Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  And then, as if all that support weren’t enough, over Labor Day she’d gone to the Wisconsin Dells, to the Bear Claw Resort and Conference Center, which turned out, amazingly, to be an even higher peak experience than the Jenna Faroli Show. She’d been mistakenly put into the literary workshop, instead of romance, a disappointment at first. The romance teacher, Wanda Carol Newman, was so vibrant and full of excitement, and she clutched her Bear Claw clipboard to her chest, and her charges followed behind her as if she were Mother Goose. Laura said to the workshop director, “Do I have to go to Literary?” The director had assured her that she’d love it, and that if she conquered Literary, if she learned about character and setting and lyrical language and punctuation, which was Literary in a nutshell, she could hang all that expertise on any plot that occurred to her.

  The Literary person, Valerie Shippell, looked as anyone might have expected: short, thin, but with a menopausal paunch, nondescript hair, and small oval glasses that were only slightly larger than her beige eyes. She’d apparently written several books that had not, as far as Laura could tell, been read by class members, or anyone else, for that matter. The books were critically acclaimed, it said in the brochure, but, as it happened, they were out of print.

  The Bear Claw Resort was an ideal location, because if you were outdoorsy you could hike the trails along the Wisconsin River, but if you weren’t that type there was a water park inside the hotel, including a one-thousand-gallon tipping bucket, and the Howlin’ Tornado, advertised as a “6 story funnel of outrageous tubin’.” Their teacher, Valerie, said that the muffled shrieks of the children and adults alike from inside the enormous fiberglass structure made it sound as if they were being tortured, as if their suffering were being suppressed. But, then, that, as Laura learned, was the way Valerie thought: evil, discontent, discouragement around every corner. And even though Valerie’s assessment that the resort was tacky was true, it was tacky in an expensive, rough-hewn way which Laura did not find all that offensive. She had never been happier than in her room with a log-cabin motif, with a loft for the bed, so that when she woke she looked out, not to the parking lot and the Home Depot across the street, but instead to the woods in the distance.

  There were ten others in Literary. In the first several minutes of the class, Laura was intimidated because of the grave, ominous sound of “Literary,” but she soon saw that there was nothing to fear in people who were serious, just as she was, about the work. They met in the corner of the Timber Ridge Banquet Hall, at a large round table. You could imagine the place gussied up for a special dinner, folded napkins in towers, and orchid centerpieces, place cards, party favors, rows of cutlery. For now the room was quiet, the fifty tables bare. Scattered through the hall were some of the other groups, including True Crime, Mystery, Thrillers, and Self-Help, but they all seemed far away; they all seemed in a different galaxy. After the introductions, Valerie Shippell told her students to find a silent corner for thirty minutes, and write about something they had never told anyone before. To get their juices, she said, flowing.

  Laura had gone down to the grand post-and-beam lobby, four stories high, and she sat by the mammoth fieldstone fireplace in a deep-green-and-black plaid chair. It was not exactly silent, but under the massive yellow beams holding up the place, and the vaulted ceiling, she felt as if she were in a cathedral, as if she were about to engage in a holy contemplation. A deep calm filled her. As she sat, eyes closed, she considered writing about the Jenna Faroli newsletter episode, but in a way that was not fulfilling the assignment, since potentially a lot of people, 637 to be exact, knew about the gaffe.

  On that Thursday, she had driven home from the Jenna Faroli Show without seeing the road, the stop signs, the landmarks, the blue sky. She could not see anything but her own glittering future. It had not been possible to thank Jenna personally after the program, because the next guest had been brought into Studio B even before Laura’s segment was finished. Jenna had not had a second to turn to her to say goodbye, but Laura understood. The host had to gather up her generosity and let it shower down upon the next author. Ms. Faroli had boosted Laura’s self-esteem to the stratosphere, and in effect given Laura permission to start writing. Laura figured she’d send her an e-mail when she got home. What a concept, writing to Jenna as Laura Patricia Rider, writing to Jenna as herself.

  Charlie had been waiting for her in the kitchen, with a copy of the newsletter, rolled up in a tube, in his fist. It was funny, she later thought, that he was the one who was angry, when the Jenna message proved that he was the guilty party. It was Laura who should have been livid. It was Laura who, by all rights, should have claimed the moment.

  “What? What”—Charlie was huffing—“are we, are we supposed to do about this?” He was waving the tube at her. He was so rarely in a temper that the spectacle of him, his face gone pink and puffy, his shortness of breath, was unnerving.

  “What are you talking about?” She had just had her triumph. What could be wrong? Couldn’t she rest on her laurels for one instant before whatever the next crisis was?

  “How many people?” he spat, “does the newsletter go out to?”

  “I don’t know. Six hundred and thirty-seven?”

  He slapped the tube into her hand so hard her fingers smarted.

  “What’s the matter,” she said, unrolling the pages, “with—with …”

  “You—you’re laughing?” He was goggle-eyed. “All you can do is laugh?”

  She couldn’t help it. Oh my God! She had no memory of having done such a thing, but she did recall how lightheaded and exhausted and wound up she’d been the night before. “Charlie,” she said through her snickers but trying really as hard as she could not to laugh, “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Didn’t mean to?” He was shouting at her. “How do you think Jenna will feel? I’ve been trying to reach her. Do you understand how, how—”

  “Just a minute,” Laura snapped. “Hold on here. Let’s get a few things straight. Mrs. Voden shouldn’t have written the message in the first place. Did you ever think about that? Not that I meant to paste it in there”—she snorted, the laughter coming through her nose—“because I didn’t.”

  “Stop laughing!”

  “I’m trying, I am.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Did Jenna read this before the show? Did she know?”

  “You heard her.” Laura ate a grape from the fruit bowl. “She was amazing. She was fantastic. She wanted to talk about me, about my dreams, about my real work, instead of gardening. She was unbelievably—”

  “That’s her,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s how she is.” Charlie, standing by the sink, looked as if he was about to cry, as if he might turn around and bend over the drain in order that his tears not drench his clothing or the floor. “That’s totally who she is.” His voice was cracking. “And no, I didn’t catch the program. I had to help José with the mower, and I missed it.” Laura ate another grape, and another. “And by the way,” he said, angry again, “my mother called this morning. She called to ask what was going on, what kind of joke we were playing.”

  Mrs. Rider sank into the chair. Even though she truly hadn’t meant to paste Jenna’s message into the newsletter, she all at once realized what she’d done: this was it. This was the Black Moment for her lovers. It had finally arrived. They were exposed in the most unflattering light, exposed as the perverted, shallow, obsessed sex-maniacs that they were. And so here was the question: how were they going to get through it to reclaim their best selves? A woman still wants a man to show her who she is, and maybe in some way Charlie had done that for Jenna. Laura was going to have to get to her study to figure it out, to work through the problem.

  “I’m not denying,” she said, “that this is a weird and upsetting situation.” Jenna Faroli was the kindest person Laura had ever met. Everyone in the world read e-mails first thing in the morning, so it was certain that Jenna had seen t
he newsletter. And still she had treated Laura like an artist. Hadn’t she? If there was a small speck of doubt, the memory of Jenna’s big mouth and sharp teeth as she chopped through her words in the last few seconds of the interview, Laura let it float beyond her sight line. No, Jenna had spoken to Laura as if she’d seen exactly who she was. Maybe, just maybe, her generosity to Laura was not only a result of Jenna’s special vision but also a way to repay Laura for the gift of Charlie. “Maybe,” she ventured, “maybe the newsletter doesn’t seem like such a big deal to Jenna?”

  “Are you crazy?” Charlie cried. “Not a big deal?” He picked up a kitchen chair and threw it to the floor. “You have wrecked her life, do you hear me? And you’ve destroyed our lives, too.”

  Laura wasn’t sure if he meant she’d destroyed the Riders’ lives, or if she’d ruined Jenna and Charlie’s cozy arrangement.

  In the lobby of the Bear Claw Resort, it took Laura several minutes to decide that she should write about the death of her father rather than the Jenna Faroli newsletter incident. The murder of her father by her mother, her mother allowing her father to choke to death, was a straightforward event, something she could write about in the remaining twenty-five minutes without too much trouble. She was not sorry in her choice, because when she read it out loud to the class in the corner of the Timber Ridge Banquet Hall, she felt that right away she had them in the palm of her hand. She had imagined that she would be much more nervous than she actually was. Once she got going, by the third sentence, she was there with her mother at the kitchen table, watching her father begin to gag on the broccoli stalk. She was there watching her father tip over to the floor. She waited to make sure he was quite dead before placing the phone call. It was as if, in the act of creation, in that neverland, she became her mother.

  There was silence at the Literary table when she finished her piece. Laura didn’t start shaking until it was over. She had to sit on her hands, bite down hard on her lip, and try, as best she could, to slow her breathing. Valerie Shippell removed her glasses and blew her nose. Her lashes were so light her eyes looked bald, parrotlike in her rhythmic blinking. “That is powerful material,” she said to Laura. With those colorless eyes it was difficult to tell that she was actually looking at you. “Good job.”

  “It must have been healing to write,” Nora said. “Here you are, and you’ve never told anyone this story? That’s got to be therapeutic.”

  Laura guessed it was true. Maybe there was a weight that had been lifted, and yet, at the same time, she was full up with the wonder of the pages she’d written, the wonder of her own words.

  “I like the description of his neck, the chicken flesh,” Doug said, and Kayla said, “I like the part where the clock ticking is in the wife’s heart, that her heart is the clock.”

  “I love how she just waited,” Tawny said, “while the clock ticked, how it ticked softly, how it ticked loud, how it ticked in singsong, and how the ticking echoed inside of her.”

  “I like,” Rhonda said, “how she felt light and lighter as time ticked on. And then how bizarre it was, that she was singing ‘Three Blind Mice’ to herself.”

  It was a very heady experience. Laura couldn’t ever remember being supported by so many loving people, and that would include her wedding day, when her own sister had tried to sabotage the event. After they had all said what they admired about her piece, Valerie spoke about how Laura, if she wished to hone the scene—and with such powerful material she surely should—might want to focus on concrete details. For instance, the color of the father’s face as time wore on. What was the mother doing with her hands while she waited? Laura might want to tone down the imagery of the mother’s heart as a clock, which was a bit cumbersome, and think about the sounds the father would have made, the way his chair hit the floor, and how still the room became when he was dead. She should think about the detachment of the narrator, should think if the black humor was intentional, and if it was, she might develop it. Before Laura could say, “Black humor?” Valerie pronounced for the third time that it was extremely powerful material.

  “It’s incredible,” Doug said.

  Laura tried to be helpful to the others as they read their pages, but she couldn’t help basking inside the shining cloud of her own piece. She’d not only written up a storm, she thought; she’d written the storm itself. When the afternoon was so quickly over, she went, carrying her Bear Claw Resort and Conference Center clipboard with her fresh pad of paper, up to her room to begin the exercises Valerie had assigned.

  Even if she hadn’t been held aloft by her new friends, even if she hadn’t felt by the workshop’s end that they understood her essential being in a way that no one, besides Jenna Faroli, had done, she would have been more than happy to get away from home. Together, before she’d left for the Dells, she and Charlie had composed a message to the newsletter list apologizing for the joke. They’d kept it short, because there was no point in drawing more attention to the mistake. Charlie continued to be in a state of agitation, however: Jenna hadn’t contacted him since the Laura Show, as he referred to it. He’d been sending his lover e-mails, he’d called her cell, he’d texted her. He knew she was on vacation, but she had assured him that Dickie’s beach house was equipped with wireless, and that they’d be able to communicate as usual. Laura had written to her also, and gotten no response. Over Labor Day, Charlie was calling his wife at the Bear Claw Resort every half-hour, and when she did answer she tried to reassure him, telling him that on the Outer Banks there might not be cell-phone service, and that the promise of wireless could have been false advertising. She reminded him that Jenna would never have been so openhearted if she’d been upset about the newsletter.

  One of the things that still incensed Charlie was the fact that he’d never been able to tell Jenna about his experience with the Silver People. He’d never had the chance to relate what had happened in his own words. He’d been working up to it, crafting the story in his mind. If there was anything that aggravated him about his wife, in addition to her stupendous faux pas, it was how she’d stolen the story, his story, out from under him, especially when Jenna had charged him with telling it as well as he knew how. He wanted to make contact with Jenna—he needed to reach her—so that he’d know that she was all right. He also wanted to find out if they were finished. Never again meet in the Kewaskum Inn? He must tell her, once more, just how much he loved her.

  He wondered if there was any good that could come from the newsletter incident and from his isolation from Mrs. Voden. Laura had gone off to the Dells to do a writing workshop, to pursue a hobby she’d always dreamed of, which was news to Charlie. Maybe, just maybe, he’d sit himself down in his nook, in the odd silence of the creaky farmhouse. Maybe he’d write, too, why not? He’d take up paper and ballpoint pen, go the old-fashioned route. He’d write to his muse using his “narrative skills,” as she had called them, so that she would believe his story, his truth, that one night, long ago, he was carried away.

  On the second day of the workshop, they went around the table and talked about what books they were working on or hoping to write. Although the others in the group had purposefully signed up for Literary, their projects sounded like normal books. Kayla was writing a love story about a real-estate agent and a client, but then the client turns out to have been fathered by the same sperm donor as the real-estate agent, which they don’t realize until the morning of the wedding. Talk about a Black Moment. At the end, the hero pledges to devote himself to genetic engineering so that they can have biological children who are shielded by technology from the negatives of intermarriage. Doug was rewriting the Arthurian legend set in New Orleans during Katrina, and Tawny was starting a project about a sex-offender priest who goes to Europe to have both of his hands surgically removed. When it was Laura’s turn, she explained that she wanted to write a romance, but a different sort of romance, a novel in which the characters have an elevated consciousness. Jenna had supplied the term—the conscious romance—w
hich Laura was hoping might be a whole new subgenre.

  While Laura had the floor, Valerie looked up into the face of the stuffed bear that hung over the dais. Right into his fanged mouth. “A conscious romance,” she repeated, as if to herself. “That sounds like an oxymoron to me.” She tilted her bland face to give the bear a different angle of herself. “Can falling in love be a conscious experience? If it were, that would change the nature of love.” She turned to her students. “Love is savage, people. Sexual love blows apart your assumptions, your sense of self, your place in the world. It’s a hurricane—it’s a nuclear bomb. Don’t kid yourself that Eros is a cute little winged angel with a rubber arrow. That arrow will … kill.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, and Laura was not exaggerating when she recounted to her classmates what they’d each experienced, for fifteen minutes Valerie couldn’t stop talking about love as insanity, and about the hope that romantic love promises, only to let down those who believe. She recited:

  “For each ecstatic instant

  We must an anguish pay

  In keen and quivering ratio

  To the ecstasy.”

  Laura, of course, would never say, but maybe there were other reasons Valerie had been disappointed by love besides being taken in by a pipe dream. But this, clearly, was Literary, nothing but negativity, nothing but pessimism. Valerie herself said so, going on and on about how it was in finely crafted novels that characters lived deeply with sorrow or they lived ambivalently with happiness. Life in great literature, she explained, was nuanced and complex and ambiguous, qualities not usually found in the genres. She asked the students if they didn’t think probing a relationship often revealed hostility. She asked them to consider life as shipwreck, and she demanded that when they go home they read Chekhov.