Laura Rider's Masterpiece (13 page)
Shortly after Suzie’s crisis, Jenna was making her way home from her first county-park assignation with Charlie. Frank was
always in the backdrop of her mind, but she wasn’t actively thinking about him, and neither did she dwell on the three ticks
that had come crawling down her arm, which she sliced to pieces with her fingernail. She tried not to think about more burrowing
into her back and her scalp, tried not to think about the complications of Lyme disease. Instead, she pictured Ariana, the
therapist’s daughter in Hartley, who spent her afternoons with her suitors on the steps of her mother’s office. How would
the princess choose just one boy? She thought, too, of Suzie Raditz and David Oberhaus. What had Jenna said to Suzie?
Try to find the thrill in sound judgment
. What fly-by-night Girl Scout leader had that come from? David was genial, had a soft, feminine-looking mouth, and was an
Americanist, specializing in Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Robert Penn Warren. Suzie’s husband was not so different
from David physically, but he was an entomologist for the county extension. Had Suzie wanted someone she could talk to about
books, or was David’s appeal unrelated to his love for the big cats of American literature? Whatever the attraction, Jenna
imagined that Suzie had filled her dresser with black lace crotchless panties, that she’d hidden them under her extra-large
T-shirts, which she wore as pajamas in her tired marriage to the bug man.
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
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