An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

  LEES ARDOR WAS AN associate professor of American literature—it said so on the plaque on her office door—but she didn’t like literature, didn’t believe in it. I found this out after I knocked on her door, she opened it, and I stood there for too many seconds, staring at her hair. It was long, red, and straight: it was the sort of hair that demanded to be brushed religiously, two hundred times a day. Her hair was as shiny as a newly waxed kitchen floor, as mesmerizing as a hypnotist’s swinging gold watch, and it was the only physical characteristic of Lees Ardor’s that stuck with me. I’m sure she had others—she had a body, for instance, and it was wearing clothes; she had a voice and it was somewhere in the range of normal human voices—but it was her hair I remembered. Lees Ardor’s hair stood for the rest of her, the way Ahab’s peg leg had stood for him.

  Anyway, I must have been staring at her hair for too long, because Lees Ardor put her fingers right under my nose and snapped them twice. The snapping brought me out of my trance. I stuck out my hand and asked, double-checking the accuracy of the door plaque, “Professor Ardor?” Without sticking out her hand to meet mine, she asked back, “And what, exactly, am I supposed to profess?”

  This threw me some, I’ll admit, and because of that, I forgot to introduce myself and stammered for a moment or so before finally saying, “You profess literature,” and then I pointed at the door plaque, where it said so.

  “I don’t believe in literature,” she said. “I don’t like literature, either.”

  “But you’re a literature professor.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I knew from experience that it is exactly this response teachers most desire, because it makes them feel necessary. While at Our Lady of the Lake, I had understood so few things that I became something of a teacher’s pet.

  “It makes perfect sense,” she said. “Does it not?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned her back to me, walked around her desk, and sat in her chair, the comfortable rolling sort of desk chair that you can lean back in until you’re nearly horizontal. The only other chair in the office was one of those ancient hard-backed wooden chairs that my stern Yankee ancestors probably made to be so uncomfortable that the Puritan sitting in it became miserable enough that he’d go back to work. I sat in it, across the desk from Lees Ardor. The desk between us, and the hierarchy of our chairs, made me feel diminished, like a lower life-form.

  “Name a book that I should like,” Lees Ardor said. “Name a book that’s so great I should like it.”

  I thought hard about all the books my mother had made me read, about certain books that everyone knew were great, and of course I came up with Huckleberry Finn. It was my mother’s favorite book: when, as a boy, I’d asked her why, she always said she saw herself in it, although I never knew whether she saw herself in Huck, or Jim, or Tom, or the Duke, or maybe one of the minor characters. Plus, I was here because Lees Ardor’s man, Mincher, wanted the Mark Twain House burned to the ground, and so I thought maybe I’d learn something important about her and the case if I said, “What about Huckleberry Finn?”

  “Huckleberry Finn my ass,” Lees Ardor replied. She smiled at me ingratiatingly, as if we had reached a kind of understanding, even though I didn’t understand what “Huckleberry Finn my ass” meant, and I don’t think Lees Ardor did, either.

  I didn’t get a chance to ask her to clarify, though. Lees Ardor went into a fury of book and legal pad gathering, then stood up, walked past her desk and me, and said over her shoulder, “We’re late for class.”

  Of course, I hadn’t introduced myself yet and so she must have thought I was her student, a student whom she didn’t recognize and whose name she didn’t know, even though the semester must have been more than half over by then. In any case, I got up out of that uncomfortable chair and followed her down the hall. The hall was beautiful, the most beautiful institutional hall I’d ever seen, and nothing at all like the halls at Our Lady of the Lake. There were no drop ceilings or water stains in the plaster, and it was all dark wood and marble, with even a few ceiling-tile mosaics here and there. Looking at the ceilings at Heiden College made you want to learn, whereas looking at the ceilings at my alma mater made you not want to look at the ceilings.

  The students in Lees Ardor’s class, though, probably looked much the same as the students at Our Lady of the Lake. The boys wore backward baseball caps, and the girls wore low-slung jeans and cropped shirts that left a strip of white, white skin between the shirt and the pants. Besides me, there were only two other aberrant-looking characters in that classroom: a Richard Nixon kook wearing a gray three-piece suit and red paisley tie, and a kook who looked like a female Chairman Mao, with that famous bowl haircut and matching workingman’s denim ensemble, plus many facial piercings, including a hoop through her septum by which she could, I supposed, be led around. Those two were sitting in the back row, and I sat between them. They didn’t acknowledge me when I asked the girl, and then the boy, “Hey, what class is this, anyway?” But still I felt an unspoken kinship with them, the way the untouchables in the back row always do.

  Lees Ardor had positioned herself at the front of the classroom and was staring at the class, her hair flowing behind her as though it were her head’s own academic gown. She stared for at least three minutes. At first I thought she was taking a silent form of attendance. But there were only fourteen people in the class—I counted—and it wouldn’t have taken her that long to figure out who was there and who wasn’t. Besides, she wasn’t really looking at us but rather at some spot on the wall at the back of the room, as if trying to bore a hole through it. Finally, still looking at the wall, she said, “Willa Cather is a cunt.”

  “Whoa,” I said, apparently out loud, since several of the real students turned and looked at me before assuming their previous face-forward positions. They seemed unimpressed, bored even, by Lees Ardor’s pronouncement, but it threw me, that most forbidden of forbidden words, even though I’d read Wesley Mincher’s letter and should have been expecting it or something like it. I turned to the Chairman Mao kook and whispered, “Did she really say”—and here I paused, not daring to say that word myself, the most off-limits of all the off-limits terms for the female pudendum—“that word?”

  “Yes,” she said. There was a strong, wet sibilance to the word, which made me suspect that she had a tongue ring, in addition to her many other piercings. She would have been in high demand as a model for Face and Metal, assuming there was such a magazine.

  “Why?”

  “We’re reading My Ántonia,” the Chairman Mao kook said. My face must have looked as baffled as I, its owner, felt, because she clarified: “That’s a book. By Willa Cather.”

  “I know that,” I said. My Ántonia was another book my mother had made me read, and I remembered it well: the sweeping Nebraska prairie, the waist-high snow, the transplanted Scandinavians and Slavs and their work ethic, the strong women in calico always drinking strong coffee. And then there was Ántonia herself, who, as I remembered, was plucky, among her other notable qualities. “But why did she call Willa Cather”—and here I summoned all my courage and finally got it out—“a cunt?”

  The Chairman Mao kook didn’t flinch when I said the word. “Professor Ardor thinks all writers are cunts.”

  I turned to the Richard Nixon kook to get his take on the matter, but he wasn’t paying any attention to us at all. His eyes were fixed on Lees Ardor; he had this aroused, glazed look on his face and kept smoothing and stroking his tie, and you didn’t have to be an English major or a reader to know what that symbolized.

  Meanwhile there was a discussion going on in front of us. One of the normal, scantily clad college girls had said about My Ántonia, “I liked it.”

  “What do you mean by like?” Lees Ardor asked, in the same tone she’d used when she asked me what she was supposed to profess. There followed a long debate about what it meant to like something. I didn’t pay much attention to this at all,
not so much because I didn’t understand the discussion, but because it flew so far below the radar of my interest. Finally they exhausted that topic, I mean really exhausted the hell out of it: even the air in the classroom seemed weary.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” one of the other normal, scantily clad girls said.

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

  “Professor Ardor’s mother died,” she whispered back. “She canceled classes 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 Ántonia is set, by the way.”

  “I knew that, too,” I said. “I’ve 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 classmates, 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 class cared about Lees Ardor: her mother had died, after all, and they had just read My Ántonia, 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 class, 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 class 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 class—her hair glinted like armor in the buzzing overhead lights—and said, “My mother was a cunt.”

  This was too much: there was a collective gasp, and then all the women in the class left en masse, even the Chairman Mao pierced-tongue kook. Almost all of the men left, too, not because they were offended by the word “cunt,” I’m pretty sure, but because they hadn’t been paying attention and saw the women leaving and probably assumed class 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 buttoned-down guys who couldn’t love anyone unless he was terrified of them. Lees Ardor’s repeated use of the word “cunt” had no doubt made him fall for her hard.

  “Get the hell 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 woodpecker 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 cunt, do you?”

  “No,” she said. “I loved 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 cunt.”

  “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 muffled 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 Ántonia,” 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 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 “cunt,” 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 god’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 disappear
ed almost immediately, as though made of an especially fast-drying sort of salt. “Who the hell 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 fucking 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.”