Brock Clarke has published a novel, The Ordinary White Boy,

© Harvest Books

and a short story collection, What We Won't Do,

© Sarabande Books

which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

He has stories published or forthcoming in The Georgia Review, New England Review, Southern Review, Mississippi Review, Five Points, and New Stories from the South.

He's been a fellow in fiction at the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Wesleyan Writers' Conferences, and teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.

"The Wedding Present" is an excerpt from his novel in progress, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.

The Wedding Present
Brock Clarke

Lees Ardor wanted to burn down the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, because even though she was an associate professor of American literature, Lees Ardor didn't like literature, didn't believe in it, as she told everyone who would listen to her. Not many people listened to her: not her colleagues in the English Department at Heiden College, not the college administration, not her students either, for the most part, except for a couple of kooks—a neo-conservative Richard Nixon kook who wore a blue blazer and red knit tie everyday in class, and a neo-Marxist kook who dressed like a female Chairman Mao with a pierced tongue—and these students were such severe kooks that even Lees Ardor recognized them as such and discouraged their adoration. No, mostly it was reporters who listened to her: reporters from the local radio and television stations and newspapers who once a year every year, when hard up for genuine news, remembered hearing something about this literature professor at Heiden who didn't like literature, and they would hustle out to the college to interview Lees Ardor and maybe stir up some outrage amongst their readers and viewers and listeners then poll the readers and viewers and listeners on the potential consequences of their outrage. The reporters would ask Lees Ardor why a literature teacher who didn't like literature would be a literature teacher in the first place, and she would say "It makes perfect sense, doesn't it?" It made such perfect sense, apparently, that Lees Ardor wouldn't say why it made perfect sense. The reporters became agitated, inevitably, at Lees Ardor's smug superiority; they climbed all over themselves trying to get out of the pond of their inferiority and at Professor Ardor's thin, pearl white neck. In the reporters' minds it was a perfect neck for wringing, and in Lees Ardor's mind she knew that reporters didn't have it in them to choke someone, all they could do was ask their questions, that was all they were good for. So they asked their questions, always the same questions. They pressed Lees Ardor on her feelings on certain books, certain great books that everyone knew were great, like Moby Dick. "What about Moby Dick?" they would ask her. "Moby Dick my ass," Lees Ardor would say, and then would smile at the reporters ingratiatingly as if they had reached a kind of understanding, even though none of the reporters understood what "Moby Dick my ass," meant and neither, really, did Lees Ardor.

Lees Ardor had long, red hair. She brushed it religiously, two hundred times a day on each side of her head. The hair was as beautiful and shiny as a newly waxed kitchen floor. Lees Ardor hated newly waxed kitchen floors and she also hated it when women asked: "How many times a day do you brush your hair?" She responded, always, by saying, "I never brush my hair. Ever." Lees Ardor hated the question and she hated the women who asked it. Once she had argued to one of her male colleagues that it was impossible for women to hate other women, it wasn't in their "make-up." When Lees Ardor said "make up," she made air quotes with her index and middle fingers and also raised her eyebrows just so her colleague knew that she had complete control over the gender-coded world of words and gestures and to also let him know that you did not have to have a penis to be ironic.

Even so, Lees Ardor hated the women who asked her about her hair and how many times she brushed it: because when Lees was asked this question she felt as though she was a character in a book that everyone has read, that she was a stock character who has hair so beautiful that she must brush it with almost pathological regularity and gravity. It's obvious to her that she is this type of character, and it must be equally obvious to everyone that Lees Ardor was lying about not brushing her hair, and all of this was so obvious because everyone had read the book in which Lees Ardor was a character, and if everyone had read it then everyone had made up their minds whether it was a good book or bad book and they all had their private reasons for thinking so and none of them would explain their reasons to Lees Ardor, because she was so obvious a character that they knew already what her response to them would be. The only thing that was not obvious about Lees Ardor was that she's from Canada, from just north of Edmonton. She didn't have an accent and didn't drink beer and had never seen a hockey game in her life and she had no opinion at all about the Quebec question.

Lees Ardor's mother had died, back in Canada, just a few months before Lees decided to have the Mark Twain House burned to the ground. It was in the middle of the semester, and Lees had to cancel a few classes to travel to her mother's funeral. When she returned to Heiden, she told her Twentieth Century Woman's Literature seminar why she'd had to cancel class, and she sensed most of the women in the class waver in their dislike for her. The men did not care-they were slunk down in their chairs, as usual, their baseball hats pulled down over their faces like they had something to hide and they were tireless in their apathy-but the women cared, their empathetic smiles and concerned wrinkled brows told Lees Ardor so: her mother had died, after all, and they had just read My Antonia by Willa Cather in class and they no doubt had visions of Lees Ardor's melancholy return to the great sweeping North American prairie. On the prairie, the students probably imagined, there were self-strong women in calico showing off their self-strength during Lees Ardor's mother's funeral and drinking strong coffee afterwards. This wasn't far from the truth. At the funeral the women had big, wind-chapped Scandinavian faces and they did not cry and they did drink strong coffee after the funeral and they were all barely a generation removed from wearing calico. This was true of Lees Ardor's mother, too, who was as strong and as stoic as any woman in Alberta--strong when her husband had died ten years earlier of a heart attack and then she had to sell their farm, strong during the six months she was dying of leukemia. Lees Ardor's mother was so admired by everyone who knew her that they felt no need to say so over and over again and there were no teary toasts in her honor because, it was agreed, Mrs. Ardor would have hated such a gesture. Lees Ardor had been so moved by this stoical show of respect that she cried at the funeral, cried out loud for the first time she could remember. She put her hands over her face when she wept and her crying sounded oddly far away, as if she were a princess holed up in some distant castle. Lees Ardor's mother was gone from the world and there would be no one else like her, and now there was just Lees Ardor herself. Lees Ardor could never carry on her mother's legacy, she knew this. How could she emulate her mother when she could barely stop crying long enough to accept the strong coffee from her mother's cronies who soon would also die stoically and put their weeping orphaned daughters to shame?

But Lees Ardor did not tell her students this story. All she said was: "My mother was a cunt." She had said the same thing about all the authors they had read during the semester and about some of the their characters, too. When Lees said, for instance, that "Edith Wharton was a cunt," the class fell into a stunned, queasy silence, which was what Lees intended. Lees Ardor was looking to disturb her students' notion that authors were deities, beyond reproach, and she was also trying to teach her class that words were weapons and hateful, not benign and beautiful. Besides, Lees Ardor explained, people being what they are, and famous people being even more so, odds were decent that Edith Wharton was something of a cunt and why not just say so and see what happens. The students didn't really accept this rationale, Lees Ardor knew, but they were in a class and they were getting a grade and besides they actually liked some of the books they were reading ("What do you mean by 'like'?" Lees Ardor always asked them) and so they stuck it out. But Lees Ardor calling her dead mother a cunt was too much: all the women in the class left, en masse, even the Chairman Mao pierced tongue kook, and almost all of the men left, too, not because they were offended by the word cunt, but because they hadn't been paying attention and saw the women leaving and assumed class was dismissed early.

Finally, it was just Lees Ardor and the Richard Nixon kook, who was looking at her from the confines of his desk chair in the throes of both fear and love. There had been a Richard Nixon kook in every class she'd ever taught, and each one of them had adored her and Lees Ardor knew all about the adoration and the reasons for it. Lees Ardor knew that for the Richard Nixon kook, there would never be any difference between fear and love. He wanted to be afraid of a woman so he could love her. Lees Ardor 's repeated use of the word "cunt" had no doubt made him fall for her, hard.

"Get the hell out of here," Lees Ardor told him, and the Richard Nixon kook went pleasurably limp in his desk chair, and then got up, wobbly legged, and left the room.

Then, Lees Ardor was all alone, which was really what she wanted most of all. She did not want to be someone who was loved out of fear by some Richard Nixon kook. She wanted to be alone, so she could cry about her mother and what she'd just said about her. If Lees Ardor had her brush with her she would have brushed her hair right there in the classroom, two hundred times on each side. Because it had gotten to that point: she didn't care who saw her brush her beautiful hair and she didn't care who saw her cry, either. Her mother was dead and she had called her a cunt and if she feared her hair brushing was pathological then there was no sense in trying to hide the pathology any longer.

Lees Ardor knew why she had said what she'd said about her mother, whom she loved and whom she'd been loved by. Lees Ardor did not want to be a character in the book her students had been reading, the hard-bitten character who had endured tragedy and come out a better, more sympathetic person. She'd starting teaching literature because she was good at reading books and then talking about them, taking them apart, making sense of them, and what else did this talent qualify her to do except teach English? But now the books had somehow grown beyond her and swallowed her. Whether she didn't like books because they had grown beyond her and swallowed her, or whether they had grown beyond her and swallowed her because she didn't like books, Lees Ardor didn't know. All she knew was that she hated the books because she feared being a character in them and not a real person, whatever that was, and not knowing what a real person was made her hate the books even more, the books and the words within them, too, and then all words everywhere, like "cunt," which was a word she loathed and which she could not stop using and like all words was horrible and inadequate. It was words, all of them, all of them that could gesture feebly toward your anger but not do justice to the complexity of it, that made her go out and contract a complete stranger to burn down the Mark Twain House.

There was a simple reason why Lees Ardor wanted someone else to burn down the Mark Twain House: she hadn't a clue as to how to commit arson, and thought she was too old to learn a new skill, or rather, another skill. And there was a simple reason why she wanted someone to torch the house rather than destroy it in some other fashion: several years earlier a young man had burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, and so there was both a precedent and someone out there with the proper credentials. And there was a simple reason why she wanted to destroy the Mark Twain House and not some other writer's home: it was right in town, in Hartford, and connected to the college in some vague way. The department spoke of the house all the time, and had an annual literary festival devoted to Twain and his house. At one faculty meeting (weeks after Lees Ardor had said what she'd said about her dead mother) the department head, in announcing plans for the upcoming festival, had announced the theme of the festival, which was: "Mark Twain: The Problem of Greatness." Upon hearing the word "greatness" Lees Ardor knew why she didn't believe in literature anymore, if she ever did: literature was supposed to elevate you above the sorry things of this world, but it didn't, it dragged you down, down into the book itself, which if it was any good was the truest document of the world's sorry things and in which case made the book great but also terrible. Upon hearing the name Mark Twain she immediately thought of herself as the shrewish spinster Aunt Polly in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and it became clear to her what she had to do and she said, as an afterthought and as a matter of course: "Mark Twain is a cunt."

Lees Ardor's colleagues had heard Lees Ardor say this kind of thing many times before, and her ability to shock them was nil. They usually just ignored her. But this time, one of her colleagues did not ignore her.

"Mark Twain is indeed a cunt," Wesley Michner said. Michner, too, had been thinking evil thoughts about Twain and he was also thinking about Lees Ardor's hair, how it was so clean and luminous that you could polish rare coins with it. Collecting and polishing rare coins was one of Wesley Michner's hobbies, in particular Confederate coins, because Wesley Michner was a scholar of southern literature and Expert in All Things Southern. He had been on the faculty at Heiden for twenty years and had been Lees Ardor's colleague for eight of those years, but he had never really noticed her (nor she him) until the moment she said, "Mark Twain is a cunt."

After the department meeting was over, Wesley Michner chased down Lees Ardor in the hallway and asked: "Do you have any interest in drinking red wine with me and talking about Confederate currency and maybe looking over my rare lithograph of the Confederate mint in Richmond, Virginia?" To her great surprise, Lees Ardor said "Yes," (she did not remember the last time she had said "Yes" to anything). Over the course of the next six months, Lees Ardor said Yes many more times to Wesley Michner and she and Michner fell in love and conspired to have the Mark Twain House burned back to hell, where it belonged.

How was it was possible that Lees Ardor and Wesley Michner had never noticed each other over the course of eight years, even though there were only ten full time faculty in the English Department and even though they had bi-weekly departmental meetings about which everyone groused but would not think of skipping? It was possible because, as they realized over the six months of their courtship, they had been each walled up in their own ghetto of resentment, unable to see anything outside the walls. Lees Ardor was the only woman in the department, which perhaps (she realized) was what made her say cunt so often. As for Wesley Michner, he was the only Southerner on the faculty--the only one who had a bachelor's degree from Sewanee and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt as opposed to Amherst and Harvard-- and it was difficult for Wesley Michner to see anyone else in the department over the high ramparts of his defensiveness.

"I am a fourth generation Michner from the North Carolina foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains," Wesley Michner said, apropos nothing, on the night of their first date. They were drinking red wine and looking at coins, as promised. He lived in an old, musty colonial home in West Hartford. They were sitting in a room that looked like a study but might not have been, because all the rooms he'd shown her looked like studies with their towering, overflowing bookcases and dim lighting and the shabby look of neglect and intellectual wear and tear. Wesley Michner had his legs propped up on a settee because, as he explained, he had severe diabetes and a severe circulation problem, which accounted for how yellow his skin was. Lees Ardor hadn't noticed the yellowness before he mentioned it. Or rather, she had, but she assumed it was the bad lighting.

"I'm from Canada," Lees Ardor replied. "I don't know if you knew that, or if it even matters."

"The so-called hillbilly of the Appalachians speaks an English closer to true proper English than any Yankee that went to Harvard."

"I called my dead mother a cunt and I'll never forgive myself for it. Never."

"My mother could make a poultice out of the sap of a piney tree that could take away your toothache before you even knew you had one, buddy ro."

"I brush my hair two hundred times a day, each side of my head. I don't know why I do it. It hurts my scalp when I do it, pain like tiny fires, but it feels good, too."

"Our Bobby Lee kept a lock of his daughter's hair in his saddle bag. It was magic, the lock of hair. It protected him from the minie balls."

They could talk like this for hours, their meanings barely intersecting. But always, at the end of the evening, they arrived at their absolute common ground.

"I'm afraid of becoming Aunt Polly," Lees Ardor said. "I need to burn down the Mark Twain house before I become Aunt Polly."

"I know exactly what you mean," Wesley Michner said. "I'd like to burn that sucker down, too."

Wesley Michner's reasons for wanting to burn down the Mark Twain house were somewhat different from Lees Ardor's. He did not fear that he was becoming a character; he already knew he was a character. In fact this was one of the traditional Southern values he often spoke of: if you were a Southerner you were already a character, you had to be, this was one of the things that defined you as a Southerner and the thing you had to defend most vigorously against all other people in all other parts of the country. What being a character had to do with traditional Southern values, Wesley Michner was loath to say, but it had something to do with misdirectional double speak and losing the war and not wanting others to talk about it and not being able to stop talking about it yourself and having wise, lugubrious old folks and front porches for them to sit on, and black people, always black people, about whom you knew everything and about whom no one else knew shit and the idea that self-criticism is art but criticism from outside is hypocrisy and wise folksy sheriffs and God and farm animals and good food that wouldn't be good if you ate it in a restaurant and not in your mama's kitchen, and a set of white wall tires leaning up against the barn that would look good on the 1957 Buick that you had a funny story to tell about.

No, Wesley Michner believed in all these things and he knew they made him a character and he was glad to be a one and did not want to torch the Mark Twain House because of it.

Wesley Michner wanted to torch the Mark Twain House because he couldn't figure out whether Twain was Southern or not. Was he for or against? Wesley Michner knew that he himself was a Southerner, because he had been in Connecticut for twenty years and not for one moment felt at home. The pain and loneliness of his exile made him certain that he was a Southerner, and he longed daily for the North Carolina piney woods. But about Twain, he couldn't tell. Wesley Michner was forced to teach Huckleberry Finn in his southern literature class by virtue of the department list of must-be-taught masterpieces. But was Twain from the south? Where was he from? He was from Missouri. Was Missouri the south? Let's say it was. Twain had a historical home in Missouri. But then again, he had one in Elmira, New York, too. And the one right here Connecticut. He had lived in all these places, in California and Europe, as well. Still, the students in Michner's class accepted without much thinking that Mark Twain was southern by simple virtue of his inclusion in a course on Southern literature. Wesley Michner wished he were like his students in this regard: it didn't matter to them who was southern or not. But it mattered to Wesley Michner a great deal.

The books themselves did not help any. There were no firm allegiances anywhere in any of the books. In all of them, Wesley Michner suspected that Twain was making fun of the characters, white or black, rich or poor, young or old, from Virginia or Missouri or Connecticut. There was no character safe from Twain, and if there was no character safe from Twain then there was no reader safe from him, either. This was the way Wesley Michner felt and this feeling affected his teaching. For instance, there was inevitable conflict over whether Twain was racist or not vis a vis The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. More often than not, Michner defended Twain and the book from charges of racism, arguing that the book's artistry made the issue of race besides the point, and besides, he argued, you had to look at the book in context and what hillbilly white teenager wasn't a racist in those days. His students had their own monstrous prejudice against hillbilly white teenagers and so they accepted his explanation. But when Wesley Michner gave the explanation, he felt as though Twain would have scoffed both at the explanation and at Michner for giving it. So once in a while, Michner reversed fields and argued that the book was racist, unredeemingly racist, and it should be read only as a document of a history of racism in America and not for any enduring artistic qualities. The students accepted this explanation, too (Michner found that they would accept almost any explanation); but again, Michner felt as though Twain were laughing at him.

"Do you feel like Twain is laughing at you?" Michner asked one of his students one day when she came in to visit him during office hours to see why she was getting an A- instead of an A.

"I feel like the book is racist," the student said. She was an ex-high school valedictorian who took copious notes and thus would repeat Michner's comments back to him like a court stenographer. "The book is unredeemingly racist and should be read only as a document of a history of racism in America and not for any enduring artistic qualities."

"I have this feeling he's laughing at me, at all of us, but especially me," Michner said. "When Huck talks to Nigger Jim, I see Twain there laughing at me, not knowing what to do with this white kid and black man talking to each other in the way they do."

"It's super confusing," the girl agreed, furiously taking notes.

"There's no way, if Twain were a real Southerner, he would be laughing at me," Michner said. "This is the way I feel. Except sometimes, I feel the opposite."

"It's super confusing," the student repeated, and then smiled sweetly and expectantly at Michner until he told her she had earned her A and she left him alone.

But the girl was right: it was super confusing. And the most confusing thing about the whole matter was why Michner cared whether Twain was southerner or not. What difference did it make? He liked the book, did he not? Did he not find it funny? Did the book not move him and trouble him, both? What difference did it make whether Twain was a southerner or not? This was the conclusion that Michner came to when he was sitting alone, thinking clearly and rationally about the matter in his house full of studies: that it did not matter whether Twain was southern.

"It doesn't matter," Michner said to himself, and then wiped his brow in a pantomime of relief. It felt good to get rid of Twain in this fashion, until he realized the consequences of his decision. If it did not matter whether Twain was a Southerner or not, then did it matter whether Michner himself was a Southerner?

"It does matter," Michner said to himself. But it was too late: he had already said that it didn't matter, and he couldn't so easily banish the idea from his brain.
"It does matter and it doesn't matter," Michner said again, outloud and to himself, and then felt very silly for doing so.

Michner talked to himself often, which he knew was silly, and re-asserting your southerness was very much like talking to yourself: it was silly, too. Michner came to believe this after the conversation with his student and then after the conversation with himself alone in his house full of studies: it was silly feeling the need to explain yourself even if no one has asked you to. And it was also silly believing that there was no self there at all if you did not explain how it was unlike other selves in other parts of the country. It was worse than silly: it was sad.
Not long after these epiphanies, Michner was approached by the chair of the Twain festival, a slightly overweight, bearded man in his fifties with whom Michner supposed he had nothing in common, even though Michner himself was a slightly overweight bearded man in his fifties. The man was from Michigan and had never been to North Carolina in his life.

"Wesley," the chair said, "I wonder if you might contribute something to the Twain festival."

"Such as?"

"Perhaps something on Twain and the southern tradition."

"You're talking to the wrong man," Michner said.

"Pardon?"

"Get someone else to do it," Michner said. "I'm tired of being southern."

He was tired of being southern, that was the truth, and it was Twain who had made him so tired, and it was Twain who had to suffer the consequences. Because if he were tired of being southern, what else could he be? Could someone be just nothing after being something for so long? It was Twain who made Michner ask these questions and it was Twain who had to pay for it. Of course, Wesley Michner was not alone in believing so; Lees Ardor knew that Twain had to pay, too.

So Lees Ardor and Wesley Michner made plans to burn down the Mark Twain House in West Hartford, Connecticut. At first, it was just talk: how much they hated Mark Twain, how much they wanted to burn down his house, etc. But the more they talked, the more they fell in love, and they both felt that if they were going to do justice to the love, then they would have to do more than talk. They would burn the Mark Twain House down not simply out of hatred, but as proof of the seriousness of their love for each other. Both of them had read about the young man who had torched the Emily Dickinson House (it had reduced one of their colleagues-an expert on lyric poetry--to tears). So they wrote the arsonist a letter in prison. Then they waited. Two months passed. One night, the phone rang. It was around the time of year when the real news tended to dry up and die, and Lees Ardor thought it might be one of the reporters, asking her why she hated literature. "Wesley," she said, "please answer the phone, would you? And if it's a reporter, tell them I have nothing to more say on the subject."

But it wasn't a reporter: it was the arsonist, asking them if they were still interested in having the Mark Twain House burned to the ground.

"We just became engaged," Wesley Michner told the man on the phone. It was true: earlier in the evening, he had proposed to Lees Ardor, and she had accepted, and they were drinking red wine in celebration and looking into each others' eyes and not at Wesley's exhaustive collection of Lost Cause ephemera.

"Congratulations," the man said. "Do you want me to burn down the Mark Twain House or not?"

"Were it not for the Mark Twain House we would not be engaged."

"You're not answering my question."

"My apologies," he said. "Of course we still want you to burn it down. It'll be my wedding present to my wife to be."

"It'll cost you ten thousand dollars. We have no discount for the about-to-be married."

Wesley Michner was about to object: ten thousand dollars seemed an extraordinarily expensive token of his affection and love. But then he stopped himself. Because wasn't excessive cheapness one of the things that distinguished southerners from the rest of the country? Or was it one of the things that distinguished New Englanders from the rest of the country? Perhaps it was the thing that distinguished cheapskates from big spenders, tightwads from high rollers. In any case, he was through with this kind of thinking. It was this kind of thinking that had gotten him into such trouble in the first place, that had prevented him from seeing Lees Ardor even though she had been right there in front of him for eight years. Eight years! Eight years was an intolerably long time to waste thinking about where you were from and what it meant when you could be falling in love.

"Ten thousand dollars sounds perfectly reasonable," he said. Wesley Michner hung up the phone, and then smiled at Lees Ardor, who looked lovely with a glass of red wine in one hand, and a hair brush in the other. Lees Ardor looked so lovely that she did not even need to smile back at Wesley Michner to complete her loveliness. But she did.

© Brock Clarke