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

“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?”