An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (4 page)

Camelot was beautiful. There were no trees anywhere — it was as though Camelot had been nuked or had been the brainchild of the logging industry maybe — and each house was exactly the same except that some had powder blue vinyl siding and others had desert tan. There were elaborate wooden playgrounds in the backyards and mini – satellite dishes on every roof, and each driveway was a smooth carpet of blacktop and there wasn’t a sidewalk crack to trip over because there were no sidewalks, and each house had a garage that was so oversized it could have been its own house. There was the constant, soothing hum of lawn maintenance coming from somewhere, everywhere, even though the grass seed in front of most houses hadn’t matured yet and I couldn’t spot a lawn mower anywhere, and the sprinkler systems were all activated even though it was late September and too late for grass watering, the spray arcing and dancing in the streetlights, of which there looked to be about 150, all of them on even though it was the middle of the afternoon.

“Wow,” I said.

“Wow what?” Anne Marie said. “Are you talking about that?” She pointed at a tan house that was exactly like the others except that there was that
FOR SALE
sign on the lawn. Anne Marie and I got out of the van; the kids were sitting in their seats, screaming about something, everything, but the windows were rolled up and their screaming noises were as soft and welcome as rain on the roof.

“What are you thinking?” Anne Marie said finally. There was a weary, sighing quality to her voice, which I took for simple human fatigue, but which might have been resignation. I wish I’d paid more attention to Anne Marie back then, but I didn’t. Oh, why didn’t I? Why don’t we listen to the people we love? Is it because we have only so much listening in us, and so many very important things to tell ourselves?

“Sam, what are you thinking?” Anne Marie asked again, because I hadn’t answered her, because I was still thinking about Camelot and the house.

“Hello, life,” I said back.

“Are you crying?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. I
was
crying, because I was so happy, because this was my new home, and because it was clean and perfect and I couldn’t imagine anyone knowing me here, anyone wanting to know me. My neighbors, were they ever to introduce themselves, and upon hearing that I was an arsonist and a murderer, would start talking about the virtues of Bermuda grass as opposed to Kentucky blue. I could not be normal in Amherst, but I could be normal in Camelot. I felt so happy, so grateful. I wanted to thank somebody. If there were any neighbors visible, I would have thanked them. But there weren’t any neighbors visible; they were all inside, minding their own business, and that was one of the things for which I was grateful.

“Thank you so much,” I said to Anne Marie.

“I guess you’re welcome,” she said, without having to ask what I was thanking her for, because that’s what our love was. We called the real estate agent and bought the house and said good-bye to the apartment over the Student Prince (it wouldn’t be a permanent good-bye, although I didn’t realize that at the time) and moved to Camelot, and for five years we lived there and I commuted my half-hour commute and the kids grew up a little and Anne Marie got a part-time supervisory job at the super housing-supply store, and for five years there was no story to tell and we were happy enough, as happy as anyone can expect to be. True, it took Anne Marie some time to find happiness: she cried the first year when she discovered that the fireplace was ornamental and always would be; she cried the second year when she found she could put her index finger through the surprisingly thin plaster walls without really trying so very hard and she did this repeatedly in her dismay, and the house probably still has the many finger holes to prove it; she cried the third year when our neighbors still didn’t know her name and she didn’t know theirs, either. This time she really cried and couldn’t stop, and I had to send the kids to stay with Anne Marie’s parents while she worked it out. But even Anne Marie seemed happy enough after a while, and if prison was my first not entirely unpleasant exile from the world, then this was my second, and not once was I recognized as the man who burned down the Emily Dickinson House, et cetera, and not once did I hear that voice, the voice inside me that asked,
What else? What else?
Not once, that is, until the man whose parents I accidentally killed in the Emily Dickinson House fire appeared at my front door one day, and then the voice returned and then I moved back in with my parents and reread those letters, and then the bond analysts showed up and started giving me a God-and-country hard time, and then people (not me! not me!) started setting fire to writers’ homes all over New England, and that’s when all the trouble started.

First, there was the man, the son whose mother (she was one of the Emily Dickinson House tour guides) and father happened, unknown to me, to be sharing a private, after-hours moment on Emily Dickinson’s bed when I accidentally burned the house down and killed them those many years before. He showed up in early November, on a Saturday, which was about right, since nothing ever happened in Camelot during the week. During the week, everyone worked and went to bed early and got up early and you couldn’t clip your toenails on your front porch for fear of bothering someone with the noise.

Weekends were different, our chance to prove that we could pour gas out of a spout and into a hole and pull a cord and make noise and then cut some grass. I’d just finished cutting mine. There wasn’t much to say about it. It was short, and I’d cut it with a mower, the kind of mower all my neighbors used: one of those self-powered, space-age things where you stood on a platform and steered with levers at the handles. The mower moved so fast that it seemed to hover and basically did all the work for you. But still, I managed to work up a sweat while riding it, which caused me to take off my shirt, which got me in some trouble with my neighbors, my male neighbors (no women mowed lawns in Camelot; in this we were like the Muslims), who all wore big, padded recording-studio-type headphones while they mowed, and also huge, floppy hats and safety goggles and heavy-duty gardening gloves and long-sleeved oxford shirts and paint-spattered khaki pants tucked into the top of work boots. Except for tiny swatches of upper cheek and neck, there was no skin visible on them at all. My barechestedness ran counter to some unwritten subdivision behavioral code and had earned me some hard, disgusted stares from my neighbors. Every Saturday I reminded myself to remain fully clothed, but once I started sweating I could never remember to keep my shirt on and in this way fell into my own little unintentional piece of rebellion. I was like the patriot who kept forgetting
not
to dump the king’s tea into the harbor. This is not to say that because I sweated and took off my shirt and unintentionally rebelled, I was better than my neighbors. I wasn’t. I can’t remember any of their names, but they were all good people. I hope they’re well.

I was sitting on my front porch, which was really just a concrete slab that we called a porch because we liked to sit on it. I’d just turned off my mower, the roar of it still in my ears, and so I didn’t hear the son of my accidental victims drive up, park his Jeep on the street, then walk up the driveway, didn’t know he was there at all until he was right in front of me. His name was Thomas, Thomas Coleman, although I didn’t know this yet. I was looking down in thought when he came up to where I was sitting, and so I saw his feet before I saw the rest of him. He was wearing hiking boots, the waterproof kind.

“Are you Sam Pulsifer?” he said. At the sound of the voice, a stillborn lump caught in my throat, because I thought I knew who this voice and those feet belonged to. I was sure it was a reporter. I hadn’t spoken to one in years, but I remembered the way they talked, always leading you away from your version of the truth and toward theirs; I remembered their tiny spiral-bound notebooks and the way they looked so eager to ask you their questions, to which they already knew the answers, and so disappointed in the way you answered them.

“Yes, I’m Sam,” I said, then raised my eyes to look at the reporter and found that he wasn’t one, which I could tell at first glance. For one thing, no visible notebook. For another, no pen or pencil. And unlike the reporters I remembered, now that he’d asked his question and I’d answered it, he didn’t seem inclined to ask another one but instead just stood there and looked at me. I let him, and looked back, too. He was not so tall, but he was skinny, real skinny; I could tell this even under all his clothes. He was wearing lined jeans (I could see the red flannel peeking out from under the cuffs and over the hiking boots) and a flannel shirt over which he wore a corduroy shirt over which he wore a fleece vest, even though it was freakishly warm out for November, and if I’d known the guy better I would have told him that if he ate more he wouldn’t have to wear so many clothes. I was a walking, shirtless advertisement for that truth. And then there was his face, which was gaunt, and pale, so pale, and pockmarked, too; if my face was the flaming sun, then his was the cratered moon.

“I’m Thomas Coleman,” he said.

“OK, nice to meet you,” I said, and stuck out my hand, which Thomas didn’t take. His jaw started pumping a little bit, as if working up some saliva to spit on the hand I offered to him, and so I took it back.

“You don’t recognize my name, do you?” he said, and he was right in that. There was nothing, no bells or whistles; right then my memory was a happy, empty, echoing place.

“Well, I do recognize the name Thomas,” I said, trying to be polite. “But then again, it’s a pretty common name.” Which it was, and I meant this seriously, but he took it as sarcasm. I could tell by the way his jaw started working double time. He was an angry man, all right, and maybe that’s why he was so skinny: chewing so hard on his anger that he didn’t have the time or the energy or the appetite to chew on anything else.

“Thomas Coleman,” he finally said. “My parents were Linda and David Coleman. You killed them in the Emily Dickinson House fire.”

“Oh!” I said, since I didn’t know what else to say, and then, because this suddenly seemed like a more formal occasion, I put my shirt on. Once I was fully clothed, and out of nervousness, I went into a flurry of greeting: I shook his hand — I went out and grabbed it this time, there was no stopping me — slapped his back, asked, “How are you? So good to see you. How’ve you been?” and so on. All of this may seem horribly inappropriate, but what
should
I have done? There is no etiquette book for this sort of thing; I was writing it as I stood there. Besides, Thomas didn’t seem to think that I’d been so inappropriate — maybe after you’ve accidentally killed someone’s parents, every other offense is minor by comparison. His face even seemed to get a little color when I asked him if he wanted a drink — beer, juice, I told Thomas he could have whatever he wanted — although it may have been the glow off my own face illuminating his pockmarks. I really was giving off some heat and light; I probably could have powered the whole subdivision if there’d been a blackout.

“Do you recognize my name now?” he asked. “Do you recognize my parents’ names?”

“Sort of,” I said, even though I didn’t, not really, and even at the trial I tried hard not to know their names, as my future seemed a lot more likely a prospect if I forgot the details of my past. “I don’t really remember the whole thing all that well,” I told him, which as I’ve mentioned is a talent of mine and was true besides. Even now, with Thomas in front of me, the fire and the smoke and his parents’ burning bodies were so far away they seemed like someone else’s problem, which is awfully mean to say and in that way perfectly consistent with most true things.

“
Sort of?
” he repeated. A little more color crept into Thomas’s face when he said this, and I could already see I was doing his health some good, and if this kept up I might even get him to eat something.
“Sort of?
Don’t you feel even a little bit bad about killing my parents?”

“It was an accident,” I said. Thomas drew himself up at this and made a face, and in his defense I could see how he didn’t believe me: because if you said over and over again about the fire you’d set and the people you’d killed, “It was an accident,” it sounded as though you were whining, and if it sounded as though you were whining, it also sounded as though it wasn’t an accident, and then it didn’t matter whether it really
was
an accident or not. If you said about something terrible you’d done, “It was an accident,” you sounded like a coward and a liar, both. I sympathized with Thomas completely. But still, the truth is the truth is the truth. “It was an accident,” I said again, again.

“There’s no such thing as an accident,” Thomas said.

“Wow, it’s funny you say that,” I told him. Anne Marie had said the same thing many a time: in our life together I’d ruined more than one surprise party and leaned over backward and broken more than a few of our neighbors’ cherished heirloom chairs and told far too many ethnic jokes in the company of someone of that same ethnicity, and after each of these unconscious, unpremeditated bumblings, Anne Marie accused me of doing it intentionally. “This wasn’t an accident,” she’d say. “You did it on purpose.” And I always told her, “I didn’t! I don’t!” And she’d say, “There is no such thing as an accident.” And I’d say, “There is, there is!” But maybe there wasn’t. I could see what she was talking about, and Thomas, too.

“I miss my parents so much,” Thomas said. “It’s been twenty years since you killed them, and I still miss them so fucking much.”

“Oh, I know you do,” I told him. I was feeling empathy for him deep down in my gut, and his missing his parents made me miss mine, too, and in a way we were both orphans and in the same boat. “Hey, listen,” I said, “are you sure you don’t want a drink or something?” Because I was still thirsty from the lawn mowing, and besides, I was really starting to feel close to him and in his debt for doing what I’d done to his parents and his life, and would have gotten him anything he wanted.