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

“I didn’t kill my parents at all,” I said. “Thomas, it was just a story.’

“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “In the story you killed your parents in the same way you killed my parents in real life.”

“OK, I get your point,” I said, his point being that once something bad happens to you, once you become tragic, you have rights to that tragedy, you own it — not just the tragedy, but the story of that tragedy, too — and then you and only you can do what you want with it. You could write a memoir about it, for instance. Yes, I had plagiarized Thomas’s grief, the way the bond analysts thought they’d plagiarized mine. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re damn right you’re sorry,” he said. “You’re always sorry.”

That was so obviously true that I didn’t feel the need to confirm it. “And then I’m guessing Anne Marie told her parents what you told me,” I said. “And that’s when Mr. Mirabelli started following me.”

“And then you kissed a woman who wasn’t your wife with your father-in-law watching,” Thomas said. “I didn’t really have to do any work at all.”

“My mother saw me do it, too,” I admitted.

“That poor woman,” he said.

“I know you know my father,” I said. “Do you know my mother, too?”

“I’ve known them both for a long time, Sam,” he said. His anger had turned to sadness now, meaning not that anger is fleeting, but that when anger melts away, then sadness is always there in its middle.

“From my father’s parties,” I said.

“No,” Thomas said. “Your mother has never been at the parties, not that I know of.”

“My father said she didn’t like his guests.”

“Just one guest, really,” Thomas said, and finally I was starting to understand. My parents had something like an agreement: every Tuesday my father would have a party at the house with Deirdre among the guests, and my mother would know to stay away. As long as my father remembered what day of the week it was, my mother wouldn’t have to see Deirdre, and as long as she didn’t see her, she didn’t have to admit she existed. She would go to her apartment that night, and Deirdre would come over to the house; when my mother came back to the house the next day, Deirdre would be gone. She did and she didn’t know about Deirdre; now I knew what my father meant when he said things were complicated.

“So you know that my father has a Deirdre.”

Thomas nodded. “It’s complicated,” he said.

“My father has been cheating on my mother for thirty years,” I said. “That’s not complicated.”

“They’re not bad people, Sam, not any of them.” I recognized immediately what he’d said and the way he said it: this was a rationalization a son might make about his parents. It occurred to me that my mother and father had become his parents as much as they’d stayed mine. Or was it my father and Deirdre whom he considered his parents? How many parents might a person have in this life? Was there an infinite supply? And supposing there was, did this infinite supply of parents mean an infinite supply of comfort, or of heartbreak?

“How do you know my mother if she wasn’t at the parties?”

“Your mother came and found me after my parents died,” he said. “She wanted to say how sorry she was. She’s the only one in your family to say that. I used to come around and see her in her apartment once in a while, but I had a feeling she didn’t want me there.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think she likes me very much,” Thomas admitted. I knew why: my mother probably pitied Thomas too much to like him. I remembered there were books she wouldn’t read, and wouldn’t let me read, because they were so full of pity. For my eighth-grade English class, I was assigned Uncle Tom’s Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird, and my mother refused to let me bring them in the house. I had to read them on the front porch, even though it was winter and uncomfortably cold even if you were completely dressed, as I had been back in eighth grade and Thomas wasn’t now. Snow was starting to accumulate on his hair, his shoulders. He was hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm. He was so cold, even his sternum was turning blue. The only reason I could figure he didn’t go inside was that he enjoyed showing me how much he knew about my family that I didn’t.

“Tell me about my mother’s apartment,” I said. “How long has she had it?”

“A long time. Almost ever since I’ve known her.”

“But when I came home from prison, she was living in the house,” I said. “My father didn’t have any parties then, either. I lived there a whole month.”

“They tried for a month, for your sake,” Thomas said. “And then you left.”

“But they wanted me to leave.”

“It’s complicated,” Thomas said again, world-wearily, sagely, as if only he could know what it felt like to know so much.

“You seem to know so much,” I said. “If you didn’t try to burn down the Mark Twain House, then who did?”

“I have no idea,” Thomas said. This was exactly what my father had said when I asked him why my mother didn’t like the parties. But he’d had an idea, all right. My father had known exactly why my mother didn’t like the parties, even though he pretended he didn’t.

“What about the Edward Bellamy House?” I asked Thomas, knowing what he would say.

“I have no idea,” Thomas said. Now he looked longingly toward the house, a house being not just a shelter from the elements but also a place where you could try to hide from all the things you didn’t know or didn’t want to know.

“I think a woman did it,” I said, testing him out. “That’s my theory. Do you know a woman who might have tried to burn down those houses?”

“I have no idea,” Thomas said.

“I think you do,” I said. I remembered what Detective Wilson had said the day before, when he’d seemed so confident, and so I tried to mimic him. “I don’t know who it is yet,” I said, “but I bet you do. And I bet I’ll find out.” I patted Thomas on his frozen shoulder, then walked around to the driver’s side of the van, and Thomas followed me.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

“I’m going to my mother’s apartment to talk to her and Anne Marie.”

“Jesus, Sam,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “It’s too late.”

But it wasn’t too late. I had an idea that it wasn’t too late. “Why did Anne Marie take your Jeep to my mother’s house instead of her van?” I asked him. “I’m just curious.”

“My Jeep was blocking her in,” he said. “It was easier for her just to take the Jeep.”

“Why didn’t you go with her?”

“She said she wanted to go by herself,” Thomas said, not able to keep the resentment out of his voice. I knew then that he had wanted to go with her, and she wouldn’t let him, and that he felt a little lost and abandoned because of it, the relationship between man and woman being like that between man overboard and life raft.

“It’s not too late,” I said.

“It is,” Thomas said. “You should just give up.” He suddenly turned away from me and ran to the house, brushing the snow off his head and shoulders as he ran.

Thomas was right: I should just have given up, and that’s another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide. Unlike other guides — those guides that tell you not to give up on this or that, never to give up, good things will happen if you just don’t give up — I’ll tell you to just give up, immediately and without a struggle, surrender being our most underrated reaction to difficulty.

But I didn’t know that then, and so I didn’t listen to Thomas. I didn’t give up.