Laura Rider's Masterpiece (18 page)

Jenna whacked her papers on the table and sat in the spot next to Laura, so that both of them would have to swivel a bit in
their chairs to conduct the conversation. She put her headset on, and to the engineer she said through her mike, “I’m all
right on the levels?” She studied her notes, licked her finger to turn a page, and took a drink of water.

At 9:59:57, she turned her gaze on Laura. It was slightly unnerving—the eyes, for one, and the hard, wide, close-mouthed smile.
She was smaller than Laura remembered, and possibly prettier? She’d managed to corral her hair into an upswept structure,
a bunnish thing somewhere between a
French twist and the Great Pyramids, and she was wearing
a beige brushed-cotton suit, and heels, so that her clothing, at
least, was not so far from the vision Laura used to have of her, before they’d met. It made total sense that Jenna’s cheeks
would burn under the pressure of the show, and of course she would be businesslike rather than friendly before the program
went on air.

“Here we go, then,” Jenna said. She looked, Laura realized, as if she were going to vomit, and in a certain way this made
Laura feel good, to know that Jenna was nervous, too. She was glad not to be across the table but next to her host, as if
they were seatmates traveling to the same destination.

The jaunty Jenna Faroli music, the signature loopy, playful clarinet, sounded in Laura’s headset. She squeezed her eyes shut.
She hadn’t known what to wear, how dressy it should be, and she’d chosen a flowered knee-length skirt, a pouffy thing, roses
splashed on the pale-yellow seersucker, and a silk tank top of the same yellow. It was garden-theme–y, festive, and yet serious,
which was how she wanted to feel. If it was an outfit a schoolgirl would wear, well, that was part of the picture. The producer
had told her that she was first, and next there’d be an author who had written a book about growing vegetables with prison
inmates, and following that a phone interview with a director who staged Shakespeare plays with convicted felons, and, last,
Jenna would discuss the Bard with another author, a man who’d written a biography of the playwright, and an exegesis, Suzie
had called it, of the plays in relation to the flora of the times. Always, in a Jenna show, there was a flow and a circle.
Just now Suzie had been very interested in the Riders’ business, and she’d asked quite a few questions about the current newsletter,
which Laura had to confess she’d patched together late the evening before.

“You don’t say,” Suzie had said.

“I have with me in the studio Laura Rider,” Jenna was saying, “co-owner of Prairie Wind Farm in Hartley, Wisconsin. It’s one
of the most enchanting places I’ve ever visited. Ms. Rider designs gardens, and has a showcase on the farm that will transport
you to another era and another continent.”

Jenna had gone from being fierce and commanding, gone from looking ill, to her warm and inviting self. Laura took a deep breath
and smiled gratefully at her. She sent out yet another prayer that she would be able to speak in whole sentences, that she’d
be able to do justice to this experience.

“Your farm is a masterpiece,” Jenna said, “of design and execution. It is a place of great tranquillity and peace for visitors,
and yet it must afford
you
little time for peace and quiet.”

Laura nodded, and then realized that of course she needed to speak. “It—is a lot of work, absolutely, but we, my husband and
I, we have some time for hobbies, we do. I’m actually—what I love, Jenna—is to write, I—really do. I’m planning, in fact,
to write a book. I’m sort of, well, I’m already at work on a novel.” Eeeek! She was telling her secret to Jenna!
Pinch me!
“So it seems sort of fitting that I’m on this show today, which is about writing—about Shakespeare, a glove maker’s son,
right?—as well as gardening.” What a mouthful! But she’d said it; she’d told Jenna who she was.

Jenna’s gaze, narrowed now, and focused as if to a pinprick, was, needless to say, intense, but when you factored in the voice
like a flute, plus the smile, you could sort of relax. Maybe, Laura thought, Jenna’s eyes looked so penetrating because it
was there, in her pupils, that her thinking was expressed. Some people talked in order to think, some people could only understand
their ideas if they wrote them down, Charlie’s irises flooded with love, and Jenna’s eyes went into laser mode when she did
her interviews. Everything was
logical!

“Writing a book,” Jenna said slowly, as if this were a concept that was unknown to her. “How fascinating.”

“It is amazing.”

“Have you always been a reader, then? Were you one of those girls who were up a tree somewhere, nose in a book?”

“No, not at all. I was so average back then. My family thought I was pretty hopeless. I liked animals, and arts and crafts,
and dolls, and then, you know”—she didn’t mean to giggle, but a little high hee-hee escaped her—“boys.”

“Not a reader,” Jenna purred, “and yet you want to write.”

“I used to read, you know, for facts, but I started in with novels, with those kinds of books, reading them, a few years ago,
and I got very very hooked.”

Jenna cocked her head and adjusted her mike so she could lean toward Laura. It was just how Laura used to imagine Jenna when
she listened; it was actually true that you could hear Jenna’s curiosity. “So you feel as if you can write a novel even though
you haven’t trained for it all your life. I’m sure you are aware that we live in a culture of the amateur, a
culture where everyone thinks he is an artist. You blog and you’re a poet. Didn’t George Bernard Shaw say that hell is filled
with amateur musicians? Most writers I’ve interviewed on this show report that they’ve read since their earliest years, and
either they studied literature in college or they read seriously for decades before taking pen to paper. Many of them have
spoken about how in the act of writing they are having conversations with authors long dead and with the books themselves.
They are part of a specific history and continuum. And yet you feel you can read up, for a year or two, and then sit down
and write a book?”

Laura could tell by how close Jenna had come and her look of concern that she truly wanted to know what Laura thought. It
was personal and intellectual, at the same time. “I do feel I can do it,” she said. “Anyone can if they believe hard enough.
If they follow their bliss. That’s the greatest thing about writing. It’s not rocket science. It’s not some in-joke with other
writers or books. It’s storytelling, something we all do, all of us, every day. I do believe we are all writers. Every glove
maker’s son can be a poet.”

“Surely not every glove maker’s—”

“Stranger things have happened, trust me. And because, Jenna, I’ve been working on a romance novel, I’ve been watching classics
like
Pride and Prejudice
with Keira Knightley, movies like that. Doing, you know, catch-up.”

“Classics,” Jenna repeated. “Keira Knightley.” She seemed to be getting information from her producer, from her feed, because
she looked at Suzie, who was now standing at the window, and sternly shook her head. “What, I wonder, do you like about
Pride and Prejudice
, the movie, that classic, as you call it? In this current Austen revival, it’s assumed that we all understand she’s great
and why this is so, but what do you, who have just come to her, have to say about that greatness?”

“Oh my gosh, the movie is so empowering. And happy. You really get that the hero and the heroine have made each other better
people. Which I think is the point, right, of love? You probably next want to ask me if I’ve read a lot of romances, and the
truth is, I haven’t.”

Jenna laughed her wonderful water-going-over-the-falls laugh, all bubbly and rolling. Laura’s heart swelled, and her own cheeks,
she was sure, were glowing. It was with merriment that Jenna said, “That does seem like trying to play a concert without ever
practicing, without having tried to blow through your instrument!” And then, more seriously, “Many of the most successful
romance writers started out as devoted readers of the genre, didn’t they?”

“That makes sense. But for me, Jenna? The fact is, I don’t like the usual plot where the independent, strong woman meets the
stud-muffin who seems stupid or evil or stuck up, and after three hundred pages where the characters don’t know what is what,
and after he rapes her and gets to play around, after she shows him his pure side, he carries her off into the sunset. That
just doesn’t feel right to me. But I’m not sure I like the plot, either, where the hero is so strong he can let the woman
rule, because that makes the heroine seem sort of like a brat. I want to write a book about all women, Every Woman. I want
to find out what women want, deep down, and I want to discover what the ideal man is for today’s real woman.”

“The ideal man. Today’s real woman.” Jenna shook her head again, a sharp back-and-forth at the window. “That’s very ambitious.
How do you find out such a thing? How do you research, if you will, what Every Woman wants, or who Every Woman is?”

“How I look at it is, a writer has to be a sleuth. It’s detective work. I’ve been trying to study, to study what, in my opinion—in
my humble opinion?—an ideal woman, a brilliant and amazing woman, actually wants in a man, what kind of hero she needs when
she’s already sort of perfect. Because, Jenna, today’s women are superevolved. I don’t need to tell you that! They run their
own businesses, they raise children alone, they take charge of their own learning. If women need men, why do they? What kind
of man can improve the new model? What kind of partner can take her to new heights? That’s what my research is about. And
if the artist has to snoop a little bit and create opportunities, if you have to listen very hard to the people around you
and watch, that’s all part of the process.”

Laura would remember how the room went still, how it was as if Jenna had been in a game of tag, as if she’d been made to freeze
by an invisible hand. What had just happened? Laura could hardly remember, sentence to sentence, what was coming out of her
mouth. She’d never experienced living in the moment as she was doing now. She almost said to Jenna, “Are you okay?” but she
thought it might be better if she continued to talk. “I listened to the show you did about a year ago—I mean, I listen to
you every day!—but a while back you interviewed an author who’d written a book about romance readers. I probably won’t get
this straight, but the author—if I’m remembering correctly—said that romance readers and the heroines in the books, too, seem
to be searching for a hero with the kind of tenderness and love they got from their mothers. I just thought that was so interesting,
that longing for mother-love and trying to find it in a man. I mean, good luck! The author made the point that in most romances
the hero is masculine in terms of his … equipment, but actually feminine in—what would you call it?—his emotional capacity.
His feminine and masculine sides are … calibrated exquisitely. I guess I’ve been thinking of that a lot, maybe without even
knowing I’ve been thinking of it, which is how an artist goes about her life and work. The thing is, I want to write a romance
where the characters are fully conscious as they enter the relationship. Really, truly, fully conscious.”

For a second, Laura felt dizzy. She had never spoken like that, in a full paragraph, one that she hoped was coherent. Jenna
still hadn’t moved. Was she having a stroke? Was she like that actor, what’s-his-name, who for all those years performed in
his sitcom while in secret he had Parkinson’s disease? Laura felt bad about bringing up the idea that women were searching
for their mothers when Jenna, after all, had been adopted. She wished she could scoot her chair over to the motherless child
and take her in her arms.

“A conscious romance.” Jenna was finally speaking, drawing out the
s
sounds, hissing the words.

“Yes! Oh my goodness, that’s it! The conscious romance! That’s exactly the name of the new genre I’m planning to invent. Thank
you!!!”

Jenna blinked, sat up straight, and seemed, Laura later thought, to go into an autopilot-type mode. “Studies have been done”—she
was still blinking—“which show that romance novels, while often ideologically conservative, while often recommending the patriarchy,
are, for many women, an activity of protest.” Her eyes popped open and she said, “Have you researched that aspect of the genre
in order to understand what propaganda, if you will, your book will espouse?”

“I feel like I’m living in my book,” Laura said, “that my book is from deep inside me, that it’s an expression of myself rather
than a—what did you call it?—rather than propaganda? I’ve listened to your show for years, and I know that artists make great
sacrifices, and I myself, believe me, have sacrificed, more than anyone can imagine, more than anyone will ever know. But
I feel that it’s meant to be. I’ve had this fantasy for years that I’m sitting in a chair, in a long dress, with a cup of
tea by my side, and a cigarette in an ashtray. And I’m writing.”

Jenna thrust her head forward and squinted at her. “Just as Nicole Kidman does in the movie
The Hours
, when she’s playing Virginia Woolf? When she’s writing
Mrs. Dalloway
?”

“Uh-huh,” Laura said vaguely.

It was as if, just then, Jenna woke back up into herself. Maybe she had some kind of seizure disorder and the crisis had passed.
She pulled her mike closer to her, turning away from Laura, and she said to the window, “You’ve got all the visual trappings
of Virginia Woolf without, of course, knowing Greek, or being well-read, or having a literary circle. But you would no doubt
say that everyone needs her fantasies, and the movies are a good place to get them.”

“Absolute—”

“And you believe that what women want has fundamentally changed through the eons, through the feminist revolution, and now
into the third wave of that revolution, when poststructuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality is central to the discussion.
I’m sure you’ve looked at queer theory, womanism, postcolonial theory, ecofeminism, the riot-grrrl movement, to name but a
few.”