Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  Sally said, “I had a patient once who hadn’t actually seen a Martian but he was a believer. I said to him, ‘Why would they be interested in us? Why would they continue to harvest eggs and sperm, taking the same samples, over and over again? If they are so intellectually superior, which aliens always seem to be, why do they keep repeating the experiments? Don’t they have freezers?’ ”

  Frank snorted. “Wasn’t it Swedenborg who became a mystic after he’d had temporal-lobe seizures?”

  Dickie said, “He spoke with inhabitants on each of the planets in our solar system. He reported that Lunarians speak very loudly from the abdomen.”

  Jenna thought of the three boys standing in the moonlit field. Three boys “in the grip,” Charlie had written, “of an unbearable light.” It was difficult to imagine the scene without picturing it as a film—the boys, shoulders thrust back, chests forward, heads tilted upward, mouths open, the light growing bright, brighter, until it overtakes them, the whiteness of the ship’s beam filling the screen. Jenna hoped that Charlie’s aliens did not resemble any creature from a movie that had been released shortly before his notable evening. Surely it would be disappointing when you realized that your special-occasion encounter was the result of Universal Studios’ production team, when you understood that you hadn’t even come up with your own details.

  “There was that crazy Harvard psychologist,” Sally said, “the guy who got on board for abductees, who seemed to believe them. He said that to listen to one of them talk was to be in the presence of a truth teller, to be in the presence of a sacred reality. As I remember it, Harvard ended up investigating his research methods because his conclusions were so bizarre.”

  On they talked. The dust glittered in the long afternoon shafts of light. They talked about the treatment of the Iraqi translators inside the Green Zone, they talked about the fragility of habeas corpus, and they argued about the most recent published story by Jenna’s writer, the Saint. They all knew better than to ask Dickie about his own writing, as he never spoke about it. He laughed when Jenna admitted that, after interviewing authors for most of her life, she didn’t really, with the exception of the Saint’s oeuvre, give a shit anymore about the creative process. She didn’t know why everyone was so interested in the mystery of creation—let it be! Let it happen without questioning it. When she looked back at her college classmates, she realized that you could not have predicted who would become the real artists, those who would be disciplined enough to use their talents. Even though she didn’t want to hear about their work schedules and where they got their ideas, she hadn’t gotten over being surprised by the unlikely people who had burst through with their gifts.

  Dickie said that it was true, that even if you thought you’d identified the real writers in a classroom there was often someone ten or twenty years later whom you’d hear on the radio reading his poems while you happened to be driving to the recycling center.

  Sally curled up on the swing and napped while they talked about the ouster of an opera singer from the Met, a woman whose contract was not renewed because of her girth. Dickie sang a snippet of a Puccini aria, and wondered what the world was coming to if a diva wasn’t allowed to weigh 280 pounds. Although they knew better, they believed on the porch that everyone in the country was held by their same fascinations, that everyone read the same magazines and novels, that the culture had not moved beyond 1955, that their enthusiasms were those of the mainstream. This mirage was a great comfort.

  When Frank announced that the meat, which must cook for seven hours, had another two to absorb the spices, to saturate itself with its juices, Jenna wondered if her guests might like to see Prairie Wind Farm. It was, after all, the showplace of Hartley. They could take a walk through the copses, Dickie would remember when he was a shy boy in the wilds of South Dakota, and when they returned it would be a respectable hour, finally, for cocktails. It did occur to Jenna that Charlie might be working, that they might spot him through an arbor arranging the roots of a bush in a deep hole, mending a fence, or he might be standing still, face to the heavens, in a field of poppies. Laura Rider was sure to be there, too, encouraging her customers to buy, to plant, to cultivate, to discover their own artistry.

  As Jenna was waiting for Sally to get her purse, she pictured Charlie in her kitchen. Charlie airborne, descending upon them; Charlie suddenly beside her. She and Frank, Dickie, and Sally were all accustomed to accommodating people who did not have their own frames of references. They would draw Charlie out. They would be interested in him as a bit of Hartley sociology, as an artifact. An artifact? A bit of Hartley sociology? Had she drunk too much gin? Why was she inserting Charlie into her party as local color? Why throw him in, even imaginatively, with Sally—Dr. Karmauth—and Dickie, the genius, not to mention the Honorable Judge Voden, author of Traditions of Law and Jurisprudence? But surely if Charlie were present he’d perform admirably, or well enough, anyway. In his self-deprecating way he’d defend his UFOs. He’d suggest that the movie executives, the TV producers, and the average citizen had had the same visual experiences at the same time in the early 1960s because the aliens maybe—who could say?—were real. He would wonder if the consciousness hadn’t became collective in an instant.

  “Are you all right?” Dickie had appeared in the hall and was putting his skinny arms around her. If only Jenna had been attracted to Dickie, she could have run off with him. She loved him best. If she had been interviewing Dickie instead of Frank Voden at the college radio station when she was eighteen, it would perhaps have been the poet who guided her into adulthood. But it wasn’t too late! They could escape to a southern climate, leave Sally—who was always caring, and always composed, too—leave her to sing with Frank. It would probably be tedious to be married to someone who had long depressions and occasional affairs, someone who worked so privately, but in the moment, listening to his poet’s heart beating, she liked the idea; that is, it made sense to be in love—if she were going to be in love—with someone who wrote so exquisitely and truthfully.

  At Prairie Wind Farm they walked aimlessly along the same wooded corridors Charlie had shown Jenna the week before. She had failed to think through the expedition, failed to realize that her friends, quiet people on their own, were inveterate talkers in company, that they would not stop the conversation to appreciate the Riders’ accomplishments. The place was as fantastical as before; she had not exaggerated its haunting loveliness to herself or the others. Charlie had sent her a few amusing character sketches of his employees, and she had a new respect for his ability to manage his workers and keep the grounds looking so dewy. When she saw him in the distance by the clapboard farmhouse where he lived, she longed once more for that feeling she’d had with him; it had been as if she were a girl, as if they’d both been released backward to their long-ago selves. Why did she keep returning to that sense of him, and why did such a witless thing seem beautiful? She wondered about the Riders’ house, if it was filled with the artful whimsy and simplicity of the gardens, if they had transformed their ordinary Midwestern farmhouse into a dreamscape.

  The friends were strolling without purpose, despite Frank’s repeating that they should start for home, that the lamb was in grave danger of drying out. The three came along after Jenna with their heads down, discussing whether they should play Scrabble in French.

  “You always win in French,” Sally was saying to Dickie, “whereas some of us have a chance in English.”

  “Remember the time we played in German?” Dickie said rapturously.

  “Gloating does not become you,” his wife said. “And you do it so seldom it always comes as a shock.”

  Jenna did not want to play Scrabble after dinner in any language. Frank, as always, would work solely for the score, unjustly racking up a huge number of points with easy words; Dickie would conjure his turn out of five vowels and one j; Sally would be motherly and praise all efforts; and Jenna, useful only in setting up opportunities so the others could rush in and tri
umph, would drink more and grow sleepy. She looked about herself, at the planting beyond the path, at the sea of grasses which she thought were bergamot and Culver’s root and butterfly weed and senna, among other things that she could not name. It seemed again not enough to look upon the beauty; she wanted, somehow, to splash into it, as if the flowers were water, as if she could run out into the waves of Mrs. Rider’s design. She wondered again about their house, and how the couple moved around inside it, husband and wife, co-workers, sometimes friends, and no doubt sometimes enemies. She wondered if she’d ever be able to grasp again that peculiar solace she’d felt before, when she’d walked with Charlie.

  When they got home, she went right upstairs to check her e-mail. Vanessa hadn’t written or called in two days, which was cause for either celebration or worry. But instead of her daughter there was crider, with a short message:

  Subj: Dream come true?

  From: crider@kingmail.com

  To: JFaroli@wis.staff.edu

  Because I often imagine you walking along the grape arbor I cannot be sure if it was you, or if I was tricking myself. Either way, vision or reality, your presence is a joy to me. Did I see you? Charlie

  “Ridiculous,” she said, smiling—she was smiling. “You are ridiculous.” She wasn’t sure if she was speaking to herself or to Charlie. Sally was starting up her singing again, this time the Italian song in praise of her lover’s mouth. Un bocca bocca bella, literally “the beautiful mouth mouth,” a mouth so glorious you had to repeat the word. That was the first occasion when Jenna thought about Charlie’s mouth, the first occasion when she fixed on what she remembered, finding, to her surprise, that she could see it clearly, the fleshy lower lip, and the thinner peaked line above. Her heart didn’t lurch, but she did feel an ache, a pull that had old meaning to her, a feeling she’d let go of years before, a feeling, she would have said, that was foolishness, and a sad one at that.

  Chapter 9

  LAURA BELIEVED THAT THE BEST PART OF ANY ROMANCE WAS the lead-up, the building of sexual tension even while both parties were uncertain about the feelings of the beloved. She had watched Pride and Prejudice, and she had enjoyed her fright as the attraction between Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, and also the panic, escalated. She happened to like stories where the heroine is in complete shock at the moment when the hero reveals his love: shock, because her own emotions are unknown to her.

  Charlie had told Laura his e-mail password, Beaver, the name of their dead dog, and so she had been privy to Jenna’s messages. She sometimes wrote back to Jenna, always as Charlie, of course, when he was not around, but more often she composed with him, her laptop on the kitchen table. At first she wished he wasn’t writing so much on his own, and she tried, tactfully, to restrain him. “I miss out on the fun when you write to Mrs. Voden without me,” she’d say, or “Let’s write her another poem. That first one was hilarious.” Or, more bluntly, “I’m feeling left out, Chuck.” She could see, however, that what was developing between the two of them—or, in actuality, the three of them—was a conversation, and she could understand that when she was busy and away he felt the need to keep it rolling along.

  In her abiding fantasy she had always been the star pupil of Jenna, and although it surprised her in the beginning that Jenna continued to write back, in a certain way the teacher’s attention felt normal to her. It seemed right. She did on occasion have to remind herself that she was not Laura who was writing, she was Charlie; this did, now and again, take some effort. But one of the unexpected perks of the project so far was the fact that she felt closer to Charlie than she had in a long time, the two of them merged into the single character who was Jenna’s pen pal, who was “crider.” In this regard they were like Vera Nabokov and her husband, the subjects of a Jenna Faroli program a few years back, spouse and writer working as a team. Mrs. Voden, she and Charlie called Jenna—Mrs. Voden, their joint creation.

  It had seemed right, too, that her husband from the start was worshipful of Jenna. He had always been a romantic person, not only about love, but about goodness. If there was any quality that was girlish about him, it was that saccharine drip that ran steadily through his veins; it was a quality that had taken an embarrassingly long time to annoy Laura. She wondered if a person like Jenna would be scornful of Charlie’s wide-open spigot, the devotion spraying from him, Charlie the gusher, Charlie the eternal geyser of love. After a few years of courtship, she’d wanted to put a plug in him. If you were vulnerable, as Laura had been in her twenties, you were a goner with that kind of schmaltz, but if you were someone like Jenna, you might, sooner rather than later, register Charlie’s fountain of love as nothing more than the penis wagging its tongue.

  Not that Charlie—or she and Charlie—were making love through e-mail, or not exactly, not yet. But he’d drawn a portrait of Jenna in ink, without the committee’s knowledge or approval, laboring over the picture for a week, apparently, and then he’d scanned it into the computer and sent it to her.

  “You drew a portrait?” Laura said at breakfast, when he’d mentioned it so casually, as if she had known all along. “You sent it to her late last night?”

  “Yup.” Charlie, watching his wife ripping the coated plastic of the coffee bag with her teeth, could tell that she was displeased. “Is that against the law?”

  “It’s a little pushy.” He hadn’t, after all, drawn Laura until they’d been together for three months. It was the portrait, for her, that had sealed the deal, how he’d captured what he’d called her heartbreaking tenderness. There was no one more full of shit than Charlie, even if sometimes it was in the nicest possible way, and even though Charlie believed his own bullshit through and through. Over the noise of the coffee grinder Laura said, “If you ever say ‘Fucking A’ to her again, I’ll have to bean you.”

  “I apologized!” He had to shout to be heard. Why was she bringing up that old mistake? “I told her I was sorry. You—you didn’t tell the story about the Silver People the way I wanted you to. You didn’t—”

  “What?” The short assault of the grinding concluded.

  “I said I apologized.”

  “Did she like it?” his wife asked.

  “You know what she said. After I said I was sorry, she wrote me something like ‘Dear fucking idiot.’ ”

  “No—did she like the portrait?”

  “The portrait?”

  “What did she say about it, Charlie?”

  “She said it was lovely.” That word, the one the girls were crazy about. He stirred his Froot Loops.

  “What else?”

  “She said she was going to have T-shirts made with the portrait on the front, and sell them on eBay, and also make her staff wear them. She said with the proceeds she and I could run off to St. Barts.”

  Laura flung open the cupboard and banged it shut.

  It was possible to enjoy his wife’s wrath, but only if he was just as angry. When they’d fought in the early years, they’d ended up in bed, but now if she was irritated she tended to stay in that mode longer than was any fun, and without the ultimate payoff. He had plenty of reasons to get worked up, to blame her for taking over his story—he could get himself on a roll if given another half a chance—but he thought it probably wasn’t worth it. “I’ll get the laptop,” he said, “and we can write her back.”

  The minute he set the computer before her at the table, she felt calmness settling through her, as if the screen itself were a drug. Ah, she thought, and Okay, and Here we go. “Dear you,” she wrote. It was intimate to be sure, Dear you. “Even if you sold T-shirts that only said Jenna on them, they’d make millions.” There had been, from the start, the question of how much of Charlie someone like Jenna was willing to accommodate. Laura deleted what she’d written. There was not necessarily a delicate balance between slathering it on and being honest, but there was a balance nonetheless. She suddenly felt warmth toward Charlie, toward the goof who used the torch approach when a match was adequate. She turned to
her husband. “What do we say?”

  “We say, ‘Send the T-shirts to press. I would like Jenna Faroli’s beautiful puss next to my skin.’ ”

  “Charlie!” She swatted him over the head with a place mat. “You’re terrible.” She started to laugh. “You’re disgusting!”

  “I didn’t say pussy. I said puss. And she knows I’m just kidding.” He put his head down and sucked up the pink milk from his cereal bowl.

  After breakfast, Laura had to sit herself at her desk and think the project through again. It did seem as if it was slightly out of control, maybe, but she had meant, after all, for it to go in, or at least toward, this direction. She was realizing that there were a couple of problems with the structure of the relationships. That is, in a traditional romance, the heroine was supposed to be socially, intellectually, and financially inferior to the hero, so that in all areas the love was lifting her up. If Jenna fell for Charlie, it wasn’t going to have anything to do with a wish to improve her status, and it might not be about self-improvement, or self-knowledge. If she fell for him, it was going to be pure. The other uncharacteristic part of the situation was Jenna’s marriage. Laura could see that it would be easier to fool around with a donkey if you already had a stallion back in the paddock. If the experiment was going to run true, if she was to prove that Jenna could love Charlie in an everyday kind of way, Frank—she laughed out loud—Frank would have to be killed. The book could be a murder mystery and a romance!

  But seriously: so many complications. So many difficulties. Laura had wanted to see if someone like Charlie—but wait, there wasn’t anyone else like Charlie—to see if Charlie could be made into the man for Jenna. That plan had seemed ingenious at the beginning, but she had failed to understand how she might feel if the romance actually heated up. That possibility had seemed so remote, she hadn’t thought to factor her own self into the story. Therefore, the thing was, if it got sexual—say it got sexual—how would she feel about it? Would Charlie cheat on his best girl? The girl he’d sworn to love on earth, in outer space, in all of their incarnations to come, as he had loved her in past lives, including when they’d been prehistoric birds and tadpoles and slime molds? Casting Charlie, for a moment, aside, could Jenna Faroli, deep down under her fully loaded brain, be a vulnerable woman, a woman who was in need of a grand passion? Although any man looked sexy in a judge robe, maybe Frank wasn’t the snorting, pawing stallion Jenna all through the years had longed for. If it happened, Laura was sure to know, because Charlie Rider was an open book, because Charlie’s eyes would go shiny.