An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [71]
"Wait a minute," I interrupted at this point in the story. "Why didn't you just ask her to marry you? She wouldn't have been Aunt Polly if you'd married her."
"I wanted to prove I was worthy of her first," Mincher said. "The destruction of the Mark Twain House would have proved my worthiness." This struck me as the most ridiculous sentiment I'd ever heard, the sort of absurd romantic hooey that Lees Ardor would have scoffed at if her students had expressed it or if she'd read it in a book. But when Mincher said this, Lees Ardor didn't scoff. She reached over and gently put her hand on his yellow neck and left it there; he shivered noticeably, as though her touch were the best kind of ice.
"But why did you wait so long for me?" I asked. "Why didn't you just try to burn down the house yourself?"
Mincher didn't answer; he just stared at me with disdain. I knew why, too: in Mincher's world, people were either experts or they weren't. He wouldn't have presumed to burn down the house, any more than he would have let me presume to know anything about the Lost Cause.
All of which brought us ― and you ― up to speed, to the day before I heard this story, when the letter from whoever was pretending to be me arrived at Mincher's campus mailbox. Wesley drove to the dumpster, deposited the three thousand dollars, and then went home and told Lees Ardor what he had just done, all for her. She had begun to cry, as tough-seeming people often do as a self-reward for appearing so tough.
"What's wrong?" Mincher had asked.
"That's so sweet," she'd said. "But that's not what I want."
"What do you want?"
"I want you to ask me to marry you."
This he did. "I've never been so happy," Lees Ardor said. Here, she flashed me a diamond engagement ring that was the only thing I'd seen thus far to rival the brightness of her hair. They ― her ring and her hair ― were like two guiding stars in the sick, murky light of the living room. "The only thing I'm not happy about is that you threw away all that money."
"Mincher women have always been ... how shall I put it ... frugal," Mincher said. He smiled at Lees Ardor, and I don't blame him: she looked beautiful, more beautiful even than the sum of her ring and her hair. She couldn't have been further away from the woman in the classroom, the Professor Ardor who called her dead mother a cunt.
"Do you still have the letter?" I asked them.
"What?" Mincher asked. He was back inside his head again, that was clear, except I bet that Lees Ardor was in there, too, leaving even less room for me and my questions.
"The letter I supposedly sent you, asking you for money. Do you still have it?"
"Yes," Mincher said. He got up and walked toward a desk in the corner of the room, withdrew a letter from one of the desk's drawers, came back from the desk, handed me the letter, sat back in his chair, and took Lees Ardor's hand again, all without taking his eyes off her, as if she were his compass, his north star. I took the letter out of the envelope. It was typed, and said, more or less, what Mincher and Ardor had told me it had said. The envelope was blank. There was no postmark on it, no name or return address, no sense of where it had come from or who had delivered it. It was basically the least helpful piece of evidence ever. I put the letter back in the envelope, then put it in my pocket, right next to the other letter, the letter that had led me to Wesley Mincher and Lees Ardor in the first place.
"Good-bye," I said to them, but they didn't seem to hear me, and why would they have wanted to? Why would they have wanted anything else to do with the world outside each other? Outside each other, they were mean little