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

“It is,” I said, and this was more bumbling on my part. I meant my response as a question, but maybe it sounded otherwise, like a statement, a confession, because Anne Marie started crying harder.

“No, no,” I said, snapping to a little. “Of course I’m not having an affair. Why would you think that?”

“Well, for one,” she said, “you went out of town on business.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s true, I did. I told you that. You knew that.”

“Sam,” she said, in that righteous, cocksure tone we use when we’ve known someone too well for too long, “I thought about it while you were gone. You’ve not once been out of town on business in your life.”

This wasn’t true, exactly. My first year at Pioneer Packaging, I was sent to do a product demonstration, and the thing I was sent to demonstrate was that unbreakable mayonnaise jar. I demonstrated the hell out of it and wouldn’t rest until I’d dropped it from places low and high, bounced it off concrete and blacktop. Before I knew it, I’d taken up the better part of the day, and the potential clients were a little tired around the eyes and they didn’t buy the product, either. From then on the higher-ups at Pioneer Packaging always sent other people out into the world to meet clients and attend conventions, while I stayed around the plant. So as with the adultery, Anne Marie was wrong in letter but right in spirit, and the more I thought about it, the more this true story of mine sounded like a lie. But still I persisted.

“But it’s true, it’s true,” I said, and started telling her about the sausage casing I’d designed, how it preserved the integrity of the meat in a way that no other casing ever had, but Anne Marie interrupted and said, “You’re lying. I don’t believe you.”

“Anne Marie,” I said, “honey, you’ve got it all wrong. All of this is just a big mistake. I love you so much.”

“You just shut up,” she said. “He told me you’d say that.”

“Wait,” I said. “Who did? Who said I’d say what?”

“The man whose wife you’re sleeping with. He told me that you’d say it was all a big mistake. That’s the other reason I know you’re having an affair. Because he told me so.”

“Who is this guy?” I said, grateful that I had another lying man to focus on. “What’s his name?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response. You know who he is.”

“I don’t, I don’t,” I said. “What’s his name? Please tell me. Please.”

And maybe I sounded sincere; I mean, I was sincere, but maybe I actually sounded that way, too. You can never tell how you sound over the phone, that evil piece of machinery, and I would stop using one, we all would, if only there weren’t these great distances we need to put between us and the people we need to talk to. Still, it’s possible that I truly sounded sincere. Or maybe Anne Marie was holding out hope that I wasn’t the cheater and liar she now believed me to be. Because she told me his name, as if maybe I didn’t know. Which, it turns out, I did.

“Thomas,” she said, and her voice sounded kinder, softer, more hopeful than before. “Thomas Coleman.”

“Oh no. Shit,” I said. This, of course, was the wrong thing to say and did nothing at all to convince Anne Marie of my innocence.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, her voice hard again, the way it gets after you’ve cried and then discovered you’ve been crying for a good reason.

“He’s lying,” I told her. “Don’t believe a word that guy says.”

“He said you’d say that, and so he asked me to ask you why he would lie.”

Oh, that hurt! Thomas had outsmarted me, and it felt bad. It’s a painful thing, finding out that you’re dumber than someone else. But then again, there is always someone smarter than you; you’d think we’d die from the constant pain of our mental inferiority, except that most of the time we’re too stupid to feel it. Yes, Thomas Coleman was smarter than I was, I knew it, and now my wife knew it, too.

“That’s what I thought,” Anne Marie said again. “He also said that you’d say the whole thing with his wife was an accident, that you’d never meant for it to happen.”

“That sounds like me,” I admitted. You had to hand it to Thomas: he really knew me, inside and out, and how to use that knowledge against me. I had no idea why he’d told Anne Marie I was cheating on her, rather than telling her the truth about my burning down the Emily Dickinson House and killing his poor mom and dad, but no doubt there was a reason, a good one, and he was smart enough to know it and I wasn’t. How did he get so terribly smart, so determined? Maybe it was the pain I’d caused that made him that way, and if that were true, then I’d sort of had a hand in it, in making him as smart and devious as he was. I was really starting to dislike the guy. But I also felt a little proud, like Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his monster turned on him, because, after all, it was Dr. Frankenstein who had made the monster strong and cunning enough to turn on him.

“You know what else he said?” Anne Marie asked.

“Tell me,” I said. I didn’t want to know, of course, but she was going to tell me anyway, so why not invite in the inevitable, which is why, in the movies, vampires have to be asked inside by their victims and always are.

“He said that we didn’t belong together anyway, and good riddance. He said I was much too beautiful to be with a man like you.”

“Hey, Anne Marie, I’ve said the same thing. Many, many times.” And I had. But it was different with Thomas saying it. When I said Anne Marie was too beautiful for me, it was as if only I knew and saw the truth. Now that Thomas had said it, though, I could see us as everyone else no doubt did: we were the couple that no one could figure out. What does she see in him? That was the unanswerable question.

“Listen,” I said. “I know you don’t believe me. But don’t trust this guy Thomas; he’s bad news.”

“You’d know,” she said.

“I would?”

“Bad news knows bad news,” she said. I could hear her light up another cigarette, which meant that she was on track to smoke more than her daily three. She didn’t like to smoke around the kids, and so I thought maybe I could talk to them while she finished her smoke. I’d lost her; it felt that way already. But I hadn’t lost the kids yet, I didn’t think. Apparently this is what you do when you lose someone you love: you scramble to make sure you don’t lose everyone you love.

“Hey,” I said, “are the kids around?”

“Yes.”

“Can I talk to them?”

“No,” she said.

After that, silence opened up between us, big and yawning and much wider than the actual two miles between the gas station from which I was calling and our home to the west. The gap was so big that it felt as though there were nothing I could do to close it, nothing at all. It was the worst feeling in the world. Think of when California finally breaks off from the rest of country, and the people in Nevada watching it happen from their new coastline. That’s what I felt like.

So what did I do? Did I finally, out of desperation, do what the bond analysts told one another to do? Did I tell Anne Marie the truth? I didn’t. It would have been like reaching inside of me and yanking out one of my organs — my liver, my spleen, or one of their vital neighbors — and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. But I could tell Anne Marie what she thought was the truth. This is what I decided, right there on the phone: that I would tell Anne Marie I’d had an affair with Thomas Coleman’s wife. After all, wasn’t it better to be a philanderer than an arsonist and a murderer? Wasn’t I catching a bit of a break here, that my wife was convinced I was a philanderer and not something much worse? Wasn’t it better — if your wife thought you were a philanderer and wouldn’t be convinced otherwise — just to go ahead and admit to her truth, so that you could then apologize and beg her forgiveness, and then she could get on with the business of forgiving you and things could get back to normal? This was my thinking when I admitted to Anne Marie, “OK, yes, I cheated on you. I am so sorry. Please let me come home and we’ll talk this over.”