Laura Rider's Masterpiece (14 page)
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:
[email protected]
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.
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 clothes 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!”
Periodically Jenna interjected. “Oh!” And “Did you talk to him?” And “Maybe you could ask for a meeting.” And “Did you sleep
last night?”
There was very little that made Charlie happier than sexual intercourse. Long ago, Laura, when she had also liked sex, had
told him that he’d been born for that single activity, that it was what he could do best. He had considered this a compliment,
although he had since thought that maybe it was a put-down. Jenna had not only given him his greatest pleasure back, she had
restored his confidence. Here was something he could not fuck up: he could not fuck up fucking.
“Honey, honey, listen,” Jenna was saying, “I feel a little strange talking here in the middle of the produce aisle. Can I
call you later tonight?” A long silence. “I know you are, I know it. What did the therapist say?”
Charlie read random passages in the Song of Solomon. “Your navel
is
a rounded goblet; it lacks no blended beverage.” Rum and coke, he thought, gin and tonic, Jenna and Faroli. “Your waist
is
a heap of wheat set about with lilies.” He loved the sound of a heap of wheat but Jenna probably wouldn’t find that very
flattering. “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” Her breasts, if you were going to go the animal route,
were more like young and very still rabbits. He already knew that when Jenna asked the therapist question she was going to
be on the phone for another fifteen minutes. It didn’t matter to him how long she spoke to her daughter. When she came back
to bed, she’d be hot and bothered and he would be ready, again, to take her mind off her troubles. He would tell her that
her navel lacked no blended beverage, and even though he believed the poet had taken liberties, he also knew it was absolutely
true.
A few days later, in the same room, after much the same routine—although it was always different; there was always a way he
moved, or a position he wrapped her into, that astonished her—after that, when she was recovering in his arms, she had, not
an idea, but an impulse. “Charlie,” she said, sitting up. “I’d like to do something for her.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Rider. I’d have you, but that would be complicated and nerve-racking and wrong—if you know what I mean. But I could
invite her in for a gardening segment.”
Later, of course, she could not believe herself, could not believe she had made the unprofessional, the shameful, the baleful
suggestion. She had an ironclad rule that she never asked her friends on the program, not counting Dickie, who had done two
shows during his tenure as poet laureate. She would have asked the poet laureate even if he hadn’t been Dickie, was her defense.
“Laura?” Charlie yanked himself up. “Is that what you’re saying?” With both hands he pushed his curls off his forehead. “Laura
on the
Jenna Faroli Show
?”
Jenna, perhaps not incidentally, had never, before that afternoon, had someone bring her to orgasm orally. “It’s one little
thing I could do for you,” she said, “for the farm, for the business. More people need to know about the place. We do this
kind of show now and again. We had Stephanie Anderson in the spring talking about garden style. I’ll admit it was fun because
people called in trashing Martha Stewart, and Stephanie was queenly, as you might imagine, taking the high road, praising
Martha for raising the consciousness of gardeners. We, in the studio, could tell how delighted Stephanie was, how gleeful.”
“Laura on the show?” Charlie said again.
“Your wife spoke well at the garden-club meeting in Hartley.” Jenna was trying to remember if that was true. Laura had seemed
quite nervous, but her presentation had been straightforward, and she’d answered the questions without too much hesitation.
This was such a small thing—fifteen minutes—that Jenna could do for the Riders.
“In August,” Jenna said to Charlie. “It wouldn’t be a typical end-of-the-season-type garden show, but something more whimsical,
a segment about the names of flowers, or maybe a piece that dealt with the philosophical or, or spiritual tensions when brute
labor is required to make a place of beauty, the—”
“I don’t think there is anything that would make Mrs. Rider more thrilled,” Charlie said, staring at the ceiling, “than being
on the
Jenna Faroli Show.
” He was beginning to see the plan: it was occurring to him that getting on Jenna’s show had been Laura’s goal in this friendship
thing all along. She had known that if Charlie did his amazing penis tricks with Jenna she would invite Laura on the program.
He knew he was married to a force, but he had not realized just how
Machiavellian she was.