The Arsonist: A novel

by Sue Miller

“You go around to my side,” she said. She hoped her voice was kind. That was what she intended, anyway.

  He did as he was told, and they both got in and put their seat belts on. She slid the seat forward a few inches and put the car in drive. She swung it out onto the road again.

  They’d keep going. It made as much sense as turning back. Sooner or later there would be something she’d recognize. Or a town, with road signs, arrows with mileage pointing to some place she knew. They had to be within an hour or so of Pomeroy in one direction or another. It would be all right. They’d get there, she told herself. She’d get Alfie to bed, and then she’d let herself think about this.

  Six or seven miles later, the speed limit dropped to thirty, then twenty-five, and they were in the village of North Winslow, only forty minutes or so from the house. “Here we go,” she said in relief. She looked at Alfie, but his face was as blank as before.

  He had stayed that way even as they swung into the long driveway at the farm, even as she turned the engine off. She had to speak to him to get him to take his seat belt off, to open the car door.

  When he’d used the bathroom and gotten into bed, she spoke to him as you would to a child—reassuringly, soothingly. She kissed him good night and said she’d be in herself in a little bit, she was just going to have a drink and unwind from the drive.

  And now here she sat, on the porch, the night noises quietly riotous around her—the peepers’ steady cheerful churning down by the pond, the odd owl hooting. She’d heard a distant cry as she sat down—an animal, caught, killed perhaps. The chair itself made little noises of dry protest when she moved in it.

  He would be fine tomorrow, chances were. This was the worst it had ever been, but he had never not bounced back, as she thought of it. He would again, maybe commenting on the failure, as he sometimes did, “I completely lost my train of thought there,” when he paused in the middle of a sentence he’d launched himself into, befuddled. Or “I forgot for a couple of minutes where I was going.” And they would commiserate, though it was sometimes hard to keep the tone light—she was aware of the sharper note of real perplexity in him from time to time. But what had frightened her most tonight was that he wasn’t perplexed at all—that he’d seemed so unconcerned with their being, essentially, lost.

  At first, she had ignored the signs—he’d always been a little forgetful anyway, a little scattered. Years earlier, long before any of this had started, she had pinned a New Yorker cartoon to his study door—a bearded, anxious man in a tweed jacket, stopping a policeman: “I’m an academic. Where am I?”

  Then, for a while, she was impatient, irritated. Well, she could still be impatient and irritated, if she were honest. But within the last year or so, she was mostly just worried. And as a result there was this—booze, which she used too often. The strained attempt not to notice, to be kind. The solitary assessing and reassessing. The managing of appearances. The covering up.

  But it was he, after all, who had pushed them toward this move, to retirement. He who had faced that realistically. Who had brought them to this little town. To this house.

  Which had been in her family since the town was settled, lived in from generation to generation. When it became her grandmother’s, though, it had become a seasonal home, empty through most of the year. She’d used it as a summer retreat from visibility as a minister’s wife—the place she could always come “to be as naughty as I care to be,” she would say. It had become Sylvia’s about twenty years ago because she was the oldest child of the only son, but mostly because she was also the only one in the family who wanted the managing of it.

  And she might not have been interested either if it weren’t for Alfie, who had loved it from the moment he saw it, and then for the girls, to whom it represented home in a way none of the other houses they lived in had—too many houses in too many towns as Alfie moved around in academia.

  At first she had resisted the idea of retiring, of moving. What she had said to Alfie was that she wanted to keep on teaching. But as the fall semester dragged on, she realized that wasn’t it, that there would be a kind of relief to stopping. That a part of her was tired of waxing enthusiastic about her students’ halfhearted, mediocre essays, tired of hearing their excuses, the same disasters that had befallen students year after year and made it impossible for them to get their work done—parents divorcing, a sick grandmother, breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Sometimes they just forgot. No, although there were pleasures involved in her work—her colleagues, the occasional really gifted student, the sense sometimes of having won a class over to a writer she loved—there was also a lot she could easily leave behind.

  No, her resistance was centered on Alfie. She didn’t want to be alone with him, watching his old age happening to them both in slow motion. Being in charge of it.

  Leaning back now in the old wicker chair, looking at the net of stars in the black sky above her, she thought of one minor episode after another. The time he didn’t recognize his own coat and held it up for her to put on. The time he got lost on the way home from the campus and had to knock on a stranger’s door, had to ask to use the phone to call her to come and get him. When Sylvia picked him up, she could tell that the woman who’d let him in was frightened of him. Sylvia had written her a note of thanks the next day, realizing even as she did it how self-serving it was, that she was trying to assert something about herself, to put some distance between herself and Alfie in the woman’s mind. He may be gaga, but I still know how to behave.

  They didn’t make love anymore either. They hadn’t for more than a year. She would become sexless, then—a sister, a daughter, a nurse. She would manage their lives in Pomeroy, as she’d managed getting up here this spring, as she’d managed their successful arrival home tonight.

  She sat back in the creaking chair and looked through the window into the living room. She did love the house. In another life, she might have been glad to live her last years here. And it was in better shape now than it had been in a long time—the new bedroom wing on the ground floor, the new furnace, new storm windows. Insulation had been blown in, everything had been repainted.

  All of this she’d been in charge of, too. And there would be other issues to deal with. There always were. Last winter the fancy new generator had gone on the fritz in a snowstorm. Who knew what else would come up? Algae in the pond, peeling paint, rot here and there. And all of these problems would fall to her to sort out, while Alfie worked on his book on Virgil’s Eclogues or read or made notes for the Harper Prize.

  The Harper Prize. He’d been so pleased to have been asked to be on the jury. She’d felt almost sick when he told her. She’d already been worried on his behalf, he was having so much difficulty with other intellectual tasks.

  But it seemed cruel, given his pleasure, to remind him of any of that, so she’d said nothing. They’d gone out to dinner to celebrate, and in the subdued lighting of the only really elegant restaurant in Bowman, he had looked younger. And because he was so exuberant, so animated, he seemed younger, too. It made her think maybe he could do it, could call up in himself the sense of focus, the energy, to read carefully, to make an intelligent judgment.

  And after all, it was a committee. If he weren’t up to it, there would be the others to take over, to cover for him.

  When she went into the bedroom, he was lying on his back, utterly still. She froze, unable to step closer. She had the sudden conviction that he was dead; but then he drew a shuddering, snorting breath through his nose and open mouth, and she felt herself relaxing.

  She’d been holding her own breath, she realized abruptly, and because of that, perhaps, her heart was beating faster, a little irregularly.

  As if she were excited.

  No. That wasn’t so. She’d been frightened, that was all.

  She pulled off her clothes in the cool night air and put on her pajamas. In the bathroom, as she brushed her teeth, she watched herself in the mirror, ready to dislike what she saw ther
e. But all that showed in her face was how tired she was, how old.

  At six, she got up. In the night, she’d heard Frankie moving around in the living room, awake again, as she’d been last night. She’d thought briefly of getting up, of going in to talk with her, telling her about Alfie tonight, but decided not to. If it had been Liz, she might have, but Frankie … no. No need to worry her when she’d be leaving so soon.

  She dressed in the living room so as not to disturb Alfie. In the kitchen, she got the coffee carafe out and set the kettle on to boil. When the coffee was done, she sat in the living room drinking it, looking out the window at the overgrown meadow down in front of the house. The grass on the lawn around the house was nearly as long—all the rain they’d had, and then the nonappearance of Adrian Snell, who was supposed to take care of the mowing as he took care of so much else for the summer people, though some of the newer ones used other, younger, handymen, too. But for Sylvia and Alfie and perhaps six or seven other old-timers, Adrian was the one who plowed, who mowed, who cut firewood.

  She’d have to speak to him about the lawn. An image of him rose in her mind, the barrel-chested, self-assured man he’d turned into, completely at ease with himself in his own small world.

  It was complicated, with Adrian, complicated because she’d grown up with him, seeing him every summer, and then coming to know him well in the one year she lived with her grandmother in high school—the year her parents were off doing research in Guatemala—which was when she’d been in love with him, and he with her.

  In love, she thought now, and her face twisted. An infatuation, that was all.

  This was how she’d taught herself to think about it afterward in order to go on seeing him year after year. To go on talking to him cordially while he filled the gas tank—though that didn’t happen anymore, now that you paid with a card at the pump and filled the tank yourself. But she still talked to him about the summer tasks she asked him to perform. She talked to him while she wrote him a check.

  She didn’t like to think, and didn’t often, of the few times they’d made love. It was not memorable sex, though at the time everything about it was powerful to her. But that mostly resided in her response to him, to the way he looked, the way he smelled. Sometimes just glancing over at his arms and hands as he drove a car excited her.

  The lovemaking itself was awkward and usually uncomfortable. Only once had they done it in a bed, when her grandmother was away and he came to her late at night. That was near the end of her senior year, when she’d been accepted to college. Lying in the dark next to her when they were finished, he asked her not to go, to stay and marry him; and she understood, abruptly, what her grandmother had meant when she said at the tentative start of their high school affair, “I’d think about whether it’s such a great kindness you’re doing the boy, taking up with him before you go off to your real life.” She’d been smiling, her voice was mild, as it usually was. Her eyes were unreadable behind her bifocals.

  “This is my real life,” Sylvia had said.

  “Oh, is it, now?” her grandmother had asked. They were having dinner together, as they did most nights that year. Sylvia’s parents had taken the two younger children with them, but they thought Sylvia should stay in the States for her senior year. It would be better for her college applications to have a normal year, to be able to take the required tests easily. So Sylvia and her grandmother learned to move around the old farmhouse companionably, to talk comfortably in the evenings over dinner; or, just as comfortably later in the evening, not talk, as Sylvia did her homework on the dining room table, and her grandmother read or wrote letters in the living room. “We’re like monks, off to our cells,” her grandmother said one night as they separated.

  She’d wait to call Adrian until nine or so, she thought now, drinking her coffee. She’d have to remind him of their arrangement, of her expectations. This added a heightened sense of—what?—unpleasantness, she supposed, to the worries about the day.

  ——

  But when Alfie got up, he was fine, he had bounced back, and she felt herself relaxing. She poured him coffee, and herself a second cup, and they went to sit outside on the screened porch together—it had warmed up enough by now to make this possible. He didn’t mention getting lost the night before. They talked quietly, aware of Frankie, asleep upstairs. They talked about her, about how worn out she seemed, even taking the jet lag into account. They talked about the fire. They talked about Liz and Clark’s arrival on Sunday.

  After a while, she stood up to go to make breakfast. He followed her to the kitchen and poured himself another cup of coffee while she pulled out the equipment she’d need.

  He went back to the living room while she got things ready. She could hear that he was listening to NPR on the radio, but she couldn’t hear the words—the bacon frying made a kind of white noise. When she called him in and they sat down, he summarized what was happening in the world for her, mostly more on the Lewinsky scandal. She was tired of it already.

  As they were finishing breakfast, she thought perhaps she’d try now, she’d ask him what had been going on the night before. But what did she want?

  For him to acknowledge it, she supposed.

  What he’d put her through? Was that it? Or—this would be more generous—what he was going through himself?

  Maybe that.

  She smiled at him. “So,” she said. “What happened last night, do you think?”

  “Oh, you were probably just tired, dear.” His voice was reassuring. “It was so dark out, it’s easy enough to make a mistake. I shouldn’t have let you do it.”

  She was so disoriented by this that she didn’t know what to say. What came out quickly, without really thinking, was, “But you drove, too.” She couldn’t help it, her voice was accusatory.

  He looked at her with concern for a moment, frowning. Then he smiled, gently, kindly—his Alfie smile—and said, “Surely not.”

  She turned away, shocked. After a moment, without looking at him, she got up and started to clear the table.

  Behind her, he seemed to be waiting for something. She ran the water over the first plate, watched the yellow paste of the egg yolk disappear. Should she argue with him? Should she insist he remember it as it had happened? Would that be punitive?

  Or would it be condescending, punitive in a different way, to let it go, to assume he wouldn’t be able to correct his error? And why was she so furious at him? Whatever it was, he couldn’t help it, could he?

  “Okay,” she said finally.

  And it seemed this was enough. At any rate, after a moment she heard him go out of the room.

  As she finished loading the dishwasher, as she wiped the counters, scrubbing fiercely at the fine, faint sprays of grease from the bacon, she was fighting back tears.

  It was in the midst of this confusion of feeling that Adrian’s old blue pickup truck came up the driveway and parked by the barn. But it wasn’t Adrian in it. She watched as a young man swung himself down from the cab, a skinny kid maybe twenty or so in a plaid shirt and blue jeans, orangey work boots. He opened up the back of the truck and pulled out two long boards, which he rested against the bed of the truck to make a kind of ramp. He walked up this and started to slowly back the riding mower down.

  She wiped her hands. She blew her nose and went out to confront him. He looked up as she crossed the circular drive.

  “I’m Sylvia Rowley,” she said coldly, approaching him.

  He looked at her for a few seconds before he said, flatly, “Hi.”

  “And you are?”

  “Tink. Snell.” He was a handsome boy, with dark curly hair that spilled over his forehead, that covered his ears. He had pale eyes, a greenish blue, with lashes so dark they looked mascaraed.

  “I thought Adrian did our work,” she said.

  “Not no more,” he said.

  “Well, you’re late, if you’re in charge. This lawn is a disgrace.” She swept her hand around grandly.

&n
bsp; “Yes, ma’am,” he said. A little smile. An assertion, she thought, that the ma’am, maybe even the yes, were meant ironically.

  And then she was remembering. A scandal. Adrian’s sister, much younger, always in trouble, pregnant in high school by somebody or other. This would be her boy.

  “You’re taking over for Adrian?”

  “Some stuff. Just what he doesn’t have time for no more.” He reached into a red plastic milk crate full of tools and equipment in the back of the truck and extracted some bright yellow plastic ear protectors.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on Adrian unless you can do the work we have for you in a timely fashion.” She waved around herself. “This is … unacceptable.”

  He smiled once more. “Ma’am? It’s been raining.” He spoke as though this was something everyone ought to know. “For about three weeks steady. And now it warms up overnight and everybody’s getting here all at once and every one of um has got a list.” He lifted his shoulders, his hands: What can you do?

  Then: “If you want, you can talk to Adrian, but he’s behind in his stuff, too. You can’t do much about rain.” They stood silently for a moment. “If you want, you can talk to Adrian,” he said again.

  “No. No, that’s okay,” she said. She was aware, suddenly, of how much she was taking out on this kid, of how unfair she’d been. Of her tone, which she hated.

  And that word, unacceptable. Why that word? She detested it, that schoolmarmy word with its assertion of the hierarchical arrangement between them.

  “Okay,” he said. He put the ear mufflers around his neck and turned away, climbed onto the mower. She turned away, too, and went back to the house.

  Inside, she sat for a while at the kitchen table, watching the mower make its slow circuit around the house, its noise sudden, unpleasantly loud through all the open windows.

  He hadn’t been rude, exactly, she thought—she’d been ruder to him than he was to her—but she felt injured, all the same. And she felt, reasonlessly, that the injury came from Adrian.