The Arsonist (34 page)

“Ah, yes,” Sylvia said. “Tink Snell was up today, mowing.” Sylvia, she noticed, had refilled her martini glass once already, topping off the ice cubes, the twist of lemon, with straight gin.

“Well, it’s pretty fabulous.” She sipped her drink. “So, you’re still having him come?” She thought of him, that gorgeous boy. She thought of the night he’d called in the fire up here, before she’d slept with Bud. It seemed a world ago.

“Why not?” Sylvia said.

“I guess the idea that he might have started the fire here. Or others, too.”

“He can’t start a fire while he’s mowing. And I’m a wreck no matter what.”

“So you’re wakeful?”

“Of course I am.”

“Really? Alfie, too?”

She laughed. “God, no. Alfie seems incapable of sustaining anxiety at this point in his life.”

They were silent for a moment or two. Then Frankie went ahead and asked: “Any results from the tests?”

“She says it’s clear there’s loss. And they can see what look like dead areas in his brain.”

“God! What a horrible thing to think of.”

Sylvia nodded, and drank. After a moment, she said, “But she says it might be something else, though. She said it might be something called Lewy body disease.”

“Which is? Not as bad, I hope.”

“Well, it is as bad, really. Just different. So it hardly matters.”

“Different how?”

“Oh, it has a slightly Parkinsonian element to it—you’ve noticed he moves a bit stiffly, I’m sure. And then there’s the business of going in and out of it—you know, sometimes he seems pretty good. And then, even minutes later, he’ll seem really bad.”

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s more typical of Lewy body. As are the hallucinations.”

This was news. “What hallucinations?”

“Oh, sometimes mistaking one thing for another. Or imagining things. Visits from people. That he’s in his room at his parents’ house. Or he thought you had been kidnapped once.”

Frankie was thinking of the Larkin poem her father had mentioned to her. She’d gotten the book out of the library,
High Windows
, and thought she’d rarely read a darker vision of life than the collection proposed. But “The Old Fools,” the poem Alfie had mentioned, seemed remarkable to her in its description of how the old people thought. And it seemed recognizable to her in what her mother was saying now.

They were silent again. Frankie wondered what Sylvia was thinking, and then her mother said, “Well, maybe we’ll end up hiring someone eventually.”

“Hiring someone?”

“To guard the house.”

“Shades of Africa,” Frankie said, trying to make her voice light, teasing.

“I suppose.”

But Sylvia didn’t seem to be thinking about the argument they’d had the night Liz and Clark arrived, the argument about Frankie’s dependence on servants in Africa, including the guards at the gate.

“Aren’t you nervous down at Liz’s?” Sylvia asked now.

“No more than usual. Which is to say a little bit all the time. I’m up in the night, too. But it seems pretty clear this guy at least
tries
to set them when no one’s at home.”

“But it looks like no one’s at home all the time at Liz’s, since you have no car.”

“I suppose.”

“Maybe you could just rent someone’s car, instead of renting a guard.”

“Maybe I should
get
a car. I can’t go on borrowing from you forever.”

“Well, that’s up to you.” And after a moment, “Though if you went to New York, a car would just be a burden. You’d end up selling it.”

Here it comes, Frankie thought.

“Is that still a possibility?” Sylvia asked.

Frankie smiled at her. “Almost anything in this world is still a possibility for me. I’m all potential. Everything is possible. Until I go to New York and actually talk to someone about what there might be for me to do.”

“Hmm,” Sylvia said. She had some more gin.

And a little bit later, Frankie excused herself and left.

By the time she got down to Liz’s, she had decided that she would do it, she would rent a car. Later it would occur to her that she had avoided for a while longer thinking about her mother’s question about the future, about New York; but at the moment, the more important question for her was the one having to do with mobility. A little later in the evening, she called Bud and arranged to go with him the next Monday afternoon on his weekly trip to the printer in Whitehall to pick up the papers.

Where he dropped her at the rental-car office, and where, in spite of the laborious attempts of the guy running the office to upgrade her, she rented the smallest, least-powerful compact available.

It was six by the time she drove away. She was hungry. On an impulse, she stopped in Winslow at a restaurant whose name struck her as familiar—she thought she remembered it as a place people in Pomeroy used to go to for a slightly upscale meal when the need arose. And yes, when she went inside, she recognized it—the big plate-glass windows looking out on Winslow’s Main Street, the white-paper table covers, the open kitchen behind a long counter.

She sat at a table by herself and had some wine, and then a half portion of pasta. There was music playing in the background, nothing she recognized, and the clink and tinkle of silver and glassware all around her. She found herself eavesdropping on the conversation next to her, a couple discussing what kind of refrigerator to buy. And suddenly, absurdly, she felt happy. She supposed having the freedom the car provided was part of it. But there was more. Some way in which she was excited by being alone in a public place, being alone and mobile. She felt reminded of a part of herself she seemed to have left behind when she came to stay with her parents.

She wasn’t sure whether it was a result of that feeling or a corrective to it that later that evening she got dressed up in a skirt and low-cut top and drove to Bud’s office. She waited until the cars in the lot were gone, the cars belonging to the little group of volunteers who helped him with the papers on Mondays, and then she pulled in and parked.

He must have heard her come in, because his silhouette appeared in the doorway at the top of the dark stairs just as she started up, and he
was halfway down to her before she was halfway up, unbuttoning her shirt, sliding his hands into her underpants, into her, pushing her down onto the stairs, saying her name over and over, his face in the shadows stamped with the intense focus that had become so familiar to her, so exciting, when they made love.

When they were done, sitting next to each other on a step in the darkened stairwell, he asked her if she wanted a drink. Frankie was breathless, her blouse unbuttoned, her skirt up around her waist. “I think I
need
a drink,” she said. They got up and went into the office, and he poured each of them some bourbon in mismatched glasses. She set the underpants she was carrying down on the table and clinked her glass against his.

They talked for a while, and then Bud washed their glasses and they went downstairs and out to their cars. And though they had said good night standing in the little parking area, when Frankie turned right off Main Road, where Bud should have kept going straight, she saw that he had turned also, to follow her. The sight of his headlights behind her, the steady distance he kept from her in the black night, all this made her nearly breathless as she drove. At Liz’s house they stumbled across the yard and into the dark house, into the bedroom, where they made love again without turning on any lights.

Frankie loved having a car. For a few days, she spent most of her time driving around, much as she had when she was an adolescent in Pomeroy. She drove to North Conway and went to the outlet shops. She went swimming a few warm afternoons at Silsby Pond, once with Bud. She drove to the Dairy Queen outside Somerset and had a frappe, sitting at a sticky wooden picnic table with various initials and messages carved into it.

And then finally she called the places she’d found in the yellow pages and talked to earlier, the ones that she thought might work for Alfie, might offer some relief to Sylvia. She made appointments at both.

But walking through these places, watching the residents in groups doing activities that Alfie would have no interest in—sing-alongs, exercises, movies, cooking, reminiscing, or else just watching television—Frankie was remembering her father’s open contempt for Sylvia’s
occasional preoccupation with the Sunday
Times
crossword, his lack of interest in the board games she and Liz, and sometimes Sylvia, played in the summer evenings. She recalled the time when, after sitting through an hour or so of Monopoly with the two of them and a friend, he had divided his properties evenly between them and left. She’d heard him say to Sylvia on his way through the kitchen, “They certainly don’t call them bored games for nothing, do they?”

No, Alfie would need a topic, maybe a book, as a prop. He would be bored, and he would probably bore others. Alfie was a loner, she saw, looking at these other old people, who were not. It might not always be the case—he might change—but the fact was that if he ever became capable of the kinds of activities she was looking at, it would be a mark of his greater disintegration.

In the end, she suggested to Sylvia that they might do best to see if Marie Pelletier could come in and stay with Alfie a couple of times a week. Maybe, she suggested, Marie could busy herself with other chores Sylvia could set out for her so that Alfie wouldn’t be aware that she was monitoring him. “If she could do that maybe twice a week, I could come in maybe one afternoon. That would give you three afternoons to go out and just … be alone, I guess. Or call on someone. Or …”

“Two would be ample, Frankie. I’m not going to ask you to help.”

Frankie lifted her shoulders. “Okay. But I could be your backup.” Sylvia started to shake her head. “If you
needed
it. Only if something came up. You know. What if Louise wanted to go out for dinner, just the two of you? Something like that.”

And so they agreed.

Marie, it turned out, agreed, too. But she couldn’t, right away. Until the summer folks were gone, she could only do one afternoon—she had too much cleaning and catering to do.

Then Sylvia started to worry about money. She wasn’t sure she could really afford Marie. It seemed extravagant, since she didn’t really
need
her. It made Frankie realize, she told Bud, how little she knew of their financial situation. “I can’t tell if it’s just the same old penny-pinching impulse she seems to have been born with, or something real.”

They were at Bud’s house, which was a new venue for them since Frankie had rented the car. They were upstairs, in his bedroom. Frankie
had been touched by the order of the house, by the care with which Bud had furnished it. She liked this bedroom, in spite of its strange cloudy windows. She liked the little painting on the wall, a stucco farmhouse in a green field, impressionistic. She liked the clean white sheets, mussed now, and damp with sweat and their juices. She liked the plaid coverlet on the bed, which they’d pulled up to their waists in the fall air coming through the windows.

It was only the first hint of fall, the steady cool of these evenings, but everyone felt it. Now, in addition to the conversations about the fires, people talked about the change in the weather, about a maple flaring fuchsia here or there, about the quickly melting snow seen high on a mountain one morning.

“There’s no family money, then,” Bud said to her now.

“No money at all,” she said to him. “Just the farmhouse and the land.”

“Well, shit. I thought I was latching on to some serious bucks.”

“Nope.”

After a silent moment he said, “You know, your mother may be thinking about the long haul with him, and then what’ll be left for her own old age. It’s not cheap, Alzheimer’s care.”

“But what about the government? What about Medicare?”

“I don’t think so, Frankie. I think they don’t pay for that long-term, not-purely-medical stuff. So she might feel like she’s staring down a long, dark expensive tunnel she can’t see the end of.”

After a minute, Frankie said, “Poor Sylvia.”

“Yeah. It’s a tough one.”

“Well, not just that. She doesn’t even love him, that’s the problem.”

“How do you know that?”

“She said so. To me. That night their barn was set on fire. After you left, we were talking for a while, and she told me.”

“Okay, but come on. She was just being honest, in a way. He’s so compromised.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t it. She said she hadn’t loved him for a long time. That there was no … 
store
, I guess you’d say, of loving goodwill, based on the way she’d felt for him earlier. Based on who he’d been, ever.”

After a moment, he said, “That is sad. God.”

They lay still for a while, and then Bud turned to her and began to move against her. She could feel that he was hard again. It seemed funny, suddenly. “This is so odd to me,” she said.

“What? This?” He pushed his cock against her hip.

“No, not that. I meant talking the way we do, in between.” He rose up as if to move on top of her, but she put her hand against his chest.

“Stop. Stop for a minute.”

“That’s asking an awful lot, Frankie.”

“I’m asking it.”

He lay down again, on his side, propping his head on one hand.

“This is new, Bud. I’ve never … 
chatted
 …” She laughed. “I’ve never talked like this with anyone about these … teensy events, in my life.”

“Oh, well. That’s my specialty. Teensy events, and the chatting thereabout.”

“Be serious.”

“You be serious. What are you saying?”

“I feel so companionable with you.”

He made a gagging sound. “Eros, please.”

“Well, there’s that, too. Plenty. But I’m just not used to this other. This kind of talking.”

He was quiet for a long minute. “You’re used to talking about grander things,” he said. “Larger things.”

“Moment by moment, I suppose not. The people I worked with, we talked a lot about … practicalities. How to do things. Or
get
things. A lot. About politics, some. But these personal issues, this kind of daily-life stuff—no.”