“I’m afraid of becoming Aunt Polly,” Lees Ardor had confessed. She was talking, of course, about the shrewish spinster in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
. I had read those books, could easily see what she was afraid of, and realized that she was probably right to be afraid. “I don’t want to be Aunt Polly,” she’d told Mincher.

“I don’t want that, either,” Mincher had said to her, way back then, and also to me, in his house years later. “So I turned to chivalry, as men in my family always have.” Thus he began to tell a long story about the many chivalric Minchers through the ages, leading, finally, to himself, Wesley Mincher, who decided to have the Mark Twain House torched as proof of his love for Lees Ardor. He had remembered reading about a young man who had destroyed the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts (it had apparently reduced one of their colleagues — an expert in lyric poetry — to tears). So he wrote the arsonist a letter at his home address. Then he waited. Months and years passed; he fell deeper and deeper in love with Lees Ardor, and she with him. But there was that Mark Twain House: they passed it every day on their way to school (she’d moved in with him a year after they first fell in love), and it served as a reminder of his failures as a man, of how Lees Ardor still wasn’t totally rid of her Aunt Polly nightmares.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted at this point in the story. “Why didn’t you just ask her to marry you? She wouldn’t have been Aunt Polly if you’d married her.”

“I wanted to prove I was worthy of her first,” Mincher said. “The destruction of the Mark Twain House would have proved my worthiness.” This struck me as the most ridiculous sentiment I’d ever heard, the sort of absurd romantic hooey that Lees Ardor would have scoffed at if her students had expressed it or if she’d read it in a book. But when Mincher said this, Lees Ardor didn’t scoff. She reached over and gently put her hand on his yellow neck and left it there; he shivered noticeably, as though her touch were the best kind of ice.

“But why did you wait so long for me?” I asked. “Why didn’t you just try to burn down the house yourself?”

Mincher didn’t answer; he just stared at me with disdain. I knew why, too: in Mincher’s world, people were either experts or they weren’t. He wouldn’t have presumed to burn down the house, any more than he would have let me presume to know anything about the Lost Cause.

All of which brought us — and you — up to speed, to the day before I heard this story, when the letter from whoever was pretending to be me arrived at Mincher’s campus mailbox. Wesley drove to the dumpster, deposited the three thousand dollars, and then went home and told Lees Ardor what he had just done, all for her. She had begun to cry, as tough-seeming people often do as a self-reward for appearing so tough.

“What’s wrong?” Mincher had asked.

“That’s so sweet,” she’d said. “But that’s not what I want.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to ask me to marry you.”

This he did. “I’ve never been so happy,” Lees Ardor said. Here, she flashed me a diamond engagement ring that was the only thing I’d seen thus far to rival the brightness of her hair. They — her ring and her hair — were like two guiding stars in the sick, murky light of the living room. “The only thing I’m not happy about is that you threw away all that money.”

“Mincher women have always been … how shall I put it …
frugal
,” Mincher said. He smiled at Lees Ardor, and I don’t blame him: she looked beautiful, more beautiful even than the sum of her ring and her hair. She couldn’t have been further away from the woman in the classroom, the Professor Ardor who called her dead mother a cunt.

“Do you still have the letter?” I asked them.

“What?” Mincher asked. He was back inside his head again, that was clear, except I bet that Lees Ardor was in there, too, leaving even less room for me and my questions.

“The letter I supposedly sent you, asking you for money. Do you still have it?”

“Yes,” Mincher said. He got up and walked toward a desk in the corner of the room, withdrew a letter from one of the desk’s drawers, came back from the desk, handed me the letter, sat back in his chair, and took Lees Ardor’s hand again, all without taking his eyes off her, as if she were his compass, his north star. I took the letter out of the envelope. It was typed, and said, more or less, what Mincher and Ardor had told me it had said. The envelope was blank. There was no postmark on it, no name or return address, no sense of where it had come from or who had delivered it. It was basically the least helpful piece of evidence ever. I put the letter back in the envelope, then put it in my pocket, right next to the other letter, the letter that had led me to Wesley Mincher and Lees Ardor in the first place.

“Good-bye,” I said to them, but they didn’t seem to hear me, and why would they have wanted to? Why would they have wanted anything else to do with the world outside each other? Outside each other, they were mean little human beings like the rest of us, the kind of people you both loathed and pitied. Separately, they were characters, and not in a good way. But together they were something to wonder at and maybe even envy. I had this unoriginal thought as I walked out the door and toward my van: love changes us, makes us into people whom others then want to love. That’s why, to those of us without it, love is the voice asking,
What else? What else?
And to those of us who have had love and lost it or thrown it away, then love is the voice that leads us back to love, to see if it might still be ours or if we’ve lost it for good. For those of us who’ve lost it, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way. Aphoristically, that is.

No one parks on the street in Camelot. It’s not illegal; there are no signs saying you must not park there between such and such a time on such and such a day for such and such a reason. But no one does, maybe because the driveways themselves are wide and deep enough to park a fleet of SUVs and minivans, the preferred family-friendly chariots of our tribe. Or maybe because there is something aberrant and lonely and sinister about a car parked on the street by itself, the way Thomas Coleman’s black Jeep was that late afternoon when I pulled up to my house.

Was I surprised to see his Jeep there? I was not. Or at least I had been surprised too many times over the past few days to be truly surprised by anything. Surprise felt almost like its opposite, something familiar, like home itself. I parked my van in the driveway, next to Anne Marie’s, in an attempt to distinguish myself (husband and father) from him (menacing stranger) in case someone was watching me from the front picture window. Which, it turns out, no one was.

I watched them, though, from the safety of my parked van. Not the kids — they were nowhere to be seen — but Thomas and Anne Marie. He was sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar. His right hand was on the counter, palm down. Anne Marie was standing over him, bent at the waist; she was putting what looked like a piece of gauze on the back of his hand, as though protecting a new tattoo, or perhaps dressing some kind of wound. Perhaps a burn wound. Of course. A burn wound. I was starting to see things clearly, and from my perspective inside the van, it looked as though Thomas had done more damage to his hand than to the Mark Twain House itself. Anne Marie smoothed and patted the gauze so gently and so many times that I began to get jealous of the gauze, and then the hand it was stuck to, and then the person whose hand it was.

Fear and love might leave a man complacent, but jealousy will always get him out of the van. I got out of the van, strode purposefully to the front door. I could really do it this time: I would tell Anne Marie the truth, starting with how much I loved her and how I’d never, ever cheated on her, no matter what I’d told her and what Thomas Coleman had told her, and how I knew where Thomas Coleman had gotten that burn on his hand. Then I’d go from there.

Except I didn’t go anywhere. The front door was locked. I tried my key, but it didn’t work: Anne Marie had changed the lock. It was bad enough that she was inside, touching the arm of Thomas Coleman, whom I’d begun to think of as less my victim and more my archnemesis. That was bad enough. But did she have to
change the lock on our front door?
I could think of no bigger betrayal than a wife’s changing the locks on her husband, just as long as I didn’t think about my burning and killing and then lying about it. And what does a husband do when he’s been betrayed the way I’d been betrayed? He rages. Therefore I raged, which is to say, I pounded and pounded on the door. There is something humiliating about a man pounding on his own front door, though, and by the time Anne Marie finally opened it, the front door felt less like mine than ever.

“What?” Anne Marie said. She was wearing a long black skirt and those black boots I loved, and a white, nearly transparent top that bulged in all the right places.

“I love you so much,” I said.

“Good for you,” she said, arms crossed over her chest now. She looked like a Mediterranean General MacArthur with hair extensions and without the corncob pipe. She had a military bearing, is what I’m saying. “What else?”

“Thomas,” I said, feeling strangely breathless, and nearly panting the word out of my mouth. “He isn’t telling you the truth.”

“He told me,” she said, “that you didn’t sleep with his wife after all. He also told me that he doesn’t even
have
a wife. Is that the truth, Sam?”

“Jesus,” I said. “It is.” I suddenly felt so tired I had to sit down, right on the front slab. The truth makes you tired, not free; that’s another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide — wherever it’s relevant to burning down writers’ homes in New England, that is.

“OK, then,” she said, and then turned to go back inside.

“Wait,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “Can I come home now?”

“No,” Anne Marie said, her back to me. Her hand was on the open door, preparing to put it between her and me once again.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because you lied to me,” she said, turning around to face me. “I don’t know why you lied to me, but you did, and I don’t trust you anymore.” Fatigue had replaced ferocity in Anne Marie’s voice; maybe the truth made her feel tired, too.

“Do you think you can trust
him
?” I asked, not needing to specify who “him” was.

“I don’t know
what
I think about him,” Anne Marie admitted, which was her way of saying that she knew me all too well, but that Thomas was still mysterious and that mystery is sometimes closer to love than familiarity is — depending, of course, on whom you’re so familiar with.