An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [21]
Finally we all sat down. After the day I'd had, it seemed to me something like a miracle that we were all eating at the same table, the way a family is supposed to. A miracle is something to be commemorated in prayer, they taught us that in college, except I didn't know any prayers, had forgotten the few the nuns made us memorize. So I simply said, "I am the luckiest father and husband in the world." I was, too; I had been lucky for ten years, and I was lucky for four more days, and then my luck ran out and I did something I shouldn't have.
4
I went out of town on business. My bosses sent me to Cincinnati, where I was to pitch a revolutionary kind of sausage casing to the people at Kahn's. All told, I was gone for less than thirty-six hours and everything went well (the casing pretty much spoke for itself and did all the work). The only hitch was that after I'd flown into the airport, gotten my van out of long-term parking, and driven to Amherst, I stopped to get gas only two miles from my house and managed to lock my keys in the van while doing so. I didn't want to pay someone at the gas station to jimmy the lock, so I called Anne Marie to ask her to drive over a spare key.
Anne Marie answered the phone. It was Wednesday afternoon, four o'clock or thereabouts. She smokes a cigarette in the morning, another before dinner, and a third last thing at night, and she must have just smoked one, because her voice came at me like a distant train, a lovely, throaty rumble bearing down on me through the receiver, and it made me happy and hopeful just hearing her say, "Hello?"
"Hey, Anne Marie, honey," I said, "it's me, Sam."
"Sam," she said, "are you having an affair?"
That question stabbed me and changed my mood immediately. Oh, happiness can turn to despair so quickly it's a miracle we don't pull a muscle or wrench a neck with the suddenness. I was about to say, No, of course not, don't even think it, when it occurred to me that by not ever telling Anne Marie what I'd done to the Emily Dickinson House or Thomas Coleman and his parents, I was having an affair of sorts, an affair with all the betrayal and the guilt if not the woman and the sex. Yes, I was in bad shape, my mind a clogged drain, and so it's possible that I didn't respond to Anne Marie for a few seconds or even half a minute, and finally she cried out, "You are having an affair, you are, it's true!"
"It is," I said, and this was more bumbling on my part. I meant my response as a question, but maybe it sounded otherwise, like a statement, a confession, because Anne Marie started crying harder.
"No, no," I said, snapping to a little. "Of course I'm not having an affair. Why would you think that?"
"Well, for one," she said, "you went out of town on business."
"Yes," I said, "that's true, I did. I told you that. You knew that."
"Sam," she said, in that righteous, cocksure tone we use when we've known someone too well for too long, "I thought about it while you were gone. You've not once been out of town on business in your life."
This wasn't true, exactly. My first year at Pioneer Packaging, I was sent to do a product demonstration, and the thing I was sent to demonstrate was that unbreakable mayonnaise jar. I demonstrated the hell out of it and wouldn't rest until I'd dropped it from places low and high, bounced it off concrete and blacktop. Before I knew it, I'd taken up the better part of the day, and the potential clients were a little tired around the eyes and they didn't buy the product, either. From then on the higher-ups at Pioneer Packaging always sent other people out into the world to meet clients and attend conventions, while I stayed around the plant. So as with the adultery, Anne Marie was wrong in letter but right in spirit, and the more I thought about it, the more this true story of mine sounded like a lie. But still I persisted.
"But it's true, it's true," I said, and started telling her