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

This was too much: there was a collective gasp, and then all the women in the class left en masse, even the Chairman Mao pierced-tongue kook. Almost all of the men left, too, not because they were offended by the word “cunt,” I’m pretty sure, but because they hadn’t been paying attention and saw the women leaving and probably assumed class was dismissed early. Then it was just me and Lees Ardor and the Richard Nixon kook, who was looking at her as though in the throes of both fear and love. He was probably one of those buttoned-down guys who couldn’t love anyone unless he was terrified of them. Lees Ardor’s repeated use of the word “cunt” had no doubt made him fall for her hard.

“Get the hell out of here,” Lees Ardor told him. The Richard Nixon kook went pleasurably limp in his desk chair and then got up, wobbly legged, and left the room. Lees Ardor crossed the room and closed the door behind him, then sat in one of the student desk chairs and started crying with such force that I was afraid that her eyes were going to fall out of her head and onto the desk, smearing the graffiti. And then, as if the weeping wasn’t enough for her, Lees Ardor began banging her head, softly at first and then harder and harder, like a woodpecker determined to serve its purpose without its beak. I was afraid she was going to do some real damage, to herself and her forehead and to the desk.

“Please don’t cry,” I told her. I had said the same thing to Mr. Frazier just two days earlier. Was this what a detective did, after all? Did a detective try to get his suspects to stop crying long enough to ask them the things he needed to know? “Please don’t.”

“I loved her, so much,” Lees Ardor said.

“Your mother?” I guessed.

“Yes,” she said. “Why did I call her that?”

“You don’t really think she’s a cunt, do you?”

“No,” she said. “I loved her.”

“Then why did you call her that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh yes, you do,” I said. Because I’d often given this answer—“I don’t know”—to my mother when I was a boy and confronted with an especially difficult question, and I’d also tried it with my packaging-science professors, and none of them had accepted “I don’t know.” I bet Lees Ardor didn’t take that sort of answer from her students, either, and now I wasn’t going to take it from her. “Tell me why you called your mother a cunt.”

“Because,” Lees Ardor said. Her head was down on the table, her hands locked behind her head as though she were being arrested, and so the words came out muffled but with force, probably because she’d been wanting to say them for so long. “Because I didn’t want to be a character in the book my students had been reading.”

“You didn’t want to be Ántonia,” I said, although I wasn’t really thinking about that book, or even about Lees Ardor: I was thinking more about my mother and how she had given up her books and whether it had done her any good. Which character did my mother not want to be anymore? I wondered. Were there so many characters in her that the moment she stopped being one, she immediately became another?

“That’s right,” Lees Ardor said. She picked her head up and looked at me urgently, as though she was saying something important for the first time ever. “I didn’t want to be the hard-bitten character who had endured tragedy and come out a better, more sympathetic person.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t understand,” she said, and started wailing again. “I want to be a real person.”

“I do understand,” I said. Because I was pretty sure I did, and I was also pretty sure I knew why she didn’t believe in literature or like it very much, either. She didn’t believe in or like books because she feared being a character in them and thus not a real person, whatever that was, and not knowing what a real person was made her hate the books even more, the books and the words within them, too, and then that hatred extended to all words everywhere, like “cunt,” which was a word she loathed but could not stop using and which, like all words, was lousy and inadequate. Maybe it was words, all of them, all of them that could gesture feebly toward your anger but not do justice to the complexity of it, that made her — or her Wesley Mincher — go out and contact a complete stranger and ask him to burn down the Mark Twain House. This theory came out of my head, fully formed, like that Greek god’s daughter, who leaped out of his skull and into the ancient world, fully formed.

Then I made a mistake. Empathy makes us do things we shouldn’t, which makes you wonder why it’s one of our most respected emotions. Empathy made me touch Lees Ardor, gently on her back, just to let her know that I understood what she was going through and that I was there, as her detective, to comfort her. But it seemed as though she didn’t want a detective or a comforter. At my touch, she leaped out of her chair and turned to face me. Her tears disappeared almost immediately, as though made of an especially fast-drying sort of salt. “Who the hell are you, anyway?” she asked.

“I’m Sam Pulsifer. Your”—and here I paused, as anyone would have— “manfriend, Professor Mincher, wrote me a letter a long time ago, asking me to burn down the Mark Twain House.”

Her face changed dramatically then. Outrage and suspicion took the place of sadness, as so often happens. “So you’re fucking Sam Pulsifer.”

“I am,” I said, although the way she said it made me wish I weren’t. Lees Ardor looked at me in such disbelief that I thought it might move the discussion along if I gave her some form of identification. So I took my driver’s license out of my wallet and handed it to her. She looked at it, looked at me, looked at it again, and then said in a low, hissing voice, “You owe us three thousand dollars.”

“I do?” I said.

“You do,” she said. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m not pretending,” I said.

“You are,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said, and we went around like this for a while, like enemies without weapons and armed with only a very limited vocabulary. Finally I decided just to ask the question that might end the fight: “Why do I owe you three thousand dollars?”

“Fine,” she said. Then she adopted a theatrically bored tone, to let me know she was playing along but not at all happy to do so: “You owe us three thousand dollars because that’s what we paid you to burn down the Mark Twain House. Which you did not do.”

“Did you pay me in person?” I asked, playing along myself.

“No,” she said. “You sent Wesley a letter saying you would be willing to burn down the house for three thousand dollars. Wesley agreed. He left the money in an envelope inside a dumpster next to the Cumberland Farms, right down the street from the Mark Twain House. That was yesterday at noon. You were very specific in your instructions.”

“I guess I was,” I said. “Except that wasn’t me.” And before she could respond, I said, “If that was me, then why would I show up right now, after I hadn’t successfully set the fire you paid me to set, so that you could then demand your money back? Now that I had your money, why wouldn’t I just disappear?”

She thought for a while, her forehead wrinkled, as if I were an especially difficult passage in a novel and she were trying to unpack me. Who knows, maybe she was trying to figure out whether I was a character, too, and if so, which one or ones.

“Shit,” Lees Ardor finally said. “We’d better go see Wesley.”

WESLEY MINCHER AND LEES ARDOR lived in West Hartford, in a home much like my parents’: an old, musty colonial home full of rooms that all looked like studies and not the living and dining and parlor rooms they had probably been designed to be. Each room had towering, overflowing bookcases, and dim lighting, and the shabby look of neglect and intellectual wear and tear. We found Wesley Mincher sitting in the biggest of all these rooms: he had his legs propped up on a settee, and he immediately struck me as someone who probably didn’t get enough exercise and had diabetes. His face was yellow, although that might have been from the lighting. He was reading a book, an ancient-looking, clothbound book whose pages were probably as yellowed as Mincher’s skin.