Laura Rider's Masterpiece (20 page)

And then, as if all that support weren’t enough, over Labor Day she’d gone to the Wisconsin Dells, to the Bear Claw Resort
and Conference Center, which turned out, amazingly, to be an even higher peak experience than the
Jenna Faroli Show.
She’d been mistakenly put into the literary workshop, instead of romance, a disappointment at first. The romance teacher,
Wanda Carol Newman, was so vibrant and full of excitement, and she clutched her Bear Claw clipboard to her chest, and her
charges followed behind her as if she were Mother Goose. Laura said to the workshop director, “Do I have to go to Literary?”
The director had assured her that she’d love it, and that if she conquered Literary, if she learned about character and setting
and lyrical language and punctuation, which was Literary in a nutshell, she could hang all that expertise on any plot that
occurred to her.

The Literary person, Valerie Shippell, looked as anyone might have expected: short, thin, but with a menopausal paunch, nondescript
hair, and small oval glasses that were only slightly larger than her beige eyes. She’d apparently written several books that
had not, as far as Laura could tell, been read by class members, or anyone else, for that matter. The books were critically
acclaimed, it said in the brochure, but, as it happened, they were out of print.

The Bear Claw Resort was an ideal location, because if you were outdoorsy you could hike the trails along the Wisconsin River,
but if you weren’t that type there was a water park inside the hotel, including a one-thousand-gallon tipping bucket, and
the Howlin’ Tornado, advertised as a “6 story funnel of outrageous tubin’.” Their teacher, Valerie, said that the muffled
shrieks of the children and adults alike from inside the enormous fiberglass structure made it sound as if they were being
tortured, as if their suffering were being suppressed. But, then, that, as Laura learned, was the way Valerie thought: evil,
discontent, discouragement around every corner. And even though Valerie’s assessment that the resort was tacky was true, it
was tacky in an expensive, rough-hewn way which Laura did not find all that offensive. She had never been happier than in
her room with a log-cabin motif, with a loft for the bed, so that when she woke she looked out, not to the parking lot and
the Home Depot across the street, but instead to the woods in the distance.

There were ten others in Literary. In the first several minutes of the class, Laura was intimidated because of the grave,
ominous sound of “Literary,” but she soon saw that there was nothing to fear in people who were serious, just as she was,
about the work. They met in the corner of the Timber Ridge Banquet Hall, at a large round table. You could imagine the place
gussied up for a special dinner, folded napkins in towers, and orchid centerpieces, place cards, party favors, rows of cutlery.
For now the room was quiet, the fifty tables bare. Scattered through the hall were some of the other groups, including True
Crime, Mystery, Thrillers, and Self-Help, but they all seemed far away; they all seemed in a different galaxy. After the introductions,
Valerie Shippell told her students to find a silent corner for thirty minutes, and write about something they had never told
anyone before. To get their juices, she said, flowing.

Laura had gone down to the grand post-and-beam lobby, four stories high, and she sat by the mammoth fieldstone fireplace in
a deep-green-and-black plaid chair. It was not exactly silent, but under the massive yellow beams holding up the place, and
the vaulted ceiling, she felt as if she were in a cathedral, as if she were about to engage in a holy contemplation. A deep
calm filled her. As she sat, eyes closed, she considered writing about the Jenna Faroli newsletter episode, but in a way that
was not fulfilling the assignment, since potentially a lot of people, 637 to be exact, knew about the gaffe.

On that Thursday, she had driven home from the
Jenna Faroli Show
without seeing the road, the stop signs, the landmarks, the blue sky. She could not see anything but her own glittering future.
It had not been possible to thank Jenna personally after the program, because the next guest had been brought into Studio
B even before Laura’s segment was finished. Jenna had not had a second to turn to her to say goodbye, but Laura understood.
The host had to gather up her generosity and let it shower down upon the next author. Ms. Faroli had boosted Laura’s self-esteem
to the stratosphere, and in effect given Laura permission to start writing. Laura figured she’d send her an e-mail when she
got home. What a concept, writing to Jenna as Laura Patricia Rider, writing to Jenna as herself.

Charlie had been waiting for her in the kitchen, with a copy of the newsletter, rolled up in a tube, in his fist. It was funny,
she later thought, that he was the one who was angry, when the Jenna message proved that he was the guilty party. It was Laura
who should have been livid. It was Laura who, by all rights, should have claimed the moment.

“What? What”—Charlie was huffing—“are we, are we supposed to do about this?” He was waving the tube at her. He was so rarely
in a temper that the spectacle of him, his face gone pink and puffy, his shortness of breath, was unnerving.

“What are you talking about?” She had just had her triumph. What could be wrong? Couldn’t she rest on her laurels for one
instant before whatever the next crisis was?

“How many people?” he spat, “does the newsletter go
out to?”

“I don’t know. Six hundred and thirty-seven?”

He slapped the tube into her hand so hard her fingers smarted.

“What’s the matter,” she said, unrolling the pages, “with—with …”

“You—you’re laughing?” He was goggle-eyed. “All you can do is laugh?”

She couldn’t help it. Oh my God! She had no memory of having done such a thing, but she did recall how lightheaded and exhausted
and wound up she’d been the night before. “Charlie,” she said through her snickers but trying really as hard as she could
not to laugh, “I didn’t mean to—”

“Didn’t mean to?” He was shouting at her. “How do you think Jenna will feel? I’ve been trying to reach her. Do you understand
how, how—”

“Just a minute,” Laura snapped. “Hold on here. Let’s get a few things straight. Mrs. Voden shouldn’t have written the message
in the first place. Did you ever think about that? Not that I meant to paste it in there”—she snorted, the laughter coming
through her nose—“because I didn’t.”

“Stop laughing!”

“I’m trying, I am.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Did Jenna read this before the show? Did she know?”

“You heard her.” Laura ate a grape from the fruit bowl. “She was amazing. She was fantastic. She wanted to talk about me,
about my dreams, about my real work, instead of gardening. She was unbelievably—”

“That’s her,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s how she is.” Charlie, standing by the sink, looked as if he was about to
cry, as if he might turn around and bend over the drain in order that his tears not drench his clothing or the floor. “That’s
totally who she is.” His voice was cracking. “And no, I didn’t catch the program. I had to help José with the mower, and I
missed it.” Laura ate another grape, and another. “And by the way,” he said, angry again, “my mother called this morning.
She called to ask what was going on, what kind of joke we were playing.”

Mrs. Rider sank into the chair. Even though she truly hadn’t meant to paste Jenna’s message into the newsletter, she all at
once realized what she’d done: this was it. This was the Black Moment for her lovers. It had finally arrived. They were exposed
in the most unflattering light, exposed as the perverted, shallow, obsessed sex-maniacs that they were. And so here was the
question: how were they going to get through it to reclaim their best selves? A woman still wants a man to show her who she
is, and maybe in some way Charlie had done that for Jenna. Laura was going to have to get to her study to figure it out, to
work through the problem.

“I’m not denying,” she said, “that this is a weird and upsetting situation.” Jenna Faroli was the kindest person Laura had
ever met. Everyone in the world read e-mails first thing in the morning, so it was certain that Jenna had seen the newsletter.
And still she had treated Laura like an artist. Hadn’t she? If there was a small speck of doubt, the memory of Jenna’s big
mouth and sharp teeth as she chopped through her words in the last few seconds of the interview, Laura let it float beyond
her sight line. No, Jenna had spoken to Laura as if she’d seen exactly who she was. Maybe, just maybe, her generosity to Laura
was not only a result of Jenna’s special vision but also a way to repay Laura for the gift of Charlie. “Maybe,” she ventured,
“maybe the newsletter doesn’t seem like such a big deal to Jenna?”

“Are you crazy?” Charlie cried. “Not a big deal?” He picked up a kitchen chair and threw it to the floor. “You have wrecked
her life, do you hear me? And you’ve destroyed our lives, too.”

Laura wasn’t sure if he meant she’d destroyed the Riders’ lives, or if she’d ruined Jenna and Charlie’s cozy arrangement.

In the lobby of the Bear Claw Resort, it took Laura several minutes to decide that she should write about the death of her
father rather than the Jenna Faroli newsletter incident. The murder of her father by her mother, her mother allowing her father
to choke to death, was a straightforward event, something she could write about in the remaining twenty-five minutes without
too much trouble. She was not sorry in her choice, because when she read it out loud to the class in the corner of the Timber
Ridge Banquet Hall, she felt that right away she had them in the palm of her hand. She had imagined that she would be much
more nervous than she actually was. Once she got going, by the third sentence, she was there with her mother at the kitchen
table, watching her father begin to gag on the broccoli stalk. She was there watching her father tip over to the floor. She
waited to make sure he was quite dead before placing the phone call. It was as if, in the act of creation, in that neverland,
she became her mother.

There was silence at the Literary table when she finished her piece. Laura didn’t start shaking until it was over. She had
to sit on her hands, bite down hard on her lip, and try, as best she could, to slow her breathing. Valerie Shippell removed
her glasses and blew her nose. Her lashes were so light her eyes looked bald, parrotlike in her rhythmic blinking. “That is
powerful material,” she said to Laura. With those colorless eyes it was difficult to tell that she was actually looking at
you. “Good job.”

“It must have been healing to write,” Nora said. “Here you are, and you’ve never told anyone this story? That’s got to be
therapeutic.”

Laura guessed it was true. Maybe there was a weight that had been lifted, and yet, at the same time, she was full up with
the wonder of the pages she’d written, the wonder of her own words.

“I like the description of his neck, the chicken flesh,” Doug said, and Kayla said, “I like the part where the clock ticking
is in the wife’s heart, that her heart is the clock.”

“I love how she just waited,” Tawny said, “while the clock ticked, how it ticked softly, how it ticked loud, how it ticked
in singsong, and how the ticking echoed inside of her.”

“I like,” Rhonda said, “how she felt light and lighter as time ticked on. And then how bizarre it was, that she was singing
‘Three Blind Mice’ to herself.”

It was a very heady experience. Laura couldn’t ever remember being supported by so many loving people, and that would include
her wedding day, when her own sister had tried to sabotage the event. After they had all said what they admired about her
piece, Valerie spoke about how Laura, if she wished to hone the scene—and with such powerful material she surely should—might
want to focus on concrete details. For instance, the color of the father’s face as time wore on. What was the mother doing
with her hands while she waited? Laura might want to tone down the imagery of the mother’s heart as a clock, which was a bit
cumbersome, and think about
the sounds the father would have made, the way his chair hit the floor, and how still the room became when he was dead. She
should think about the detachment of the narrator, should think if the black humor was intentional, and if it was, she might
develop it. Before Laura could say, “Black humor?” Valerie pronounced for the third time that it was extremely powerful material.

“It’s incredible,” Doug said.

Laura tried to be helpful to the others as they read their pages, but she couldn’t help basking inside the shining cloud of
her own piece. She’d not only written up a storm, she thought; she’d written the storm itself. When the afternoon was so quickly
over, she went, carrying her Bear Claw Resort and Conference Center clipboard with her fresh pad of paper, up to her room
to begin the exercises Valerie had assigned.

Even if she hadn’t been held aloft by her new friends, even if she hadn’t felt by the workshop’s end that they understood
her essential being in a way that no one, besides Jenna Faroli, had done, she would have been more than happy to get away
from home. Together, before she’d left for the Dells, she and Charlie had composed a message to the newsletter list apologizing
for the joke. They’d kept it short, because there was no point in drawing more attention to the mistake. Charlie continued
to be in a state of agitation, however: Jenna hadn’t contacted him since the Laura Show, as he referred to it. He’d been sending
his lover e-mails, he’d called her cell, he’d texted her. He knew she was on vacation, but she had assured him that Dickie’s
beach house was equipped with wireless, and that they’d be able to communicate as usual. Laura had written to her also, and
gotten no response. Over Labor Day, Charlie was calling his wife at the Bear Claw Resort every half-hour, and when she did
answer she tried to reassure him, telling him that on the Outer Banks there might not be cell-phone service, and that the
promise of wireless could have been false advertising. She reminded him that Jenna would never have been so openhearted if
she’d been upset about the newsletter.