An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [65]
"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 Lather 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