Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  “Yes, that’s true. Especially because you would have had to start out—let’s see—a million miles per hour, and if you came from the nearest star, that’s Alpha Centauri, so … wouldn’t you have had to start out at roughly … give me a minute … I’m not quite sure about the math, but something like the time of Moses?”

  “Whoa!” he said. “Math! Wow.” His whole body now seemed to be nodding, the bounce coming from his heels. “But maybe, maybe you have to do that thing where you shift the—what’s it called?—the paradigm. Isn’t it possible that they have other ways to travel? Maybe our laws have nothing to do with theirs. Maybe they can surf the astral plane, or even travel on our thoughts.”

  “Poor things! My thoughts would certainly rumple their clothing. Still, however they get here, I maintain that it’s important to make a good impression.”

  “You don’t like the green bodysuit? Too casual? You wish they’d snazz it up a little, make an effort? Accessorize?”

  “I have large feet, so I always think if you’re a dainty size you should use that. You should wear elegant shoes, at the least.” In her brown oxfords she stepped closer to the field. “What else do I want in my aliens?” She squinted hard at the sky. “Let me just say I refuse to be frightened of creatures smaller than me and those whose pallor is green. I’d like to think they were getting a charge out of us, out of our dramas, that we were providing them with a degree of entertainment. That is, I hope we’re not too dull. Not that I want to be made fun of, no, but I’d like them to be lovingly amused. I’d like them to feel as if they’d seen a masterpiece—a Preston Sturges film, for instance. I’d like them to feel as if the world, our world, was a generous place. A tall order, to be sure.” She smiled at him, a genuine smile this time. “I’d like them to feel lighthearted.”

  He was staring at her, all movement suspended. “I don’t know you,” he said after a minute. “I mean, I know you—you know I know you, but I don’t know you. If you know what I mean. So it doesn’t make sense for me to want to tell you a secret. But—I’d like to. I’d like to tell you one.”

  “You probably shouldn’t,” she said, “since you don’t know me.”

  He noodled the gravel with the toe of his boot. “I can appreciate that—but if you have any questions, about what you’re seeing? Not that I’m an expert …” He rooted around in his pocket and pulled out a card for her. “If you find yourself thinking about this scene, you could e-mail me, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “Charlie Rider,” Jenna said. She was not going to bring up the Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited. “I met your wife a few weeks ago at the library. She was very helpful.”

  “The indomitable Mrs. Rider,” Charlie sang out. “It was the greatest night of her life, talking to you.”

  “I doubt that,” Jenna said. “At least, I hope it’s not true. Please do thank her again for me. And thank you for this—”

  “Miracle.”

  “Card,” she said firmly. “Thanks for the card.” The restrained, tasteful font was Eaglefeather, the invention of Frank Lloyd Wright. You could tell a person’s class, or his aspirations anyway, his pretensions, perhaps, by his font. Someone else, she was sure, had designed the card for him. If you had such a lavish head of hair and an impish face, if you had excitement pulsing in your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to see clear to a font like Eaglefeather. As she got in the car, she called back to him, “But what the hell are they?”

  “If I told you,” he said, walking toward her, coming alongside her Toyota, “if I told you about the Silver People, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “It all depends on how you tell it.”

  “I don’t even believe me when I tell myself the story.”

  “Then you’d better get to work on your narrative skills.”

  “Narrative skills,” he echoed. He stuck his hand through her open window. “Charlie Rider,” he said, shaking what he had grasped, shaking her fingertips. “It’s an honor to meet you. A real thrill.”

  Charlie had always had confidence. He was the sixth and final child in his family. His mother had understood by baby number three that there was little point in worrying, and by baby number five, no point in trying to mold. By the time he came, her wisdom was honed to a comfortable dull edge, that line she worked between concern and neglect. As an infant, Charlie had been happy to lie on his back nibbling his toes, singing to himself, and watching his grandfather play his fiddle. His mother loved his shining eyes, his astonishing curls, and the dreaminess that would later make his teachers want to smack him. The other children had straight hair, were good in math, and had chubby legs. Where had Charlie come from? Once he could crawl, he had the habit of throwing himself into the family swimming pool, and for years he believed the story his brother told him, that he was a creature who had been born of a fish. He believed, that is, that his own real mother was capable of transformation. No fish-child has ever been so variously and well dressed, from matador, to pirate, to magician, to king, to nurse—all professions that required capes and millinery. He drank a bottle until he was seven, pouring the milk from the refrigerator into the Evenflo, and screwing on the blue-rimmed nipple that had a chewed hole the size of his thumb. When his older brothers beat him up at home they were mild about it, and out in the world they defended him. He was lucky in their protection. He seemed, though, not to care much about what anyone thought of him. And he didn’t ever consider himself to be in danger. It was his native happiness, that radiant, dreamy joy, that both invited teasing and shielded him from it.

  When he was seventeen and flunking out of high school, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Shirley lured him away from the pool table at Nybo’s Tavern, drove him to her uncle’s house on Lake Margaret, and taught him in one night so many things he wondered if he should make a list of the pleasures in order not to forget. He recalled the way she had drawn his lower lip into her own mouth, the way she had licked his pants before she’d removed them, and the pressure of her finger in a place he had not before considered would hold any interest to a second party. He realized, as he tried to imagine what he would write, that Shirley’s teachings were not things a boy could scribble in a notebook. What had happened with Shirley was a wordless miracle, just as music was, a dissolving happiness into the cosmos. It was essential, then, to keep singing, to keep making love, to keep creating the songs note by note as the sound, note by note, vanished.

  After graduation, made possible by Principal Stapleton’s generous interpretation of his efforts, Charlie found jobs here and there around Hartley. He met Laura; they often had sex three times a day; they dabbled in horticulture, including growing marijuana; they bought the farm with money Charlie inherited from his grandfather; they started the business; and they got married. By the time he was forty, he felt that the adventure was over. His wife was never going to sleep with him again; hundreds of people traipsed around their property through the spring and summer, and he would work to keep it at that trembling point of perfection, as per Mrs. Rider’s orders; he would sing “Eyes likeCherries” and other Grandpa Rider songs at the annual St. Lucy’s School fund-raiser; he would marvel at the universe, trying to see into it—and that was his lot. He understood that his feelings of decline were ancient ones, that men before him had suffered in the same way. He knew this because he had been exposed to some classics on the stage—two Shakespeare, one Chekhov. In high school, Mrs. Garstucky had taken them to see Uncle Vanya in Chicago, and he remembered a scene where Vanya, played by George C. Scott, had said something like “I’m forty-seven. How am I going to get through the next years of my life? What shall I do? How shall I fill up these years?” Charlie had come home from the play, and, standing on the lip of the swimming pool fully clothed, he had given his mother that speech in Scott’s growly voice, and then fallen over into the water. There was no one who laughed as hard at him as his mother. Now, at forty-five, he understood Vanya’s sentiments; he could see they were no joke.

  It wa
sn’t that life was unhappy or that difficult, not at all. He was married to his Captain of Industry. They owned their farm, and their business was more successful than they’d imagined it could be at the start. With sixteen employees, he had become, to the surprise of his siblings, a boss. This had never been his goal, in part because he’d never had any particular goals. He loved to sing his grandfather’s songs. He liked to pluck at the banjo. He enjoyed drawing. He loved thinking about what lay beyond the blue sky. He’d loved lying on the floor channeling himself into the dream life of their dog, Beaver; he’d imagine Beaver chasing a squirrel, and by and by the real-life mutt would start twitching and whining in his sleep. There were no limits to the powers of the mind, no limit to what was out in that swirl of gas and infinity. A person, however, did not get paid to inhabit the dream life of a dog or love the mysteries of this world, and so it was best that he and Laura had Prairie Wind Farm Inc. It was probably better than doing hospital transport, although he had enjoyed that job, wheeling patients from surgery to recovery and then to their rooms. He had met Laura en route to having her appendix removed.

  It was Laura who had grown the business, Laura who every day gave all of them their marching orders, saving for her husband the jobs that she was pretty sure he could pull off without ruining the machinery or plowing up a section of orchids, or planting the row of twenty-five peonies in the wrong yard. It was Laura, his family believed, who had saved Charlie, who had made the nutcase—the adorable, the lovable nutcase, to be sure—into a solid citizen and a happy man.

  Chapter 3

  ON THE WAY HOME, JENNA FOUND HERSELF MORE INTERESTED in the idea of Charlie Rider than in the celestial spheres, the ionic disturbances, the travelers from Coma Berenices—whatever they were. The lights, she was sure, could be explained, and so, presumably, could Charlie Rider, and yet in the moment he seemed the greater mystery. He had wanted to tell her something, and he’d been both persistent and patient, both cocksure and pleasantly uncertain. He’d been earnest and whimsical, two qualities that do not always go hand in hand. She had not wanted to hear about his experience with the UFOs while she’d been with him, but the farther she was from him, the more curious she grew. It seemed to her good fortune to have watched the aliens with someone who could have passed for one himself, an alien who didn’t take his species too seriously.

  Jenna had always been privately scornful of people who dabbled in the occult. As a child, she had not been able to get spooked by playing Mary Worth in front of a mirror or contacting the dead via the Ouija board. At the age of nine, she had understood that what bored girls do is try to scare themselves silly. She was willing to grant that victims of alien abduction had complex disorders, or at the least a vague cultural malaise, and shouldn’t be dismissed, but she couldn’t work up much sympathy for the type. She wondered if at the root of their troubles wasn’t the childish need to have a frightening element in their lives. She wondered what Mrs. Rider—the feverish, stylish, indomitable Mrs. Rider—thought about Charlie’s interest in the supernatural. She wondered if a woman who looked so mild could be more or less invincible. Did the Riders listen to the Jenna Faroli Show while they worked side by side in the greenhouse potting geraniums? She liked that idea, Mr. and Mrs. Rider, a part of her life without her knowing it, without her ever having to know.

  At dinner, over veal birds, oiseaux sans têtes, Jenna described the lights to her husband. “They were blurry and bobbing,” she said. “It was so strange I pulled over to get a better look.”

  “Weather balloons, no doubt,” Frank said, his nose to the cunning slices of veal he’d wrapped around a filling of mushrooms and butter and basil. He’d been a Rhodes scholar, and therefore as he sliced down through his ribboned creation he held his utensils in the continental style. There had been nothing more miraculous in Jenna’s life than Frank’s recent verve in the kitchen. He had taken charge when they’d remodeled the 1868 fieldstone farmhouse, insisting on eight burners, three sinks, two ovens, granite countertops, the overhead rack for the new pots and pans, and a pantry to store the gadgets. “Or they were earth tremors,” he said, “which cause electromagnetic fields. The intensity of the fields, of the luminosities, can be stunning. They can cause alterations in TV and radio reception, power outages—they can knock people insensible.”

  “I could almost imagine,” she said, “if you were prone to that kind of thing, thinking that those lights were UFOs. They seemed to have an intelligence, bobbing and dancing in relation to each other.”

  “The revolt of the soul,” he pronounced, “against the intellect. Goodbye, Jenna Faroli. In case you were thinking to retrieve an abduction memory, they are formed, you know, just as beliefs in witches, incubi, and Satan are. The United States leads in UFO reporting, because we have more practicing hypnotists than any other country in the world. But when there’s a real physical phenomenon, when there are luminosities which, as I said, have been known to give people tingling sensations and actual paralysis—why not”—he took a bite and chewed for a moment, his eyes shut—“call it the work of aliens? Do you think there’s too much paprika?”

  “I’m weeping, Frankie. Can’t you see? I’m weeping because this is the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.”

  “It’s somewhat overboard on the paprika.” He drew a small leather book out of his apron pocket and wrote himself a note, tucked it back in the pocket, and returned his attention to his plate and his subject. “Whitley Strieber’s books have probably done more to standardize the alien experience for victims than possibly even Hollywood movies—”

  “But you can understand the impulse to believe,” she said, her voice raised only slightly, “especially in people who have religious longings, people who are disaffected from their church. Maybe they can’t get interested in science. Maybe they want to do something contrarian or rebellious.” She could all at once imagine that Charlie Rider, a lifelong Hartley resident, had found his way to be an individual by having an experience with an extraterrestrial. She leaned over her place setting toward her husband. “And it’s not drag racing or drug addiction or gang mayhem. It’s harmless.”

  “Harmless? Most abductees, a huge percentage, say that their encounters with UFOs have had a devastating effect on their lives.” With his mouth full he said, “And it’s not far-fetched to say that occultism has on occasion gone hand in hand with reactionary ideologies.” He swallowed, swiping his mouth with his napkin. “Maybe it’s harmless here, in our somewhat stable democracy. But you could make a connection without that much trouble, connecting, for example, Theosophy with Nazi ideology.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. She didn’t think that Charlie Rider had had a frightening encounter with his Silver People—as he’d called them—or that he’d turn his beliefs toward fascism. He was in the minority, surely, one of those who had tripped the light fantastic with the space travelers, who had had a jolly night out. “One could argue,” she pressed on, “that perfectly ordinary people need to detach religious impulses from any entrenched creed, and so they fall into the refreshment of the occult. But I’ll settle for the globes’ being weather balloons, even though I think I’m disappointed.”

  There were several reasons Frank knew everything. In the course of a thirty-year career in the law, eight as public defender, four as district attorney, and finally holding forth from various benches, including now the bench of the state supreme court, he had seen cases that touched on a great many subjects. His capacious mind was superbly organized, and so there was very little he forgot, very little in the archive he could not access. But the real cause of his erudition, Jenna often said, was his abuse of literature. His addiction was a joke in the family—Frank the user, the biblioholic—and it was also something of a problem. He read, his wife thought, pathologically. It was fine to read the Russian novels again and again, fine to read criticism, the belletristic essay, military history, science, biography, collections of letters, and the occasional grocery-store mystery. It was not fine that
early in the marriage they had had strife when Jenna banned him from reading at dinner, that she had to prohibit him from turning on the light immediately following sexual intercourse—as if for everyone postcoital entertainment always included V. S. Pritchett—and that she had once caught him in the shower, one hand thrust from the curtain, reading her father’s inscribed first-edition copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. She liked to tell her friends, and on occasion her radio audience, how frightened Frank became if there wasn’t printed matter near his person. Their car had once broken down, and for some unexplained—perhaps paranormal—reason, they’d had no reading material for the two hours they’d had to wait for rescue. Frank had almost gone mad. There had not even been the Saab manual. He sweated and he paced, reciting all the soliloquies that were his set pieces, roving through Othello, Lear, Merchant, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, and a few sonnets as well. He had, however, learned to cope without a book over the sacred dinner hour, and in fact, when he had made a dazzling effort, driving to upscale markets to buy Chilean sea bass and cranking out pasta by hand, he was happy to linger at the table with his port and his wife.

  If Jenna had to choose between the asset of Frank’s erudition and his pleasure in the new kitchen, she would be tempted, even though she relied on his intellect for her work, to tip toward Chef Voden. Many nights a week she walked in the door to find him in a blue-and-pink-striped denim apron pulled tight around his stout middle, his glasses fogged from steam or exertion, the two or three damp hairs on his pate flattened against his shiny scalp. The chops were simmering in their glaze, the rolls baking in the oven, the sliced Ida Red apples bubbling in their cider reduction, the wine taking one heavenly breath after another. Their daughter was grown, Frank was in the kitchen, and for as long it lasted, she, Jenna Faroli, was blessed among women. The beauty of his industry! Once summer was full-blown, he would begin working on his book about jurisprudence, a tome that would run, if his other books were any indication, to fifteen hundred pages. She would enjoy his gastronomic feats, his culinary acrobatics, while she could.