Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  “How lovely,” she murmured, bending over the blooms. She wanted a sweep of beauty in her yard, however that could be had. Often her listeners were eager to meet her, but when they did they stared, trying to put voice and face together, which, Jenna knew, was a struggle.

  Laura had squatted down to get her box of brochures from under the table, and when she stood up, there, right in front of her, was her idol. In spite of her rich fantasy life, she had never imagined the first seconds, the introductory moment. “Ha!” was what came out of her mouth on a sharp inhale.

  Jenna remembered first thinking that Laura Rider was trying to make the mental leap, trying to square the fact of Jenna’s unruly hair, the ungainly figure, with the disembodied silky voice. Or did the woman have a fever? Her color was high, her wide blue eyes were glassy, her puffy lips parted in a small o. “Are you all right?” Jenna said, reaching across, touching Laura’s forearm.

  “Me?” Laura breathed. What she’d give for a second chance, and yet she idiotically said again, “Me?”

  Jenna couldn’t help admiring the style of the plant woman, a contrast to the constrained beige uniforms of the garden club members. Laura Rider was wearing a straight denim dress with a toothy shiny zipper down the front as if in mockery— or was it in homage to a farmer’s coveralls? She had boldly cinched it at the waist with a wide leather belt in the muted soft purple of liver. On her the effect was somehow both elegant and humorous.

  “It seems warm in here,” Jenna said, “and I was only yesterday with someone who fainted. So now I suppose I’m afraid everyone I see is going to keel over, one by one, all these ladies collapsing. Imagine the sound of those bracelets at the same time hitting the floor, the point of impact.”

  Laura burst out laughing, her hands clapped to her mouth. She had grown up in Casey, the next town to the west, and she, the upstart from the rival high school, had dated the brothers of some of these women.

  “Is that shock or glee?” Jenna asked, leaning into the table as if the better to see for herself.

  Laura wasn’t going to look, but she sincerely hoped that the women of Hartley were observing that, of all the people in the room, Jenna Faroli had chosen to talk to Laura Rider. “I, I played basketball at Casey High.” She was speaking through her smile, through her laughter, the words bubbling from her mouth. “I was on the team, the shooting guard, my fifteen minutes of fame, and one time the sister of Cassie Johnson, she’s over by the flag, tried to beat me up after a game.” Shock or glee? Laura was being interviewed by Jenna Faroli! “I almost married Patty Heiderman’s—she’s the one in red—her brother.” Mark Heiderman was the reason Laura had dropped out of community college, escaped to her sister’s, hadn’t shown her face in Hartley for a year. Mark Heiderman had socked her in the stomach when she’d gotten pregnant, and Patty had slain her verbally in public, at the car wash, when she’d found out Laura had had an abortion.

  “I’m sure there is so much in the understory of a small town,” Jenna said, “so much a stranger, no matter how long she lives here, can never know. From the outside, though, I tell you, it all looks wonderfully serene. It seems to us like heaven.” She picked up one of Laura’s brochures. “So—you’re not going to faint even if you secretly wish everyone here would, and you sell perennials, and you do landscaping. Prairie Wind Farm.”

  “Yes, yes, we do. My husband, my husband, Charlie, Charlie Rider, and I have had the business for—oh my gosh—over ten years.”

  Jenna would remember that, too, the first time she heard his name. “Charlie Rider,” she mused. She knew that she shouldn’t bring up the title of a book to this woman, and yet, even as she meant to stop herself, the sentence was floating between them: “Have you ever read Brideshead Revisited?” Why was she asking? Why did she persist in referring to books when it was obvious the listener would not have read them. “Or seen the miniseries?” Jenna added with little optimism.

  Although Laura nodded with great enthusiasm, although she grinned hard, she was sure Jenna would be able to tell that she had never heard of it.

  “I say so,” Jenna forged on, “because Charles Ryder is the name of the narrator, a blank slate of a young man, very impressionable, who goes up to Oxford. To study there, that is. He becomes captivated—obsessed, really—by nearly everyone in a wealthy Catholic family. He falls in love with the idea of them. He loves them and observes them and chronicles their downfall.”

  “My Charlie,” Laura exclaimed, “would do something like that!”

  Jenna thrust her nose into the blooms again and said, “How lucky you are to raise such exquisite things.” She had recently decided that, in the balance and in general, she hated people, but in spite of this new self-knowledge, she couldn’t help finding the individual person interesting and often heartbreaking.

  “This is our love, Charlie’s and mine. Our real love is the nursery.”

  “How lucky,” Jenna repeated. Why had she mentioned Brideshead? She sometimes disliked herself more than she disliked the population at large. Why lecture this stranger about one of her favorite novels, a wonderfully sentimental book about decline, the sorrow of aging, the loss of love, the end of a glorious era for the landed gentry? It was funny, of course it was, the way Laura had so happily said, “My Charlie would do something like that,” without having any idea that the fictional Charles Ryder was actually a colorless, depressed character. Still, how could the name Charlie Rider come up without Jenna’s mentioning Brideshead?

  In an effort to redeem herself, she began to talk. “I’m a beginner,” she said, “and so I feel as if I’m here under false pretenses. I don’t have time right now to be a regular member of the club, or go through the Master Gardener course, but I’m dying to make a garden, to do the actual work, to plant—to get back, somehow, to …” She hardly knew what she was trying to explain, an unusual predicament for her. “I want to be outside and have my hands in the dirt, a primal sort of desire, I guess. The idea that a person can make something as fantastic as the pictures in the books I’ve looked at seems preposterous, all that beauty of your own making. With this garden business I feel naïve and ignorant and arrogant, too. As if I think I could become a brain surgeon by reading a manual, or a best-selling novelist because I like books.”

  “Not at all!” Laura cried. From the corner of her eye she could see that Patty Heiderman had rotated 180 degrees to stare in her direction. “We can work out a color palette in relation to the shade and the sun in your yard.” Imagine Jenna Faroli at the farm, sitting in the wicker chair in the shed with Laura, the books spread out on the table, the color wheel before them. It was a reversal of the fantasy: Laura, the teacher; Jenna, the student. She was not as ugly as Laura remembered, or maybe she seemed somewhat attractive—handsome was perhaps the word—because she was speaking. Laura could now fully understand why the radio guests revealed themselves to Jenna in the interviews. In person and in a large room, it was just as if Laura were alone in her car with Jenna on the radio, with that voice, the color of it a warm buttery yellow. “There are many hardy varieties,” Laura went on, reaching over to touch Jenna’s arm, the same gesture Jenna had made a few minutes earlier. If it was Patty Heiderman’s gaze that spurred her to this intimacy, so what? “I could guide you, if you came to the farm, if that seemed like a good idea to you. You can learn as you go and at the same time have fun. You can have real pleasure with the basics.”

  “Pleasure with the basics,” Jenna murmured.

  “I sometimes tell my customers, I say, What did God know about horticulture when He created the Garden? He probably made it with dumb luck, and there were probably plants Eve later dug up and moved around. But even God at a certain point just had to plunge in.”

  Laura was always honest up to a point, careful to explain that the learning curve could be expensive if you didn’t have a watering schedule and if you didn’t fertilize your investment. If you had lousy taste—a problem afflicting many of her customers—then you would be blissfu
lly ignorant of the atrocity out back, the mismatched colors and the inevitable silly impatiens thrown in to cover the dying perennials that Laura had painstakingly advised. It was hard to say who were worse, the haughty, demanding Illinois vacationers, or the relaxed Wisconsin women in their oversized appliquéd shirts, bursting out of their Capri pants. Laura wanted to say to Jenna how impossible it was to remain a nice person if you so much as had eyes in your head; Laura was not nearly as kind, she knew, or as generous, as Jenna Faroli.

  If she’d been truthful with Jenna, she would have said she was ready to sell the business, chuck the farm, get out while they were having success. Keeping the place watered and weeded and mowed, managing the employees, coming up with workshops, designing new beds, tearing out the old, dealing with the customers whose peonies weren’t the right color—she had had enough. She would have explained to Jenna that the huge sellers at Prairie Wind, the steel buckets wrapped in shelf paper, planted with geraniums and sweet woodruff, were a rip-off at fifty dollars, and she was embarrassed, too, even though they were high-end, by the terra-cotta angels and frogs and owls, the grapevine wreaths, the wind chimes, the plaster birdbaths. The thought of another season made her want to vanish all of a sudden, to drive off, no note left behind. She could breed dogs, maybe, in a new life, in Nova Scotia or British Columbia. She looked into the gray eyes of Jenna Faroli and she silently asked this question: What, Jenna, is my calling? What is my true love?

  Laura wanted to tell Jenna how she had worked to improve herself, in spite of quitting William Faulkner. She had, for a time, read the titles in the Hartley Library’s book club. She hadn’t ever gone to the evening meetings, but she had tried to be loyal to the member that was herself. It wasn’t always easy, because in her opinion some of the books were wordy, dull, interminable. Hello! We don’t have all day here! She often couldn’t help thinking that if the hero and heroine had only been able to get ahold of medication there would not have been any occasion for a story. Holden Caulfield would have been fine on Prozac, and ditto for the Professor in his dusty old house, in the dreary Willa Cather novel that she had not been able to finish.

  While Jenna was asking her questions about potting soil and pruning, and while Laura was answering in detail, she was imagining that she was telling Jenna the essential facts of her life. She was saying what she’d never say to anyone else; she was saying, “I think, Jenna, I think I want to write a book.” She was sure, if she said so, that Jenna would spur her on, just as Laura was cheering her on about gardening. It occurred to her, in the middle of the discussion of Jenna’s ailing hydrangea, the six in her front yard, that what Laura most wanted to write was a novel about a plain woman who becomes beautiful. A story that finally discovers what a woman needs and wants, and there in the distance is the man who can meet those requirements, the man coming closer and closer to her, the woman’s beauty snapping into focus as he arrives. She shivered even as she was speaking to Jenna about the wonder of mushroom compost. Although Laura Rider was finished with sex, she was not the least bit tired of romance. She looked into the small but knowing and sympathetic eyes of Jenna Faroli, and she said to herself, I want to write a book about love.

  Chapter 2

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE GARDEN-CLUB MEETING, CHARLIE Rider and Jenna Faroli met along Highway S outside of Hartley. This encounter occurred by chance. “Or,” Charlie later said, “did it?” The month was May, the wheat and alfalfa were waving in the soft breeze, the green was so bright in the sunlight, making the pastures and fields so shiny, it all looked like a plastic backdrop. Wasn’t it as if, Charlie would ask her, the Silver People, on an avenue named S, had called to them on that spring day of the spangly colors, when nature looked more phony than phony nature? The Silver People, the glowing dwarfs who inhabited Charlie’s private universe. He happened to be driving in front of Jenna, and it was he who pulled over on the wide gravel shoulder to look across the field to the horizon.

  Nature in general was such a dazzling, goofball thing, always bubbling up out of nowhere, always morphing into a crazy something else; one minute you’ve about killed yourself digging out all the thistles in the field, and the next, garlic mustard has spread itself right behind your back. Son of a bitch—nature! And what a sense of humor, blowing your house down, say, and what do you find under the mud floor of the basement but a fossilized T. rex? Thank you very much. The next minute, the trickster goes into ravishing mode without any effort: mist on a pond, the crescent moon—So don’t look at me!—the whole place lit up in blossom time for no one but the bees. What was behind it all, beyond it, not to mention right in front of us? Who knew how many dimensions, scrim after scrim, a person could peel back into if he took the time to pay attention? “Don’t start,” his wife often said to him when he was gearing up on this subject. “What you see is what you get. Reality is reality, period.”

  Would Jenna have stopped on Highway S if he hadn’t led the way? She wondered if she would have ignored the bobbing lights in her eagerness to get home if he hadn’t, by pulling over, guided her toward awe. “What are they?” she called to him as she climbed out of the car. She had her hand to her brow, looking, not at the stranger next to her, but at the six or so quivering spheres past the silos, the barns, just above the tree line. “Are we having floaters?” she said. “Both of us? Do we need to see an ophthalmologist right now? Or a shrink?”

  Ah, that voice. He was having an out-of-body experience hearing it in the flesh. He had known it was Jenna Faroli who would step from the car, because he’d been watching her from his rearview mirror for the two miles she’d been behind him. He didn’t listen to her program, but whenever he heard it in the background he wished she would stop talking. He wanted her to sing along with him in the sound track that was often going in his head, principally the old-time string-band music he’d learned from his grandfather. “Short Life of Trouble,” “June Apple,” “Going Across the Mountain.” She must have a pure and yet sweetly lusty singing voice, with a spine-tingling vibrato. For a minute he forgot the spheres. The Grand Ole Opry: he’s up there with Jenna, and here comes Dolly, boobs like traffic cones, and, wait, Emmylou, she’s belting out “Pretty Little Girl” with them, too.

  “Or do we need a neurosurgeon,” Jenna was saying, “are our brain tumors flaring up?”

  Charlie closed his eyes, took a deep breath, raised his full glass to life. Jenna Faroli—biggest cranium on the planet, according to his wife—and here he was with her, looking out to the world revealed. “There’s nothing wrong with your vision,” he said, blinking, checking his own. “Or your circuitry, I suspect, nope, not a thing. You probably don’t have psychiatric troubles, either. Clean bill of health. They, those lights—they might be what you think they are.”

  It was then that she turned to look at him. Out of long habit, she masked her censure in the singsong of her satiny tones. “And what do I think they are?”

  It wasn’t the tender shape of his dark eyes or his unlashed smile, ear to ear, that first drew her attention, or even his corkscrew curls, the tight spring of them, but the pleading in the long, tapered fingers with the flat pads, as he held them out, in prayer position.

  “Here’s my guess,” he said. “You don’t really think those lights are UFOs, and you could never say that they might be, you wouldn’t really even consider it, because then everyone within range of 90.4 FM would think you’d flipped. UFOs aren’t even the word you want for what’s out there. You’re thinking spirit world. You’re thinking alternative reality, maybe. You’ve heard about ionic disturbances, so you could go the science route. But this seems like something different from that description. It’s possible you’d like them to be magical. It’s possible you want to be charmed.”

  She said nothing. She used what her producer in the studio called Jenna’s I-hate-you smile, the tilted head, the closed mouth spread to 45-percent capacity, the sincere nod. She had recently done a show about Yeats’s beliefs in palmistry, astral travel, and crystal gazing,
about the poet’s falling under the spell of the mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Her guest had gone on to the question in general of well-educated and discriminating people who give themselves over to the occult. Jenna did not doubt that the sacrifice of Yeats’s reason, the force of his sheer wackiness, had yielded great benefits to the culture at large. But in the moment she had never wanted less to be charmed by alternative reality. The one miracle she believed in was kindness—but only if it wasn’t talked about. She was of course open to all points of view, even those of a presumptuous kook. Her stranger’s jeans were so crisp she wondered if they’d been starched and ironed, and the sleeves of his light-green shirt had been neatly rolled up, each to the same level on his forearm. Even as Jenna considered the spectacle at the edge of the sky, she noted that Charlie looked like a schoolboy whose mother had dressed him.

  “Are they benign?” she asked. “Those beings caravanning in the spheres?”

  “Would you like them to be?”

  She again turned to her companion. “I’d like them to be as well dressed as you.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “It’s hard, though, to look like this when you’re traveling. When you’ve come from so far.”