Laura Rider's Masterpiece (21 page)

One of the things that still incensed Charlie was the fact that he’d never been able to tell Jenna about his experience with
the Silver People. He’d never had the chance to relate what had happened in his own words. He’d been working up to it, crafting
the story in his mind. If there was anything that aggravated him about his wife, in addition to her stupendous faux pas, it
was how she’d stolen the story,
his
story, out from under him, especially when Jenna had charged him with telling it as well as he knew how. He wanted to make
contact with Jenna—he needed to reach her—so that he’d know that she was all right. He also wanted to find out if they were
finished. Never again meet in the Kewaskum Inn? He must tell her, once more, just how much he loved her.

He wondered if there was any good that could come from the newsletter incident and from his isolation from Mrs. Voden. Laura
had gone off to the Dells to do a writing workshop, to pursue a hobby she’d always dreamed of, which was news to Charlie.
Maybe, just maybe, he’d sit himself down in his nook, in the odd silence of the creaky farmhouse. Maybe he’d write, too, why
not? He’d take up paper and ballpoint pen, go the old-fashioned route. He’d write to his muse using his “narrative skills,”
as she had called them, so that she would believe his story, his truth, that one night, long ago, he was carried away.

On the second day of the workshop, they went around the table and talked about what books they were working on or hoping to
write. Although the others in the group had purposefully signed up for Literary, their projects sounded like normal books.
Kayla was writing a love story about a real-estate agent and a client, but then the client turns out to have been fathered
by the same sperm donor as the real-estate agent, which they don’t realize until the morning of the wedding. Talk about a
Black Moment. At the end, the hero pledges to devote himself to genetic engineering so that they can have biological children
who are shielded by technology from the negatives of intermarriage. Doug was rewriting the Arthurian legend set in New Orleans
during Katrina, and Tawny was starting a project about a sex-offender priest who goes to Europe to have both of his hands
surgically removed. When it was Laura’s turn, she explained that she wanted to write a romance, but a different sort of romance,
a novel in which the characters have an elevated consciousness. Jenna had supplied the term—the conscious romance—which Laura
was hoping might be a whole new subgenre.

While Laura had the floor, Valerie looked up into the face of the stuffed bear that hung over the dais. Right into his fanged
mouth. “A conscious romance,” she repeated, as if to herself. “That sounds like an oxymoron to me.” She tilted her bland face
to give the bear a different angle of herself. “Can falling in love be a conscious experience? If it were, that would change
the nature of love.” She turned to her students. “Love is savage, people. Sexual love blows apart your assumptions, your sense
of self, your place in the world. It’s a hurricane—it’s a nuclear bomb. Don’t kid yourself that Eros is a cute little winged
angel with a rubber arrow. That arrow will … kill.”

For the next fifteen minutes, and Laura was not exaggerating when she recounted to her classmates what they’d each experienced,
for fifteen minutes Valerie couldn’t stop talking about love as insanity, and about the hope that romantic love promises,
only to let down those who believe. She recited:

“For each ecstatic instant

We must an anguish pay

In keen and quivering ratio

To the ecstasy.”

Laura, of course, would never say, but maybe there were other reasons Valerie had been disappointed by love besides being
taken in by a pipe dream. But this, clearly, was Literary, nothing but negativity, nothing but pessimism. Valerie herself
said so, going on and on about how it was in finely crafted novels that characters lived deeply with sorrow or they lived
ambivalently with happiness. Life in great literature, she explained, was nuanced and complex and ambiguous, qualities not
usually found in the genres. She asked the students if they didn’t think probing a relationship often revealed hostility.
She asked them to consider life as shipwreck, and she demanded that when they go home they read Chekhov.

Laura could sort of see what her teacher meant if she made the huge effort to be depressed. She did remember the first time
she’d felt the kind of black tunnel of hopelessness Valerie was maybe talking about. She’d been twelve, old for a flower girl,
but a flower girl nonetheless. She’d stood in the doorway of the bride’s room in the church basement, watching the bridesmaids
help her cousin Jersey sit on the toilet. Jersey, it turned out, could not go to the bathroom in the wedding dress by herself.
It seemed a strange and terrible world of intimacy that somehow was related to marriage, and it had made Laura feel empty
and frightened.

She raised her hand after Valerie was finished talking and said, “I think I know what you’re saying, about how life has its
secret and black places. But that’s not what I want to see in a book or movie. I want a lesson learned. Gratitude and understanding.
A healing hand. I like books where people get what they deserve.”

Laura wouldn’t point out the obvious, the fact that Valerie’s books were out of print, the fact that if Valerie could torque
her worldview maybe she’d sell a few more copies.

“Take, for example,” Laura said, “a situation where a brilliant woman, a genius, is found out for having an affair with a
laborer, a simple stonemason. I’d like to see what she learns from that experience. It seems like she could be a better person
for it, that there should be a take-home message. In high school we learned about tragedy, how there’s supposed to be evil,
and then suffering, but finally values. A meaningful man in action. I don’t want my heroine to offer herself to the world,
to reach with both hands, and what she discovers is that life is awful. What’s the point of that?”

Valerie said, “What has compelled your character to take up with a laborer, someone out of her class? Does she feel liberated,
or is she ashamed? Will she be punished? Those are certainly some avenues to explore with your plot.”

“Punished?” Laura asked. “Punished for being in love? Punished for connecting to her humanity? Punished for being who she
is? The stonemason might make her realize that her retarded brother is a complete human being. Maybe the stonemason teaches
her to respect her mother, who has Alzheimer’s.”

Valerie nodded and then lined up her pencils above her clipboard. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said, “but I’m
ready for a drink.”

The magical aspect of the group was how quickly they got close. They did as Valerie said and adjourned to the bar, and after
they were lubed, many of them got their suits and reconvened in the indoor water park. Valerie had a staff meeting, which
for Laura, frankly, was a relief. Without their leader, they went down the slides, they played in the interactive tree-house
water fort, they went in the Howlin’ Tornado, and they took turns soaking in the hot tub. Through all of it, they never stopped
talking about writing. Laura admitted that when she read a book she always located the end of the chapter, and each time she
turned a page she mentally counted how many more to the finish. She was quick to say it was a habit she hoped to break. Doug,
sitting on the edge of the hot tub, announced that he had found a metaphor in the water slide. “So,” he said, “you’re going
through the long tunnel, and the water is both mental juices and amniotic fluid, and when you burst out at the end, it’s the
birth of an artist. The birth of an artist at Bear Claw Resort. The lifeguard is there in the shallow water, the girl in the
red suit holding the safety strap, there for your delivery, and ready to save you if you need it.” They all had to laugh at
the idea of dowdy, morose Valerie in her tank suit waiting to rescue them.

It wasn’t all fun, not by a long shot. Laura worked as hard as she ever had in her life. They had assignments through the
day and homework in the evening. She wrote an opening page that Valerie sent her back to rewrite, not once, not twice, but
three times. She wrote descriptions of her characters not because she knew exactly who they were, but because Valerie had
instructed them to come up with something, to get anything at all on paper. She worked on a sketch about the farm, she rewrote
her father’s death scene, and she even turned in a short piece about the Knees. She tried a love scene in a hotel room that’s
interrupted several times by a cell phone, and another few pages, which Valerie praised, about an ugly woman falling in love.
Mrs. Rider was definitely starting to hear the mermaids sing. Even if Valerie didn’t write interesting books, even if she
had a jaundiced outlook, Laura admitted by the end that she was a good taskmaster.

On the last day, she exchanged e-mail addresses with her fellow workshoppers. Doug was going to set up a Bear Claw Resort
and Conference Center Literary chat room so they could continue to share their manuscripts, so at least they’d have a virtual
community. “None of us will ever be lonely,” Nora said. And they would all keep each other posted when they got published.
They checked out, they hugged, they waved. When it was really over, Laura sat in the parking lot and cried.

Charlie had still not heard from Jenna when his wife got back from the Dells. “I need to know she’s all right,” he whined.

Laura didn’t say that Jenna was probably just fine without his concern. “She’ll get in touch when she has a minute,” she said.

“She’s furious,” Charlie insisted. “She’s devastated.”

Maybe, Laura thought, Charlie privately subscribed to the Valerie Shippell school of thought, always assuming that people
deep down are ravaged. Though Laura had tried to imagine Jenna on the beaches of North Carolina, she had not, because of her
own exhilaration, focused on the possible varieties of her idol’s suffering, if, indeed, Jenna was unhappy. She had not pictured
Jenna taking long walks at dawn by herself, the early hour of that exercise not born from a wish to comb the beach for treasure,
but the result of never having fallen asleep.

On the first morning, before Frank and Sally were up, Jenna had talked to Dickie by the water’s edge. Her friend had never
disappointed her before, and she found it hard to believe, even as it was happening, that he was so uninterested in her humiliation.
She did not know if his recent spate of migraines had made spiritual and emotional pain seem insignificant. “No one cares
about adultery anymore,” he pronounced. “It’s unfortunate, the perception in the culture that passionate love no longer has
the power to transform. And the end of shame means the novelist no longer has a subject. The novel will die as a result.”

Jenna didn’t care about the death of the novel. “Dickie!” she cried. “I’m ruined.”

“My darling, you are not ruined. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no one is ruined by this kind of scandal. On the contrary,
your stock is probably soaring.” And if she was ruined, time would pass, he assured her, the wounds would heal, all would
be forgotten, all was vanity, all was dust. The world was coming to an end, and if she had enjoyed herself before the coasts
fell into the ocean and Wisconsin became a desert, then she’d done the universe a favor. If she’d enjoyed herself before the
jihadists or the Christian Right destroyed Western civilization, she had done well.

She wondered if he was on new medication. She could not explain to him that something fundamental was lost to her, an old-fashioned
respect and authority that had seemed part of her nature—
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains
is bestial
. And it wasn’t only the discovery but the fact that the poison pen had been her own. Sally seemed not to have shared the
message with him, and Jenna was too mortified to recite it, but if she had, surely he would have better understood her plight.
Because he paid no attention to the technological world, because he’d never used a computer, he did not realize the pandemic
speed with which a person’s shame could travel. The stain on her honor was bright and indelible. She couldn’t bear to think
about the amount of energy she’d have to muster to walk out of the door every single day, head held high, from here on out.