An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [42]
Was I angry? Of course I was. Is this what memoirists did? Steal someone else's true story and pass it off as their own? I was tempted to put the book right back on the shelf and not buy it, except that I wanted to see whether Morgan had gotten my father's story right and also whether I was in the memoir or not. I wasn't on the acknowledgments page, that's for sure: I checked, right there in the store, before I moved on to the cash register.
AFTER I BOUGHT Morgan Taylor's fake memoir and left the Book Warehouse, I did exactly what my father said I shouldn't: I didn't wait. Instead I drove out to Camelot. Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.
It was after four by this point, but beyond daylight savings and so already dark and getting suddenly cold and weirdly cheerful and Yuletide-like. Camelot was festive in a way it had never seemed when I lived there, with its streetlights and floodlights, and in a few houses you could tell the ventless gas fireplaces by their steady, nonsmoky, nonflickering blaze. I knew our own ventless gas fireplace wouldn't be in use ― Anne Marie was a big believer in wood fire, and no other kind would do ― but the lights were on downstairs, in the living room and dining room and kitchen. I parked across the street so that I could see through our living room's enormous bay windows, turned off my headlights, and watched as each member of my family passed the window in turn, as if modeling for me. There was Katherine, carrying that gigantic ringed binder full of the homework that came so easily for her that she would already have finished it; there was Christian, holding his plaster hammer above his head as if preparing to strike a blow for the working man; there was Anne Marie, gesturing wildly about something, her free hand flapping around her head as if defending herself against bees, sometimes smiling, sometimes scowling, the whole time talking to someone else in the room, I couldn't tell who. It wasn't the kids, because I could see them sitting at the table now, and Anne Marie's back was to them. She was speaking either to herself or to someone else. But who? I couldn't tell, because there was me, Sam, sitting in my van and not in the house, looking at the three of them (plus this invisible guest), feeling so far away from them, longing for them and afraid to knock on the door and find out that they weren't longing for me. Yes, I was outside looking in, all right, which was not unlike being a reader (this was my very thought), and maybe this was another reason why my mother gave up reading: she was sick of being outside the house. Maybe she wanted to be inside, with my addled father, drinking beer until there was no beer left to drink and nothing to forget that hadn't already been forgotten. Suddenly I wanted that, too, so, so badly, and so I drove out of Camelot, back to my one family, my one family that I didn't have to long for, my one family with whom I could drink myself to sleep and forget about the other one.
8
In many of my mother's books, the troubled narrator has a telling dream at a crucial moment, and so I wasn't at all surprised that night when I had one. A telling dream, that is.
In my dream I was standing in a cupola, four stories in the air, on the very top of a sprawling, gray-shingled mansion. The mansion backed up to the ocean, and there was a storm. The white-lipped, whip-backed waves crashed against the boats, which were coming unmoored in the surf, their lines snapping off like overextended rubber bands. The water was a bruise; the sky, an even darker, more violent blue. Up in the cupola, my back was to