Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  Periodically Jenna interjected. “Oh!” And “Did you talk to him?” And “Maybe you could ask for a meeting.” And “Did you sleep last night?”

  There was very little that made Charlie happier than sexual intercourse. Long ago, Laura, when she had also liked sex, had told him that he’d been born for that single activity, that it was what he could do best. He had considered this a compliment, although he had since thought that maybe it was a put-down. Jenna had not only given him his greatest pleasure back, she had restored his confidence. Here was something he could not fuck up: he could not fuck up fucking.

  “Honey, honey, listen,” Jenna was saying, “I feel a little strange talking here in the middle of the produce aisle. Can I call you later tonight?” A long silence. “I know you are, I know it. What did the therapist say?”

  Charlie read random passages in the Song of Solomon. “Your navel is a rounded goblet; it lacks no blended beverage.” Rum and coke, he thought, gin and tonic, Jenna and Faroli. “Your waist is a heap of wheat set about with lilies.” He loved the sound of a heap of wheat but Jenna probably wouldn’t find that very flattering. “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” Her breasts, if you were going to go the animal route, were more like young and very still rabbits. He already knew that when Jenna asked the therapist question she was going to be on the phone for another fifteen minutes. It didn’t matter to him how long she spoke to her daughter. When she came back to bed, she’d be hot and bothered and he would be ready, again, to take her mind off her troubles. He would tell her that her navel lacked no blended beverage, and even though he believed the poet had taken liberties, he also knew it was absolutely true.

  A few days later, in the same room, after much the same routine—although it was always different; there was always a way he moved, or a position he wrapped her into, that astonished her—after that, when she was recovering in his arms, she had, not an idea, but an impulse. “Charlie,” she said, sitting up. “I’d like to do something for her.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Rider. I’d have you, but that would be complicated and nerve-racking and wrong—if you know what I mean. But I could invite her in for a gardening segment.”

  Later, of course, she could not believe herself, could not believe she had made the unprofessional, the shameful, the baleful suggestion. She had an ironclad rule that she never asked her friends on the program, not counting Dickie, who had done two shows during his tenure as poet laureate. She would have asked the poet laureate even if he hadn’t been Dickie, was her defense.

  “Laura?” Charlie yanked himself up. “Is that what you’re saying?” With both hands he pushed his curls off his forehead. “Laura on the Jenna Faroli Show?”

  Jenna, perhaps not incidentally, had never, before that afternoon, had someone bring her to orgasm orally. “It’s one little thing I could do for you,” she said, “for the farm, for the business. More people need to know about the place. We do this kind of show now and again. We had Stephanie Anderson in the spring talking about garden style. I’ll admit it was fun because people called in trashing Martha Stewart, and Stephanie was queenly, as you might imagine, taking the high road, praising Martha for raising the consciousness of gardeners. We, in the studio, could tell how delighted Stephanie was, how gleeful.”

  “Laura on the show?” Charlie said again.

  “Your wife spoke well at the garden-club meeting in Hartley.” Jenna was trying to remember if that was true. Laura had seemed quite nervous, but her presentation had been straightforward, and she’d answered the questions without too much hesitation. This was such a small thing—fifteen minutes—that Jenna could do for the Riders.

  “In August,” Jenna said to Charlie. “It wouldn’t be a typical end-of-the-season-type garden show, but something more whimsical, a segment about the names of flowers, or maybe a piece that dealt with the philosophical or, or spiritual tensions when brute labor is required to make a place of beauty, the—”

  “I don’t think there is anything that would make Mrs. Rider more thrilled,” Charlie said, staring at the ceiling, “than being on the Jenna Faroli Show.” He was beginning to see the plan: it was occurring to him that getting on Jenna’s show had been Laura’s goal in this friendship thing all along. She had known that if Charlie did his amazing penis tricks with Jenna she would invite Laura on the program. He knew he was married to a force, but he had not realized just how Machiavellian she was.

  “Are you all right?” Jenna said.

  “I’m stunned,” Charlie said, “that you would do this for her, for us. That you would have her on the show.” Should he feel used? Or should he celebrate his wife, a woman who had developed a win-win strategy? Charlie was happy using his greatest gift, and Laura got a giant kickback. So good! He should be happy—he was happy!

  “Don’t tell her yet,” Jenna said. “I’ve got to map out the program, check to see if it fits in the schedule. Please don’t mention it quite yet.”

  Laura would go ape when he told her. “I understand,” he said to Jenna. Could he keep the secret? “Not a word,” he muttered, nodding his head solemnly.

  Jenna did not tell anyone about the affair. Dickie was the only friend she might have confided in, but she wanted to talk to him in person. Surely he would be amused by the story, and he’d have a generous spin on her taking up with someone like Charlie, reminding her that she was only human, falling for a longshoreman, the milkman, the party-event clown. He’d bring up Edith Wharton’s love for Morton Fullerton, Proust’s obsession with his prostitute, Helen Schlegel’s coupling with Leonard Bast, and Lady Chatterley’s delight in her gamekeeper. Dickie himself, she knew, had had several transgressions, as one might expect of a poet laureate.

  She was as careful as she could be, wearing a gray silk scarf and sunglasses, parking in the rear of the Kewaskum Inn, dashing, with as few steps as she could manage, between vehicle and door, into the deluxe dream catcher room—Jacuzzi, king bed, and wireless!—where Charlie, if all went according to plan, would be sprawled across the comforter, as naughty and inviting as a pinup model. When it came time to leave, she peered between the smallest parting of the curtains, to make certain no one, 90.4 FM listener or otherwise, was on the pavement. It did occur to her that the scarf and glasses fairly screamed ADULTERY, but she could not bring herself to drive to the motel and onto the premises without her flagrant disguise.

  “Please don’t get caught,” she urged Charlie. “Please, let’s never get found out.”

  Once, when she was leaving home on a humid Saturday afternoon, she locked herself out of the house and found, to her dismay, that she didn’t have her car keys, either. It was one of those days when she could hardly wait to get to him, when, if she was going to be reckless, it would be worth it for that moment, kneeling on the spongy mattress, face to face, fingers light and kisses deep, the holy time—go slowly, hurry, go slowly, hurry—before the deeper religious experience. But she was sitting in her hot car with no keys. She could not get back into her house. The sweat was soaking her clothes, and she was smeared into her seat. “Think!” she demanded. “Think!”

  She remembered that one of her study windows did not have a screen on it, and that it was not locked. If she could get up to it, she could open it from the outside, and climb through. In the barn she found an eighteen-foot ladder that Frank had bought to clean out the eaves troughs, something in the end he had hired the neighbor to do. The ladder was aluminum and not terribly heavy, although it was unwieldy. Jenna managed to get it over to the house and, using all her strength, she was able to set it by her window. She had weights that she now and again made a halfhearted attempt to lift, but that was the extent of her exercise regimen. Setting the ladder had made her dizzy, and now she must climb, rung by rung, up and up and up. This was how she was going to die. She tried to focus as she had never done before, step, breathe, lift the foot, don’t look anywhere but hand and ridged rung. Don’t see the rosebushes underneath you, don’t
dwell on the thick orange thorns which occur at murderously regular intervals along the stem wood. She would fall to her death because she could not get to her lover. Frank would come home and find her splattered parts speared through by the roses. Women were idiots! They had learned nothing through the centuries! How slick she was as she lost her nerve, as she clambered back to terra firma, sweat and tears trickling down the hot aluminum.

  “Since when did Jenna Faroli lack courage?” Her own voice in her fevered ear as she glared at her window. “Get a grip.” She held tight and again began to mount the rungs. “Jenna Faroli, Queen of Tartoli.” The ladder seemed sturdy. Up another step, and another—“Jenna Faroli, the Dame of the Bandwidth.” Near the top she leaned over and, mustering her reserves, hoisted the sticky window, raising it an inch, another, another, resting, sucking in air, another inch, until it was open enough for her to get herself through. Now she had only to dive in headfirst. If the ladder held. If she didn’t slip in the wide space between house and ladder. If she didn’t fall once she was teetering on the sill, her top half in, her bottom hanging out.

  There was no time that July quite like the window escapade, no time when she felt as reckless. Once she was inside her office, she sank down into the carpet, shaking, and sobbing with relief. She might have died. She might have died, and all for Charlie Rider. It would not have been worth it, such a death. Was she actually as strong as her feat proved her to be, or was she like a parent who performs a supernatural stunt in order to save her child? Her arms and legs were limp. Still trembling, she got up, changed her clothes, found her keys, and drove to the Kewaskum Inn, for a session that was, despite her fatigue and upset, possibly more profound than all the other assignations. How grateful he was that she had survived! How much he loved her for her near-sacrifice! When they were finished, she curled up next to him, and slept the divine sleep of the saved.

  After the ladder incident, her message writing hardly seemed dangerous. What were a few smoochy e-mails compared with daredevil Jenna, seventeen feet in the air, catapulting her greasy self through a window? She knew she was writing, in a way, well beyond her feelings, and that he was, too, but the hyperbole was part of the game, part of the joy. And yet her feelings were basically sincere. She could blame the eleventh-century troubadours for inventing courtly love in the first place, for starting a tradition of excess. “I love you,” she wrote to Charlie. “I love you before the Big Bang, I love you into the wormhole, I love you after all nothingness, I love you into the darkest reaches of the cell’s intelligence, I love you into the mystery of the double helix, I love you into the repetition of the hexagon.” Her high-school English teacher every now and again raised her painted black eyebrows. Fuck you, Mrs. Billingsly. Fuck you, Strunk and White.

  “Have you lost weight?” Suzie Raditz said to her one morning as they walked down the hall toward the studio. “You look like you’ve shed about a gazillion pounds.”

  “I’m doing the South Beach for those—gazillion pounds,” Jenna said. “Biting the bullet before menopause. It’s brutal, but I guess it’s working.”

  “I didn’t mean you needed to lose a lot of weight, or even that you had weight to lose, I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay, Suzie. I’m on a diet, it’s effective, everything’s fine.” Jenna was having an unpleasant déjà vu, a clear memory of having had this same discussion about Suzie’s weight, before the affair with David Oberhaus had been revealed.

  “I’m just always so impressed when people get thin without personal trauma or falling in love. Frankly, those are the only ways I’ve ever slimmed down, the only ways—”

  “She’s in love with life, Suzie,” Pete Warner said, from behind. He smashed his large frame up against the wall as he sidestepped past them. “Even so,” he said to Jenna, “you still have a big ass.”

  “She does not. Jenna, you don’t, I mean it’s—”

  Jenna opened the door to Studio B. “He’s the only one around here who consistently speaks the truth.”

  “Okay,” Suzie said, following her to the table. “Speaking of truth, I don’t think we should do another gardening show. It was about five minutes ago that we had Stephanie Anderson, and who’s this woman you want on—Laura Rider? Someone from your town? Phil is always doing the gardening-and- canning-and-fishing beat, and I swear to Jesus we don’t need any more of that crap. Stephanie Anderson was one thing, because she’s famous and she’d had her book, and she’s best friends with Calvin and Ralph, and all those important, stylish fashionistas. But this Laura Rider, she’s not anybody. I signed up for the Prairie Wind Farm online newsletter, and it’s well done, but nothing amazing. Who in California is going to care about some farm in Nowheresville, Wisconsin?”

  Jenna straightened her papers and sat down on her red chair. She was relieved to be back on track with Suzie. “Laura Rider’s farm,” she said, “is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. It’s fifty miles from here—a terrific, undiscovered destination. I’m going to have her for fifteen minutes on August 30, for my own pleasure. We will have no trouble, I assure you, finding an interesting angle. It will not be the end of the world.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Thank you, Suzie. I appreciate it. Your instincts are good, and I understand your point. But I want to advertise something wonderful in our part of the state. For fifteen minutes, I’m not going to care about California or Massachusetts or Florida. Fifteen minutes.” Once more she said, “It’s not going to be the end of the world.”

  Chapter 12

  WHAT STRUCK LAURA MOST WAS THE BANALITY OF THE EXCHANGES. And that they both—all—had time for such schlock, and that their best efforts had so little creative spirit. They were saying things to each other that had been said by lovers through the ages, and yet they seemed to think they were inventing the concepts. That Jenna Faroli could be tedious was a shock, to be sure, and a disappointment, but, then, maybe the lesson was that love itself was tedious and disappointing. Love reduced the wooer and the wooed to no one more interesting than a baby rolling around in fecal matter. Even Jenna’s large words and long sentences did not really do that much to dress up or make fascinating I love you. There was only so much a person could do on that score, and they’d already exhausted the genre. Laura supposed that she should take some responsibility, for having blazed the trail, but she had merely been channeling Charlie, and since then she was simply following in the gruesome twosome’s footsteps. She wondered if the core conflict in their romance was the fact that they were unbearably dull.

  Into July, she found herself skimming the messages and writing back cursorily. She was sure they were sleeping together when the message came through in which Jenna referred to their parts with proper names. Laura felt hardly a jolt, no real bombshell, because, frankly, she wanted to puke. Harvey for his, Gloria for hers. Gloria! As if Jenna’s privates were the lead song in the ecstatic and reverent tradition of the Roman Catholic Mass. She was embarrassed for Jenna, embarrassed for Charlie, embarrassed for anyone who had ever done the same thing; she was embarrassed for being alive. The two of them were so proud of their accomplishments, as if, together, Harvey and Gloria had painted The Last Supper or performed The Nutcracker or written As I Lay Dying. They’d humped for hours, which was not, she should inform them, performance art or service to the Pope. It was nothing except a way to catch an infection or expire from boredom, nothing but a route to death.

  She wondered now and again how she would get her characters through the long hot summer day of their affair, how she would keep the reader’s attention if she had to include the lovers’ endless kissy-face claptrap. It would have been so much better, she thought, if Don Juan and his patootie had waited awhile before they had sexual congress, if the lead-up to rubbing the bacon had been longer. It made her mad that they’d short-changed her experiment, but she had to keep reminding herself that her romance wouldn’t concern itself with that part of the relationship, that her novel would be all courtship a
nd coming into self-knowledge, all foreplay. There would be the Black Moment, and then the story would end with the final self-illumination and the wedding. Her book would not deal with the irksome rest of life.

  It was perhaps to spice up her own interest in the exchanges that she began to insert herself more forcefully into the messages. One night at the beginning of July, she’d written to Jenna:

  Subj: Every song

  From: crider@kingmail.com

  To: JFaroli@wis.staff.edu

  Darling,

  I am making a mix tape for you. That’s what people do who are going steady. I am making a tape that includes my old favorites as well as new tunes that remind me of you. Each one is for you. Each one is about you. Each one is everything I feel for you. Every song is you.

  The message was just the kind of idiotic prattle they’d been writing to each other four hundred times a day, but she thought with satisfaction that Charlie, when he read it, would blow a fuse. He’d storm through the house and then back up to his nook to do the mix tape, something he would wish he’d thought of on his own. She sent the message, and then she lay down on her sofa to think and to wait. She wondered if Jenna had overblown, violent fantasies. For instance, Jenna might wish that Laura would die slowly of natural causes, or that Laura and Frank Voden would smash into each other at the one traffic light in downtown Hartley, that they’d perish in the same accident. After a decent interval, the lovers could get married. Or Jenna might envision a weeper wherein Laura would phone in the middle of the night to say that Charlie had fallen down the stairs, and Jenna was the only person he wished to see before he drew his last breath. Mrs. Voden would arrive at the bedside, and they’d have a very special, a very beautiful parting.