The Arsonist (5 page)

“No, that’s fine.” She sat up. “I’ll do it.” And she turned the radio on and fiddled with the buttons until she got a station carrying the game, already a little fizzy with static. It was the fourth inning, still no score. She tilted her seat back a little and looked up at the deepening indigo of
the sky, listening to the slightly nasal, assured voice of Joe Castiglione. She liked that voice. She felt comforted by it. She closed her eyes again and imagined the things he was looking at—the brilliant green of the Fenway grass, the muted powdery green of the walls, the figures in white and gray at their stations, almost motionless until the ball was hit and they responded, moving wildly in different directions but in balletic synchrony.

She woke sometime later—suddenly, completely—to the dark outside the car’s windows. The headlights made a bright tunnel ahead of them, the trees arching over it were caught at the edge of the light, falling away to join the blackness that surrounded them. The road was narrow, two lanes. She recognized nothing. There
was
nothing—no buildings, no milestones, just the black woods rushing past them. Her mouth was dry and tasted stale. The radio buzzed steadily.

She looked at Alfie. He was intent, focused on the road ahead, both hands gripping the wheel tightly.

She reached over and turned the radio off. “Where are we?” she said in the sudden silence.

He looked at her and then back at the road quickly. “I don’t … 
know
,” he said. He sounded almost bemused by this fact, as if it had occurred to him just this minute that perhaps this was strange, that perhaps he ought to know.

She looked at the dashboard. It was past eleven. They should have been at the house now, getting ready for bed.

“How … what do you mean? How can you not know?” She felt a rising impatience that she tried to keep out of her voice, but she could hear herself, hear that she wasn’t successful.

“I … I must have … taken a wrong turn somewhere, I suppose.”

“But how long ago, do you think?” She’d gotten her voice under control. “How far back?”

He looked at her again, his mild, handsome face emptied out, blank. “I don’t know.”

Okay
, she had thought then in the car.
This is it
. His failing, the thing they’d both been aware of in less critical moments, that they’d talked around, gingerly, over and over. The reason, after all, for him to be retiring,
for their move—the negative student evaluations, the trouble sustaining his latest book. And for her, the increasing sense of an absence in him. Here, distilled, made pure and clear and undeniable.

Where the hell were they?

“I think you should pull over when you can,” she said, as gently as she could. “Slow down.” The car slowed, instantly. They crept along. Within a few miles she saw a spot ahead where the shoulder on the right widened a little. “There,” she said. “Up there.”

He slowed more and pulled over. Gravel crunched under their wheels. The headlights met an impenetrable wall of forest—trees, shrubs, undergrowth—all a surprising vivid green in this flat, harsh light.

“I’ll drive,” she said. “Put it in park.” He obeyed her. She got out and came around behind the car. The air was cool and full of night noise. It smelled of pine, of earth. As she came to the driver’s-side window, she looked down at him. He seemed frozen, his hands still on the wheel. When she opened the door, he looked up at her, a scared child, and then quickly turned away to fumble with his seat belt. He unsnapped it finally and got out.

“You go around to my side,” she said. She hoped her voice was kind. That was what she intended, anyway.

He did as he was told, and they both got in and put their seat belts on. She slid the seat forward a few inches and put the car in drive. She swung it out onto the road again.

They’d keep going. It made as much sense as turning back. Sooner or later there would be something she’d recognize. Or a town, with road signs, arrows with mileage pointing to some place she knew. They had to be within an hour or so of Pomeroy in one direction or another. It would be all right. They’d get there, she told herself. She’d get Alfie to bed, and then she’d let herself think about this.

Six or seven miles later, the speed limit dropped to thirty, then twenty-five, and they were in the village of North Winslow, only forty minutes or so from the house. “
Here
we go,” she said in relief. She looked at Alfie, but his face was as blank as before.

He had stayed that way even as they swung into the long driveway at the farm, even as she turned the engine off. She had to speak to him to get him to take his seat belt off, to open the car door.

When he’d used the bathroom and gotten into bed, she spoke to him as you would to a child—reassuringly, soothingly. She kissed him good night and said she’d be in herself in a little bit, she was just going to have a drink and unwind from the drive.

And now here she sat, on the porch, the night noises quietly riotous around her—the peepers’ steady cheerful churning down by the pond, the odd owl hooting. She’d heard a distant cry as she sat down—an animal, caught, killed perhaps. The chair itself made little noises of dry protest when she moved in it.

He would be fine tomorrow, chances were. This was the worst it had ever been, but he had never not
bounced back
, as she thought of it. He would again, maybe commenting on the failure, as he sometimes did, “I completely lost my train of thought there,” when he paused in the middle of a sentence he’d launched himself into, befuddled. Or “I forgot for a couple of minutes where I was going.” And they would commiserate, though it was sometimes hard to keep the tone light—she was aware of the sharper note of real perplexity in him from time to time. But what had frightened her most tonight was that he wasn’t perplexed at all—that he’d seemed so unconcerned with their being, essentially, lost.

At first, she had ignored the signs—he’d always been a little forgetful anyway, a little scattered. Years earlier, long before any of this had started, she had pinned a
New Yorker
cartoon to his study door—a bearded, anxious man in a tweed jacket, stopping a policeman: “I’m an academic. Where am I?”

Then, for a while, she was impatient, irritated. Well, she could still be impatient and irritated, if she were honest. But within the last year or so, she was mostly just worried. And as a result there was this—booze, which she used too often. The strained attempt not to notice, to be kind. The solitary assessing and reassessing. The managing of appearances. The covering up.

But it was he, after all, who had pushed them toward this move, to retirement. He who had faced that realistically. Who had brought them to this little town. To this house.

Which had been in her family since the town was settled, lived in from generation to generation. When it became her grandmother’s, though, it had become a seasonal home, empty through most of the year. She’d used it as a summer retreat from visibility as a minister’s wife—the place she could always come “to be as naughty as I care to be,” she would say. It had become Sylvia’s about twenty years ago because she was the oldest child of the only son, but mostly because she was also the only one in the family who wanted the managing of it.

And she might not have been interested either if it weren’t for Alfie, who had loved it from the moment he saw it, and then for the girls, to whom it represented home in a way none of the other houses they lived in had—too many houses in too many towns as Alfie moved around in academia.

At first she had resisted the idea of retiring, of moving. What she had said to Alfie was that she wanted to keep on teaching. But as the fall semester dragged on, she realized that wasn’t it, that there would be a kind of relief to stopping. That a part of her was tired of waxing enthusiastic about her students’ halfhearted, mediocre essays, tired of hearing their excuses, the same disasters that had befallen students year after year and made it impossible for them to get their work done—parents divorcing, a sick grandmother, breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Sometimes they just forgot. No, although there were pleasures involved in her work—her colleagues, the occasional really gifted student, the sense sometimes of having won a class over to a writer she loved—there was also a lot she could easily leave behind.

No, her resistance was centered on Alfie. She didn’t want to be alone with him, watching his old age happening to them both in slow motion. Being
in charge
of it.

Leaning back now in the old wicker chair, looking at the net of stars in the black sky above her, she thought of one minor episode after another. The time he didn’t recognize his own coat and held it up for her to put on. The time he got lost on the way home from the campus and had to knock on a stranger’s door, had to ask to use the phone to call her to come and get him. When Sylvia picked him up, she could tell that the woman who’d let him in was frightened of him. Sylvia had written her a note of thanks the next day, realizing even as she did it how self-serving
it was, that she was trying to assert something about herself, to put some distance between herself and Alfie in the woman’s mind.
He may be gaga, but I still know how to behave
.

They didn’t make love anymore either. They hadn’t for more than a year. She would become sexless, then—a sister, a daughter, a nurse. She would manage their lives in Pomeroy, as she’d managed getting up here this spring, as she’d managed their successful arrival home tonight.

She sat back in the creaking chair and looked through the window into the living room. She did love the house. In another life, she might have been glad to live her last years here. And it was in better shape now than it had been in a long time—the new bedroom wing on the ground floor, the new furnace, new storm windows. Insulation had been blown in, everything had been repainted.

All of this she’d been in charge of, too. And there would be other issues to deal with. There always were. Last winter the fancy new generator had gone on the fritz in a snowstorm. Who knew what else would come up? Algae in the pond, peeling paint, rot here and there. And all of these problems would fall to her to sort out, while Alfie worked on his book on Virgil’s
Eclogues
or read or made notes for the Harper Prize.

The Harper Prize. He’d been so pleased to have been asked to be on the jury. She’d felt almost sick when he told her. She’d already been worried on his behalf, he was having so much difficulty with other intellectual tasks.

But it seemed cruel, given his pleasure, to remind him of any of that, so she’d said nothing. They’d gone out to dinner to celebrate, and in the subdued lighting of the only really elegant restaurant in Bowman, he had looked younger. And because he was so exuberant, so animated, he seemed younger, too. It made her think maybe he could do it, could call up in himself the sense of focus, the energy, to read carefully, to make an intelligent judgment.

And after all, it was a committee. If he weren’t up to it, there would be the others to take over, to cover for him.

When she went into the bedroom, he was lying on his back, utterly still. She froze, unable to step closer. She had the sudden conviction that he was dead; but then he drew a shuddering, snorting breath through his nose and open mouth, and she felt herself relaxing.

She’d been holding her own breath, she realized abruptly, and because of that, perhaps, her heart was beating faster, a little irregularly.

As if she were excited
.

No. That wasn’t so. She’d been frightened, that was all.

She pulled off her clothes in the cool night air and put on her pajamas. In the bathroom, as she brushed her teeth, she watched herself in the mirror, ready to dislike what she saw there. But all that showed in her face was how tired she was, how old.

At six, she got up. In the night, she’d heard Frankie moving around in the living room, awake again, as she’d been last night. She’d thought briefly of getting up, of going in to talk with her, telling her about Alfie tonight, but decided not to. If it had been Liz, she might have, but Frankie … no. No need to worry her when she’d be leaving so soon.

She dressed in the living room so as not to disturb Alfie. In the kitchen, she got the coffee carafe out and set the kettle on to boil. When the coffee was done, she sat in the living room drinking it, looking out the window at the overgrown meadow down in front of the house. The grass on the lawn around the house was nearly as long—all the rain they’d had, and then the nonappearance of Adrian Snell, who was supposed to take care of the mowing as he took care of so much else for the summer people, though some of the newer ones used other, younger, handymen, too. But for Sylvia and Alfie and perhaps six or seven other old-timers, Adrian was the one who plowed, who mowed, who cut firewood.

She’d have to speak to him about the lawn. An image of him rose in her mind, the barrel-chested, self-assured man he’d turned into, completely at ease with himself in his own small world.

It was complicated, with Adrian, complicated because she’d grown up with him, seeing him every summer, and then coming to know him well in the one year she lived with her grandmother in high school—the year her parents were off doing research in Guatemala—which was when she’d been in love with him, and he with her.

In love
, she thought now, and her face twisted. An infatuation, that was all.

This was how she’d taught herself to think about it afterward in order
to go on seeing him year after year. To go on talking to him cordially while he filled the gas tank—though that didn’t happen anymore, now that you paid with a card at the pump and filled the tank yourself. But she still talked to him about the summer tasks she asked him to perform. She talked to him while she wrote him a check.

She didn’t like to think, and didn’t often, of the few times they’d made love. It was not memorable sex, though at the time everything about it was powerful to her. But that mostly resided in her response to him, to the way he looked, the way he smelled. Sometimes just glancing over at his arms and hands as he drove a car excited her.