An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes In New England Part 7

"What is she talking about?" I asked the Chairman Mao kook.

"Professor Ardor's mother died," she whispered back. "She canceled cla.s.ses last week so that she could go to the funeral. It was in Nebraska." She paused again, fingered her nose ring like a thoughtful bull, and then added, "That's also where My antonia My antonia is set, by the way." is set, by the way."

"I knew that, too," I said. "I've read the book read the book, you know."

"Her mother died of cancer," she said. "The really bad kind."

I could hear something shift in the Chairman Mao kook's voice, could hear the boredom and knowingness seep out and the empathy flow in. I could see the change in her female cla.s.smates, too. They sat up in their chairs and leaned toward their teacher, and you could almost feel them waver in their dislike for Lees Ardor. The men did not care they were slumped down in their chairs, as usual, their baseball caps pulled down over their faces in an attempt to either hide or call further attention to their apathy but the women in the cla.s.s cared cared about Lees Ardor: her mother had died, after all, and they had just read about Lees Ardor: her mother had died, after all, and they had just read My antonia My antonia, and no doubt they were thinking what I was thinking. No doubt they had visions of Lees Ardor's melancholy return to the great sweeping North American prairie. On the prairie, the students probably imagined, there were self-strong women in calico showing off their self-strength during Lees Ardor's mother's funeral and drinking strong coffee afterward. And then there was Lees Ardor's mother herself, who (so we imagined, speaking for the female members of the cla.s.s, whom I considered myself one of at that moment) was as strong and as stoic as any woman in Nebraska strong when her husband had died ten years earlier of a heart attack and she'd had to sell their farm, strong during the six months she was dying of leukemia. Lees Ardor's mother was so admired by everyone who knew her that they felt no need to say so over and over again, and there were no teary toasts in her honor because, it was agreed, Mrs. Ardor would have hated such a gesture. Lees Ardor, I imagined, had been so moved by this stoic show of respect that she cried at the funeral, cried out loud for the first time she could remember. She put her hands over her face when she wept, and her crying sounded oddly far away, as if she were a princess holed up in some distant castle. Lees Ardor's mother was gone from the world and there would be no one else like her, and now there was just Lees Ardor herself. Lees Ardor could never carry on her mother's legacy, she knew that. How could she emulate her mother when she could barely stop crying long enough to accept the strong coffee from her mother's cronies, who would soon also die stoically? I'd imagined all of that, sitting there in my desk chair, and I bet the women in the cla.s.s had, too, and in doing so we'd imagined our way into empathy for Lees Ardor. Someone even sucked back a sob, which Lees Ardor did not appreciate. I know this because she stared furiously at the cla.s.s her hair glinted like armor in the buzzing overhead lights and said, "My mother was a c.u.n.t."

This was too much: there was a collective gasp, and then all the women in the cla.s.s left en ma.s.se, even the Chairman Mao pierced-tongue kook. Almost all of the men left, too, not because they were offended by the word "c.u.n.t," I'm pretty sure, but because they hadn't been paying attention and saw the women leaving and probably a.s.sumed cla.s.s was dismissed early. Then it was just me and Lees Ardor and the Richard Nixon kook, who was looking at her as though in the throes of both fear and love. He was probably one of those b.u.t.toned-down guys who couldn't love anyone unless he was terrified of them. Lees Ardor's repeated use of the word "c.u.n.t" had no doubt made him fall for her hard.

"Get the h.e.l.l out of here," Lees Ardor told him. The Richard Nixon kook went pleasurably limp in his desk chair and then got up, wobbly legged, and left the room. Lees Ardor crossed the room and closed the door behind him, then sat in one of the student desk chairs and started crying with such force that I was afraid that her eyes were going to fall out of her head and onto the desk, smearing the graffiti. And then, as if the weeping wasn't enough for her, Lees Ardor began banging her head, softly at first and then harder and harder, like a woodp.e.c.k.e.r determined to serve its purpose without its beak. I was afraid she was going to do some real damage, to herself and her forehead and to the desk.

"Please don't cry," I told her. I had said the same thing to Mr. Frazier just two days earlier. Was this what a detective did, after all? Did a detective try to get his suspects to stop crying long enough to ask them the things he needed to know? "Please don't."

"I loved her, so much," Lees Ardor said.

"Your mother?" I guessed.

"Yes," she said. "Why did I call her that?"

"You don't really think she's a c.u.n.t, do you?"

"No," she said. "I loved loved her." her."

"Then why did you call her that?"

"I don't know."

"Oh yes, you do," I said. Because I'd often given this answer "I don't know" to my mother when I was a boy and confronted with an especially difficult question, and I'd also tried it with my packaging-science professors, and none of them had accepted "I don't know." I bet Lees Ardor didn't take that sort of answer from her students, either, and now I wasn't going to take it from her. "Tell me why you called your mother a c.u.n.t."

"Because," Lees Ardor said. Her head was down on the table, her hands locked behind her head as though she were being arrested, and so the words came out m.u.f.fled but with force, probably because she'd been wanting to say them for so long. "Because I didn't want to be a character in the book my students had been reading."

"You didn't want to be antonia," I said, although I wasn't really thinking about that book, or even about Lees Ardor: I was thinking more about my mother and how she had given up her books and whether it had done her any good. Which character did my mother not want to be anymore? I wondered. Were there so many characters in her that the moment she stopped being one, she immediately became another?

"That's right," Lees Ardor said. She picked her head up and looked at me urgently, as though she was saying something important for the first time ever. "I didn't want to be the hard-bitten character who had endured tragedy and come out a better, more sympathetic person."

"Why not?"

"You don't understand," she said, and started wailing again. "I want to be a real real person." person."

"I do understand," I said. Because I was pretty sure I did, and I was also pretty sure I knew why she didn't believe in literature or like it very much, either. She didn't believe in or like books because she feared being a character in them and thus not a real person, whatever that was, and not knowing what a real person was made her hate the books even more, the books and the words within them, too, and then that hatred extended to all words everywhere, like "c.u.n.t," which was a word she loathed but could not stop using and which, like all words, was lousy and inadequate. Maybe it was words, all of them, all of them that could gesture feebly toward your anger but not do justice to the complexity of it, that made her or her Wesley Mincher go out and contact a complete stranger and ask him to burn down the Mark Twain House. This theory came out of my head, fully formed, like that Greek G.o.d's daughter, who leaped out of his skull and into the ancient world, fully formed.

Then I made a mistake. Empathy makes us do things we shouldn't, which makes you wonder why it's one of our most respected emotions. Empathy made me touch Lees Ardor, gently on her back, just to let her know that I understood what she was going through and that I was there, as her detective, to comfort her. But it seemed as though she didn't want a detective or a comforter. At my touch, she leaped out of her chair and turned to face me. Her tears disappeared almost immediately, as though made of an especially fast-drying sort of salt. "Who the h.e.l.l are you, anyway?" she asked.

"I'm Sam Pulsifer. Your" and here I paused, as anyone would have "manfriend, Professor Mincher, wrote me a letter a long time ago, asking me to burn down the Mark Twain House." "

Her face changed dramatically then. Outrage and suspicion took the place of sadness, as so often happens. "So you're f.u.c.king Sam Pulsifer."

I am," I said, although the way she said it made me wish I weren't. Lees Ardor looked at me in such disbelief that I thought it might move the discussion along if I gave her some form of identification. So I took my driver's license out of my wallet and handed it to her. She looked at it, looked at me, looked at it again, and then said in a low, hissing voice, "You owe us three thousand dollars."

"I do?" I said.

"You do," she said. "Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about."

"I'm not pretending," I said.

"You are," she said.

"I'm not," I said, and we went around like this for a while, like enemies without weapons and armed with only a very limited vocabulary. Finally I decided just to ask the question that might end the fight: "Why do I owe you three thousand dollars?"

"Fine," she said. Then she adopted a theatrically bored tone, to let me know she was playing along but not at all happy to do so: "You owe us three thousand dollars because that's what we paid you to burn down the Mark Twain House. Which you did not do."

"Did you pay me in person?" I asked, playing along myself.

"No," she said. "You sent Wesley a letter saying you would be willing to burn down the house for three thousand dollars. Wesley agreed. He left the money in an envelope inside a dumpster next to the c.u.mberland Farms, right down the street from the Mark Twain House. That was yesterday at noon. You were very specific in your instructions."

"I guess I was," I said. "Except that wasn't me." And before she could respond, I said, "If that was me, then why would I show up right now, after I hadn't successfully set the fire you paid me to set, so that you could then demand your money back? Now that I had your money, why wouldn't I just disappear?"

She thought for a while, her forehead wrinkled, as if I were an especially difficult pa.s.sage in a novel and she were trying to unpack me. Who knows, maybe she was trying to figure out whether I was a character, too, and if so, which one or ones.

"s.h.i.t," Lees Ardor finally said. "We'd better go see Wesley."

WESLEY MINCHER AND LEES ARDOR lived in West Hartford, in a home much like my parents': an old, musty colonial home full of rooms that all looked like studies and not the living and dining and parlor rooms they had probably been designed to be. Each room had towering, overflowing bookcases, and dim lighting, and the shabby look of neglect and intellectual wear and tear. We found Wesley Mincher sitting in the biggest of all these rooms: he had his legs propped up on a settee, and he immediately struck me as someone who probably didn't get enough exercise and had diabetes. His face was yellow, although that might have been from the lighting. He was reading a book, an ancient-looking, clothbound book whose pages were probably as yellowed as Mincher's skin.

"Wesley," Lees Ardor said, "there is someone here to see you." He didn't answer her, even though they were only a body length apart. "Wesley," she said again, but with more sweetness in her voice, as though she loved the way he didn't answer her. She said his name five more times, her voice sounding as if she were saying not, "Wesley, Wesley," but rather, "Love, Love." Still no response. It wasn't that Mincher was deaf; no, he was one of those distracted academics who are so lost in their own heads that it takes them a long time to realize that they might be needed in the world outside their skulls. But finally he did hear: he looked up and saw her and gave her a big, fond smile. He even put down his book, or rather he slid it into a protective plastic sleeve, the way Anne Marie might have slid a sandwich for Katherine's lunch into a plastic sandwich bag. I had designed both kinds of bags, by the way, or at the very least worked with someone who had.

"Wesley," Lees Ardor said, "this is Sam Pulsifer."

"I am a fourth-generation Mincher from the North Carolina foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains," Wesley Mincher said, apropos of nothing. He had a southern accent, the gentle, lilting kind. My father had edited many books by southern historians about southern history for the university press, and I'd met a few of what he called "his authors," had heard him talk about those authors, and so I immediately pegged Wesley Mincher for what he was: he was a character, too, the sort of southern character who believed that being a southern character had something to do with misdirectional doublespeak, and losing the Civil War and not wanting others to talk about it but not being able to stop talking about it yourself, and having wise, lugubrious old folks and front porches for them to sit on, and black people, always black people, about whom you knew everything and about whom no one else knew s.h.i.t, and the idea that self-criticism is art but criticism from outside is hypocrisy, and wise, folksy sheriffs and G.o.d and farm animals and good food that wouldn't be good if you ate it in a restaurant and not in your mama's kitchen, and a set of whitewall tires leaning up against the barn that would look good on the 1957 Buick that you had a funny story to tell about.

"Mr. Pulsifer has something to tell us regarding the Mark Twain House, Wesley," Lees Ardor said gently, so gently. You could feel the fondness pouring out of her the way those tears had an hour earlier.

"The so-called hillbilly of the Appalachians speaks an English closer to true proper English than any Yankee who went to Harvard."

"He says he wasn't the one who burned down the house, or tried to."

"My mother could make a poultice out of the sap of a piney tree that could take away your toothache before you even knew you had one, buddy-ro."

"He says he wasn't the one we paid three thousand dollars."

"Our Bobby Lee kept a lock of his daughter's hair in his saddlebag. It was magic, that lock of hair. It protected him from the minie b.a.l.l.s."

I just stood there, feeling sleepy in that dim light, enjoying the show. The two of them could have talked like this for hours, I bet, their meanings barely intersecting, until they arrived, always, at the end of the evening, at the necessary common ground.

"I believe him, Wesley," Lees Ardor said. "I think he's telling us the truth."

"Then I believe him, too, my love," Mincher said. He reached over and held out his hand, and she took it. They held hands for the rest of my time there, as though I weren't there at all, or as though I were there only to bear witness to their hand-holding.

I got exactly one piece of evidence that day, but it took hours and hours to get it. Mostly, Mincher told me the story of how they first met. They had been on the faculty at Heiden together for eight years, but they had never really noticed each other because they had each been walled up in their own ghetto of resentment, unable to see anything outside the walls. Lees Ardor was the only woman in the department, which was perhaps (she admitted) what made her say "c.u.n.t" so often. As for Wesley Mincher, he was the only southerner on the faculty the only one who had a bachelor's degree from Sewanee and a PhD from Vanderbilt as opposed to Amherst and Harvard-and it was difficult for Wesley Mincher to see anyone else in the department over the high ramparts of his defensiveness. That was his phrase "the high ramparts of my defensiveness" and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts.

Anyway, it was Mincher who noticed Lees Ardor first, at a faculty meeting, the subject of which was a conference to be held at Heiden dedicated to the topic "Mark Twain: The Problem of Greatness." At the faculty meeting there'd been a long discussion on plenary and breakout sessions and keynote speakers, and at the end of all this, Lees Ardor had said, loudly, "Mark Twain is a c.u.n.t."

Her colleagues, of course, had heard Lees Ardor say this kind of thing many times before, and her ability to shock them, as with her students, was close to nil. They ignored her, but Mincher did not. There was something lovely, fragile, and mysterious about the way she said, "Mark Twain is a c.u.n.t," and after the department meeting was over, Wesley Mincher chased down Lees Ardor in the hallway and asked, "Do you have any interest in drinking red wine with me and talking about Confederate currency and maybe looking over my rare lithograph of the Confederate mint in Richmond, Virginia?" To her own great surprise, Lees Ardor said, "Yes" (she did not remember, she admitted to me, the last time she had said yes to anything). Over the course of the next six months, Lees Ardor said yes many more times to Wesley Mincher (she blushed when he said this, but she wasn't displeased, you could tell), until finally he asked her why she'd said what she said about Mark Twain.

"I'm afraid of becoming Aunt Polly," Lees Ardor had confessed. She was talking, of course, about the shrewish spinster in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I had read those books, could easily see what she was afraid of, and realized that she was probably right to be afraid. "I don't want to be Aunt Polly," she'd told Mincher.

"I don't want that, either," Mincher had said to her, way back then, and also to me, in his house years later. "So I turned to chivalry, as men in my family always have." Thus he began to tell a long story about the many chivalric Minchers through the ages, leading, finally, to himself, Wesley Mincher, who decided to have the Mark Twain House torched as proof of his love for Lees Ardor. He had remembered reading about a young man who had destroyed the Emily d.i.c.kinson House in Amherst, Ma.s.sachusetts (it had apparently reduced one of their colleagues an expert in lyric poetry to tears). So he wrote the arsonist a letter at his home address. Then he waited. Months and years pa.s.sed; he fell deeper and deeper in love with Lees Ardor, and she with him. But there was that Mark Twain House: they pa.s.sed it every day on their way to school (she'd moved in with him a year after they first fell in love), and it served as a reminder of his failures as a man, of how Lees Ardor still wasn't totally rid of her Aunt Polly nightmares.

"Wait a minute," I interrupted at this point in the story. "Why didn't you just ask her to marry you? She wouldn't have been Aunt Polly if you'd married her."

"I wanted to prove I was worthy of her first," Mincher said. "The destruction of the Mark Twain House would have proved my worthiness." This struck me as the most ridiculous sentiment I'd ever heard, the sort of absurd romantic hooey that Lees Ardor would have scoffed at if her students had expressed it or if she'd read it in a book. But when Mincher said this, Lees Ardor didn't scoff. She reached over and gently put her hand on his yellow neck and left it there; he shivered noticeably, as though her touch were the best kind of ice.

"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 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 cla.s.sroom, the Professor Ardor who called her dead mother a c.u.n.t.

"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 compa.s.s, 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? 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. 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.

13

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? 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. 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 have a wife. Is that the truth, Sam?" a wife. Is that the truth, Sam?"

"Jesus," I said. "It is." I suddenly felt so tired I had to sit down, right on the front slab. The truth makes you tired, not free; that's another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide wherever it's relevant to burning down writers' homes in New England, that is.

"OK, then," she said, and then turned to go back inside.

"Wait," I said, scrambling to my feet. "Can I come home now?"

"No," Anne Marie said, her back to me. Her hand was on the open door, preparing to put it between her and me once again.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because you lied to me," she said, turning around to face me. "I don't know why you lied to me, but you did, and I don't trust you anymore." Fatigue had replaced ferocity in Anne Marie's voice; maybe the truth made her feel tired, too.

"Do you think you can trust him? him?" I asked, not needing to specify who "him" was.

"I don't know what what I think about him," Anne Marie admitted, which was her way of saying that she knew me all too well, but that Thomas was still mysterious and that mystery is sometimes closer to love than familiarity is depending, of course, on whom you're so familiar with. I think about him," Anne Marie admitted, which was her way of saying that she knew me all too well, but that Thomas was still mysterious and that mystery is sometimes closer to love than familiarity is depending, of course, on whom you're so familiar with.

"Please, let me explain," I said, but she held up her hand to block my explanation.

"Thomas hurt himself," she said. "I'm taking care of him."

"So why don't you ask him how he hurt himself!" I said, my voice getting high pitched and hysterical. "Why don't you ask him right now!"

Anne Marie looked at me curiously, her eyebrows and nose moving toward each other, making the face's own unique question mark. "OK, I'll do that," she said, and then closed and locked the door behind her.