Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  The night of the bouncing globes, Frank had gone on from the subject of aliens to tell her about a fistfight that had occurred between two men in Athens, Ohio. Jenna had a fair amount of work to do and was feigning interest as best she could. One fellow in Athens believed that the Earl of Oxford had written the Shakespeare plays, whereas the other, a Stratfordian, was defending the honor of the Bard.

  “Uh-huh,” Jenna said again.

  The trouble had begun in a chat room and escalated to the street, the two men, coincidentally in the same town, the two men, Frank said, surely yelling in iambic pentameter, while trying to puff up their puny chests. He flung his knife from side to side, crying,

  “Pale trembling coward, there I throw my gage,

  Disclaiming here the kindred of the king,

  And lay aside my high blood’s royalty….”

  Jenna pushed back in her chair. In the morning, she reminded Frank, she had two authors, a British woman who trained dogs, and a memoirist who had acquired four springer spaniels after he had been in an accident that damaged his frontal lobes. Those two would fill the first half of the program, and for the second a neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins would speak about therapies for the impaired, and, finally, the actress Teri Garr would be in the studio to discuss her struggle with MS and her crusade to help those who suffered from the disease. The shows were often patchworks, including segments that invited callers, and others that were pretaped and edited. Tomorrow’s program was live throughout, but in any case Jenna always liked to be overprepared.

  “You should invite the Shakespeare thugs in,” Frank was saying. “You’d get a tremendous number of callers, and there would be the threat of real violence to keep everyone on the edge of their car seats.” He was off again:

  “’Tis not the trial of a woman’s war,

  The bitter clamour of two eager tongues,

  Can arbitrate this cause betwixt us twain.

  The blood is hot…”

  The Honorable Judge Voden leaned back and, dabbing his white linen napkin to his mouth, he giggled.

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Jenna said. With a glass of port in hand, she walked around the table to his chair and bent to kiss his head. “Thank you, Frankest, for the remarkable grub.”

  She did her best to read as much of her guests’ books as she could, but she had also, through the years, become adept at scanning the pages for the heart of the matter, and zooming in on paragraphs that her producers had highlighted, those that offered up suitable questions. Jenna’s standard line, when asked about her preparation, was that the author had put his time and talent and energy into his work and she would respect that labor by reading thoughtfully. It was said that she was thorough, fearless, and polite. This pleased her, and she hoped it was true. Her goal, always, was to find something to like in her guest no matter how distasteful his opinions, no matter if his book turned out to have wasted the nation’s resources. She tried not to care what a guest thought of her. The pact between them was obvious and implicit. She, by virtue of her interest in him, would ask questions that would showcase his expertise or his nobility or his wit. She would try to delve without being intrusive, in the hope that he would arrive at the truth of his experience, and he would honor her by being as lively and as fascinating as he knew how. There was no predicting how it all might go, how, for instance, the minute the on air sign flashed, a formerly talkative person might clam up, or a quiet one begin to jabber. Her job was to shape the interview, to keep the guest on track when necessary, to give the piece a flow when it was live so there was something of a narrative arc, and to manage the callers so that, without permitting them to rattle on, they felt heard.

  When she was upstairs in the office thinking about how to approach the brain-injured patient with his spaniels, Charlie Rider came to mind again. “If I told you about the Silver People, you wouldn’t believe me.” What had she said to him? “You’d better get to work on your narrative skills.” At dinner, Frank had said that in some quarters abduction stories were judged not by the verisimilitude of the details, but by the sincerity and emotional distress of the teller. Jenna couldn’t help wondering if Charlie was a capable raconteur. She wondered what he’d have to do to make her believe, if his own doubt would make the story more convincing, if confidence would work against him. Maybe Charlie had come through the riptides of her thoughts, bobbing between the cranial waves, bursting free, and washing up on Highway S. He was silver within, the shine glowing from his astral core. Astral core? She liked the sound of it, and she pictured what such a thing might be: the deep, clear wishing well of the soul.

  As she often did, she told herself that it had been a good move to come to Hartley, to leave the suburbs for this small farm surrounded by woods. She had grown tired of the women in particular in Fox Grove, tired of their fierce political correctness, the calcification of their righteousness, the competitive spirit of kitchen remodeling. She had once discovered a neighbor boy, a seven-year-old, sobbing in her scrubby bushes because on the occasion of his birthday his guests had been told to donate to their favorite cause rather than bring presents to the party. A donation to Greenpeace rather than a video game? What was wrong with the parents?

  Jenna had come to the point in her forty-six years when she would rather talk with a doe-eyed elf, someone with an astral core, than have to speak over the fence to Janey Slauson about full-spectrum compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Frank and Jenna’s only child, Vanessa, had made the best of a good school system in Fox Grove, and finally, after college, when the girl had gone off to get her doctorate, they’d moved fifty miles from the city. They had bought small energy-efficient cars not only because they believed in them, but to assuage their guilt about the commute, and to mitigate, as much as possible, the criticism of people like Janey Slauson.

  Jenna remembered Charlie saying to her about the bouncing globes, “They might be what you think they are.” Such an insolent alien! It would be difficult to do a measured show about UFOs, difficult to strike the right tone. She wouldn’t want it to turn into a free-for-all, the crazies jamming the phone lines with their testimonials, but she wouldn’t want them to be crushed, either, by the common sense and science of a psychologist and meteorologist. She’d done what she’d thought had been a respectful show about the community of Lily Dale, a place the spirits were said to favor. The show had been funny, in large part because the mediums she’d interviewed had had a sense of humor about their calling.

  Charlie Rider had wanted to tell her a secret involving the Silver People. He was out of his radiant head, but why turn down a secret? Months away, she would ask herself what exactly propelled her to write him the first e-mail. The memoir about the spaniels and the frontal-lobe injury was, if nothing else, a testament to the human spirit, but lately Jenna was having trouble working up enthusiasm for that type of grit and endurance and good cheer; humans, she sometimes thought, had too much spirit. One of her producers, Suzie Raditz, liked to yoke together disparate subjects—in this case dogs and brains—but perhaps Suzie was having a dry spell. Perhaps Suzie needed a vacation.

  Out the long windows of Jenna’s study, out in the darkness, there was not a light from human or sprite or alien. There were only the sounds of the tree frogs, their strange, mournful Gregorian tones. She loved her room, the high ceiling, the curlicues in the original molding, the built-in shelves, and the comfort of her books, which had been alphabetized in the move, Achebe to Zuravleff. In her aloneness there was the draw of that most private-seeming space, the small, bright, beckoning rectangle of a blank e-mail page. It was a page that would yield company, that would people her own little world. She wondered what Charlie was telling Mrs. Rider over their dinner, wondered what they usually talked about. She would write to him because she wasn’t severe and aloof, but someone who was interested in a small town personality, a woman who was investing in her new community.

  It crossed her mind that by writing to him she was thumbing her nose at the likes of Jan
ey Slauson and also Suzie Raditz. It was possible, too, that she was escaping, for just a moment, from Shakespeare; she was electronically fleeing from her husband’s dishwashing down the stairs, from the noise of his recitation of Richard II.

  Chapter 4

  THERE WERE RULES ABOUT WRITING ROMANCE NOVELS, Laura discovered. Directly after the garden-club meeting, she had gone upstairs to the stacks in the library, and checked out four how-to books. Because the rules were strict, at first the enterprise didn’t sound that hard to her. If, say, your book was a Christian romance, there was to be no alcohol consumption, no magic, and the heroine and hero could not, under any circumstances, remain overnight together alone. The confusing thing was all the categories in addition to Christian: there was historical romance, futuristic, time-travel, paranormal, contemporary-comedy, chick-lit, suspense, and African American. Also gay and lesbian. What Laura wished to accomplish was more … global, maybe, was the word. She wanted to tell a story that would appeal to any woman, Every Woman. She understood that you were supposed to come up with archetypes such as Wild Woman, or Earth Mother, or Passionate Artist. She thought she could do that. Everyone was, after all, something.

  There had to be an intriguing plot and an emotionally intense core conflict, and then what was called the Black Moment, when there seems to be no solution for the couple in love. The Black Moment had to be one of real terror—emotional terror, that is. The manual said that creativity played a huge role. Well, obviously. If she took an honest look at herself, she would say that, on a scale from one to ten in the creativity department, she was about a seven and a half. She was creative enough to give life sparkly moments, talented enough to make pretty, theme-based tables for her nieces’ birthday parties, but that sort of care and invention of course wasn’t what the manual meant. She was capable of vision, certainly; the gardens and the farm itself were testaments to her taste, and her dream life, and her ability to work past the point of exhaustion. But pulling a tale of two lovers out of thin air was altogether different—not that she and Charlie didn’t make up stories every day, about all kinds of things, including their four cats. The beasts had jobs and family concerns. They had supportive and troubled relationships. Their Maine coon cat, Polly, who had just gotten a new job as a bagger at the grocery store, was still in high school. In fact, big excitement: Polly was going to the prom this year. So perhaps the collaboration with Charlie was proof that Laura was not a complete beginner.

  The manual that was most useful to her suggested that in order to get to know your character you could write a journal from her point of view, or have a friend pose as a reporter and interview you as your heroine. The journal was definitely the route Laura would take, after she’d determined what archetype her woman would be. She remembered a Jenna Faroli program with an author who had written a book about why women read romances, and she made a note to look it up in the online archive. As for the hero, he who provided safe harbor, she had considered for some time, long before she knew she wanted to write, what traits the perfect man should possess. It had been a purely academic question, a subject that had occupied her in the potting shed, in dinner conversations at the holidays, and through the nights when she could not sleep. Her sisters believed that women wanted to rule, but since Laura had that arrangement in her household she now and again thought it might be nice to be dominated, to live with a know-it-all who gave orders, took care of every detail, a man who was never, ha-ha, wrong. Either way, though, what most women wanted was a man who understood the rigors and rules of unconditional love. Wasn’t that it? A shower of affection at the right moment, continuous and sincere reassurance, a reasonable amount of interest, and above all a well-tuned sense of timing: knowing precisely when to back off. Most adults seemed incapable of such a thing toward people who weren’t their children. She wasn’t even sure most parents, if called upon to demonstrate it, wouldn’t have already used up their hard-worn store of love by the time their children were teenagers. That was one of the main reasons she was glad she hadn’t had a baby: she wasn’t convinced she would have been equal to the task.

  She was pretty sure Charlie loved her as unconditionally as was humanly possible even though she had deprived him of the activity he most enjoyed. It was a terrible thing to have done to him, but the thought of returning to their old routine— No! She couldn’t bear the thought of any of it, the rattling of her bones, the jarring of her brains as he shook not only the bed but the foundation of the house with the jackhammer of his thrusts, and, please, never again, the assault on the rosy dumpling of her cervix. He coped in his own private way in his solitary bed, and he did seem fine. Not that she would ever admit this to anyone, but there was a chance that she loved her cats unconditionally—that is, more, maybe, just a little bit more than she loved Charlie. She wasn’t saying that it was true, only that it was possible. In her experience, women wanted to give and give and give, and then, suddenly, they were done, they were spent, they didn’t have another crumb to offer up.

  Two weeks after she’d talked to Jenna Faroli at the garden meeting, on an ordinary Wednesday night in May, she had, before dinner, still been in the early stages of her romance research, not to mention vague about who her characters would be. Making his entrance into the kitchen for his supper, Charlie, as usual, took a running start in the carpeted hall, and then slid in his stocking feet across the linoleum to the table. When they’d bought the farm, Laura had gone to considerable trouble to find the boxy refrigerator in pale green, and a speckled green-and-white Formica table, and chairs with plastic seats, so that the old farm kitchen was true to a gentler and more loving time, a period when neighbor women gathered to shell peas and put up tomatoes and pickles. Not that Laura had time for those old arts, not that she had time, these days, for friendship.

  “You’ll never guess,” Charlie said, landing in his seat, “who I saw on my way home.”

  She was setting out two corn dogs for him, and a bowl of Tater Tots, baby carrots, and a glass of milk. For herself she had made a salad and a chicken patty. “Who?” she said.

  “Guess.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  He didn’t want to make it too easy. “A person,” he said, “who never name-drops, far as I can tell.”

  “Take a napkin. Your sister?”

  He reached for a stack of green-and-white-checked paper napkins in the crock. “Nope.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Woman—or hybrid, maybe. Every bit a woman but—”

  “Bigger than a bread box?”

  They had played this game for years. The bread-box line was standard.

  “Larger, in her britches, much, than a bread box, but small enough, humble enough, to be a … beginner.”

  “Big enough in her britch—” Laura lurched across the table. “Her?” She grasped his shoulders. “You saw her?”

  He was happy for any occasion when she touched him, and wished she had not so soon gone back to her own side. “Saw her! I freaking watched the Silver People with her. I flipping talked with her for at least twenty minutes.” Laura did not like him to use profanity, and he did his best to avoid it in her presence. He picked up his corn dog on a stick and spoke into it. “Charles Rider and Jenna Faroli sighted a UFO convoy this afternoon on Highway S, in the township of Hartley. Ms. Faroli was skeptical at first but warmed to the idea that unidentified objects could be messengers from beyond our realm.”

  “You talked to her?” Mrs. Rider absently reached for a carrot. What in the world had Jenna Faroli thought of Charlie? Laura had always imagined meeting Jenna, but somehow never expected Charlie to have the experience. Did Jenna think he was insane or lovable? It could go either way, depending, and Laura couldn’t always be sure what person would think which way. Was Jenna laughing at him—was she mocking him right now in the privacy of her kitchen? Charlie Rider, the ding-a-ling. “What do you mean, the Silver People?” Laura asked. “How Silver and how People-ish?” If he had told Jenna about the alien thing,
she would for sure think he was certifiable.

  He was tossing his Tater Tots, one by one, into the air, and seeing if he could land them in his mouth. It was funny, how lately she was thinking about her book all the time, even when she was doing tasks that had nothing to do with it, such as watching Charlie, his head thrown back and roving side to side, his mouth wide open, his straight little top and bottom teeth bared. The question that occurred to her just then came like a stranger knocking on her door: What kind of hero would Jenna Faroli want, and, more important, need? What kind of lover? It was as if, along with the question barging in, came Jenna herself in her wide-legged Chinese silk pants and a matching wrinkled jacket, and her messy hair. It was as if she were standing there on the welcome mat waiting for Laura to decide.

  Would Jenna want the Hero Devoted to a Cause? She might, since she was always interviewing people who were bent on doing good works. Or would Jenna be drawn to the Weary Warrior, someone she could mother? Or could Jenna, deep down, have a basic need for the hulk, for the Alpha, the type who’d untie her from the tracks, or in the modern-day narrative donate a kidney to her and then do the surgery himself? The manual did say it was important to have a gimmick, and Laura was partial to the Alpha Medical Doctor idea. What had initially seemed relatively simple was getting more difficult by the minute. If Laura’s book was going to appeal to Every Woman, if it was going to be about Every Woman, that heroine had somehow to include the qualities of a Jenna Faroli–type intelligence.

  “Charlie,” Laura said firmly. “Stop that. Use your fork. Tell me. Tell me everything.”