An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [99]
"You look like you could use this," she said, and then put the joint up to my mouth. I took a drag: it was my first drag ever, tasted like dirt, and made me cough but otherwise had no effect on me that the bourbon hadn't already had. Then the band started another song, one I recognized from high school: it was Skynyrd, the band doing its best to replicate the famous three-guitar attack with only two guitars. I didn't dance this time, though, so I didn't dream or remember-not about my parents or Anne Marie or the kids, everyone whom I loved and for whom I was put on this planet. How does this happen? Why don't we always have someone on hand to say, Don't! Cut it out! Run out into the snow and throw yourself into a drift until your capacity to hurt and be bad is frozen out of you! Why don't we have that kind of voice, a voice that tells us not, What else? What else? but Stop! Desist! You are about to do harm! But even if we had this voice, would we listen to it? What is it that makes us deaf to all the warnings? Is it need? Is it need that makes us so deaf, that fills us up to our ears so that we can't listen to our better impulses? Is it that we are so full of need, or so full of ourselves?
I wasn't thinking of any of this at the time. I wasn't even thinking about Anne Marie and Thomas, wasn't even lying to myself about being a victim with rights rather than a victimizer with no rights at all. All I was thinking was that there was a beautiful woman standing next to me, smiling at me even, her smile making the bad band sound not so awfully bad, and she had two cheeks and I wanted to kiss the one nearest to me. I leaned over and kissed her cheek, and then she turned her lips toward mine, and so I kissed them, too, with feeling, and when the kissing didn't seem to be enough anymore, we groped, enthusiastically and without regard to anyone else in the bar, as though our hands were made invisible on contact. All of this went on for a long time. I know this because eventually my lips began to get tired and there was considerable hooting and clapping that didn't seem intended for the band. I glanced up to see who was making all this noise and saw my father-in-law, Mr. Mirabelli, standing directly behind the woman. And a few feet behind him, I saw my mother. Neither of them was hooting or clapping. Both of them were looking directly at me in huge disappointment, as though the bar were a museum and I were a famous painting that they'd paid too much to see.
"Mom!" I yelled, breaking the lip-lock. "Mr. Mirabelli!" This surprised the woman almost as much as my mother and father-in-law had surprised me.
"What did you just call me?" the woman asked. She backed up a little and also turned my body, so that my back was to my mother and father-in-law, although the woman still held on to my biceps. She had quite a grip, too, a grip that reminded me of Anne Marie's at our wedding those many years ago, which makes me wonder if all women have this grip, this grip being the thing that keeps a woman steady while she's deciding whether to hold on to or let go of the man she's hitched to.
"Wait," I said. I tried to break her grip and simultaneously twirl us around so that I could face my mother and father-in-law again, and the resulting motion no doubt came off as something violent, because the woman said, "What the hell do you think you're