An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes In New England Part 11

"Sam, look at me," my father said. This wasn't the stroked-out father, not the drunk one, either, but rather the insistent, scared father, the father wanting to spare his son from seeing that which no son should see. "Sam, turn around right now."

I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes fixed on the bathroom door, which opened slowly, creaking the way doors in movies and old houses do, and my father's voice creaked a little bit too as he yelled, "Deirdre, don't open the door!"

But it was too late: Deirdre already had. She'd opened the door and stood there in front of me, a towel wrapped around her important parts, a blond woman vaguely my father's age, and for that matter my mother's age, too, and for that matter wrapped in a towel my mother had probably bought, long ago, back in the age when my mother bought nice things for the house and actually lived in it, too.

"h.e.l.lo, Sam," Deirdre said, then extended her right hand, holding the towel in place the way women do, through some complicated arrangement between inner arm and armpit and rib cage and breast. And not knowing what else to do, I took it. The hand, that is.

"HOW LONG?" I ASKED my father. We were sitting in the dining room, at the table, drinking beer. Deirdre had disappeared into my father's room. I could hear a hair dryer in there, the steady hum and blast of its hot white noise.

"How long what?" my father repeated. His face was a mask of nonchalance, although I could feel his legs bouncing jackhammer-like underneath the table.

"How long have you been with Deirdre?"

"Off and on," he said, "maybe thirty years."

"Thirty years," I repeated, doing the math. It wasn't difficult to do. Thirty years. I was thirty-eight years old. That meant my father had been with this Deirdre since I was eight, which was, not coincidentally, the year my father left us for ...

"Dad," I said, "when you left us, where did you go?"

"I went to Deirdre's." I looked at him for a while, and my face must have continued to ask him, not what what or or why why or or when when, but where where, because he then said, "Northampton," which is a town not far from Amherst. Maybe twenty minutes away. My father had lived twenty minutes away for three years.

"For three years?"

"Yes," he said. "Where did you think I went?"

Instead of answering him, I handed him the postcards. What a relief it was to do that: what a pleasure it is to use someone else's solid, reliable written words instead of your own less-than-reliable ones.

"I didn't write these," he said when he was through looking at the postcards. He put them back in the manila envelope and slid them halfway across the table, so that they rested between him and me like a fence between neighbors. My father still wore the mask of nonchalance, but now I thought I could see its little seams and st.i.tches and all the things that were supposed to hold it together.

"No kidding," I told him.

"That's your mother's handwriting," he said.

"No kidding."

"Why did she do that?" he asked, presumably rhetorically, except then he looked at me for the answer, which unfortunately I was able to give him.

"Because she didn't want me to hate you," I said. "Because she wanted me to think you were out finding yourself finding yourself instead of living in Northampton with Deirdre." instead of living in Northampton with Deirdre."

"She's a good woman," my father said.

"I know she is."

"How do you know that?" my father asked.

"Because she's my mother," I told him, knowing now that the "good woman" to whom he was referring was Deirdre and not my mother at all. I took a long slug of my beer, then took a silent inventory of all the things I wanted to say.

"Oh," my father said, and then the nonchalance cracked and fell off completely, and shame and regret took its place. His head dipped and seemed to be pulled toward the table, as if the table were one of the poles and my father's head something newly magnetized. "Your mother is a good woman, too," he said.

"You know" my teeth were gritted, but the words made their way through and around them anyway, as the words you shouldn't say always do "it worked for a long, long time."

"What worked?"

"Mom sent me the postcards because she didn't want me to hate you. And it worked: I didn't hate you. I never hated you until right now."

My words had their intended effect: my father's eyes got watery and then the rest of him seemed to get watery, too, his whole body sagging and turning to liquid except for his right hand, which kept its firm hold on the beer can. Then there was me, his son, across the table from him: the minute I said this mean, hateful thing, I, too, turned to liquid except for my right hand, with its firm hold on the beer can. Imagine if my mother had walked into the house right then and seen her two Pulsifer men, only thirty years separating their mirror images. Imagine what she would have thought if she'd seen us right then, just as the night before she'd seen me dancing with and kissing and groping the woman who was not my wife, and suddenly I understood exactly why my mother had thought she'd known me I'd cheated on my wife just as my father had cheated on his and I also understood that we hate our fathers only as practice for hating ourselves. If my mother had been there in the kitchen, I would have apologized to her, and then I might have apologized to my father, too, for being like him.

"Dad," I said, "did you tell Mom I was going to New Hampshire?"

"I did," he said. He was looking down at the table, refusing to meet my eyes. His voice was like a child's, watery and high. "I told her yesterday morning when she came by the house. She asked where you were and I told her. And then she went after you."

"Why?"

"Because she was worried about you. Because she didn't want you to do anything stupid."

"Too late," I said.

"It usually is," my father admitted.

"Did you tell anyone else?" I asked.

"I did," he said. He raised his head slowly, looking stricken but also hopeful, as though by giving me one thing I wanted, he might be able to give me more than just that.

"Let me guess," I said. "He was tall, thin, blond."

My father nodded. "He's one of my regulars. For maybe fifteen years now, week in, week out, except for this last week. He came by yesterday, right after your mother left. She almost hit him pulling out of the driveway. He asked me where she was going in such a big hurry ..."

"And you told him."

"I did," he said. "That's the guy you were asking me about?"

"Thomas Coleman," I said. "You didn't know his name?"

"He probably told me once, but I forgot it," my father said, shaking his head. "I never thought it was important."

I could picture Thomas telling my father, I'm Thomas Coleman I'm Thomas Coleman, and then waiting for my father to recognize the name and say, I'm so sorry for what my son did. I'm so sorry about your parents, so sorry for everything. I'm so sorry for what my son did. I'm so sorry about your parents, so sorry for everything. Finally, though, Thomas realized that he wasn't going to get satisfaction from my father, so he tried to get it from me. I wondered if things would have been different if my father had recognized Thomas's name and apologized, if one apology really could have made all that much difference. Finally, though, Thomas realized that he wasn't going to get satisfaction from my father, so he tried to get it from me. I wondered if things would have been different if my father had recognized Thomas's name and apologized, if one apology really could have made all that much difference.

"How about the bond a.n.a.lysts?" I asked. "Do you know them, too?"

"The who?" my father asked, and I described all five of them. When I was done, my father nodded, and said, "That sounds like the writer and his a.s.sistants."

"The writer and his a.s.sistants," I repeated.

"Five guys came around a couple of days ago, but only one of them talked. He said he was writing a book about you; he asked if I could tell him anything about you that he might not already know."

"So you showed them the letters," I said, already knowing he had. "I can't believe you showed them the letters."

"He said he was going to portray you sympathetically," my father told me. "He said he was on your side."

"Didn't you think it was suspicious that there were five of them and not just one?" I asked.

"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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 pa.s.sed 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.

21

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 once lived before they moved somewhere else. 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 antic.i.p.ation; 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 compet.i.tion 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 thud instead of a instead of a crack crack. Thomas fell back into the doorway and onto his a.s.s; 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.

"Out of my way," I said, then charged past Thomas and into my house, through the empty living room and into the dining room. The table there was much lower than normal and was balanced on four of Christian's building blocks, its legs removed and stashed in the corner of the room, like kindling ready for the fire. The normal tablecloth white, lace had been replaced with a tablecloth with some complicated pattern meant to seem Middle Eastern. There were covered serving dishes filled with something I guessed would be almost edible (the Mirabellis weren't known for their skill around the kitchen). Mrs. Mirabelli was the only person in the room besides me; she was, despite her arthritis, sitting crossed-legged on the floor and was wearing a white homemade burka, which was clearly just a bedsheet with a hole cut in it in such a way that it covered her hair and ears and then extended southward. She had unst.i.tched and then rest.i.tched a lace napkin or handkerchief for a veil; when she heard me come in, she lifted her homemade veil, looked at me in the way you might expect a mother-in-law to look at her wayward son-in-law a look that was somewhere between pity and poison and then dropped the veil again.

"Well, look who's here," my father-in-law said as he walked into the room. Mr. Mirabelli was dressed like the underground leader of a radical Islamic faction: he was wearing a green army jacket, a long white gown he might have stolen from a hospital, and a red-and-whitechecked scarf wrapped around his head and flowing down his back. All he lacked was the Russian-made machine gun, for which, considering the circ.u.mstances, I was grateful. My father-in-law had his left hand on Christian's shoulder. Christian was dressed like Thomas sweatpants and no shirt except that the towel was in his left hand and not on his head, as though he refused to commit fully to the costume. Or maybe it was just that he'd spilled something, as he was inclined to do, and had used the towel to wipe it up.

"Hey, bud," I said to him. Christian smiled at me uncertainly; he raised his hand to his hip, gave me a shy, surrept.i.tious wave, then took his seat next to his grandmother.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Mirabelli," I said to my father-in-law, as though I were introducing myself for the first time. And as far as my father-in-law was concerned, I was.

"Coleslaw!" Mr. Mirabelli said, then sat next to Christian. Christian gave me a sudden look of blank panic, the way children do when they don't know whether something is supposed to be funny or frightening.

"Who?" I said. "What?"

"Please join us, Coleslaw," my father-in-law said. "It's dinnertime."

"Boola, boola, boola," Thomas said as he entered the room and sat at the end of the table, where I normally sat. It was hard to miss the symbolism, and I didn't; but I couldn't focus my full attention or outrage on it just then, either.

"Did you just call me Coleslaw?" I asked my father-in-law. If this was my nickname, I'd never heard it before. The Mirabellis had never been much for nicknames, not even shortened versions of their own names, maybe because Anne sounded all wrong without the Marie, and because Mrs. Mirabelli's name Louisa would be a man's if you shortened it, and because Mr. Mirabelli's name was Christian, and if you shortened that that, it might be seen as disrespectful to his Savior.

"What else would I call you besides Coleslaw, Coleslaw?" Mr. Mirabelli said. He gave me a big, mirthless smile and then gestured toward a place at the table, opposite them, complete with plate and fork and napkin. I guessed the place setting had been intended for Anne Marie and not for me.

"Where's Anne Marie?" I asked, dropping to the floor with a creak of knees and a crash of a.s.s. As I did, the gas fireplace in the room suddenly flared to life, as though my sitting down were Moses and it was the bush. Mr. Mirabelli held up the remote control that worked the fireplace, tucked it inside his green army jacket as though it were his sidearm, and then said, "Pa.s.s the couscous, please, Coleslaw." The couscous which was actually rice, Uncle Ben's, the five-minute kind was closer to Thomas than to me, but I did what I was told: I got on my knees, put my left hand on the table for balance, and then reached across with my right. But my weight was too much for the quadruple amputee the table had become: before I'd reached the couscous, my corner of the table slipped off its supporting building block and onto the wood floor, causing the plates, serving dishes, gla.s.ses, everything except except the couscous, to come rushing at me as though I were the castle and the table settings the siege. the couscous, to come rushing at me as though I were the castle and the table settings the siege.

"I'm so sorry," I said, fumbling around until I found the building block, stuck it under that corner of the table, and then pushed the dishes, gla.s.ses, et al. back from where they'd been displaced.

"No problem," Mr. Mirabelli said. "That's life in the Casbah!"

At this, Thomas said a few more "boola, boola's" and Mrs. Mirabelli rang her finger cymbals and then fondly recalled the time in Morocco when Mr. Mirabelli had paid too much money for each family member, one by one, to ride on what had been advertised as a camel but apparently wasn't.

"I'm so sorry for everything everything," I said, once the hilarity had died down a little. I said this to Mr. Mirabelli, but loud enough for everyone to hear, in case Mr. Mirabelli had told them what he'd seen me do in New Hampshire. And in apologizing for everything, I was also apologizing to everyone except Thomas, who was sitting at his end of the table, spooning the rice into his mouth, a pleased look on his face. I was wishing now that I'd asked him a few questions about what he'd told the Mirabellis, about what they knew and didn't know about my past and present before I'd rushed into the house.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, Coleslaw," Mr. Mirabelli said pleasantly.

"About what happened in New Hampshire," I said. Because I figured that this was part of his plan: he'd get me to admit to the bad things I'd done rather than have him say them for me. This was a parental tactic: whenever Katherine or Christian did something wrong, we always made them identify their crime themselves, which then served as the appetizer to the main course of their punishment.

"New Hampshire," Mr. Mirabelli said. "It's funny you should say that, Coleslaw. I once followed a guy to New Hampshire."

"Thomas told you where I was going," I said, then shot what I hoped was an angry look at Thomas. Thomas didn't seem to care what was going on around him, though. He maintained a look of perfect contentment, obviously so happy to be allowed just to sit there at the head of the table and say, "Boola, boola, boola," at the appropriate moment and to act as though he belonged.

"I don't need anyone to tell me how to follow a guy," Mr. Mirabelli said. I remembered now that my father-in-law had been a claims investigator for thirty-plus years and had followed people for a living. No, Mr. Mirabelli wouldn't have needed Thomas's help to follow me up to New Hampshire, but I bet Detective Wilson would have needed the help. And I bet Thomas had given it to him.

"It was cold in New Hampshire," Mr. Mirabelli said. "I didn't like it much."

"I know," I said.

"You know?" he said. "How do you know, Coleslaw?"