An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [82]
"How did she know that?" I asked him.
"I suppose she read it in the paper," he said. "How did you know it?"
"I read it in the newspaper, too," I said, which was the truth, or part of it. And then: "Dad, I saw Mom leave the house earlier."
"Yes, she was here," my father said, starting to count the letters again. "And then she left."
"She didn't look happy," I said.
"There was a bit of a mix-up," my father said. "I have one of these parties every Tuesday. Your mother tolerates the parties as long as she knows when they are so she won't be around. That's why they're every Tuesday."
"Today is Monday," I said.
"That was the mix-up," he admitted. "I thought it was Tuesday. So I called everyone and said, `Where are you? Get over here."'
"Tell me about the parties, Dad," I said, although I could picture them pretty well already. They would be populated by men like the old, rednosed guy who'd earlier bounced his head off the kitchen table, men whose natural and sole habitat was the college town: failed or failing graduate students, drunk professors or book editors like my father, all of them wearing corduroy jackets in various stages of disrepair. These guys had once had their fields ― Victorian literature, tropical botany, the cultural import of the manual typewriter ― but one day they discovered that they didn't like their fields anymore, not as much as they liked to drink, anyway. And the only thing they liked as much as drinking was oddity, which made sense, since they were both odd and drunks themselves. My father and his free booze and his son the arsonist and murderer and all those letters fit both those bills. I could picture all of them, every Tuesday, showing up at my parents' house and drinking their booze and listening to my father read those letters until they'd exhausted most of the liquor and my father had exhausted most of their curiosity and they drifted away, until there was only one red-nosed guy left, always the drunkest one, the one with nobody to see and nowhere to go and nothing to do except sit at the kitchen table and drink the last Knickerbocker and listen to my father drone on and on and on about the letters, the letters, the letters, the way he'd talked to so many drunks before. I knew this without my father telling me, even though he did, in so many words.
"So Mom doesn't like these parties," I said. I could see why, but something didn't quite make sense to me. After all, my mother didn't seem to have a problem with drunks in general, being one herself, plus being married to one, plus being mother to a son who was well on his way to becoming a drunk, too. So why would a few dozen more drunks in corduroy blazers bother her so much? "How come she doesn't like these parties?" I asked my father.
"I have no idea," he said, and that's another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide: be wary of a man who says, "I have no idea," when asked why his wife doesn't like something he's done, which of course is just another way of saying be wary of men in general. "Maybe she doesn't like what my guests do to the house," he said.
"Speaking of the house ―," I said, "Dad, how long ago did Mom move out?"
"Move out?" my father repeated. "I wouldn't exactly say she has. Her clothes are here, after all, or at least most of them. She comes back here to drink most every night."
"Dad," I said, "I saw her apartment tonight. I saw her in her apartment in Belchertown, in the Masonic temple. I know all about that."
"Oh," he said. His face fell a little and began to look more like the face of the stroked-out father I believed and wanted him to be and he perhaps wanted to be, too. "I'm sorry you have to know all about that."
"Are you still even married?"
"It's complicated," he said.
"What is?" I said.
"Marriage," he said.
"Do you still love her?"
"I love her very much," my father