An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke Page B

and I would stop using one, we all would, if only there weren’t these great distances we need to put between us and the people we need to talk to. Still, it’s possible that I truly sounded sincere. Or maybe Anne Marie was holding out hope that I wasn’t the cheater and liar she now believed me to be. Because she told me his name, as if maybe I didn’t know. Which, it turns out, I did.
    “Thomas,” she said, and her voice sounded kinder, softer, more hopeful than before. “Thomas Coleman.”
    “Oh no. Shit,” I said. This, of course, was the wrong thing to say and did nothing at all to convince Anne Marie of my innocence.
    “That’s what I thought,” she said, her voice hard again, the way it gets after you’ve cried and then discovered you’ve been crying for a good reason.
    “He’s lying,” I told her. “Don’t believe a word that guy says.”
    “He said you’d say that, and so he asked me to ask you why he would lie.”
    Oh, that hurt! Thomas had outsmarted me, and it felt bad. It’s a painful thing, finding out that you’re dumber than someone else. But then again, there is always someone smarter than you; you’d think we’d die from the constant pain of our mental inferiority, except that most of the time we’re too stupid to feel it. Yes, Thomas Coleman was smarter than I was, I knew it, and now my wife knew it, too.
    “That’s what I thought,” Anne Marie said again. “He also said that you’d say the whole thing with his wife was an accident, that you’d never meant for it to happen.”
    “That sounds like me,” I admitted. You had to hand it to Thomas: he really knew me, inside and out, and how to use that knowledge against me. I had no idea why he’d told Anne Marie I was cheating on her, rather than telling her the truth about my burning down the Emily Dickinson House and killing his poor mom and dad, but no doubt there was a reason, a good one, and he was smart enough to know it and I wasn’t. How did he get so terribly smart, so determined? Maybe it was the pain I’d caused that made him that way, and if that were true, then I’d sort of had a hand in it, in making him as smart and devious as he was. I was really starting to dislike the guy. But I also felt a little proud, like Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his monster turned on him, because, after all, it was Dr. Frankenstein who had made the monster strong and cunning enough to turn on him.
    “You know what else he said?” Anne Marie asked.
    “Tell me,” I said. I didn’t want to know, of course, but she was going to tell me anyway, so why not invite in the inevitable, which is why, in the movies, vampires have to be asked inside by their victims and always are.
    “He said that we didn’t belong together anyway, and good riddance. He said I was much too beautiful to be with a man like you.”
    “Hey, Anne Marie, I’ve said the same thing. Many, many times.” And I had. But it was different with Thomas saying it. When I said Anne Marie was too beautiful for me, it was as if only I knew and saw the truth. Now that Thomas had said it, though, I could see us as everyone else no doubt did: we were the couple that no one could figure out. What does she see in him? That was the unanswerable question.
    “Listen,” I said. “I know you don’t believe me. But don’t trust this guy Thomas; he’s bad news.”
    “You’d know,” she said.
    “I would?”
    “Bad news knows bad news,” she said. I could hear her light up another cigarette, which meant that she was on track to smoke more than her daily three. She didn’t like to smoke around the kids, and so I thought maybe I could talk to them while she finished her smoke. I’d lost her; it felt that way already. But I hadn’t lost the kids yet, I didn’t think. Apparently this is what you do when you lose someone you love: you scramble to make sure you don’t lose everyone you love.
    “Hey,” I said, “are the kids around?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can I talk