An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (32 page)

“And that’s when she told me what you’d told her: that your parents were killed in a house fire.”

“Let me explain,” I said. I could tell his low-grade anger was about to turn into pure hatred and rage, the way you can tell when rain is about to turn into one of the colder forms of precipitation.

“Your parents
were killed in a house fire
,” he repeated. “Was that supposed to be funny?” Thomas asked. He took a step toward me, removed his right hand from his armpit, and clenched it, and for a second I thought he was going to hit me, but he didn’t. Maybe Thomas had learned from my mistake earlier, when I’d hit him. When we hit someone, we want that to be the final word. But it never is. And if a blow to the face wasn’t the final word, then what was? Are we wrong for wanting there to be any such thing as a final word? Was there any such thing as a final word? And where, oh, where could we find someone to speak it?

“Wasn’t it enough that you killed my parents?” Thomas said. “Did you have to kill your own parents in the same way?”

“I didn’t kill my parents at all,” I said. “Thomas, it was just a
story
.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “In the story you killed your parents
in the same way
you killed my parents in real life.”

“OK, I get your point,” I said, his point being that once something bad happens to you, once you become tragic, you have rights to that tragedy, you own it — not just the tragedy, but the story of that tragedy, too — and then you and only you can do what you want with it. You could write a memoir about it, for instance. Yes, I had plagiarized Thomas’s grief, the way the bond analysts thought they’d plagiarized mine. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re damn right you’re sorry,” he said. “You’re always sorry.”

That was so obviously true that I didn’t feel the need to confirm it. “And then I’m guessing Anne Marie told her parents what you told me,” I said. “And that’s when Mr. Mirabelli started following me.”

“And then you kissed a woman who wasn’t your wife with your father-in-law watching,” Thomas said. “I didn’t really have to do any work at all.”

“My mother saw me do it, too,” I admitted.

“That poor woman,” he said.

“I know you know my father,” I said. “Do you know my mother, too?”

“I’ve known them both for a long time, Sam,” he said. His anger had turned to sadness now, meaning not that anger is fleeting, but that when anger melts away, then sadness is always there in its middle.

“From my father’s parties,” I said.

“No,” Thomas said. “Your mother has never been at the parties, not that I know of.”

“My father said she didn’t like his guests.”

“Just one guest, really,” Thomas said, and finally I was starting to understand. My parents had something like an agreement: every Tuesday my father would have a party at the house with Deirdre among the guests, and my mother would know to stay away. As long as my father remembered what day of the week it was, my mother wouldn’t have to see Deirdre, and as long as she didn’t see her, she didn’t have to admit she existed. She would go to her apartment that night, and Deirdre would come over to the house; when my mother came back to the house the next day, Deirdre would be gone. She did and she didn’t know about Deirdre; now I knew what my father meant when he said things were complicated.

“So you know that my father has a Deirdre.”

Thomas nodded. “It’s complicated,” he said.

“My father has been cheating on my mother for thirty years,” I said. “That’s not complicated.”

“They’re not bad people, Sam, not any of them.” I recognized immediately what he’d said and the way he said it: this was a rationalization a son might make about his parents. It occurred to me that my mother and father had become his parents as much as they’d stayed mine. Or was it my father and Deirdre whom he considered his parents? How many parents might a person have in this life? Was there an infinite supply? And supposing there was, did this infinite supply of parents mean an infinite supply of comfort, or of heartbreak?

“How do you know my mother if she wasn’t at the parties?”

“Your mother came and found me after my parents died,” he said. “She wanted to say how sorry she was. She’s the only one in your family to say that. I used to come around and see her in her apartment once in a while, but I had a feeling she didn’t want me there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think she likes me very much,” Thomas admitted. I knew why: my mother probably pitied Thomas too much to like him. I remembered there were books she wouldn’t read, and wouldn’t let me read, because they were so full of pity. For my eighth-grade English class, I was assigned
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and my mother refused to let me bring them in the house. I had to read them on the front porch, even though it was winter and uncomfortably cold even if you were completely dressed, as I had been back in eighth grade and Thomas wasn’t now. Snow was starting to accumulate on his hair, his shoulders. He was hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm. He was so cold, even his sternum was turning blue. The only reason I could figure he didn’t go inside was that he enjoyed showing me how much he knew about my family that I didn’t.

“Tell me about my mother’s apartment,” I said. “How long has she had it?”

“A long time. Almost ever since I’ve known her.”

“But when I came home from prison, she was living in the house,” I said. “My father didn’t have any parties then, either. I lived there a whole month.”

“They tried for a month, for your sake,” Thomas said. “And then you left.”

“But they
wanted
me to leave.”

“It’s complicated,” Thomas said again, world-wearily, sagely, as if only he could know what it felt like to know so much.

“You seem to know so much,” I said. “If you didn’t try to burn down the Mark Twain House, then who did?”

“I have no idea,” Thomas said. This was exactly what my father had said when I asked him why my mother didn’t like the parties. But he’d had an idea, all right. My father had known exactly why my mother didn’t like the parties, even though he pretended he didn’t.

“What about the Edward Bellamy House?” I asked Thomas, knowing what he would say.

“I have no idea,” Thomas said.
Now
he looked longingly toward the house, a
house
being not just a shelter from the elements but also a place where you could try to hide from all the things you didn’t know or didn’t want to know.

“I think a woman did it,” I said, testing him out. “That’s my theory. Do you know a woman who might have tried to burn down those houses?”

“I have no idea,” Thomas said.

“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.

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.