Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  Jenna wiped her eyes. The abstraction of doing good by not having children surely was cold comfort. As miserable as Vanessa often was, Jenna couldn’t bear the thought of the world without her child in it.

  As she was considering what subject to put forth next, he reached into his pocket and retrieved several folded sheets of paper. “I made these for you,” he said, handing her the packet.

  He had drawn portraits of the Knee family, Yardley in his shorts, Mary Ruth in a pinafore, Gerald looking downtrodden, as an orphan must, the parents beleaguered but loving. He had inked the drawings and filled them in with soft greens and blues and violets. “Charlie, oh, Charlie,” she whispered. How was it that he had filled her heart with hate one minute and won her back in the next?

  The pappardelle came in its sauce of red and yellow peppers and sausages, and she moved the portraits out of the way. They were like drawings in an Edwardian children’s book, the outlines crisp, the girls in dresses, their hair in pigtails. He’d folded them up, as if he hadn’t thought enough of them to keep them uncreased, but they were beguiling, full of charming details, Yardley with a snake hanging out of his pocket, the mother holding her purse in front of her with both hands, the dog itching a flea, the butler’s cravat askew. Jenna said, “I can’t figure out how I got here.”

  Charlie understood her meaning. “My wife,” he said. “My wife always wanted us to be friends.”

  Jenna put her fork down. “She did?”

  “She had a feeling we’d like each other.”

  “But we met by accident. We ran into each other on Highway S.”

  “That,” he said, “was the Silver People.”

  “But how—?” She opened up the drawings again. Looking at them was like taking a sip of the love potion. One glance at Yardley Knee, at the accomplishment of the drawing, and she was his. She released herself into the world of Charlie Rider. She would keep referring to the papers through the pappardelle, and the veal, and the coffee, and once more when they were back at the Faroli-Voden house, in the guest room, where, she’d decided, she must bring him after all.

  “Does Laura know about the Knees?” she whispered as he unbuttoned her shirt.

  Charlie kissed Jenna’s neck. He wanted to be honest, and so he said what seemed truthful—in spirit, anyway. “Laura is in my knee right now,” he muttered. “Laura is always in my fucking knee.”

  Chapter 14

  THE NIGHT BEFORE LAURA WAS GOING TO BE ON THE JENNA Faroli Show, she was working on the Prairie Wind Farm newsletter. It was a bad habit, she knew, to have as many windows open on her desktop as she did, and for sure a person could get confused. It was late, and although she was tired she was too excited to sleep, and also the newsletter was overdue. Best to get it done while she had adrenaline.

  She’d been following Jenna’s correspondence more carefully in the last week, since, after all, she was going to be on the program. Not that there seemed to be anything particularly new, except that Jenna and Charlie must have had some kind of intense, intergalactic sexual experience. Mrs. Voden was more ardent than usual. If there was anything to be interested in, it was how free Jenna felt when she wrote, as if she believed she was always unobserved. Laura understood very little about her own software, but she was savvy enough to suspect that everyone could be observed: the server could spy on you, and so could the twelve-year-old neighbor boys, the local government, the federal government, and the terrorists. Jenna could get excruciatingly specific without, it seemed, the thought of a peeping Tom. That evening, in fact, she’d written a doozy.

  It wasn’t so much the physical details that got to Laura, although she found them gross in the extreme. The way Jenna wrote about her pleasure, you would have thought that no one had ever touched her down there, that she’d lived her life in a convent. You would have thought that she’d only just realized, at age forty-six, why people had been making art about sex, and going to war on account of it, and jeopardizing their careers for it. Jenna and her lightbulb moment. That delayed revelation would have been enough embarrassment, without all the other mortifications.

  The message that Laura had open on her screen while she was writing her newsletter mentioned the effect on Jenna of Charlie’s fluttering tongue, his focused tongue, all the facets of Charlie’s tongue. Jenna had gone on to confide in him, to tell him that she’d been having the fantasy of carrying his child. “Jeez!” Laura spat when she read that line. Jenna wrote that through the nights she’d been dreaming of a small boy on the lawn, running and shrieking with delight as his father, Charlie, chased him. In the mornings, as Jenna woke, the feeling of the dream was still with her, the joy of it, and she’d lie in bed, she reported, imagining that this baby would bring all of them together, that she and Frank and Laura and Charlie would stand in a loving circle in the nursery. “That’s sweet, I guess,” Mrs. Rider remarked to her laptop. “I know,” Jenna had written, “that the castle-building is goofy if not perhaps pathological.”

  “Pathologically goofy,” Laura clarified.

  If Jenna had been younger, Mrs. Rider might well have felt threatened, but as it was she registered the message as the work of someone who had gone far beyond reason. If the part about the baby and the other bit about oral sex hadn’t been enough for one message, Jenna also spoke about growing old together, being on the same wing of the nursing home:

  I imagine you are down the hall, and the nurse will wheel me, poor old Jenna Faroli, to Charlie Rider’s room in the evening, and although I remember almost nothing it is you who I know, you who I recall, you who I love. I hope that in spite of the scarcity of men in nursing homes, in spite of the fact that all the old bags are throwing themselves at you, you still hold me in your heart. I like to think the nurses will be compassionate enough to lift me into your bed, that they will leave us, that they will shut the door behind them.

  Laura hooted. Finally, the couple united! She clapped. Finally, the couple gets to spend the night together! More applause. She loved this last section—she adored this derangement—the marriage of the demented and the crippled. Some romance all right, the false teeth smiling at false teeth in two glasses, side by side, on the table. And what about Laura? Where was she going to be while the seniors diddled themselves? Was she having her heavenly reward? Or was she the remaining friend and relation, the long-suffering visitor, bringing mints and reading stories and making sure their drool buckets hadn’t gotten dislodged?

  It was peculiar, she knew, that by day, when Laura was listening to the radio, Jenna Faroli was entirely separate from Charlie’s Jenna, from Mrs. Voden. Jenna Faroli was her usual enlightened and wise self beaming down upon them, educating the world. The other Jenna, the lunatic lover, was, in Laura’s mind, someone else. Laura supposed that she had learned a few things that would be useful to her for her book, but it seemed that Jenna actually hadn’t been that instructive; a romance, after all, was supposed to be empowering rather than confusing and nauseating.

  She would later say it was an honest mistake. There were too many windows open on her desktop. And she was rattled because she was going to be on the show the next day. She had meant to paste into her newsletter a small piece she’d written about making autumn arrangements, including a photograph of a pot et fleur she’d done the year before with oak, maple, and a few deciduous azalea leaves. She absolutely did not mean to paste Jenna’s message into the front page, and even though she always proofread, the hour was late. She did not mean, without rereading, to send the newsletter to the 637 customers on the LISTSERV.

  Chapter 15

  WHEN JENNA CAME INTO STUDIO B THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Laura noticed that she was flushed, and her eyes, which she remembered as a calm gray, looked like hot little ball bearings. Jenna said, “How are you?” without glancing across the table, so that, even though Laura was the only one in the studio, she wasn’t sure the question had been directed at her. The producer Suzie, the woman who had done the telephone pre-interview the day before, had said that Jenna
usually came in five or ten minutes before the show to talk with the guest, but the wall clock said 9:58:07, hardly allowing time for pleasantries.

  Laura, shoulders to her ears and grinning, clenched every part of herself. “I—I’m excited to be here.”

  Jenna’s blazing eyes were fixed on the producer in the control room. Laura could see Suzie, head down, at her laptop. “We’ll just chat,” Jenna said, as if to the window, “see where it takes us.”

  Laura nodded. On the phone, Suzie had said they would talk a little bit about unusual flower names and the spiritual aspects of working with plants that had a long heritage, and the benefits of being surrounded by beauty. They had brainstormed, and it had gone, Laura thought, pretty well. She had come armed with a list of her favorite plants as well as those with odd names. She had studied up, but if Jenna Faroli wanted to just chat, Laura, thrilled to the bone, scared out of her mind, could do that, too.

  Jenna whacked her papers on the table and sat in the spot next to Laura, so that both of them would have to swivel a bit in their chairs to conduct the conversation. She put her headset on, and to the engineer she said through her mike, “I’m all right on the levels?” She studied her notes, licked her finger to turn a page, and took a drink of water.

  At 9:59:57, she turned her gaze on Laura. It was slightly unnerving—the eyes, for one, and the hard, wide, close-mouthed smile. She was smaller than Laura remembered, and possibly prettier? She’d managed to corral her hair into an upswept structure, a bunnish thing somewhere between a French twist and the Great Pyramids, and she was wearing a beige brushed-cotton suit, and heels, so that her clothing, at least, was not so far from the vision Laura used to have of her, before they’d met. It made total sense that Jenna’s cheeks would burn under the pressure of the show, and of course she would be businesslike rather than friendly before the program went on air.

  “Here we go, then,” Jenna said. She looked, Laura realized, as if she were going to vomit, and in a certain way this made Laura feel good, to know that Jenna was nervous, too. She was glad not to be across the table but next to her host, as if they were seatmates traveling to the same destination.

  The jaunty Jenna Faroli music, the signature loopy, playful clarinet, sounded in Laura’s headset. She squeezed her eyes shut. She hadn’t known what to wear, how dressy it should be, and she’d chosen a flowered knee-length skirt, a pouffy thing, roses splashed on the pale-yellow seersucker, and a silk tank top of the same yellow. It was garden-theme–y, festive, and yet serious, which was how she wanted to feel. If it was an outfit a schoolgirl would wear, well, that was part of the picture. The producer had told her that she was first, and next there’d be an author who had written a book about growing vegetables with prison inmates, and following that a phone interview with a director who staged Shakespeare plays with convicted felons, and, last, Jenna would discuss the Bard with another author, a man who’d written a biography of the playwright, and an exegesis, Suzie had called it, of the plays in relation to the flora of the times. Always, in a Jenna show, there was a flow and a circle. Just now Suzie had been very interested in the Riders’ business, and she’d asked quite a few questions about the current newsletter, which Laura had to confess she’d patched together late the evening before.

  “You don’t say,” Suzie had said.

  “I have with me in the studio Laura Rider,” Jenna was saying, “co-owner of Prairie Wind Farm in Hartley, Wisconsin. It’s one of the most enchanting places I’ve ever visited. Ms. Rider designs gardens, and has a showcase on the farm that will transport you to another era and another continent.”

  Jenna had gone from being fierce and commanding, gone from looking ill, to her warm and inviting self. Laura took a deep breath and smiled gratefully at her. She sent out yet another prayer that she would be able to speak in whole sentences, that she’d be able to do justice to this experience.

  “Your farm is a masterpiece,” Jenna said, “of design and execution. It is a place of great tranquillity and peace for visitors, and yet it must afford you little time for peace and quiet.”

  Laura nodded, and then realized that of course she needed to speak. “It—is a lot of work, absolutely, but we, my husband and I, we have some time for hobbies, we do. I’m actually—what I love, Jenna—is to write, I—really do. I’m planning, in fact, to write a book. I’m sort of, well, I’m already at work on a novel.” Eeeek! She was telling her secret to Jenna! Pinch me! “So it seems sort of fitting that I’m on this show today, which is about writing—about Shakespeare, a glove maker’s son, right?—as well as gardening.” What a mouthful! But she’d said it; she’d told Jenna who she was.

  Jenna’s gaze, narrowed now, and focused as if to a pinprick, was, needless to say, intense, but when you factored in the voice like a flute, plus the smile, you could sort of relax. Maybe, Laura thought, Jenna’s eyes looked so penetrating because it was there, in her pupils, that her thinking was expressed. Some people talked in order to think, some people could only understand their ideas if they wrote them down, Charlie’s irises flooded with love, and Jenna’s eyes went into laser mode when she did her interviews. Everything was logical!

  “Writing a book,” Jenna said slowly, as if this were a concept that was unknown to her. “How fascinating.”

  “It is amazing.”

  “Have you always been a reader, then? Were you one of those girls who were up a tree somewhere, nose in a book?”

  “No, not at all. I was so average back then. My family thought I was pretty hopeless. I liked animals, and arts and crafts, and dolls, and then, you know”—she didn’t mean to giggle, but a little high hee-hee escaped her—“boys.”

  “Not a reader,” Jenna purred, “and yet you want to write.”

  “I used to read, you know, for facts, but I started in with novels, with those kinds of books, reading them, a few years ago, and I got very very hooked.”

  Jenna cocked her head and adjusted her mike so she could lean toward Laura. It was just how Laura used to imagine Jenna when she listened; it was actually true that you could hear Jenna’s curiosity. “So you feel as if you can write a novel even though you haven’t trained for it all your life. I’m sure you are aware that we live in a culture of the amateur, a culture where everyone thinks he is an artist. You blog and you’re a poet. Didn’t George Bernard Shaw say that hell is filled with amateur musicians? Most writers I’ve interviewed on this show report that they’ve read since their earliest years, and either they studied literature in college or they read seriously for decades before taking pen to paper. Many of them have spoken about how in the act of writing they are having conversations with authors long dead and with the books themselves. They are part of a specific history and continuum. And yet you feel you can read up, for a year or two, and then sit down and write a book?”

  Laura could tell by how close Jenna had come and her look of concern that she truly wanted to know what Laura thought. It was personal and intellectual, at the same time. “I do feel I can do it,” she said. “Anyone can if they believe hard enough. If they follow their bliss. That’s the greatest thing about writing. It’s not rocket science. It’s not some in-joke with other writers or books. It’s storytelling, something we all do, all of us, every day. I do believe we are all writers. Every glove maker’s son can be a poet.”

  “Surely not every glove maker’s—”

  “Stranger things have happened, trust me. And because, Jenna, I’ve been working on a romance novel, I’ve been watching classics like Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley, movies like that. Doing, you know, catch-up.”

  “Classics,” Jenna repeated. “Keira Knightley.” She seemed to be getting information from her producer, from her feed, because she looked at Suzie, who was now standing at the window, and sternly shook her head. “What, I wonder, do you like about Pride and Prejudice, the movie, that classic, as you call it? In this current Austen revival, it’s assumed that we all understand she’s great and why this is so, but what d
o you, who have just come to her, have to say about that greatness?”

  “Oh my gosh, the movie is so empowering. And happy. You really get that the hero and the heroine have made each other better people. Which I think is the point, right, of love? You probably next want to ask me if I’ve read a lot of romances, and the truth is, I haven’t.”

  Jenna laughed her wonderful water-going-over-the-falls laugh, all bubbly and rolling. Laura’s heart swelled, and her own cheeks, she was sure, were glowing. It was with merriment that Jenna said, “That does seem like trying to play a concert without ever practicing, without having tried to blow through your instrument!” And then, more seriously, “Many of the most successful romance writers started out as devoted readers of the genre, didn’t they?”

  “That makes sense. But for me, Jenna? The fact is, I don’t like the usual plot where the independent, strong woman meets the stud-muffin who seems stupid or evil or stuck up, and after three hundred pages where the characters don’t know what is what, and after he rapes her and gets to play around, after she shows him his pure side, he carries her off into the sunset. That just doesn’t feel right to me. But I’m not sure I like the plot, either, where the hero is so strong he can let the woman rule, because that makes the heroine seem sort of like a brat. I want to write a book about all women, Every Woman. I want to find out what women want, deep down, and I want to discover what the ideal man is for today’s real woman.”

  “The ideal man. Today’s real woman.” Jenna shook her head again, a sharp back-and-forth at the window. “That’s very ambitious. How do you find out such a thing? How do you research, if you will, what Every Woman wants, or who Every Woman is?”