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

But then again, it might have been the booze making me feel that way. Peter bought me shot after shot of bourbon, and soon I started calling myself by the wrong name, and this got all of them laughing good and hard, which made me glad, so glad that I drank some more. I must have done at least a good baker’s dozen of shots. After a point, I have no memory of any real conversation or of time passing, although it must have, because I found myself sitting on a stool at the horseshoe bar, the guys were nowhere to be seen, and there was a band playing.

There was no stage in the bar, but in one corner there was a band playing anyway, four guys — two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer — with long, stringy hair peeking out from under their ski hats, nodding their heads violently in time to a song that seemed to have no time. The bass was so loud it wasn’t just a sound but also a feeling coming up through the floor, up into me, through my groin, my heart, my throat. The sound pulled me toward the band, although first I got another shot of bourbon from the bartender.

I took my drink and went and stood in front of the band. I didn’t recognize the song they were playing, but when it ended, someone yelled out, “Creedence!” This seemed to encourage the guys in the band, because they launched into another song, a favorite apparently, and the dance floor got crowded — women dancing with men, women with women, men without partners stomping their feet and singing into their beer bottles — and before I knew it, I was dancing, too.

Yes, I was dancing, and immediately I remembered why I hadn’t danced in a long time. Because when I dance, I dream, or at least I remember, which for me is exactly the same as dreaming. So the band launched into Creedence, if that’s what it was, and I started stomping my feet and swinging my arms a little, and just like that, I started dreaming about the last time I’d danced, at my wedding, with Anne Marie. It was our wedding song, and I don’t remember what it was — another thing of which I’m ashamed — but I had the impression it had been many other people’s wedding song as well. I noticed many of the older married guests go soft in the eyes and clasp hands. It felt good to be in the company of so many similarly and successfully betrothed, and for that matter it felt good to have my beautiful girl in my arms, my beautiful, tall girl, who’d worn low-heeled shoes so that she wouldn’t be too much taller than I was, my beautiful, tall, thoughtful girl, who smelled like the cake we’d just cut. All was well except that we were dancing, and I started remembering and dreaming that time, too, remembering and dreaming about my parents, who weren’t at the wedding, of course, because I hadn’t told them about it.

Specifically I was remembering the time when I spied on my mother and father dancing. This was a year after my father had returned from his exile, and it was certainly the first time I’d seen them dance. It might have been the first time I’d seen them even touch since he’d returned. They were dancing in the front entryway. I was watching from the staircase (I was supposed to have been in bed, but I’d heard the music — it was Benny Goodman, plus his big band, I remember that — and was spying). It was some highly conflicted dancing, at least on my mother’s part. One moment, her eyes were closed, her head on my father’s shoulder as if asleep and at peace; the next, her eyes were sprung open and angry, her palms against my father’s chest and pushing him away, and the only thing holding her to my father was my father. He wouldn’t let go, and she kept saying, “I don’t know, I just don’t know,” and he kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh God, I’m so sorry.” Then she’d relax for a while, only to tense up again eventually, and so on. I felt so sad for these confused parents of mine and had the distinct impression that love and marriage and dancing were like being at war with your better judgment. Watching my parents dance made loneliness look happy and relaxing by comparison, and so I went up to my room and went to bed. When I was dancing with Anne Marie at our wedding, I was remembering all this, and at the moment when I remembered going to bed and being alone, happily so, I let go of Anne Marie and took a step to the side as if making a break for it. The guests gasped, Anne Marie grabbed me, I came to my senses, saw my beautiful girl and bride, and finished the dance, and we never spoke about it afterward. She’d grabbed me hard, too. Later on I noticed two large pincher bruises on my upper biceps, as if a lobster and not the human Anne Marie had prevented me from leaving the dance floor and ruining our marriage right off the bat and not waiting eight years to do it.

And I was remembering and dreaming all this in the bar, too. I was so deep in my dream that the song ended with a crash of drums and a shudder of bass and a screech of guitar, and still I danced in the middle of the crowd. People were staring at me. I didn’t blame them one bit and would have stared, too. I drank down my shot of bourbon, as though that would make them stop staring. It didn’t. I looked around for help, to see if there was someone around who could come to my rescue.

There was: a woman to my right, holding a lit joint. I hadn’t noticed her before that moment, and I’ve never seen her since. She was exactly my height. Her eyes were dark brown and they were squinting at me in bemusement, or maybe from the joint’s smoke. She wasn’t wearing earrings and for that matter had no holes in her lobes in which to put them. Her hair was straight and black and about ready to come out of her ponytail, although you could tell she would be as beautiful with her hair down as up, and that hair didn’t matter much to her and was just something that happened to be on top of her head. Other than these details, I know nothing about her, not even her name, although I think about her all the time, the way you do about people and things that change your life forever — although I doubt she thinks about me, which is the way life works, which is why I’m sure Noah couldn’t ever stop thinking about his Flood, but once the water receded, I’m sure it didn’t once think about him.

“You look like you could use this,” she said, and then put the joint up to my mouth. I took a drag: it was my first drag ever, tasted like dirt, and made me cough but otherwise had no effect on me that the bourbon hadn’t already had. Then the band started another song, one I recognized from high school: it was Skynyrd, the band doing its best to replicate the famous three-guitar attack with only two guitars. I didn’t dance this time, though, so I didn’t dream or remember — not about my parents or Anne Marie or the kids, everyone whom I loved and for whom I was put on this planet. How does this happen? Why don’t we always have someone on hand to say, Don’t! Cut it out! Run out into the snow and throw yourself into a drift until your capacity to hurt and be bad is frozen out of you! Why don’t we have that kind of voice, a voice that tells us not, What else? What else? but Stop! Desist! You are about to do harm! But even if we had this voice, would we listen to it? What is it that makes us deaf to all the warnings? Is it need? Is it need that makes us so deaf, that fills us up to our ears so that we can’t listen to our better impulses? Is it that we are so full of need, or so full of ourselves?

I wasn’t thinking of any of this at the time. I wasn’t even thinking about Anne Marie and Thomas, wasn’t even lying to myself about being a victim with rights rather than a victimizer with no rights at all. All I was thinking was that there was a beautiful woman standing next to me, smiling at me even, her smile making the bad band sound not so awfully bad, and she had two cheeks and I wanted to kiss the one nearest to me. I leaned over and kissed her cheek, and then she turned her lips toward mine, and so I kissed them, too, with feeling, and when the kissing didn’t seem to be enough anymore, we groped, enthusiastically and without regard to anyone else in the bar, as though our hands were made invisible on contact. All of this went on for a long time. I know this because eventually my lips began to get tired and there was considerable hooting and clapping that didn’t seem intended for the band. I glanced up to see who was making all this noise and saw my father-in-law, Mr. Mirabelli, standing directly behind the woman. And a few feet behind him, I saw my mother. Neither of them was hooting or clapping. Both of them were looking directly at me in huge disappointment, as though the bar were a museum and I were a famous painting that they’d paid too much to see.