Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

  Jenna’s biggest fear, as she drove home, in fact, was becoming someone who was even remotely like Suzie Raditz. If that should happen, she’d have to ask Pete Warner to shoot her. She wondered if the people of Hartley had seen her with Charlie: the people of Hartley in a straight line, including the garden-club ladies, and the Greek man who owned the Queen Bee Café, and Ariana and her beaux, and the postmistress—all of them advancing together up the hill to spy on Jenna Faroli of the Jenna Faroli Show. She thought of Pete, her one true ally at the station, one of the few people who did not want her job. She knew that if Pete were part of the Hartley Battalion he would think less of her; he might even feel betrayed. Enormous, bearded Pete, who was devoted to Jenna, who hadn’t had a girlfriend in a decade, who was a ham-radio and news junkie, who ate every single meal at Subway. It was the two of them who stood above the foolishness of the mortals at the station. It was Pete who, if he caught sight of Charlie, would say, “Him? You can’t be serious—that clown?” She could not imagine what Frank might think or say. It was far easier to conjure Pete, incredulous Pete.

  She had had the privilege of meeting—of flirting, even—with remarkable men. Although hormone therapy had failed to supply her with heat and moisture, she now and again had a guest on the show who she suspected could do the job. But those people were not real possibilities. She had no interest in a long-distance affair, and she would never create a mess Suzie Raditz–style at the station. Frank and Vanessa and her work were plenty of happiness; they were, in fact, an embarrassment of riches.

  She was relieved, after her expedition with Charlie, that Frank was not at home. She went out into the yard to look at the delphiniums, the spires of blue and purple and white blooms that, since she’d staked them, stood tall and straight, as if with rectitude. She had not considered how dangerous music could still be at her age, and certainly she had never feared the twangy songs of the mountains. And yet Charlie singing to her had been far more effective than hormone therapy, far more effective than her recent conversations in the studio with Robert Redford or Sting or the host of handsome legends who trooped in. She and Charlie had come down from the tree and had lain in the tick-infested grass for the better part of an hour, with all the sweetness and wonder of first love, and also the stirrings of mature and urgent lust. What strong force had held back the floodwaters, what steel gate had kept them at bay for so many years? In the arms of Charlie Rider the dike had broken. She had arched her back—arched her back!

  Charlie, in response, had whispered, “Love, do you want to see … it?”

  She had said she’d rather not. That is, she wanted to see it, of course she did, but not quite yet.

  “Not that it’s anything spectacular,” he said. “I didn’t mean it was extra-special, I was only, you know, offering.”

  “I want,” she said breathlessly, “to have a little more time to imagine it.” Was there any clearer invitation, any clearer signal than the arched back?

  He had placed his hand at her lumbar, and she’d lowered down into his firm palm, the smallest gesture that suggested he could hold all of her. She had not been able to stop trembling.

  At home, she went inside into the refurbished master bathroom—a long, narrow, empty room, with a white-tiled floor, a chandelier, and a tub on claws by the window. She took off her grass-stained linen pants and ran the water until it was scalding. In the bath, she examined her dimpled legs and the pudding of her stomach with a newly critical and dismayed eye. She cried out. She wished to be beautiful, and it was impossible. She could see that if she fell into this thing—as Suzie had called adultery—she would be filled with longing for what she could not be and have. She would yearn for Charlie, she would want him to write her several times a day, to call her, to come to her window. She would not mind if he took risks to see her, provided it turned out well. When he didn’t oblige her, she would be racked with sorrow. And she might now and again have clarity, as piercing as a blade to the heart, the passing understanding of her bad judgment. She would be as tormented as she was happy. She could also see far ahead, and so she knew that when she came out of the spell, after the potion had worn off, she would be left with only the deepest regret.

  Three days later, they met again in the county park, this time at dusk. He spread a brown army blanket on a small clear space they’d found in a thicket. The evening was windy—an important bit of luck, because the breeze had carried off most of the mosquitoes. He dropped his shorts to the ground and up it sprang: Hello! Hello! It was a violent purple with one glistening drop at the tip. She had forgotten the splendor of eagerness, and she could do nothing but kneel before it, stroking it as if it were a soft midsized animal, kissing it, patting it on the head, before she brought its velvetiness to her mouth. When he begged her to stop, in order to pace himself, she did so reluctantly.

  “Now you,” he said.

  Together they got her out of her hemp pants. “Oh my God,” Charlie said, covering his mouth. He, a more or less perfect specimen, save for a rash on his back, seemed to be stricken by the loveliness of her body, by the indoor white lumpishness of her flesh; stricken by the welt of her scar, the rude reminder of her hysterectomy, stricken by her broad hips, her thinning pubic hair, and her ample bottom. She did ask herself, in the briefest moment of reason, how she had come to be lying on a scratchy blanket, naked, and probably resembling a small harpoonable whale. And yet she felt like an ingénue. The breeze on her skin was wonderful, and there was the smell of him, an endearing mix of cinnamon and baby powder and citrus. “Impale me,” she heard herself say.

  “You are so beautiful,” he murmured.

  What miracle had Charlie wrought? What miracle was he? Had she actually said, Impale me? Had she actually said to Suzie Raditz, Try to find the thrill in sound judgment? She would burn in hell for her hard, cold treatment of Suzie but she wasn’t going to—couldn’t—think about it now. Nothing mattered, nothing, except that she and Charlie were together in this unwinding of years. Backward they went as she arched again and he kissed her breasts, and then, while she held her strong thighs aloft, her buttocks lifted in what he guessed must be a yoga pose, he deftly secured the condom, tweaking the tip, and opening his eyes wide. “I love you,” he pronounced. Slowly he drove himself into the core of her.

  A few minutes later, it was not the memory of her aunt’s china tea service or a plated runcible spoon that gave Jenna the most hallowed sense of the passing of the ages and generations, but herself on all fours, Charlie behind her on his knees, holding her hips and thrusting to a point of exquisite pain. Great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mother, Jenna, daughter, granddaughters, great-granddaughters, and on into the infinity of the future and looping around to the beginning of the world—how she hoped that all of them had been and were and would be fucked exactly, oh God yes, yes, like this.

  How could she have forgotten the happiness born from such an unlikely thing? “ ‘I can live no longer by thinking,’ ” she said out loud in her car, on the way home.

  It is perhaps not surprising that, after that simple, unlikely action, the message situation in the Rider household became somewhat confused. Charlie had told Jenna as they said their fond goodbyes in the county park that she should write her heartfelt messages, if she had them, to a new e-mail address, to CSRider. He had never deliberately lied to his wife, but it was necessary now to hide the more ardent communications in order to protect Laura’s feelings. Although he had sensed a motive in her insistence on his friendship with Jenna, he doubted at first that sex had been his wife’s plan. She had, he thought, wanted him to get out more, to expand his horizons, to live up to his social potential. But as time passed, he came to think it was possible that Laura, understanding what was missing in his life, was offering him this specific remedy. Laura the matchmaker; Laura, choosing a person for him whom they could both, in different ways, enjoy, and also someone who was not, most likely, going to upset herself or her own marriage over Charlie. Maybe Laura was allowing
him Jenna as a way to diffuse her own guilt for not sleeping with him. Where was the therapist, Sylvia Marino, when he needed her? Each idea that came to him seemed equally outlandish and equally plausible. Certainly he had seen Jenna as an opportunity, one he could not refuse. Your wife hands you a lover on a platter and you’re going to say no? He’d never had a woman like Jenna, a woman who was so much—a woman. So wonderfully big and soft, someone you could plunge into, a great bowl of dough. Still, whatever Laura was thinking, he did not want to hurt her, and a new e-mail account seemed like protection for all of them.

  Laura, naturally, was still writing her own messages to Jenna. They were as loving and heartfelt as Charlie’s loving and heartfelt communications. And so Jenna, naturally, often wrote responding to her, as full of feeling to crider as CSRider. What’s in a name? What’s in an address? When Charlie wrote to Jenna as CSRider about how gentle she was, about how her gentleness was the support for all her strengths, Jenna later wrote back on that topic to crider.

  Subj: Calibrated exquisitely

  From: JFaroli@wis.staff.edu

  To: crider@kingmail.com

  Dearest,

  You have said that you were teased all your life for being a sissy, but it is your great strength to have both masculine and feminine aspects, the levels calibrated exquisitely. You have none of the bravado of the He-man, and none of the bitch of the She-woman, and yet you have a great store of tenderness—a quality we think of as feminine. All of this is within the you that is fiercely male. Thank you for writing to say that it is gentleness which is my scaffolding, gentleness which holds me up. I shall have to tell my producer this, as she believes I am without feeling.

  Laura puzzled over this message. She didn’t recall Charlie’s writing to Jenna about her gentleness being her scaffolding, but it was a powerful statement. She had to hand it to him. Maybe Laura had overlooked it, a single message among hundreds. She had loved the recent one where Jenna explained that she felt as if she were a girl in a distant childhood with Charlie, that somehow they had been young together. It had been a time, Jenna wrote, when she was young and easy under the apple boughs, about the lilting house, and happy as the grass was green. That had been so beautiful. It had choked her up.

  Could it be that Charlie, in order to be loved by Jenna, did not need a makeover? Did Charlie need no improvement? Was he, in fact, the ideal hero? Did Jenna bring those heroic traits out in him, or had Laura forgotten that Charlie was special, that he was calibrated exquisitely? Or was this it: was Jenna as screwy as Charlie? Calibrated exquisitely! Was Jenna falling in love? Was Jenna therefore insensible to Charlie’s glaring faults?

  They were folding laundry one night, and Laura said, as if to make idle conversation, “How’s it going with Mrs. Voden?”

  “You know how it’s going,” Charlie said.

  “Do I?”

  “You read the messages. You write the messages, for Christ’s sake!”

  It was true, of course. An hour before, Laura had told Jenna that she loved her:

  Subj: Re: No subject

  From: crider@kingmail.com

  To: JFaroli@wis.staff.edu

  Darling Jenna,

  I often just want to tell you and tell you again and yet again, that I love you, and that there are many reasons why I love you. I love the things you teach me. I have considered you my teacher for so many years, and now there is this new time, where you are before me in person, teaching me more than I thought possible. I love you, C.

  Although Laura did not know for certain if they’d had sex, surely it was safe to say that Jenna was teaching Charlie many, many new things in the hours when he was away in parts unknown with Mrs. Voden. “I know I write the messages, some of them,” she said, laying out sock after sock on the sofa, “but I’m not the one meeting her for coffee—or whatever.”

  Charlie finished the undershirt, two sleeves under, folding up the front, the way his wife had taught him, even though he didn’t care if his shirts were in a wad in his drawer. He put his arms around her and said, “You were right about Jenna. You are always right. She is a lovely friend, just like you told me she would be.”

  There were moments, such as this one, when Laura almost thought she could fall in love with Charlie again. She rested her ear against his mouth.

  “What Jenna doesn’t know,” Charlie whispered, “is that she loves not only me, but you, too. She probably loves me only for the you that is in the messages.”

  And then they both gingerly lowered themselves to the sofa, so as not to disturb the laundry. They were laughing softly. Laura laughed at the idea that she was falling in love with the writer, Charlie, who was actually, in large measure, herself. She laughed harder. They were all insane! Charlie laughed because Jenna might love the messages but even more she loved how he took her from behind, she loved his endurance, she loved, she said, how in their motel sessions it was as if he was making up a symphony on the spot. He laughed because he and Jenna had been children together in a past life, growing up to screw their Victorian brains out. And so, for their own reasons, the Riders laughed together on the sofa until they wept.

  Chapter 11

  THROUGH THE SUMMER, THE LOVEBIRDS MET AT A MOTEL thirty miles north of Hartley on Saturday afternoons, and sometimes on Wednesday evenings, too. Frank, as Jenna had foreseen, had disappeared into the world of jurisprudence, writing the book that would be of interest to seven legal scholars, a book that would be intelligent and important and unread. Jenna herself would fall into a deep sleep while reading the introduction. Even Dickie would not read it in its entirety, although he’d have incisive comments and want to discuss. The writing took Frank to his office whether or not he was at work in the court, and he often stayed late in order to crank out another few paragraphs. This allowed Jenna the liberty to travel to the motel, the Kewaskum Inn, when she pleased. The Native American–themed rooms had dream catchers in every window, Indian corn tied with ribbon hanging on the bathroom doors, paintings of chiefs in headdresses, snowshoes fashioned out of twigs nailed to the walls, and lampshades made of faux birch bark. The TV remote was bolted to the end table. “I wonder why the injins don’t trust the white man,” Charlie said.

  They would first rip the waxy bedspread from the mattress, and they might then sit primly like shy teenagers or crawl under the covers fully clothed, thereby making the struggle to undress somewhat violent, or they might hurtle themselves at each other, no holds to their passion. She couldn’t always recall the sequence, how they found themselves on the floor, or over by the bureau, how it was they got themselves back in bed. Afterward, Jenna, resting her head on Charlie’s firm, tanned chest, liked to ask about Mrs. Rider. She was curious about the woman who must be an entrepreneurial as well as artistic genius, not only to have dreamed up Prairie Wind Farm but to have made it a reality. Laura was in one minute wearing steel-toed boots and overalls, shoveling a bed of stones, and in the next going to a bluegrass festival wearing a gauzy blouse and a Prada skirt. It had been purchased, Charlie was quick to explain, on sale. He carried the photograph of his wife in that skirt tucked into his wallet, and Jenna, more than once in her postcoital repose, had asked to see it. Mrs. Rider in that small skirt looked indecent, but sweetly so.

  “What’s your wife doing today?” Jenna often asked, after the first round.

  Charlie, running his fingers up her arm, to her neck, and smoothing her hair, would say, “Running the world. Overseeing the planet. I love your calmness.”

  “I’m not calm.” Still, she had lowered her voice so that it might sound even more like that of a serene person. “Sometimes,” she murmured, “I go into the resale shop in Hartley to buy a silly thing for my daughter, or a sweatshirt or jacket for myself, and I wonder if I’m buying an item that belonged to your wife. We’re different sizes, as you can see, but it gives me a strange feeling to imagine that I might take home a sweater that she once wore.”

  Charlie kissed the top of her head. “She does take her cloth
es there,” he said, “to sell on consignment.”

  Jenna raised up on her elbow to look at him. “Where does she think you are today? What does she think we’re doing?”

  “Taking a walk in the woods.”

  “An extremely long walk. We’ll be so tired!”

  “Maybe we’re training for a marathon.”

  “A triathlon, I think it is. So many different talents at work here.” She nuzzled his clavicle and his ruby-colored nipples. His penis lay flopped to the side of his leg like a tired dog’s tongue out the side of the mouth. I am the tired dog, she thought, and Charlie’s penis is my tongue. She thought, I’m losing my mind. She wondered, What will become of me? “Why,” she said, returning to his shoulder and shutting her eyes, “does she let you go, when there is so much to be done?”

  Jenna’s phone, across the room on the bureau, sounded in the ringtone of Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 in C Major, K. 338. She buried her face in his neck. “Vanessa,” she whimpered.

  “She needs you,” Charlie said.

  Jenna heaved herself out of bed and tiptoed on the sticky carpet to the phone. “Hello, sweetheart,” she said, gathering with one hand the spare blanket that had been on the bed and draping herself with it as she settled into the wigwam print of the upholstered chair. “I’m not at home. I’m at the grocery store.” She rolled her eyes at Charlie. He opened the end-table drawer and took out the Holy Bible. He held up the book and mouthed, “It’s not bolted down!”