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

“It takes a lot of people to publish a book,” he said. “Trust me, I know.”

“Dad,” I said, “do you still work at the press?”

“No,” he confessed. “I’m retired.” This could have been the same kind of retirement as my mother’s, but I didn’t care enough to ask, and I didn’t have to ask where he went during the day, either, every day, even on a Saturday. My father had been at Deirdre’s for three years, and I guessed he still went there.

“Does Mom know about Deirdre?”

“She does and she doesn’t,” my father said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” I told him.

“Bradley, we need to go.” This was Deirdre, right behind me. She might have been there the entire time, listening to us. I didn’t turn to face her, though. I didn’t look at my father, either. I kept my eyes fixed on the kitchen table as he hauled himself out of his chair and out of the kitchen. As he passed by me, my father put his hand on my shoulder and left it there for a couple of beats. When he did that, I didn’t hate him anymore, I really didn’t, and maybe this is why people do so many hateful things to the people who love them: because it’s so easy to stop hating someone if you’ve already started loving them.

Then my father lifted his hand and made his shuffling way out of the dining room. His hand was replaced by Deirdre’s face: she leaned over me, with her chin practically on my left shoulder. She was too close to actually see, to focus on, and I wondered if anthropologists and people from other planets knew this: that it’s better to look at alien cultures and worlds from afar, because if you’re too close, you don’t see anything but pores and the makeup that people use to try to cover them, and you don’t smell anything but warm hair and toothpaste, which was what Deirdre was to me that morning as she whispered, “Your father and I have been happy for a long time. And then you came back. You should never have come back. Don’t you dare judge us.”

Then she was gone, too. I heard her slam the front door on her way out of the house. I waited several minutes so that I wouldn’t have to see my father and Deirdre outside, in my father’s car, arguing or commiserating or consoling. I drank my beer slowly, then walked into the kitchen and put the can on top of the refrigerator, where my father put his beer cans when he was conscientious enough to put them somewhere other than where he’d finished drinking them. Then I opened another beer. There was an ugly gnawing in my stomach, which I pretended was still hunger. The only thing to eat in the house was one lonely piece of white bread: I slipped it out of its plastic sleeve and chewed it slowly and thoughtfully, like an especially contemplative cow. Then, after I was through with the bread, after I’d given my father and Deirdre more than enough time to get away, I put my open beer into a paper bag and grabbed the last six-pack out of the fridge. I was going to need whatever courage the beer might give me, plus some. Because now that I’d seen my father with his Deirdre, I was going to have to go talk to the people who’d seen me with my own.

It was snowing in Camelot when I arrived. This snow was different from the snow in New Hampshire: it was less intense and deadly and beautiful, just scattered big flakes floating earthward, like confetti separated from the rest of the parade. There was no wind at all; it was cold, not painfully cold but rather the kind of brisk, bright, invigorating cold that made you think cold might not be such a bad thing after all. The sun kept peeking out from behind the clouds, making the clouds and the snow seem more brilliant than they would have been on their own. There were no cars in any of the driveways, no children playing on their pressure-treated wood play sets, no one shoveling their front steps. It was lunchtime on a weekday. There is no quieter time and place than weekday lunchtime in Camelot, but this seemed even quieter than normal. I felt as if it were years in the future and I were pulling into some sort of subdivisional preserve, not a place where people currently lived, but a place designed to show busloads of field-tripping schoolchildren how and where people had once lived before they moved somewhere else.

I say there were no cars, but this wasn’t entirely true. There was mine, of course, and in my driveway, there was my father-in-law’s car and Anne Marie’s minivan. Thomas Coleman’s Jeep wasn’t in sight. Katherine would be at school; Christian would be eating lunch. He was the sort of boy who ate intensely, and so he wouldn’t be able to pay attention to anything except the sandwiches and milk he must finish. This would be my time: if Mr. Mirabelli had told Anne Marie what he’d seen, then I’d explain myself, I’d explain everything; if he hadn’t told her, then I’d tell her myself. I drank the rest of my beer, threw the can toward the back of the van, got out, and marched to the front door. This was my last chance: I knew this was my last chance because my face didn’t flame up but instead was ice cold, as though it were preparing itself to be another kind of face for another kind of life.

I knocked on the door and waited. The snow stopped falling for a moment, as though in anticipation; the sun shone on me the way the sun never had before, just like in the Bible, when the weather is there to emphasize human drama and not just to grow and kill crops.

Then the door opened. Thomas Coleman stood in the doorway. He was wearing leather sandals and a pair of black-and-white-checked baggy pants that weight lifters might wear over their spandex singlets during the Mr. Universe competition in San Diego. He was bare chested, his chest bony and flat and basically just a higher version of his stomach. His nipples were surprisingly large and choked with impressive, dark brown thatches of hair. He was wearing a white towel on his head, a thick piece of rope holding the towel tight to his skull. Thomas smiled and took a step toward me, and I hit him in the jaw as hard as I could, which admittedly wasn’t very hard: my fist hit his jaw with a thud instead of a crack. Thomas fell back into the doorway and onto his ass; he sat there rubbing his jaw but still smiling at me. It was the first time I’d ever punched anyone, and it was the most unsatisfying feeling in the world, and I knew immediately it is better to be wounded than to wound, which is yet another truth I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide. Gandhi knew this, too, until someone wounded him to death, which goes to show that there is always an exception to the rule, which makes you wonder why we have rules at all.

Thomas scrambled to his feet, then stood there, still smiling, his arms crossed over his bare chest, and I finally considered his strange getup.

“Why are you dressed like that?” I asked him.

“Boola, boola, boola,” he said.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Boola, boola, boola,” he said again, as though he were a Muslim calling other Muslims to prayer.

Which was exactly what he was supposed to be, I should say that now, and I knew exactly what was going on. The Mirabellis are a sentimental, rearward-looking brood, which is not only to say that they find comfort in the past, but that they re-create those comforts whenever they might most need them in the present. For instance, Anne Marie had a considerable stretch in her childhood when she went everywhere in her tutu, to which she was greatly attached. When we first moved to Camelot, and Anne Marie was having such a hard time with the thinness of the walls, her parents showed up one night wearing tutus, and this somehow made Anne Marie feel better, as though the thinness of the walls could be redeemed by the thickness of the past. As though it wasn’t enough simply to remember the past; as though one had to re-create it in order for it to do any good. Then there was the time, right before Katherine was born, when Anne Marie had some complications in the pregnancy, some hiccup in our girl-to-be’s heartbeat, and Anne Marie had to be hospitalized for a few days. To buck her up, and because Ben Franklin had always been by far Anne Marie’s favorite founding father in grade school, Mr. Mirabelli had visited her dressed as Ben Franklin, complete with the spectacles and knickers and kite and almanac, and Mrs. Mirabelli had dressed, on alternating days, as Mrs. Franklin or a bawdy French dame. There were too many of these childhood moments to count, and one of them was the Mirabellis’ only trip abroad, to Morocco, where they had heard Muslims calling to Muslims, which brings us to this lunchtime in Camelot. I’d always been included in these reenactments — had worn a tutu and dressed up as either Sam or John Adams, the stouter one — until now.