The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  “Hiring someone?”

  “To guard the house.”

  “Shades of Africa,” Frankie said, trying to make her voice light, teasing.

  “I suppose.”

  But Sylvia didn’t seem to be thinking about the argument they’d had the night Liz and Clark arrived, the argument about Frankie’s dependence on servants in Africa, including the guards at the gate.

  “Aren’t you nervous down at Liz’s?” Sylvia asked now.

  “No more than usual. Which is to say a little bit all the time. I’m up in the night, too. But it seems pretty clear this guy at least tries to set them when no one’s at home.”

  “But it looks like no one’s at home all the time at Liz’s, since you have no car.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Maybe you could just rent someone’s car, instead of renting a guard.”

  “Maybe I should get a car. I can’t go on borrowing from you forever.”

  “Well, that’s up to you.” And after a moment, “Though if you went to New York, a car would just be a burden. You’d end up selling it.”

  Here it comes, Frankie thought.

  “Is that still a possibility?” Sylvia asked.

  Frankie smiled at her. “Almost anything in this world is still a possibility for me. I’m all potential. Everything is possible. Until I go to New York and actually talk to someone about what there might be for me to do.”

  “Hmm,” Sylvia said. She had some more gin.

  And a little bit later, Frankie excused herself and left.

  By the time she got down to Liz’s, she had decided that she would do it, she would rent a car. Later it would occur to her that she had avoided for a while longer thinking about her mother’s question about the future, about New York; but at the moment, the more important question for her was the one having to do with mobility. A little later in the evening, she called Bud and arranged to go with him the next Monday afternoon on his weekly trip to the printer in Whitehall to pick up the papers.

  Where he dropped her at the rental-car office, and where, in spite of the laborious attempts of the guy running the office to upgrade her, she rented the smallest, least-powerful compact available.

  It was six by the time she drove away. She was hungry. On an impulse, she stopped in Winslow at a restaurant whose name struck her as familiar—she thought she remembered it as a place people in Pomeroy used to go to for a slightly upscale meal when the need arose. And yes, when she went inside, she recognized it—the big plate-glass windows looking out on Winslow’s Main Street, the white-paper table covers, the open kitchen behind a long counter.

  She sat at a table by herself and had some wine, and then a half portion of pasta. There was music playing in the background, nothing she recognized, and the clink and tinkle of silver and glassware all around her. She found herself eavesdropping on the conversation next to her, a couple discussing what kind of refrigerator to buy. And suddenly, absurdly, she felt happy. She supposed having the freedom the car provided was part of it. But there was more. Some way in which she was excited by being alone in a public place, being alone and mobile. She felt reminded of a part of herself she seemed to have left behind when she came to stay with her parents.

  She wasn’t sure whether it was a result of that feeling or a corrective to it that later that evening she got dressed up in a skirt and low-cut top and drove to Bud’s office. She waited until the cars in the lot were gone, the cars belonging to the little group of volunteers who helped him with the papers on Mondays, and then she pulled in and parked.

  He must have heard her come in, because his silhouette appeared in the doorway at the top of the dark stairs just as she started up, and he was halfway down to her before she was halfway up, unbuttoning her shirt, sliding his hands into her underpants, into her, pushing her down onto the stairs, saying her name over and over, his face in the shadows stamped with the intense focus that had become so familiar to her, so exciting, when they made love.

  When they were done, sitting next to each other on a step in the darkened stairwell, he asked her if she wanted a drink. Frankie was breathless, her blouse unbuttoned, her skirt up around her waist. “I think I need a drink,” she said. They got up and went into the office, and he poured each of them some bourbon in mismatched glasses. She set the underpants she was carrying down on the table and clinked her glass against his.

  They talked for a while, and then Bud washed their glasses and they went downstairs and out to their cars. And though they had said good night standing in the little parking area, when Frankie turned right off Main Road, where Bud should have kept going straight, she saw that he had turned also, to follow her. The sight of his headlights behind her, the steady distance he kept from her in the black night, all this made her nearly breathless as she drove. At Liz’s house they stumbled across the yard and into the dark house, into the bedroom, where they made love again without turning on any lights.

  Frankie loved having a car. For a few days, she spent most of her time driving around, much as she had when she was an adolescent in Pomeroy. She drove to North Conway and went to the outlet shops. She went swimming a few warm afternoons at Silsby Pond, once with Bud. She drove to the Dairy Queen outside Somerset and had a frappe, sitting at a sticky wooden picnic table with various initials and messages carved into it.

  And then finally she called the places she’d found in the yellow pages and talked to earlier, the ones that she thought might work for Alfie, might offer some relief to Sylvia. She made appointments at both.

  But walking through these places, watching the residents in groups doing activities that Alfie would have no interest in—sing-alongs, exercises, movies, cooking, reminiscing, or else just watching television—Frankie was remembering her father’s open contempt for Sylvia’s occasional preoccupation with the Sunday Times crossword, his lack of interest in the board games she and Liz, and sometimes Sylvia, played in the summer evenings. She recalled the time when, after sitting through an hour or so of Monopoly with the two of them and a friend, he had divided his properties evenly between them and left. She’d heard him say to Sylvia on his way through the kitchen, “They certainly don’t call them bored games for nothing, do they?”

  No, Alfie would need a topic, maybe a book, as a prop. He would be bored, and he would probably bore others. Alfie was a loner, she saw, looking at these other old people, who were not. It might not always be the case—he might change—but the fact was that if he ever became capable of the kinds of activities she was looking at, it would be a mark of his greater disintegration.

  In the end, she suggested to Sylvia that they might do best to see if Marie Pelletier could come in and stay with Alfie a couple of times a week. Maybe, she suggested, Marie could busy herself with other chores Sylvia could set out for her so that Alfie wouldn’t be aware that she was monitoring him. “If she could do that maybe twice a week, I could come in maybe one afternoon. That would give you three afternoons to go out and just … be alone, I guess. Or call on someone. Or …”

  “Two would be ample, Frankie. I’m not going to ask you to help.”

  Frankie lifted her shoulders. “Okay. But I could be your backup.” Sylvia started to shake her head. “If you needed it. Only if something came up. You know. What if Louise wanted to go out for dinner, just the two of you? Something like that.”

  And so they agreed.

  Marie, it turned out, agreed, too. But she couldn’t, right away. Until the summer folks were gone, she could only do one afternoon—she had too much cleaning and catering to do.

  Then Sylvia started to worry about money. She wasn’t sure she could really afford Marie. It seemed extravagant, since she didn’t really need her. It made Frankie realize, she told Bud, how little she knew of their financial situation. “I can’t tell if it’s just the same old penny-pinching impulse she seems to have been born with, or something real.”

  They were at Bud’s house, which was a new venue for them since Frankie had rente
d the car. They were upstairs, in his bedroom. Frankie had been touched by the order of the house, by the care with which Bud had furnished it. She liked this bedroom, in spite of its strange cloudy windows. She liked the little painting on the wall, a stucco farmhouse in a green field, impressionistic. She liked the clean white sheets, mussed now, and damp with sweat and their juices. She liked the plaid coverlet on the bed, which they’d pulled up to their waists in the fall air coming through the windows.

  It was only the first hint of fall, the steady cool of these evenings, but everyone felt it. Now, in addition to the conversations about the fires, people talked about the change in the weather, about a maple flaring fuchsia here or there, about the quickly melting snow seen high on a mountain one morning.

  “There’s no family money, then,” Bud said to her now.

  “No money at all,” she said to him. “Just the farmhouse and the land.”

  “Well, shit. I thought I was latching on to some serious bucks.”

  “Nope.”

  After a silent moment he said, “You know, your mother may be thinking about the long haul with him, and then what’ll be left for her own old age. It’s not cheap, Alzheimer’s care.”

  “But what about the government? What about Medicare?”

  “I don’t think so, Frankie. I think they don’t pay for that long-term, not-purely-medical stuff. So she might feel like she’s staring down a long, dark expensive tunnel she can’t see the end of.”

  After a minute, Frankie said, “Poor Sylvia.”

  “Yeah. It’s a tough one.”

  “Well, not just that. She doesn’t even love him, that’s the problem.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She said so. To me. That night their barn was set on fire. After you left, we were talking for a while, and she told me.”

  “Okay, but come on. She was just being honest, in a way. He’s so compromised.”

  “Yeah, but that wasn’t it. She said she hadn’t loved him for a long time. That there was no … store, I guess you’d say, of loving goodwill, based on the way she’d felt for him earlier. Based on who he’d been, ever.”

  After a moment, he said, “That is sad. God.”

  They lay still for a while, and then Bud turned to her and began to move against her. She could feel that he was hard again. It seemed funny, suddenly. “This is so odd to me,” she said.

  “What? This?” He pushed his cock against her hip.

  “No, not that. I meant talking the way we do, in between.” He rose up as if to move on top of her, but she put her hand against his chest.

  “Stop. Stop for a minute.”

  “That’s asking an awful lot, Frankie.”

  “I’m asking it.”

  He lay down again, on his side, propping his head on one hand.

  “This is new, Bud. I’ve never … chatted …” She laughed. “I’ve never talked like this with anyone about these … teensy events, in my life.”

  “Oh, well. That’s my specialty. Teensy events, and the chatting thereabout.”

  “Be serious.”

  “You be serious. What are you saying?”

  “I feel so companionable with you.”

  He made a gagging sound. “Eros, please.”

  “Well, there’s that, too. Plenty. But I’m just not used to this other. This kind of talking.”

  He was quiet for a long minute. “You’re used to talking about grander things,” he said. “Larger things.”

  “Moment by moment, I suppose not. The people I worked with, we talked a lot about … practicalities. How to do things. Or get things. A lot. About politics, some. But these personal issues, this kind of daily-life stuff—no.”

  “So it seems like … small talk.”

  “I guess so.”

  He had stopped, completely, and lain back, his forearm lifted to rest on his forehead.

  She felt he was hurt. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. “I’m sure you know what I mean,” she said. She ran her hand over the flesh of his shoulder. “I’m always aware of it, coming back to the States. That the scale of things, of people’s preoccupations, seems small. You must feel that. I mean, you used to write about national politics.”

  “Ah. Well. You want to know about small, then yeah, let’s talk about national politics. It’s all strategic. None of it’s big.”

  They didn’t speak for a minute. She let her hand fall.

  Then he said, “Look. Frankie. I get it. You were doing work that felt important to you.”

  “If sometimes futile.”

  “If sometimes futile. And you were with people who weren’t fretting about house fires or signs of memory loss in their fathers. Or whether they had enough money to pay the mortgage. And I’m sure that did feel more like asking the big questions.” He nodded several times. “Yes. Living large, morally, philosophically. What then must we do?” he said in his hoarse voice. “And my God, I admire that. I wish I’d lived that way, ever.”

  After a long moment, he said, “Although I might have felt some of that the first couple of years in Washington,” he said. “But I’m at peace with what I’m doing now. And I even think, deluded as I may be, that I get to ask the odd big question.”

  He turned on his side again and propped his head up once more. “And I don’t mean to suggest that asking those questions is a privilege, exactly, but let me just say that someone, somewhere, is always worrying about the small stuff. The children’s grades, the Alzheimer’s symptoms, what’s for dinner. The money, for God’s sake, in a strictly small-town way.

  “But chatting with you.” He shook his head. “Chatting with you here, that’s got nothing to do with that. I’m chatting with you because I fucking care about you.” He reached over and brushed his fingers lightly across her breasts. She could feel her nipples tighten.

  “You know how you said nothing was permanent for you there?” he asked.

  “Yes. That I was temporizing.”

  “Okay. Just … I’m saying I’m interested in permanence. I mean, with you, whatever that means. I want exactly this. Sex. Chatting. Every now and then maybe the consideration of something really immense. Whatever that means.”

  “Are you angry, Bud? I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  “I’m not.” He was quiet for a moment. “Not really. I’m mostly just … perplexed. About how to get to you.”

  “You’ve already gotten to me.”

  “That’s not what I mean, you know that. It’s just, we keep coming around to this, as you’ve pointed out to me more than once. The question of what’s going on between us. What it is, I guess. So I’m just saying it now. I won’t say it again.” He lay back down. “Over to you, Frankie,” he said, gently. “You figure it out. And when you do, let me know.”

  She was quiet a long time. “That’s a big responsibility.”

  “Oh.” He shook his head on the pillow, and then he grinned suddenly. “Teensy.”

  17

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, HE’S GONE?”

  Her mother said, “Just, if he’s not down there with you, I’ve no idea where he is.”

  Frankie was standing in the kitchen, still half asleep; her mother’s call had waked her, her mother’s question—Is Alfie down there with you?—had made no sense, and this made no sense, either. “Well. What do you mean? He wasn’t there when you got up?”

  “Yes, exactly. So where is he? Where can he be?” There was a frantic note in her mother’s voice.

  Frankie tried to make her own voice reassuring. “He can’t be far.” The floor was cold under her feet. “The car is there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So maybe he got up and just went for a walk.”

  Sylvia said nothing.

  “He’s gone for a walk by himself before.” Frankie sat down and pulled her feet up on the chair. “Hasn’t he?”

  Sylvia made an odd noise, a sigh, a strange, pained expelling of air. “Well, the thing is,” she said finally, “I think he
might have left in the night.”

  “What do you mean?” She wanted coffee.

  “Well, he got up in the night, as he often does, and, I just … slept through. I heard him, but then I went back to sleep and I didn’t wake again. Usually I do, but I didn’t. I just didn’t this time.” She sounded near tears, suddenly.

  Frankie said, “That doesn’t mean he’s been out all that time, Mother. He probably waited until dawn, until it was light, and then went out. He wouldn’t go in the dark, would he?” Though it was actually still not fully light now. At least not in Liz’s house, which sat in a little gully. The kitchen was deeply shadowed. “How long have you been up?”

  “About an hour. I thought … well, I hoped, pretty much that, what you said. So I waited, thinking, Okay, he’ll be back. And then I thought, well, maybe he’d gone down to see you, and I called.”

  “Okay. Look. I’ll get dressed and I’ll be right up. I’ll come up by the field, in case he’s somewhere between us, in case he came that way and fell or something. And you stay there, in case he comes home.”

  “He’s not coming home.”

  “He might. I’ll be right there.”

  Frankie had been lying in bed when the phone rang, lying there running through the strange, disjointed series of images, yearnings, that had constituted her life for the last several weeks. Now she moved quickly, pulling on jeans, a turtleneck, and a heavy sweater, warm socks, her hiking sneakers. She brushed her hair, her teeth.

  When she stepped outside, she realized the air still held the night’s chill, so she went back quickly and got her jacket.

  Her breath plumed as she hiked up the rise into the weak sunlight and then walked quickly back down through the blackberry canes, slowing as she came to the pond. Alfie wasn’t there, wasn’t drowned, and it was only as she felt the relief of this that she understood how much she’d been pushing away the imagining of it—his face, his form, under the still, clear, brownish water.

  Now she started to call his name across the field, turning one way and then another as she walked: “Aal-fie! Aaal-fie!” And hearing back only birdsong, the brushing of the dying, dry grasses against her legs.