Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

But enough. There were many, many more stories, and they were my mother’s gift to me, and look where that gift got me — that’s the point. I didn’t want to leave my kids anything like that; but neither, I was realizing, did I want to give them the truth, which was dangerous and might end up hurting all of us and helping no one. While I was thinking of something safer to give them, Katherine opened the refrigerator, reached in, took out a tall Styrofoam cup, and began sucking loudly on the straw coming out of its lid.

“What are you drinking?”

“A smoothie,” she said.

“Is that like a milkshake?”

“No,” she said.

“What makes a smoothie different from a milkshake?” I asked.

Katherine thought about this for a moment, and then said, “It’s smoother.”

“Good,” I said, and meant it. I had come home intending to give my family the truth. But instead I had given my daughter a nice, factual conversation about smoothies, something not to remember me by, and maybe this is the most we can do for our children after all: give them nothing to remember us by. “Good,” I said again.

“What’s good?” Anne Marie said, coming into the kitchen from behind me. I turned to face her. Her hair was wet; she’d obviously just taken a shower. It was funny: she never blow-dried her hair, even though it was rope thick and long enough for Rapunzel to be jealous of — even so, she never owned a hair dryer, and still her hair managed to dry. I often imagined, in my spare moments, that her hair had its own heating coils, firing from within, and just looking at her I felt my own heating coils firing from within, the flames coming up through my legs and private parts and chest and into my face. I had to resist the urge to tackle her right there, out of love and desire. I had done this once, in the Pioneer Valley Mall, in a shoe store, where Anne Marie was trying on a pair of black knee-high boots, turning this way and that like the model she easily could have been, and my need for her was so big that there seemed no way to do justice to its enormity except to tackle her. So I did, scattering boxes and display tables and other customers. After we’d cleaned up the mess and apologized to the manager and bought the boots, Anne Marie had made me promise never, ever to do it again. So instead I said, “Smoothies.”

“Smoothies what?”

“Katherine is drinking one. We were just talking about how a smoothie isn’t a milkshake.” Anne Marie looked at me quizzically, as if I were speaking one of the many foreign languages I’d never learned to speak. So I clarified. “They’re different.”

“How was your day?” Anne Marie asked. “Anything special happen?”

This was the moment, of course, for me to tell her the truth. It was there in front of me, like another family member in the room. I thought of the bond analysts, could see the pages of their memoirs flapping like gums, telling me: Tell the truth, tell the truth; you will feel better, dude. I could do it, could I not? I would tell Anne Marie about the Emily Dickinson House fire and the Colemans and my time in prison; I would tell her about my parents and how I’d hurt them so, and how they sent me off to college because of it: I would tell her about how Thomas Coleman had just come to see me. I would tell Anne Marie that I’d lied to her out of love and fear of losing her, and now I was telling her the truth out of the same fear, and that if she’d please, please forgive me, I’d never tell her another lie again.

So what did I actually tell Anne Marie? I told another lie. Because this is what you do when you’re a liar: you tell a lie, and then another one, and after a while you hope that the lies end up being less painful than the truth, or at least that is the lie you tell yourself.

“Nothing special,” I said. And then, before she could ask me another question to which I’d also have to lie, I told her something true: “I love you so much, Anne Marie. You know that, right?”

She smiled at me, put her hand on my cheek, which was her favorite fond gesture, and said, “I do know that. I do.”

“I’m starving,” I said. “Let’s make dinner.” We did: Katherine shredded the lettuce, washed it under the faucet, then put it in the salad spinner, which she spun violently, switching hands when one got tired; I set the table, putting the utensils where I thought they should go; Anne Marie made the actual meal, which I don’t remember specifically but I’m sure consisted of most of the important food groups. Christian came down, still logy from his TV watching, and managed to do his part, too, which was to sit in his chair and stay out of everyone’s way.

While we made dinner, the kitchen was filled with the usual chatter: Anne Marie talked about the book club she’d just joined, Katherine the soccer team she was the star of, Christian the cartoon he’d just watched and partially understood. Me, I didn’t talk much, mostly because there was that voice— What else? What else? — booming in my head, the voice I hadn’t heard in so many years. I was distracted by it, didn’t understand what it was doing there. I had what I wanted, it was with me, in the room, including the room itself. Was it possible that we hear that voice not when we want something else but when we’re in danger of losing the things we already have? The voice was so loud that I smacked myself on the side of the head to get rid of it, which Christian saw and imitated, and then, because he’d hit himself too hard, started crying and I had to comfort him, which at least helped me forget about the voice for a second.

Finally we all sat down. After the day I’d had, it seemed to me something like a miracle that we were all eating at the same table, the way a family is supposed to. A miracle is something to be commemorated in prayer, they taught us that in college, except I didn’t know any prayers, had forgotten the few the nuns made us memorize. So I simply said, “I am the luckiest father and husband in the world.” I was, too; I had been lucky for ten years, and I was lucky for four more days, and then my luck ran out and I did something I shouldn’t have.

I went out of town on business. My bosses sent me to Cincinnati, where I was to pitch a revolutionary kind of sausage casing to the people at Kahn’s. All told, I was gone for less than thirty-six hours and everything went well (the casing pretty much spoke for itself and did all the work). The only hitch was that after I’d flown into the airport, gotten my van out of long-term parking, and driven to Amherst, I stopped to get gas only two miles from my house and managed to lock my keys in the van while doing so. I didn’t want to pay someone at the gas station to jimmy the lock, so I called Anne Marie to ask her to drive over a spare key.

Anne Marie answered the phone. It was Wednesday afternoon, four o’clock or thereabouts. She smokes a cigarette in the morning, another before dinner, and a third last thing at night, and she must have just smoked one, because her voice came at me like a distant train, a lovely, throaty rumble bearing down on me through the receiver, and it made me happy and hopeful just hearing her say, “Hello?”

“Hey, Anne Marie, honey,” I said, “it’s me, Sam.”

“Sam,” she said, “are you having an affair?”

That question stabbed me and changed my mood immediately. Oh, happiness can turn to despair so quickly it’s a miracle we don’t pull a muscle or wrench a neck with the suddenness. I was about to say, No, of course not, don’t even think it, when it occurred to me that by not ever telling Anne Marie what I’d done to the Emily Dickinson House or Thomas Coleman and his parents, I was having an affair of sorts, an affair with all the betrayal and the guilt if not the woman and the sex. Yes, I was in bad shape, my mind a clogged drain, and so it’s possible that I didn’t respond to Anne Marie for a few seconds or even half a minute, and finally she cried out, “You are having an affair, you are, it’s true!”