Laura Rider's Masterpiece (3 page)

“Pleasure with the basics,” Jenna murmured.

“I sometimes tell my customers, I say, What did God know about horticulture when He created the Garden? He probably made it
with dumb luck, and there were probably plants Eve later dug up and moved around. But even God at a certain point just had
to plunge in.”

Laura was always honest up to a point, careful to explain that the learning curve could be expensive if you didn’t have a
watering schedule and if you didn’t fertilize your investment. If you had lousy taste—a problem afflicting many of her customers—then
you would be blissfully ignorant of the atrocity out back, the mismatched colors and the inevitable silly impatiens thrown
in to cover the dying perennials that Laura had painstakingly advised. It was hard to say who were worse, the haughty, demanding
Illinois vacationers, or the relaxed Wisconsin women in their oversized appliquéd shirts, bursting out of their Capri pants.
Laura wanted to say to Jenna how impossible it was to remain a nice person if you so much as had eyes in your head; Laura
was not nearly as kind, she knew, or as generous, as Jenna Faroli.

If she’d been truthful with Jenna, she would have said she was ready to sell the business, chuck the farm, get out while they
were having success. Keeping the place watered and weeded and mowed, managing the employees, coming up with workshops, designing
new beds, tearing out the old, dealing with the customers whose peonies weren’t the right color—she had had enough. She would
have explained to Jenna that the huge sellers at Prairie Wind, the steel buckets wrapped in shelf paper, planted with geraniums
and sweet woodruff, were a rip-off at fifty dollars, and she was embarrassed, too, even though they were high-end, by the
terra-cotta angels and frogs and owls, the grapevine wreaths, the wind chimes, the plaster birdbaths. The thought of another
season made her want to vanish all of a sudden, to drive off, no note left behind. She could breed dogs, maybe, in a new life,
in Nova Scotia or British Columbia. She looked into the gray eyes of Jenna Faroli and she silently asked this question: What,
Jenna, is my calling? What is my true love?

Laura wanted to tell Jenna how she had worked to improve herself, in spite of quitting William Faulkner. She had, for a time,
read the titles in the Hartley Library’s book club. She hadn’t ever gone to the evening meetings, but she had tried to be
loyal to the member that was herself. It wasn’t always easy, because in her opinion some of the books were wordy, dull, interminable.
Hello! We don’t have all day here! She often couldn’t help thinking that if the hero and heroine had only been able to get
ahold of medication there would not have been any occasion for a story. Holden Caulfield would have been fine on Prozac, and
ditto for the Professor in his dusty old house, in the dreary Willa Cather novel that she had not been able to finish.

While Jenna was asking her questions about potting soil and pruning, and while Laura was answering in detail, she was imagining
that she was telling Jenna the essential facts of her life. She was saying what she’d never say to anyone else; she was saying,
“I think, Jenna, I think I want to write a book.” She was sure, if she said so, that Jenna would spur her on, just as Laura
was cheering her on about gardening. It occurred to her, in the middle of the discussion of Jenna’s ailing hydrangea, the
six in her front yard, that what Laura most wanted to write was a novel about a plain woman who becomes beautiful. A story
that finally discovers what a woman needs and wants, and there in the distance is the man who can meet those requirements,
the man coming closer and closer to her, the woman’s beauty snapping into focus as he arrives. She shivered even as she was
speaking to Jenna about the wonder of mushroom compost. Although Laura Rider was finished with sex, she was not the least
bit tired of romance. She looked into the small but knowing and sympathetic eyes of Jenna Faroli, and she said to herself,
I want to write a book about love.

A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE GARDEN-CLUB MEETING, CHARLIE
Rider and Jenna Faroli met along Highway S outside of Hartley. This encounter occurred by chance. “Or,” Charlie later said,
“did it?” The month was May, the wheat and alfalfa were waving in the soft breeze, the green was so bright in the sunlight,
making the pastures and fields so shiny, it all looked like a plastic backdrop. Wasn’t it as if, Charlie would ask her, the
Silver People, on an avenue named S, had called to them on that spring day of the spangly colors, when nature looked more
phony than phony nature? The Silver People, the glowing dwarfs who inhabited Charlie’s private universe. He happened to be
driving in front of Jenna, and it was he who pulled over on the wide gravel shoulder to look across the field to the horizon.

Nature in general was such a dazzling, goofball thing, always bubbling up out of nowhere, always morphing into a crazy something
else; one minute you’ve about killed yourself digging out all the thistles in the field, and the next, garlic mustard has
spread itself right behind your back. Son of a bitch—nature! And what a sense of humor, blowing your house down, say, and
what do you find under the mud floor of the basement but a fossilized T. rex? Thank you very much. The next minute, the trickster
goes into ravishing mode without any effort: mist on a pond, the crescent moon—So don’t look at me!—the whole place lit up
in blossom time for no one but the bees. What was behind it all, beyond it, not to mention right in front of us? Who knew
how many dimensions, scrim after scrim, a person could peel back into if he took the time to pay attention? “Don’t start,”
his wife often said to him when he was gearing up on this subject. “What you see is what you get. Reality is reality, period.”

Would Jenna have stopped on Highway S if he hadn’t led the way? She wondered if she would have ignored the bobbing lights
in her eagerness to get home if he hadn’t, by pulling over, guided her toward awe. “What are they?” she called to him as she
climbed out of the car. She had her hand to her brow, looking, not at the stranger next to her, but at the six or so quivering
spheres past the silos, the barns, just above the tree line. “Are we having floaters?” she said. “Both of us? Do we need to
see an ophthalmologist right now? Or a shrink?”

Ah, that voice. He was having an out-of-body experience hearing it in the flesh. He had known it was Jenna Faroli who would
step from the car, because he’d been watching her from his rearview mirror for the two miles she’d been behind him. He didn’t
listen to her program, but whenever he heard it in the background he wished she would stop talking. He wanted her to sing
along with him in the sound track that was often going in his head, principally the old-time string-band music he’d learned
from his grandfather. “Short Life of Trouble,” “June Apple,” “Going Across the Mountain.” She must have a pure and yet sweetly
lusty singing voice, with a spine-tingling vibrato. For a minute he forgot the spheres. The Grand Ole Opry: he’s up there
with Jenna, and here comes Dolly, boobs like traffic cones, and, wait, Emmylou, she’s belting out “Pretty Little Girl” with
them, too.

“Or do we need a neurosurgeon,” Jenna was saying, “are our brain tumors flaring up?”

Charlie closed his eyes, took a deep breath, raised his full glass to life. Jenna Faroli—biggest cranium on the planet, according
to his wife—and here he was with her, looking out to the world revealed. “There’s nothing wrong with your vision,” he said,
blinking, checking his own. “Or your circuitry, I suspect, nope, not a thing. You probably don’t have psychiatric troubles,
either. Clean bill of health. They, those lights—they might be what you think they are.”

It was then that she turned to look at him. Out of long habit, she masked her censure in the singsong of her satiny tones.
“And what do I think they are?”

It wasn’t the tender shape of his dark eyes or his unlashed smile, ear to ear, that first drew her attention, or even his
corkscrew curls, the tight spring of them, but the pleading in the long, tapered fingers with the flat pads, as he held them
out, in prayer position.

“Here’s my guess,” he said. “You don’t really think those lights are UFOs, and you could never say that they might be, you
wouldn’t really even consider it, because then everyone within range of 90.4 FM would think you’d flipped.
UFOs
aren’t even the word you want for what’s out there. You’re thinking spirit world. You’re thinking alternative reality, maybe.
You’ve heard about ionic disturbances, so you could go the science route. But this seems like something different from that
description. It’s possible you’d like them to be magical. It’s possible you want to be charmed.”

She said nothing. She used what her producer in the studio called Jenna’s I-hate-you smile, the tilted head, the closed mouth
spread to 45-percent capacity, the sincere nod. She had recently done a show about Yeats’s beliefs in palmistry, astral travel,
and crystal gazing, about the poet’s falling under the spell of the mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Her guest had gone on
to the question in general of well-educated and discriminating people who give themselves over to the occult. Jenna did not
doubt that the sacrifice of Yeats’s reason, the force of his sheer wackiness, had yielded great benefits to the culture at
large. But in the moment she had never wanted less to be charmed by alternative reality. The one miracle she believed in was
kindness—but only if it wasn’t talked about. She was of course open to all points of view, even those of a presumptuous kook.
Her stranger’s jeans were so crisp she wondered if they’d been starched and ironed, and the sleeves of his light-green shirt
had been neatly rolled up, each to the same level on his forearm. Even as Jenna considered the spectacle at the edge of the
sky, she noted that Charlie looked like a schoolboy whose mother had dressed him.

“Are they benign?” she asked. “Those beings caravanning in the spheres?”

“Would you like them to be?”

She again turned to her companion. “I’d like them to be as well dressed as you.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “It’s hard, though, to look like this when you’re traveling. When you’ve come from so far.”

“Yes, that’s true. Especially because you would have had to start out—let’s see—a million miles per hour, and if you came
from the nearest star, that’s Alpha Centauri, so … wouldn’t you have had to start out at roughly … give me a minute … I’m
not quite sure about the math, but something like the time of Moses?”

“Whoa!” he said. “Math! Wow.” His whole body now seemed to be nodding, the bounce coming from his heels. “But maybe, maybe
you have to do that thing where you shift the—what’s it called?—the paradigm. Isn’t it possible that they have other ways
to travel? Maybe our laws have nothing to do with theirs. Maybe they can surf the astral plane, or even travel on our thoughts.”

“Poor things! My thoughts would certainly rumple their clothing. Still, however they get here, I maintain that it’s important
to make a good impression.”

“You don’t like the green bodysuit? Too casual? You wish they’d snazz it up a little, make an effort? Accessorize?”

“I have large feet, so I always think if you’re a dainty size you should use that. You should wear elegant shoes, at the least.”
In her brown oxfords she stepped closer to the field. “What else do I want in my aliens?” She squinted hard at the sky. “Let
me just say I refuse to be frightened of creatures smaller than me and those whose pallor is green. I’d like to think they
were getting a charge out of us, out of our dramas, that we were providing them with a degree of entertainment. That is, I
hope we’re not too dull. Not that I want to be made fun of, no, but I’d like them to be lovingly amused. I’d like them to
feel as if they’d seen a masterpiece—a Preston Sturges film, for instance. I’d like them to feel as if the world, our world,
was a generous place. A tall order, to be sure.” She smiled at him, a genuine smile this time. “I’d like them to feel lighthearted.”

He was staring at her, all movement suspended. “I don’t know you,” he said after a minute. “I mean, I know you—you know I
know you, but I don’t know you. If you know what I mean. So it doesn’t make sense for me to want to tell you a secret. But—I’d
like to. I’d like to tell you one.”

“You probably shouldn’t,” she said, “since you don’t know me.”

He noodled the gravel with the toe of his boot. “I can appreciate that—but if you have any questions, about what you’re seeing?
Not that I’m an expert …” He rooted around in his pocket and pulled out a card for her. “If you find yourself thinking about
this scene, you could e-mail me, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

“Charlie Rider,” Jenna said. She was not going to bring up the Charles Ryder of
Brideshead Revisited
. “I met your wife a few weeks ago at the library. She was very helpful.”

“The indomitable Mrs. Rider,” Charlie sang out. “It was the greatest night of her life, talking to you.”

“I doubt that,” Jenna said. “At least, I hope it’s not true. Please do thank her again for me. And thank you for this—”

“Miracle.”

“Card,” she said firmly. “Thanks for the card.” The restrained, tasteful font was Eaglefeather, the invention of Frank Lloyd
Wright. You could tell a person’s class, or his aspirations anyway, his pretensions, perhaps, by his font. Someone else, she
was sure, had designed the card for him. If you had such a lavish head of hair and an impish face, if you had excitement pulsing
in your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to see clear to a font like Eaglefeather. As she got in the car, she called back to him,
“But what the hell are they?”

“If I told you,” he said, walking toward her, coming alongside her Toyota, “if I told you about the Silver People, you wouldn’t
believe me.”

“It all depends on how you tell it.”

“I don’t even believe me when I tell myself the story.”

“Then you’d better get to work on your narrative skills.”

“Narrative skills,” he echoed. He stuck his hand through her open window. “Charlie Rider,” he said, shaking what he had grasped,
shaking her fingertips. “It’s an honor to meet you. A real thrill.”