Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  After dinner, she went outside to check the irrigation rig that had been giving problems in the west nursery. The air was warm and sweet, and the rising moon with its yellow cast was not stern, as it sometimes seemed on a cold winter night. She wondered again what Jenna Faroli had thought of Charlie and his cuckoo suggestion that he was the one to call if she ever had a question about extraterrestrials. She had forgotten the purpose of her walk as soon as she’d stepped outside. Her shoes were getting wet, but she didn’t notice. She would later think she was behaving like Charlie, lost in her own world, forgetting what she was supposed to do, and not wearing her boots. She walked along the mowed path to the Lavender Meadow, asking herself what kind of heroine Jenna would be. Hard-core professional, naturally, but deep down was she a Wild Woman, or had she once been a Virginal Heroine? Not a virgin-virgin necessarily, but the type who is unconscious of her own passionate nature—until, that is, she’s awakened by the hero. Did you have to be strict about your archetypes, Laura wondered, or could you mix and match, at least a little bit? Could you have an Earth Virgin who was wild? Would you run into trouble if you allowed the characters to stray from their archetypical traits, if you allowed them just to be themselves?

  There was a list of workshops and conferences at the back of the romance manual, and she could see now that she might possibly need some assistance. Maybe she could go to the four-day annual workshop over Labor Day at the Bear Claw Resort and Conference Center in the Wisconsin Dells, which wasn’t all that far from Hartley. Years before, her family had said that she wouldn’t be able to get the garden business off the ground, that she didn’t know enough, didn’t have the smarts, but she’d done fine. She’d figured out where to get help, and she’d had the starch to hire Charlie’s sister, who had a master’s degree in landscape architecture. And now she knew to sign up for a workshop, to tap into the knowledge of the experts. The workshop was months away, however, and in the meantime she thought she could get started if she could somehow channel Jenna Faroli. If she became friends with Jenna, if Jenna became a client, and then a confidante, she would tell Jenna her best and most painful stories. She’d tell her about her parents, her despicable father, the notorious wife-beater.

  They’d sit on the sofa in Laura’s study, both of them in stocking feet drawn under them, wrapped in shawls, drinking hot chocolate. Jenna would be amazed and horrified, but she’d understand the very human element of the situation. Laura and her siblings had never discussed the fact that their mother had killed their father. They all knew it, but they had never said it out loud to one another. Laura would tell Jenna about how, five years before his death, her father had had a stroke, and her mother, Betty, had called for an ambulance. When he got out of the hospital, when he had recovered sufficiently, he struck his wife once, twice, again, shouting that she must never humiliate him like that, not ever, letting his community see him writhing on the floor, incapacitated. She must never call 911 on him for any reason. So that when he was in danger years later, when he choked on a hard, round piece of broccoli stalk, Betty watched him clutch his throat. She watched while he gestured wildly at her. She sat still with her hands folded in her lap. She watched while he turned an unattractive, throbbing scarlet, and while he made gasping sounds, and while the color drained from his face. The change in his complexion was gradual, just as the sky’s light inexorably and seamlessly dims when the sun goes down. She watched while he made the stuttering gurgles of strangulation, and she watched while he banged over onto the floor. The chair tipped, too. When she remembered it, the fall seemed to her to have occurred in slow motion and without any clattering. She watched the blank space across from her for sixty-five minutes, in order to be sure, before she called her son. No one, not her grown children, and not the men on the rescue squad, all of whom had known Laura’s father, asked any questions. Laura was certain that there was no hero or heroine category, not in the romance genre, into which an author could squeeze her mother and father.

  Her manual said there had to be a story question, that finding the question, or settling on the question, was the way to begin. She realized that in a roundabout way she had been asking herself, since Charlie came home that night, one essential question: what, for Jenna Faroli, would be the ideal man? The manual had said to pay attention to your itches. Laura remembered, too, that the manual stressed how important it was to do exercises to learn about your characters. She hung her arms over the fence, and picked a long grass, and chewed on it thoughtfully. She wasn’t sitting in a chair smoking and drinking tea, but the fence and the grass seemed, in the moment, close approximations to her fantasy props. The pieces of the story would fall together. She didn’t know why or how she knew this, but all the same she was sure. What she had to do was discover what Jenna Faroli needed, what Jenna Faroli longed for. Charlie had mentioned that he’d given Jenna his e-mail address. Laura, thinking of that, closed her eyes and saw all at once a small opening, as if in the distance. A prick of light. It was the warm, well-lit tunnel of cyberspace, and she could hear it, too, hear the scurrying, the hum of the channel that would connect Jenna and Charlie. Jenna, she realized then, would somehow come to her through Charlie. There was mystery in creating a book world, the manual had said, and she could already feel that it was so.

  Chapter 5

  IN JENNA’S FIRST E-MAIL, SHE MEANT TO SAY LITTLE BEYOND the fact that she’d enjoyed meeting Charlie. She mentioned her hydrangeas, their condition the result of the former owner’s neglect, and how hopeful she was that with compost, informed pruning, and a watering schedule the bushes would flourish and bloom. As she wrote, she had the sense that, although he was in the business, he was probably not someone who was interested in her shrubbery. She went on to say that she felt as if she were developing a garden fetish, that whenever she was in her office she longed to be outside. The cool air on her bare arms, she wrote, was all she wanted. Was this common in the middle-aged? she asked, as if Charlie were a doctor.

  In the matter of extraterrestrials, she said she thought the impulse toward belief was driven by awe, by the wonder at how small our own lives are. She had paused while writing to listen to the frogs outside, such tiny creatures capable of making such a racket, creatures that in their habits at first seemed alien, though their calling out for love, the cry of their selves, should have been familiar. She wrote that to him, too. How many glasses of the Sena 2002 had she drunk? She didn’t really wish to know Charlie Rider or to correspond with him at any length—heavens, no!—but it was neighborly to tell him she had savored the moment, standing side by side, gazing at the solar disturbances. There was, Jenna went on, something comforting about the idea of life out in the galaxy, the idea that the adventure of man, something we seemed to be botching up, was perhaps not a one-shot deal. “I assume,” she said, “that your experience was not fearsome. Indeed, I hope it was not.” send, she pressed—oh send, oh send! E-mail, she thought, was sometimes less like letter writing and more like finger painting, like a joyful, careless spattering.

  On the morning after, on Thursday, she did her show about dog training, the solace of puppies, and the human brain. Jenna had two producers: Carol, who lassoed authors, actors, musicians, and politicians, those on the circuit with books, movies, or CDs; and Suzie, who was purer in her method. She tended to navigate by subject, to find ideas they should explore, and then see if there was anyone who fit the bill. Though their jobs overlapped, Suzie did more of the research, and was on hand for Jenna during the program, channeling callers to her, and alerting her to station breaks, reminding her, if the conversation strayed, to get back to a certain tack. Gary, the executive producer, usually edited the prerecorded segments, with Carol and Jenna’s input. Suzie whistled through her front teeth and talked far too much about herself, and Carol could be unnervingly quiet, but Jenna had grown used to their quirks and their failings. She meant to appreciate them, and she tried to reward their efforts and loyalty. She also put a good deal of energy into mentoring the young
people who came through doing internships or those in their first jobs. It was her hope that none of them would have to fight power-hungry prima donnas and timid, intractable administrators, as she had had to do when she was coming up. She did like the idea of herself as the grande dame, she who was incapable of being threatened, she who welcomed and nurtured the next crop.

  “That was less of a stretch, puppies to the brain pan, than I thought it would be,” Jenna said to the two women after the show.

  “We had spaniels when I was little,” Suzie said. “My father had our favorite put down, no explanation. That was when I realized I was never going to forgive him.”

  “Suzie,” Carol said, “you’ve lost weight. Stand up once. Your ass is about four times smaller than it was three weeks ago.”

  “Twelve pounds so far,” Suzie said.

  “It’s because we see you every day,” Carol said, “that we hadn’t noticed.” Carol was small and trim, with a crew cut and a wandering eye, her distinguishing feature. Suzie had frizzy blond hair, the physical manifestation, she always said, of being ADHD.

  “The thing I’m doing—it’s an effective diet.” Suzie was shuffling through her papers as she spoke. “I’m going for another twenty. It’s about time, don’t you think? How long can you hate your body? How long do you battle your self-esteem issues? Maybe you just can’t go on forever being a fatso and complaining about it.”

  The fact that Suzie had not been talking about this so-called diet of hers, the fact that she had lost twelve pounds in silence, made Jenna suspicious. It is, after all, a universal truth that women lose weight when they fall in love. Suzie, Jenna realized, had been wearing thin V-neck T-shirts—that was what was different about her. Suzie had been showing off her breasts. So, if Mrs. Raditz was having an affair, at some point Jenna and Carol and the engineer, Pete, would suffer from her suffering, even if Suzie didn’t tell directly. There would be crying in the bathroom, there would be unexplained running from her cubicle, there would be no whistling in the hallway. Leave it to Suzie to make something that drove them all crazy into a habit they’d miss.

  “What time tomorrow,” Jenna said, “are we calling Al?”

  “Ten-fifteen,” Carol said. “That’s all set. And, Suzie, you got the author of the book about multiple births, about fertility technology, for Tuesday, right?”

  “She’s on board. I’ve got the book for you, Jenna. It will be clear, after you take a look at it, that people should only be allowed to have babies by screwing. Night screwing, day screwing, round-the-clock screwing. By breaking their headboards, by falling out of bed. If you can’t beget a kid without screwing, adopt. No more assisted reproductive technology allowed.”

  “I’ll be sure to bring that up with the author,” Jenna said. “I’m sure saying so won’t offend anyone.”

  On Friday, for fifteen minutes, she spoke by phone with Al Gore. In the studio she had a scientist from the Climate System Research Center, as well as an emeritus professor of meteorology, an expert on hurricanes, a global-warming nay-sayer. It was the type of show she least enjoyed, the sort of program that could so easily turn into a shouting match. The phone lines had gone berserk after the professor had said that chemicals and pesticides had helped make our nation the safest, the healthiest in the world. From her seat in Studio B, Jenna looked through the picture window into the next room, where Pete Warner managed the control desk, and Suzie, at her computer, screened the callers. Suzie had a knack for ferreting out the toxic and the schizophrenics, and in addition she could anticipate Jenna’s thinking, often sending her a caller who would give the show a forward movement. It was when Suzie was separated from her by glass, and in the heat of the moment, that Jenna felt at one with her. Separated by glass, Jenna loved frizzy-haired, buxom, gap-toothed ADHD Suzie Raditz.

  After the climate show, Jenna closed her office door, took her headache medication, and began her weekend rereading of short stories by a woman she called “the Saint.” It was her proudest accomplishment, to have finally snagged an interview with the woman she considered to be the greatest living writer. She had forgotten about her Wednesday-evening e-mail to Charlie Rider, had not, in fact, thought twice about a response from him. On Saturday, she sat on the porch at home all morning and into the afternoon reading through the Saint’s collections, alternately terrified and thrilled at the prospect of Monday’s interview. She would have been no more nervous, she said to Frank, if she’d been called upon to interview Virginia Woolf or Henry James.

  “You’ll be terrific,” he’d said. “She’ll love you.”

  “I’m not after love,” she said. “I just want to do her justice.”

  “When are you not terrific?”

  Would that every woman had a friend in her corner like Frank. Jenna had kissed her husband’s freckled summer pate, and gone upstairs to check her mail. Who would have written her in the hours she’d been away? What delightful communication awaited?

  “Charlie Rider?” she said out loud. She hoped she would not have to write him back; that was her first thought. She hoped he was writing a simple thank-you for her thank-you, and that would be the end of it. She remembered, already with a pang of regret, that she’d written to him more soulfully than she should have.

  Subj: Highway S

  From: crider@kingmail.com

  To: JFaroli@wis.staff.edu

  Dear Jenna (if I may):

  Might I say that I have always admired you? Your warmth and energy have been a bright spot in my day for years now, in the potting shed, in the car, in the kitchen. You are a light (but not a supernatural one) that has followed me from home, to work, and back again. You might be tired of people telling you what you mean to them but it would require more discipline than I have not to speak from my heart. I feel that you do not judge people, and so I feel safe telling you about my first encounter with those beings I have always called the Silver People. I was eighteen. It was a Saturday night in midsummer. Petie Druzinsky, Bill Mabbit, and I were walking through Doc Webster’s back forty. You will assume that we were under the influence but I swear to you we weren’t. We hadn’t had a puff, a swig, nothing. As clear-minded as usual, which I admit is not all that crystal clear. We experienced an unbearable light coming toward us. All of us remembered being in the grip of it. None of us can explain what happened during the four hours that we can’t account for. Was it real? Did it happen? I no longer know. I say to myself that it only happened because I perceived it happening, but I also am willing to believe there are whole realms, entire realities, that we are not aware of. Because of that incident, Petie Druzinsky found Jesus. Bill drinks more than he should and will not talk much about our experience. He blames his troubles—bad marriage, drunkenness, inability to hold down a job—on that night. As I said, I believe it, I don’t believe it, I believe it, I don’t believe it. If I were to believe in anything, though, it is that the Silver People arranged for us to meet. There was a light around you on the pavement. My wife tells me I exaggerate, that I see things, but let me say that the light, the bluish light, seemed holy. Whatever or whoever or even if no one arranged our meeting, it was lovely to share whatever it was, with you.

  Very sincerely,

  Charlie Rider

  “No wonder!” Jenna said, laughing. If Charlie had seen her shrouded in a holy light, he could easily believe he’d had an encounter with aliens. She, the virgin, humble, submissive, incurious. She laughed again. She imagined the three boys in the field standing before—what? What had it been that would overpower three teenagers on a summer night? And she thought, Anything at all. Anything could happen to the young, which was part of the sadness of growing older. No one, not even an alien, would want to abduct Jenna, and, perhaps more to the point, even if a human-sized toad with language skills from Planet Z happened to be at the door, Jenna would not give it the time of day. There were enough problems on earth without having to scavenge for more heartache out in the universe.

  She went back then, to the S
aint’s stories, to those heroines who were often as wise as God but trapped by their erotic natures. This is a persistent theme in your work, dear Saint. She had begun her list of comments and questions:

  1. Your females often swing between two states—indeterminacy and male mastery—no middle ground for them, no other modes of being.

  2. Do you think feminism has made it easier for women to negotiate the pitfalls of romantic love and marriage?

  3. Your stories have moments of radiance, but the fantasies are always provisional. Why is character after character charmed by excess even as they long for balance and wholeness?

  4. Why are your women nearly always led astray by their obsessions for crazy or infantile or difficult or cruel men, men they can neither be with nor escape?

  Chapter 6

  IT HAD BEEN A DELAYED SPRING, AND WHEN THE WINDS CHANGED and the air warmed, the trees budded and bloomed in swift succession, magnolia to redbud to apple to lilac, a suspended time of fragrance, and migrating birds singing early and late. Jenna realized that in her suburban life of lawn mowing and bush trimming, administered by Yard Care Inc., she had lost the sense of headlong rush, the race: grass and weed and root and vine vying to be biggest, the most lush, to spread the farthest. She hoped to make a small, quiet garden by the porch with spiky purple salvias and fluffy pink astilbe, and a touch of golden coreopsis, to dazzle the coolness of the composition. She had been reading garden books and felt she was learning the lingo, just as she and Frank, years before, had acquired the wine-tasting jargon. In the shady wooded corner, she wanted the delicate, starlike flowers of sweet woodruff and the frothy white rodgersia, and, behind, the black snakeroot, and the queen-of-the-prairie—all of it to be sublimely thought out and lovingly tended. And then the rest of their acreage, fields and woods, could go as wild and tangled as it pleased. She wrote about nature’s competitive abandon to Charlie, and he e-mailed back, “Lust is everywhere in front of you and I.”