Laura Rider's Masterpiece (17 page)

“How am I?” she said. “Yesterday a colleague of mine tried to kill himself. I’d had warning about this from my producer, but
I’d dismissed her without hearing her out.” David Oberhaus had taken an overdose of pain pills, just, apparently, as Suzie
had feared. He had done this at home after his wife had phoned the program director at the station, telling him about Suzie.
David’s daughter, another poor girl, had found him in time, so that he could wake up in the hospital to more shame. “I don’t
know that I could have prevented it,” Jenna said, “but I should have listened to Suzie’s appeal. Probably I should have listened.
I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

She stared at the centerpiece as she spoke. “And Vanessa. She falls in love at the drop of a hat. The boyfriends either have
no ambition or no sense of humor or no job, or else they work all the time. She needs to ditch her Ph.D. and go to choosing
school.” If only there were choosing school! It was remarkable how some of Vanessa’s friends went about their sex lives as
if intercourse were on a to-do list, and when it didn’t suit, they easily cast aside the beau and found another, or did volunteer
work instead. They seemed not to be vulnerable to beauty. “Also,” Jenna went on, “she sprained her wrist, so she’s having
trouble doing simple tasks in the lab. Her purse was stolen in the emergency room, and she’s worried about identity theft.
She can’t seem to get up in the morning without having a crisis. I can’t leave at the moment, can’t rush to St. Louis to hold
her wounded hand.”

“You’re a good mother,” he said. “That’s obvious.”

“Obvious?” She snapped the menu shut. “I did the best I could, but that’s saying very little.” She should not have told him
about David Oberhaus or about Vanessa. She never talked about Frank; Frank had nothing whatsoever to do with Charlie Rider.
And Vanessa: even if Jenna wanted to, how could she explain the tailspin Vanessa could send her mother into by being disappointed
in the seasoning of her entrée or sneezing or having a lonely day? Furthermore, Jenna could never admit that every now and
then, for the smallest, sharpest measure of time, she wished for a different child, a better child, a child who was not as
difficult.

Carlo soon brought the wine and the eggplant and olives. Jenna ordered for both of them: the pappardelle, and veal chops with
garlic and anchovies, and boiled zucchini salad, which, she explained to Charlie, tasted far better than it sounded.

“Cool,” Charlie said.

The wine was nicely fruity with a mineral follow-through and a clean finish. She began to feel better despite Charlie’s having
said
Cool
. “Love is merely a madness,” she thought, “and … something, something … deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen
do.” If Frank were along, he’d quote many of Rosalind’s lines, his favorite heroine in all of Shakespeare. If Frank were here—how
ashamed she’d be. She took another swallow and for a moment closed her eyes. “Does your wife dress you, dear Charlie Rider?”
She had always meant to ask.

“I am outfitted daily by Herself. Sometimes I am draped two or three times an hour by Mrs. Rider. I am her Ken doll.”

Jenna laughed. “Why do you let her?”

“Why do I let her?”

“Are you afraid of her?”

He took four bites, each a toothful, to polish off a small niçoise olive. “In a way, I probably am,” he said.

“What way?” Jenna said. She was beginning to enjoy herself.

“I’m afraid of a force in her. A force that is always there but lying low. A force that could spring up at any moment.”

“What kind of force?”

“Dissatisfaction, maybe, I’d call it. Unhappiness coiled and at the ready? Or rage, waiting in the wings?”

She wouldn’t say, but that was exactly the problem with Vanessa.

“I’ll tell you one thing. I’d like to tell you one thing, and that is, if I could go backward in time, I’d have children.
I would have liked to be a father.” He was gazing into the street as if there before him were lined up the tykes of an alternative
life.

“Charlie!” she said, touching his hand. He would have been as boyish and playful as his sons, all of them running around the
yard after fireflies on a summer night, all of them tumbling into a hammock. She covered her mouth, and then, of all the terrible
thoughts she’d had so far that hour, she
entertained the worst: she imagined having Charlie’s baby, she, without a womb and nearly over-the-hill, bearing him a miracle,
a rotund version of himself, a baby with luscious thighs and fat little fists, and the tear-shaped eyes, and a happy, toothless
smile. She put her head into her napkin and—how mad!—began to cry.

“Honey, sweetie, it’s all right, it’s okay.” He reached over to stroke her forearm.

“But why didn’t you?” she choked. “Why didn’t you have them?”

“We made the decision not to spend the money and the time on Laura’s issues. Scar tissue down there, and a screwy cycle. We
decided to concentrate on the farm and to enjoy our nieces and nephews. Laura has never liked doctors, and to her it didn’t
seem worth it, the pain, the money, when there are enough people on the globe.”

Jenna wiped her eyes. The abstraction of doing good by not having children surely was cold comfort. As miserable as Vanessa
often was, Jenna couldn’t bear the thought of the world without her child in it.

As she was considering what subject to put forth next, he reached into his pocket and retrieved several folded sheets of paper.
“I made these for you,” he said, handing her the packet.

He had drawn portraits of the Knee family, Yardley in his shorts, Mary Ruth in a pinafore, Gerald looking downtrodden, as
an orphan must, the parents beleaguered but loving. He had inked the drawings and filled them in with soft greens and blues
and violets. “Charlie, oh, Charlie,” she whispered. How was it that he had filled her heart with hate one minute and won her
back in the next?

The pappardelle came in its sauce of red and yellow peppers and sausages, and she moved the portraits out of the way. They
were like drawings in an Edwardian children’s book, the outlines crisp, the girls in dresses, their hair in pigtails. He’d
folded them up, as if he hadn’t thought enough of them to keep them uncreased, but they were beguiling, full of charming details,
Yardley with a snake hanging out of his pocket, the mother holding her purse in front of her with both hands, the dog itching
a flea, the butler’s cravat askew. Jenna said, “I can’t figure out how I got here.”

Charlie understood her meaning. “My wife,” he said. “My wife always wanted us to be friends.”

Jenna put her fork down. “She did?”

“She had a feeling we’d like each other.”

“But we met by accident. We ran into each other on Highway S.”

“That,” he said, “was the Silver People.”

“But how—?” She opened up the drawings again. Looking at them was like taking a sip of the love potion. One glance at Yardley
Knee, at the accomplishment of the drawing, and she was his. She released herself into the world of Charlie Rider. She would
keep referring to the papers through the pappardelle, and the veal, and the coffee, and once more when they were back at the
Faroli-Voden house, in the guest room, where, she’d decided, she must bring him after all.

“Does Laura know about the Knees?” she whispered as he unbuttoned her shirt.

Charlie kissed Jenna’s neck. He wanted to be honest, and so he said what seemed truthful—in spirit, anyway. “Laura is in my
knee right now,” he muttered. “Laura is always in my fucking knee.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE LAURA WAS GOING TO BE ON THE JENNA
Faroli Show
, she was working on the Prairie Wind Farm newsletter. It was a bad habit, she knew, to have as many windows open on her desktop
as she did, and for sure a person could get confused. It was late, and although she was tired she was too excited to sleep,
and also the newsletter was overdue. Best to get it done while she had adrenaline.

She’d been following Jenna’s correspondence more carefully in the last week, since, after all, she was going to be on the
program. Not that there seemed to be anything particularly new, except that Jenna and Charlie must have had some kind of intense,
intergalactic sexual experience. Mrs. Voden was more ardent than usual. If there was anything to be interested in, it was
how free Jenna felt when she wrote, as if she believed she was always unobserved. Laura understood very little about her own
software, but she was savvy enough to suspect that everyone could be observed: the server could spy on you, and so could the
twelve-year-old neighbor boys, the local government, the federal government, and the terrorists. Jenna could get excruciatingly
specific without, it seemed, the thought of a peeping Tom. That evening, in fact, she’d written a doozy.

It wasn’t so much the physical details that got to Laura, although she found them gross in the extreme. The way Jenna wrote
about her pleasure, you would have thought that no one had ever touched her down there, that she’d lived her life in a convent.
You would have thought that she’d only just realized, at age forty-six, why people had been making art about sex, and going
to war on account of it, and jeopardizing their careers for it. Jenna and her lightbulb moment. That delayed revelation would
have been enough embarrassment, without all the other mortifications.

The message that Laura had open on her screen while she was writing her newsletter mentioned the effect on Jenna of Charlie’s
fluttering tongue, his focused tongue, all the
facets
of Charlie’s tongue. Jenna had gone on to confide in him, to tell him that she’d been having the fantasy of carrying his
child. “Jeez!” Laura spat when she read that line. Jenna wrote that through the nights she’d been dreaming of a small boy
on the lawn, running and shrieking with delight as his father, Charlie, chased him. In the mornings, as Jenna woke, the feeling
of the dream was still with her, the joy of it, and she’d lie in bed, she reported, imagining that this baby would bring all
of them together, that she and Frank and Laura and Charlie would stand in a loving circle in the nursery. “That’s sweet, I
guess,” Mrs. Rider remarked to her laptop. “I know,” Jenna had written, “that the castle-building is goofy if not perhaps
pathological.”

“Pathologically goofy,” Laura clarified.

If Jenna had been younger, Mrs. Rider might well have felt threatened, but as it was she registered the message as the work
of someone who had gone far beyond reason. If the part about the baby and the other bit about oral sex hadn’t been enough
for one message, Jenna also spoke about growing old together, being on the same wing of the nursing home:

I imagine you are down the hall, and the nurse will wheel me, poor old Jenna Faroli, to Charlie Rider’s room in the evening,
and although I remember almost nothing it is you who I know, you who I recall, you who I love. I hope that in spite of the
scarcity of men in nursing homes, in spite of the fact that all the old bags are throwing themselves at you, you still hold
me in your heart. I like to think the nurses will be compassionate enough to lift me into your bed, that they will leave us,
that they will shut the door behind them.

Laura hooted. Finally, the couple united! She clapped. Finally, the couple gets to spend the night together! More applause.
She loved this last section—she adored this derangement—the marriage of the demented and the crippled. Some romance all right,
the false teeth smiling at false teeth in two glasses, side by side, on the table. And what about Laura? Where was she going
to be while the seniors diddled themselves? Was she having her heavenly reward? Or was she the remaining friend and relation,
the long-suffering visitor, bringing mints and reading stories and making sure their drool buckets hadn’t gotten dislodged?

It was peculiar, she knew, that by day, when Laura was listening to the radio, Jenna Faroli was entirely separate from Charlie’s
Jenna, from Mrs. Voden. Jenna Faroli was her usual enlightened and wise self beaming down upon them, educating the world.
The other Jenna, the lunatic lover, was, in Laura’s mind, someone else. Laura supposed that she had learned a few things that
would be useful to her for her book, but it seemed that Jenna actually hadn’t been that instructive; a romance, after all,
was supposed to be empowering rather than confusing and nauseating.

She would later say it was an honest mistake. There were too many windows open on her desktop. And she was
rattled because she was going to be on the show the
next day. She had meant to paste into her newsletter a small piece she’d written about making autumn arrangements, including
a photograph of a pot et fleur she’d done the year before with oak, maple, and a few deciduous azalea leaves. She absolutely
did not mean to paste Jenna’s message into the front page, and even though she always proofread, the hour was late. She did
not mean, without rereading, to send the newsletter to the 637 customers on the
LISTSERV
.

WHEN JENNA CAME INTO STUDIO B THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, Laura noticed that she was flushed, and her eyes, which she remembered as a calm gray, looked like hot little ball bearings.
Jenna said, “How are you?” without glancing across the table, so that, even though Laura was the only one in the studio, she
wasn’t sure the question had been directed at her. The producer Suzie, the woman who had done the telephone pre-interview
the day before, had said that Jenna usually came in five or ten minutes before the show to talk with the guest, but the wall
clock said 9:58:07, hardly allowing time for pleasantries.

Laura, shoulders to her ears and grinning, clenched every part of herself. “I—I’m excited to be here.”

Jenna’s blazing eyes were fixed on the producer in the control room. Laura could see Suzie, head down, at her laptop. “We’ll
just chat,” Jenna said, as if to the window, “see where it takes us.”

Laura nodded. On the phone, Suzie had said they would talk a little bit about unusual flower names and the spiritual aspects
of working with plants that had a long heritage, and the benefits of being surrounded by beauty. They had brainstormed, and
it had gone, Laura thought, pretty well. She had come armed with a list of her favorite plants as well as those with odd names.
She had studied up, but if Jenna Faroli wanted to just chat, Laura, thrilled to the bone, scared out of her mind, could do
that, too.