Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  “How I look at it is, a writer has to be a sleuth. It’s detective work. I’ve been trying to study, to study what, in my opinion—in my humble opinion?—an ideal woman, a brilliant and amazing woman, actually wants in a man, what kind of hero she needs when she’s already sort of perfect. Because, Jenna, today’s women are superevolved. I don’t need to tell you that! They run their own businesses, they raise children alone, they take charge of their own learning. If women need men, why do they? What kind of man can improve the new model? What kind of partner can take her to new heights? That’s what my research is about. And if the artist has to snoop a little bit and create opportunities, if you have to listen very hard to the people around you and watch, that’s all part of the process.”

  Laura would remember how the room went still, how it was as if Jenna had been in a game of tag, as if she’d been made to freeze by an invisible hand. What had just happened? Laura could hardly remember, sentence to sentence, what was coming out of her mouth. She’d never experienced living in the moment as she was doing now. She almost said to Jenna, “Are you okay?” but she thought it might be better if she continued to talk. “I listened to the show you did about a year ago—I mean, I listen to you every day!—but a while back you interviewed an author who’d written a book about romance readers. I probably won’t get this straight, but the author—if I’m remembering correctly—said that romance readers and the heroines in the books, too, seem to be searching for a hero with the kind of tenderness and love they got from their mothers. I just thought that was so interesting, that longing for mother-love and trying to find it in a man. I mean, good luck! The author made the point that in most romances the hero is masculine in terms of his … equipment, but actually feminine in—what would you call it?—his emotional capacity. His feminine and masculine sides are … calibrated exquisitely. I guess I’ve been thinking of that a lot, maybe without even knowing I’ve been thinking of it, which is how an artist goes about her life and work. The thing is, I want to write a romance where the characters are fully conscious as they enter the relationship. Really, truly, fully conscious.”

  For a second, Laura felt dizzy. She had never spoken like that, in a full paragraph, one that she hoped was coherent. Jenna still hadn’t moved. Was she having a stroke? Was she like that actor, what’s-his-name, who for all those years performed in his sitcom while in secret he had Parkinson’s disease? Laura felt bad about bringing up the idea that women were searching for their mothers when Jenna, after all, had been adopted. She wished she could scoot her chair over to the motherless child and take her in her arms.

  “A conscious romance.” Jenna was finally speaking, drawing out the s sounds, hissing the words.

  “Yes! Oh my goodness, that’s it! The conscious romance! That’s exactly the name of the new genre I’m planning to invent. Thank you!!!”

  Jenna blinked, sat up straight, and seemed, Laura later thought, to go into an autopilot-type mode. “Studies have been done”—she was still blinking—“which show that romance novels, while often ideologically conservative, while often recommending the patriarchy, are, for many women, an activity of protest.” Her eyes popped open and she said, “Have you researched that aspect of the genre in order to understand what propaganda, if you will, your book will espouse?”

  “I feel like I’m living in my book,” Laura said, “that my book is from deep inside me, that it’s an expression of myself rather than a—what did you call it?—rather than propaganda? I’ve listened to your show for years, and I know that artists make great sacrifices, and I myself, believe me, have sacrificed, more than anyone can imagine, more than anyone will ever know. But I feel that it’s meant to be. I’ve had this fantasy for years that I’m sitting in a chair, in a long dress, with a cup of tea by my side, and a cigarette in an ashtray. And I’m writing.”

  Jenna thrust her head forward and squinted at her. “Just as Nicole Kidman does in the movie The Hours, when she’s playing Virginia Woolf? When she’s writing Mrs. Dalloway?”

  “Uh-huh,” Laura said vaguely.

  It was as if, just then, Jenna woke back up into herself. Maybe she had some kind of seizure disorder and the crisis had passed. She pulled her mike closer to her, turning away from Laura, and she said to the window, “You’ve got all the visual trappings of Virginia Woolf without, of course, knowing Greek, or being well-read, or having a literary circle. But you would no doubt say that everyone needs her fantasies, and the movies are a good place to get them.”

  “Absolute—”

  “And you believe that what women want has fundamentally changed through the eons, through the feminist revolution, and now into the third wave of that revolution, when poststructuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality is central to the discussion. I’m sure you’ve looked at queer theory, womanism, postcolonial theory, ecofeminism, the riot-grrrl movement, to name but a few.”

  “You make it sound so intense! I’m just trying to tell a story about love, about what kind of love we all need in the twenty-first century.”

  “What kind of love we need, no matter if we’re oppressed in third-world countries, if we live in a war-torn place, if we have no access to birth control, if we’re illegal immigrants or transgendered. What kind of love we need—” Suzie had tiptoed into the studio to hand a piece of paper to Jenna, at which, Laura noted, Jenna did not so much as glance. “You seem to be saying that women’s nature has changed dramatically. The new female model, as you call it, is a far cry from, say, Shakespeare’s heroines. In your book there will be no lover’s hysterics, no tension borne from misunderstanding, no subduing of one of the partners. No more shrews, no more domineering women, no hectoring missus who drives the mister to the grave. Love itself will be transformed. Love itself will no longer be a madness.”

  “There’s got to be a better way, Jenna, to live together.”

  “And yet your methods for writing this book prove that you yourself, the artist, are still fixed in one of the old models of woman, if you will. Laura Rider, the conniver.” Jenna smiled so lovingly. “Laura Rider, the snoop, as you called yourself. The manipulative vixen. A ruthless b—”

  “I’m just trying—”

  “Let me get this straight.” Jenna’s voice had gone down a notch in pitch, and had become even smoother. “You never read a novel before the age of forty-three. You think you’re getting educated by watching Jane Austen movies. You don’t have any sense of American letters. You don’t have an idea of the tradition even in your chosen genre. You seem to have the idea that Every Woman is a white middle-class female searching for love, and, further, you believe that your experience is deep enough for you to write a story that has universal appeal.”

  “I hope—”

  “I’m afraid we’re out of time. Good luck to you, Laura Rider. Perhaps you are the model of today, not just of the female but of the American. The person of the moment, this moment, when a cowboy can be president and you need no talent to be a celebrity. You need only be a narcissist in order to brutalize your husband. Or your neighbor. Laura Rider, folks, is so attractive she’ll no doubt be featured in People and Glamour and Vogue.” Jenna was talking over the music that had come on and ignoring the fact that Suzie was ushering in the next guest. “Her book is sure to be a blockbuster. Every Woman and the Ideal Hero. It will be a book, a TV series, a computer game, and there’ll be action figures in our Happy Meals. She’s sure to be a sensation, at least for a weekend. She’s sure to be a Brand. Thank you, Laura Rider, for being with us.”

  “It—it was fantastic!” What Laura would give to squeeze Jenna’s hand. “Thank you! Thank you so much.”

  Chapter 16

  IT WAS SOMETHING OF A COINCIDENCE THAT JENNA’S VACATION with Frank began the day after the Laura Rider show. If she’d been in a different frame of mind, that is, she might have seen it as fortuitous: time off with her husband just when she most needed it. She found herself, on Friday afternoon, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in Sall
y and Dickie’s beach house, the four friends with a week ahead of leisure, the four of them drinking and cooking and playing Scrabble in living languages, the four of them talking up and down the beach, talking the minute their feet hit the floor in the morning, talking the day long, talking up the stairs, talking as they fell into their beds, into a deep sleep, their mouths still open. Under the circumstances, however, she would have liked to drive alone to a stark and lonely place, to the Badlands, to the shores of a glacial lake in Alaska, no creatures there but the grizzly and the vulture.

  She had meant to glance at her e-mail before the Thursday-morning show, to see if there was any word from Vanessa, and she’d noticed the Prairie Wind Farm newsletter from LPRider@prairiewind.com. She was standing at her desk in the office, leaning over the back of her chair, scrolling—

  … the tip of your tongue, a feather in the wind … Never has anyone … I have been dreaming about your child, our child, and how … 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… .

  For an instant she couldn’t see, the screen, a murky blue, the words fizzing up, the flash of your child, our child, your tongue. She held tight to the back of her chair. Her eyes—they were dry and hot, her lids sticky, the words coming in longer bursts. Oh, but such a feather, your tongue, at once delicate, at once so strong. She tried to look with greater discernment, eyes wide, because if she were seeing more clearly the message would not be there. She tried to blink. The communication, obdurate and whole, remained. What was it doing in the Prairie Wind newsletter? In the center of the first page? How had it gotten there? She was able to frame those questions. She was able next to think, Hahahahahaha. It was a joke, a Charlie hijink, a Silver Person prank. She scrolled to the top, and there was the official logo, the long grasses waving as if in the breeze, and the address of the sender. It was from Laura Rider. It was the newsletter. But it wouldn’t have gone to anyone else, would it? Even though Jenna’s heart was banging in her ears and her eyeballs themselves were stuck and pulsing—of course this was something only Jenna was privy to, a very private joke. But what if it wasn’t? What if Laura Rider had found out? That was it, yes, Laura knew. Charlie had left his files open on his desktop, his wife had seen the message, she was in a fury, and she wanted Jenna to know she knew. Fair enough, this was retribution, a singular note to Jenna, everyone on the same page now. Laura would either be in the studio shortly and beating about Jenna’s face and shrieking, or else she wouldn’t show up. Think it through. Breathe deep. As the matter stood, therefore, wasn’t it unlikely that a polite, reserved person such as Laura Rider would come for the interview?

  She sat down and tried, again, to see, to read. In my dream life our child brings all of us together. The places you touch me bring revelation and God. Each sentence was more unspeakable than the last. In the nursing home you come to feed me tapioca and you bring your kisses, too, soft as velvet, probing as … She couldn’t read on. She knew she was the author, but she could not now believe it. Had there been acid laced into her peach cobbler? What had she been thinking last night? What had she been thinking all these months? Who was she? Even as she questioned herself, even as she felt the smear over her heart, the hot tar of shame, she also recalled how she’d loved Charlie. She’d been overcome by sentiment, overcome by the long thick viper of tenderness, as she wrote about how she hoped a nurse would help her into Charlie’s bed in the nursing home, as she imagined Charlie lifting their child up into the air in the sweet, cool spring evening.

  The shadow across her screen was Suzie Raditz in the door, Suzie standing, arms folded on her chest, her weight on one leg, the other crossed at the ankle. She was leaning against the jamb. She was staring at Jenna.

  “Uhhh,” Jenna said, clamping her eyes shut. Suzie, the star producer, thorough and up-to-the-minute, surely was on the newsletter listserv.

  “We’re fifteen minutes away. Your guest is here. Looking like a flower, like a fucking bouquet, actually. Prairie … Wind … Farm.” She nodded slowly. “Your idea.”

  Try to find the thrill in sound judgment.

  “Dear God,” Jenna whispered.

  “She’s quite a writer.”

  “Close the door,” Jenna managed, “will you please.” She wished to be vaporized, to be expelled through a trapdoor into some place that was not the state of Wisconsin, and furthermore, some place where her own basic self was gone. She had never before harbored the desire not to be, never felt the perfection of nonexistence. How hot were her cheeks, how red? She covered her moist face with her shaking hands. How ready the body was to broadcast its shame, the body always on high alert for the owner’s idiocy. How many people, besides Suzie, had read the newsletter? Had Frank? Not Vanessa, no, not her daughter! How many people could be on the mailing list of a small operation like Prairie Wind Farm? And not only that, oh no, not only that: how many newsletter readers would forward the message to their friends and relations? She put her head down on the desk to try, somehow, to get a grip. Was it the work of Charlie? Of course not! It was Laura who had written the newsletter. But why now, at this instant, right before the show?

  A few minutes later, Suzie knocked and, without waiting for an answer, opened the door. “Do you need … help?” There was very little sarcasm in her voice.

  “I’m fine,” Jenna said into her hands. “Thank you. I’ll be right there.”

  At home, after the show, she had planned to tell Frank, tell him the entire sordid tale, how she had been duped by Laura, by Charlie, and most of all by herself. She would explain the wretched unfolding, piece by piece. She would tell it without tears, without self-pity, without justifications. She would stick to the unadorned, repugnant facts.

  Unfortunately, that night he’d been delayed at the office, and once he’d charged in—kissing her on the cheek, patting her hair—he’d gone straight upstairs to pack. She’d walked out into the yard to rehearse her speech again, and when she’d finally mounted the steps, one foot, the other, so heavy, her feet in the brown lace-up shoes, he was snoring in the middle of the made bed, in the middle of his stack of Tommy Bahama shirts and his boxer shorts.

  It hadn’t seemed right to tell him in the airport, or on the plane. In the rental car, on the way to the beach, she should have come clean. But the pressure of the story in her chest, in her frontal lobe, and right behind her eyes—the fact that the only thing beating in her was the story—made it impossible to think about telling it in any rational way. She was afraid she’d open her mouth to start talking and she’d bleat.

  On the morning of the show, after Laura’s segment, she’d somehow gotten through the rest of the program with the other guests. The interviews were a thick haze in her memory. It seemed to her that there was one caller who had asked why Jenna had been so hard on the young romance writer. It was as if she’d gone into a wood that was on fire and come out, nothing to look back to but the charred remains. She did recall reading the newsletter beforehand, and she remembered with terrible clarity watching Suzie in the control room during the newsbreak. Suzie had been showing something—and surely it was the newsletter—to Pete and Carol on her laptop. Suzie was doing this, Jenna knew, for Jenna’s benefit, humiliating her in front of her staff. She could see Pete lean down to look, could see Pete frowning, saying, “What?” to Suzie, and looking again. Suzie, eyebrows raised, nodded and kept nodding her confirmation. Didn’t I always say she was a bitch? Carol had taken off her glasses and was squinting at the screen, her top lip peeled up from her teeth, the lower lip hanging open.

  When Jenna got out of the car at the beach house, she was certain she had a fever. The air and the sand and the sea were all the same visible material, all of it blowing slowly around her as she swayed. Hadn’t Bill and Hillary and Chelsea gone to a seaside, to Hilton Head, or a destination like it, after the Monica story broke? Could it be that the Carolinas were the universal place to hang your head, the place for consolation? Whichever
vacation spot, it was the ocean, the salt, the surf, the endless whump-whump of the waves, that with some luck could reduce human experience to nothing.

  She was not prepared for Sally’s first words to her as they embraced on the front porch. “Are you all right?”

  Jenna startled in her arms.

  “I’m assuming it wasn’t for real,” Sally went on, pulling Jenna closer to her.

  Mrs. Voden let out a mouselike squeak into her hostess’s ear. She blamed herself for being taken in by evil. It did not seem too strong a word to her, evil, evil dressed so simply, so beautifully, bland as flummery. Although she knew she was responsible, she was not past wanting to strangle Laura Rider, and in that moment she could have done it quickly, efficiently. Had Sally signed up for the newsletter in the Prairie Wind guest book that had been next to the cash register the day they’d visited? Or had every person in the United States of America been sent the e-mail? Jenna was not sure if she could kill Charlie at this juncture. She would be filled with grief if he was murdered, a fact that made her plight seem doubly pathetic. “Did Dickie see it?” Jenna whimpered.

  “Sweetheart!” Frank cried to Sally, coming up the path from the car. Sally, now in Frank’s arms, looked over his shoulder at Jenna, asking, with her enormous blue eyes, the next obvious question. No, Frank had not heard the news. Jenna shuddered in answer to her friend. She had seven days in the sun to let her husband know how she, Every Woman, had fallen.

  Chapter 17

  FOR LAURA, LATE AUGUST AND EARLY SEPTEMBER WERE ONE continuous high. For starters, there was the Jenna Faroli Show, a peak experience. Although she knew she hadn’t registered all of it as it was happening, she was afraid to listen to it online, afraid to disturb the afterglow. She knew there would come a moment in her writing life when she’d need a boost, and it was then that she would turn to the Milwaukee Public Radio Web site for a shot in the arm. Many of her customers had heard the show, and in the weeks after the program they said they were interested to read her book when she was finished with it. Not one person mentioned the newsletter, maybe because it was no better than spam and went straight into the trash, or perhaps the insert hadn’t made sense and so why bother commenting? Or, maybe Laura’s clientele admired her for her ability to have fun with someone important and they were in awe, or else the silence was a matter of politeness. It was hard to say. In any case, for the first time in her life, Laura seemed to have cachet with the ladies of Hartley.