by Ben Greenman
“What do you mean?”
“Stories and stories. A tower.”
“The neighbors would love that,” William said.
“Who cares what they say? There’s no kids, so stairs aren’t your enemy. Go up, young man.”
“Zoning doesn’t permit,” William said.
“Get an easement.”
“That’s not what an easement is,” Louisa said. She had come out when Tom said stairs weren’t their enemy. She had no coffee and now she wasn’t going to get it. “It’s late and only getting later. Isn’t there someone at home wondering where you are?”
“If you’re trying to hurt my feelings, I’m just going to stay right here and take it,” Tom said, but he left a few minutes later.
Louisa lifted the floor plan by its corners and told William to open up the junk room. She had prevailed on him to carry out the filing cabinets and break down the exercise machines and throw away any electronic device not in perfect working order. “I now declare this the pin-up room,” she said, and William was gratified by the phrase.
He taped the floor plan to the wall. “Come to bed,” William said, and instead Louisa pulled her knees up onto the couch and began to take liberties with what remained of the red wine. The whole thing seemed chancy at best.
“Running out,” Louisa said. “Back around noon.” William lay on his stomach in bed and sorted through the burr of a lawn mower, a mating cat yowling, the ting-a-ling of a bicycle bell. He was reluctant to get up, not because he was still tired, but because he knew the risks out there.
He went to the deck, coffee in one hand, phone in the other. He had gotten the name of a contractor from Graham Kenner, one he recognized from signs around the neighborhood. “He’s the father of a woman I work with,” Graham said. “Great guy. Loves to talk politics.” That had been enough reason not to call. Paul Prescott had another recommendation, a “true genius” whose addition to Paul’s lake house upstate was “equivalent to the finest work of modern sculpture.” He charged accordingly.
Instead, William dialed a man who came recommended, conditionally, by Eddie Fitch. “My sister used him a while back,” he said. “She liked his work but said he could be a little closed off.” He giggled. “On the other hand, you could say the same thing about my sister.” The man picked up after two rings.
“I’m looking for someone to build me a house,” William said.
“How big?” The voice was Southern, rickety, scarred by cigarettes, at least.
“You mean bedrooms? Square feet?”
The man sighed. “Let’s meet,” he said. “Do you drink?”
“Sure,” William said.
“I don’t, anymore,” the man said. “But I can’t stand those coffee places. I’ll meet you at the Sit Inn on O’Farrell and Randall.”
William didn’t know the place, and as it turned out, almost no one else did either. There was only one other patron at the bar, a white-haired gentleman with a high brow and a squashed nose.
“Mr. Day?” he said.
“Call me William.”
“Wallace,” he said. His rheumy eyes suggested an almost comic surplus of self-doubt. But when William described what he had in mind, Wallace nodded crisply. “Sounds very similar to the first house I ever built,” he said. “More than thirty years ago now. That’s one of the things you learn: no matter how much you think things are changing, you always end up right back where you started.”
“Maybe I can get the prices from thirty years ago,” William said.
“I don’t joke about money,” Wallace said. “My estimate, when it comes to you, will be ironclad.” Something like anger rose into his eyes and washed out against the water. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said. “I tell this to every client before I start working with them.”
“I hope it’s something encouraging,” William said.
“People will tell you that building a house is an emotional experience,” Wallace said. “That you’re providing shelter and future, that it’s the closest male equivalent to childbirth.” William nodded. His heart quickened. The man was articulating his feelings exactly. “Well, that’s bullshit,” Wallace said. “It’s a matter of squaring risk and reward, costs and benefits. That’s all. Don’t get sucked in by the mumbo-jumbo, or the first house you build will be your last.”
The next morning, the two of them drove out to the lot. Wallace was semiretired, living in a small clapboard house not far from William. “I didn’t build it,” he said. “I built the one I raised my kids in, but that went to the wife when we split up.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“You shouldn’t be. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He threw back his head and gave a sharp staccato laugh. They were in his truck, going Kerrick to Francis to Harrow, driving too slow the whole way, radio tuned to classic country, which he played at maximum volume. It had rained lightly the previous night, and a layer of gauzy fog hung low over the land. At the lot, the two of them got out. Wallace said he would start by building an office in what would eventually be the corner of the house. “It’ll be a wooden shack and then we’ll tear it down and it’ll be the gap between the house and the garage,” he said.
“Like a command center?” William said.
“Exactly,” he said. “I’m too old to be outside in a folding chair or leaning on a truck.” He tromped to the edge of the property and pointed. “Right there,” he said. “It’ll go there.” Then he did what he said he would not do and leaned on his truck and went through the list of steps with William: grading the site, preparing it, foundation footings, framing of floors and walls, installing windows and doors, attaching the roof and siding, roughing in the electrical and plumbing, adding insulation, putting up drywall, underlayment, painting, counters and cabinets, sod. “At that point you can put a cherry on top of it,” Wallace said.
“Is there any chance we can get the deck up early?” William asked.
Wallace smiled like he was dealing with a sharp customer. Yes, of course, it could go up fairly early in the process, he said; like the command center, they could use it for things like storage and so forth. Wind was picking up. “I’m cold,” Wallace said. “Should have worn a jacket. Or pants, for that matter.” He threw back his head again. Wallace hadn’t said that he loved the land or that he thought anything built on the spot would be a palace, which suited William fine. Wallace opened the door of his truck and the music he liked poured out.
William’s week was a series of holes he could not fill, and he had to be careful not to fall into them. He devoted the morning to minor repairs around the house, and he drove through the afternoon, skittering from station to station. The news that week was about another fire, this one in a used-car lot, where a large cardboard display in the parking lot had gone up in flames at the same time a small blaze broke out in a corner of the roof. The phrase “intentionally set” had now been replaced by the word “arson.” “We use the term because it has legal ramifications,” a fire department official said. “It has to do with whether or not we can prove the intent of the fire setter.” The language was moving them all toward a new awareness.
That night the doorbell rang. Tom stood there with a bag of chips and a six-pack. “There was another fire.”
“I know,” William said. “So we’re celebrating?”
“Yes,” Tom said, “I would like to come in. We don’t have much time.” At eight, he explained, the local news was running a special report. They were reviewing the full set of fires, repurposing old footage, even clips of the anchors reporting the story on the nightly news. “Pull up a chair,” he said. “Would popcorn be inappropriate?”
The fire commissioner came on first to introduce the hour. He had eyes like pinpricks and a habit of turning to the side to point at his whiteboard, which exposed the collop at the back of his neck. “We are looking at a distribution that radiates out from the northeast side of town,” he said. Yellow diamonds appeared on the map.
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At first, it was just William and Tom watching the show, which meant it was mostly Tom holding forth. “It’s strange to see the news report of the arsons long after the fact,” he said. “Fire’s supposed to be something primal, but this puts it on a delay, which is also a remove. It’s like Mark Twain said: ‘Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.’ In a way, you wish the cameras would just get there and shoot the fire as it burns. Or that someone would put a camera in the fire even before it starts.” He had raced through a pair of beers. “There should be a whole channel devoted just to that. I’d watch it all the time.” William thought of mentioning the fire graphs he’d found in Tom’s studio, but he caught himself before he did.
When the special broke for a commercial, Louisa joined them. She perched on the edge of the armchair and watched silently as happy children clambered into the new family car. “Hey,” she said. “Does anyone want pizza? I’ll order.”
“Sausage,” Tom said, and she went to call in the order. After she left, Tom said, “She doesn’t seem to hate you as much these days.”
Tom was wrong: she didn’t seem to hate him at all. The floor plan in the pin-up room had restored him to her good graces. “You know what else?” Tom said. “I was reading around in Latin and I found the original for ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire.’ De calcaria in carbonarium. It’s Tertullian. He was also the first one to explicitly formulate the idea of the Trinity. Oh, and he praised the unmarried state as the highest state of man. I don’t like his reasoning, celibacy and all, but you can’t argue with the conclusion.”
“News is back,” Louisa said, resurfacing to rescue William. The female anchor, cool in considered blue, reviewed the timeline, gave tips for reporting leads, warned against taking suspicious figures lightly. The camera panned to the commissioner, parked massively behind a tiny desk. “Pay attention, as well, to the crowd,” he said. “People gather to watch a fire, and sometimes the arsonist himself is among them. I use the masculine pronoun because that is, more often than not, the case.” A short feature on Karim followed: though most of the investigators did not think Birch Mutual was the work of the same man, Karim’s was still the only death, and so, however imprecisely, he was the face of the problem. Tom stood up and showed the way he’d run, legs almost straight like stilts, and Louisa put a hand over her mouth and asked him to stop.
Tom’s clowning, Louisa’s horror: between them, William took the role of analyst. There was one car that caught his eye, a black Pontiac with a decal on the back; he’d spotted it in the reports about two different fire sites, the marina and the nursing home. “Maybe that’s something,” he said. “You heard the fire commissioner. People gather to watch a fire, sometimes the arsonist among them.”
“That seems unlikely,” Louisa said. “A guy sets a fire and then comes back to rubberneck?”
“That would be like me going to my own art opening,” Tom said.
“You do go to your own art opening,” William said. “I should call this in.”
Louisa lifted a slice of pizza emphatically. “It probably belongs to one of the reporters or a tech.”
“Oh,” William said. “Yeah. I didn’t think of that.”
“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “To be the smart one.”
Two nights later, the commissioner was a guest on another local station, on a panel show hosted by a severely handsome black man who seemed like he was already auditioning for the national networks. Tom dropped by for that show, too, and Louisa protested lightly that the rubbernecking made her uneasy. “Come on, Mom, can we watch, please?” Tom said, and she relented and brought a Chinese takeout menu in from the kitchen. They switched on all the lamps and overhead lights in the den and sat in the center of the warm glow. “I hate to say it,” Louisa said, “but Tom was right. This is fun.”
“Tom is always right,” Tom said. “This is the life: food, friends, and things burning down to the ground.”
“Friends?” Louisa said. “How about family?”
“It’s not a word I like,” Tom said. “But have it your way.”
They weren’t the only ones who were captivated. The fires, nine in all now, were bringing everyone together. Fitch called to say he’d been at a local service station when the police had questioned and then released a young man buying a can of gasoline. Stevie, outside one morning watering the lawn, joked that he was going to wet the house down to protect it. Even Karla was hooked; she and Christopher were watching the coverage together, and she was using it to teach him about the difference between crimes against persons and crimes against property. “Did you hear the commissioner’s press conference today?” she asked William on the phone. “He said they’ve pretty much decided they’re not looking for a juvenile, based on the sites of the blazes. We’ve had a marina fire and a hardware store fire and a train station fire, and juvenile fire setters tend to target institutions—schools, churches, that kind of thing.”
“Why?” William said.
“They seek control,” she said.
“Who does?” Christopher said from the background.
“Nothing,” Karla said.
“Tell me,” Christopher said. “Please.”
“See?” Karla said.
TWO
Among the many things William didn’t understand was himself. When Emma had moved to town, he had pushed a chair against the dining room wall and stared out the front window for hours, and when he saw her, it only intensified his desire to see her again. Now he never saw her and hoped he never would; only by remaining absent could she be as important to him as when she was present. One morning in the coffee shop, he thought he spotted her standing along the back wall, looking at a painting of a girl on the beach. He shut his book, stood, and left without picking up his drink from the counter, though he had already paid for it.
He achieved his aim, in part, by staying away from his house, and that meant, increasingly, visiting the site of the new house and asking Wallace questions whose answers he didn’t understand. What were his options for supporting floor joists? Did new wireless technologies mean that the electrical phase would go more quickly? “It’s almost like you have a job again,” Louisa said.
“Except that instead of getting paid, I’m the one doing the paying.”
“Six of one, half dozen of another,” she said. “But see? I was right. It’s the thing that’s keeping you sane.”
“I’m glad you think so,” he said.
Nine was too early, and even nine thirty slightly obsessive, so William showed at ten. Wallace was there, along with Hank, his architect, and two other men William could not exactly tell apart. Hank was a rockhead, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, with very few ideas but perfect certainty about how to express them. He had a hand with at least two mangled fingers, which he held up whenever he counted things, which was often. “We’ve just done sill plate anchors,” Hank said, “and now we’re putting in the soil cover.” William nodded, and Wallace told Hank to show him what he meant, and Hank smiled sharply like someone’s unkind father and spread a blueprint out on a bench. He touched one spot and then another and William nodded again, quicker this time, like he was absorbing everything, when in fact he was watching the two workmen saw boards for the deck. The sky was clear of clouds and the sun was bright and the men joked over the sounds of their work. “I can see your house from here,” one of the men said to the other. “And your wife, too. I think I see the two of you screwing in front of the window.” The other man laughed and said something William couldn’t hear.
Wallace and Hank conferred in the space above the blueprint. “It’s the vapor retarder,” Hank said. Wallace shook his head. “I’m telling you,” Wallace said. “Joints have to be lapped. I don’t even know why there’s any discussion.” Hank nodded and Wallace turned to William. “And we might backfill the retaining wall,” he said. “And Hank has some ideas about the landscaping.”
“It’s too early for that,” Hank said, shockin
g William by flashing a quick smile that looked a little shy.
“Or is it too late?” Wallace said. He hummed a B-movie suspense cue.
William wondered why Louisa wasn’t visiting the lot more often. “Frankly, I’m a little insulted,” he said. “Boy meets girl, girl asks for house, boy agrees to house after being unjustly accused of dragging his feet, girl doesn’t seem to care.” He shook his head slowly enough for comedy.
“Work’s been crazy,” Louisa said. “Pick a day.”
There was a calendar hanging alongside the phone, and he stabbed a finger blindly into it. “How about . . . today?” he said. Wallace had finished the deck at the new house, and William couldn’t wait to see it.
“As long as you drop me off at work and then pick me up. No point in taking two cars all the way out there.”
“Deal.”
Louisa was waiting outside her office, sun starting to set behind her, when William arrived. He rolled down the passenger window. “Would you like some candy?” he said.
“Only if you’re a total stranger,” she said. “It doesn’t taste as good when it comes from someone you know.” William’s laugh iced over; the joke had run away from him.
The traffic on Oswald was awful, so he cut over to Pemberton—no better—and then to Rockwood, which moved at a slightly faster creep. Cars coming the other way flowed easily through the afternoon. “There’s probably an accident,” Louisa said, pointing vaguely ahead of them, and William noticed a plume of smoke snaking over the roof of a house up on the right. “Look,” he said, and Louisa did. But it wasn’t the house: the smoke, dense and black, was coming from the discount-retail mart with the statue of a pig on a pole.
William pulled the wheel and cut across a parking lot. A fire engine was already there, and one of the firemen was fitting a hose to a hydrant. They found a spot close enough that they could hear the firefighters talking to each other and he and Louisa sat and watched the place burn. The Bond Street façade was already charred; heat had melted half the struts under the sign that overlooked Lucas Avenue. The firemen were carrying cash registers and other equipment out under the sign with the huge plastic pig. William rolled down the car window to get a better sense of things, and rolled it back up immediately when he smelled the smoke: it was chemical, acrid, unvirtuous. Then one of the retail mart’s windows blew out, and the flames went like a vine up the side of the building, and the sign, its last struts melted, gave way and crashed to the pavement. The pig, thrown free, skidded out into the center of Lucas Avenue. William inched the car forward. Heat reached them through the doors. Cold air inside the car bulged to keep it away. The pig, defenseless on the pavement now, had lost a leg and one side of its face had melted flat. Louisa took his hand and touched her knee with it, and then moved it higher up on the inside of the thigh. “There’s something about a fire,” she said, burlesquing but also really feeling it.