Laura Rider's Masterpiece (10 page)

“ ‘Yes, of course,’ ” Dickie began, “ ‘if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’
she added.”

Jenna closed her eyes, letting the sun do its damage, and listened. Virginia Woolf seemed to have perfect recall of how it
felt to be a child, to be a boy with the prospect of an expedition, a boy in love with his mother, a boy filled with joy.
Jenna, as always, was grateful for Dickie’s classy brain and generous heart. When he recited, Dickie himself receded, so that
the work shone out, something that was not true when Frank spewed his soliloquies. The poet on the surface was softer, mellower
than Judge Voden, but within he was tortured, although in a refined way. When he had his dark days, he went to his woodland
cabin and read and listened to music and felt, he sometimes said, suicidal, but, he was quick to assure his friends, pleasantly
so. His voice now was low and lulling. She wished he would recite
To the Lighthouse
all day long, recite as she fell asleep and stayed asleep, dreaming to the rhythms of Woolf’s sentences. An hour ago, she
had gotten out of bed, but it didn’t matter that already she was limp and warm and drowsy. It was funny that, when she pictured
the little boy in the book, James Ramsay, getting ready to go on his trip to the lighthouse, she imagined a young Charlie
Rider. A delicate boy with brown eyes and curls, a boy who at first was quivering with anticipation.

When she woke, for in fact she did fall asleep, the trees were shading her face, and she was covered with a thin blanket—the
work of Dickie. Her guests were in the kitchen watching Frank pour a mixture of butter and lemon juice over the leg of lamb.
Sally was saying to him, “Sweetheart, you’re caring for that slab of meat as if it’s a kitten.”

“I love it more than a cat,” he murmured into the roasting pan.

They were already drinking gin-and-tonics, although they had not yet eaten lunch. The afternoon would drift by them as they
grazed and wandered from topic to topic. Frank would play the piano, accompanying Sally through her repertory of eighteenth-century
Italian love songs. That Jenna wasn’t musical had probably been a disappointment to Frank, but she couldn’t help her failure.
She’d been told in grade-school chorus to mouth the words, to make sure she didn’t actually sing. Frank, the Renaissance man,
the overachiever, had minored in piano performance, and had not given up his chamber groups during law school. His greatest
pleasures through the years had been accompanying Sally, and also making their daughter study the violin so he could play
sonatas with her. Dickie and Frank, both single children who had adopted each other as sibling, had known Sally in college.
There had been, apparently, a brief rivalry between the men over Sally, but she had resolved it for them, choosing Dickie
while managing, nonetheless, to keep Frank close. Frank had never said, but Jenna knew that it had taken him years to get
over his friend’s wife, the doctor, the soprano, the elegant blonde who still wore her hair in a French twist, the woman who
had chosen the difficult poet with the silky hair over the balding man of great reason.

That morning, Sally and Frank had spent half an hour cracking open a hundred cardamom pods, after which he’d pulverized the
seeds in the coffee grinder. He had approved the waxy cover of fat on the lamb and the soft purple muscle underneath; they
all had been required to pay their respects. The windows and doors were wide open, and the fragrance of the roast in the mild
June breeze added to their happiness. Midafternoon, they had ended up on the porch, deep into the wicker chairs, each with
a book nearby, although no one was reading. Frank said to the guests, “Did Jenna mention that she saw a squadron of UFOs outside
of Hartley?”

“Lucky!” Dickie said.

“Dickie’s the only person in the world who wants more than anything to have an experience with aliens but can’t because of
his skepticism,” Sally said. “He always remembers that the little gray man he’s about to see is from that book
The Andreasson Affair
.” She let down her faded hair, curled it back up, stuck the four pins in place, and smoothed the top of her head. “He might
be the only poet laureate who still reads science fiction.”

“The dark secrets,” Dickie muttered.

“What did you see?” Sally said to Jenna.

“Frank’s teasing me. They were weather balloons.”

“I thought for a while,” Frank said, “that I was losing my wife to the religion of alienography.”

“Don’t be silly.” Jenna passed the tray of crackers and baba ghanoush to her husband. “I only said that I could understand,
in this day and age, why people who want religion, but are disaffected from their own, would choose aliens to be their angels.”

“Do you remember,” Frank said, “the mom and pop of abductees—Betty and Barney Hill in the early sixties? They seemed perfectly
normal, perfectly sane. They had their abduction experience twelve days after they’d seen the ‘Bellero Shield’ episode of
The Outer Limits
.”

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 triumph, 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.