Laura Rider's Masterpiece (6 page)

Two weeks after she’d talked to Jenna Faroli at the garden meeting, on an ordinary Wednesday night in May, she had, before
dinner, still been in the early stages of her romance research, not to mention vague about who her characters would be. Making
his entrance into the kitchen for his supper, Charlie, as usual, took a running start in the carpeted hall, and then slid
in his stocking feet across the linoleum to the table. When they’d bought the farm, Laura had gone to considerable trouble
to find the boxy refrigerator in pale green, and a speckled green-and-white Formica table, and chairs with plastic seats,
so that the old farm kitchen was true to a gentler and more loving time, a period when neighbor women gathered to shell peas
and put up tomatoes and pickles. Not that Laura had time for those old arts, not that she had time, these days, for friendship.

“You’ll never guess,” Charlie said, landing in his seat, “who I saw on my way home.”

She was setting out two corn dogs for him, and a bowl of Tater Tots, baby carrots, and a glass of milk. For herself she had
made a salad and a chicken patty. “Who?” she said.

“Guess.”

“Give me a hint.”

He didn’t want to make it too easy. “A person,” he said, “who never name-drops, far as I can tell.”

“Take a napkin. Your sister?”

He reached for a stack of green-and-white-checked paper napkins in the crock. “Nope.”

“Man or woman?”

“Woman—or hybrid, maybe. Every bit a woman but—”

“Bigger than a bread box?”

They had played this game for years. The bread-box line was standard.

“Larger, in her britches, much, than a bread box, but small enough, humble enough, to be a … beginner.”

“Big enough in her britch—” Laura lurched across the table. “Her?” She grasped his shoulders. “You saw her?”

He was happy for any occasion when she touched him, and wished she had not so soon gone back to her own side. “Saw her! I
freaking watched the Silver People with her. I flipping talked with her for at least twenty minutes.” Laura did not like him
to use profanity, and he did his best to avoid it in her presence. He picked up his corn dog on a stick and spoke into it.
“Charles Rider and Jenna Faroli sighted a UFO convoy this afternoon on Highway S, in the township of Hartley. Ms. Faroli was
skeptical at first but warmed to the idea that unidentified objects could be messengers from beyond our realm.”

“You talked to her?” Mrs. Rider absently reached for a carrot. What in the world had Jenna Faroli thought of Charlie? Laura
had always imagined meeting Jenna, but somehow never expected Charlie to have the experience. Did Jenna think he was insane
or lovable? It could go either way, depending, and Laura couldn’t always be sure what person would think which way. Was Jenna
laughing at him—was she mocking him right now in the privacy of her kitchen? Charlie Rider, the ding-a-ling. “What do you
mean, the Silver People?” Laura asked. “How Silver and how People-ish?” If he had told Jenna about the alien thing, she would
for sure think he was certifiable.

He was tossing his Tater Tots, one by one, into the air, and seeing if he could land them in his mouth. It was funny, how
lately she was thinking about her book all the time, even when she was doing tasks that had nothing to do with it, such as
watching Charlie, his head thrown back and roving side to side, his mouth wide open, his straight little top and bottom teeth
bared. The question that occurred to her just then came like a stranger knocking on her door: What kind of hero would Jenna
Faroli want, and, more important, need? What kind of lover? It was as if, along with the question barging in, came Jenna herself
in her wide-legged Chinese silk pants and a matching wrinkled jacket, and her messy hair. It was as if she were standing there
on the welcome mat waiting for Laura to decide.

Would Jenna want the Hero Devoted to a Cause? She might, since she was always interviewing people who were bent on doing good
works. Or would Jenna be drawn to the Weary Warrior, someone she could mother? Or could Jenna, deep down, have a basic need
for the hulk, for the Alpha, the type who’d untie her from the tracks, or in the modern-day narrative donate a kidney to her
and then do the surgery himself? The manual did say it was important to have a gimmick, and Laura was partial to the Alpha
Medical Doctor idea. What had initially seemed relatively simple was getting more difficult by the minute. If Laura’s book
was going to appeal to Every Woman, if it was going to be about Every Woman, that heroine had somehow to include the qualities
of a Jenna Faroli–type intelligence.

“Charlie,” Laura said firmly. “Stop that. Use your fork. Tell me. Tell me everything.”

After dinner, she went outside to check the irrigation rig that had been giving problems in the west nursery. The air was
warm and sweet, and the rising moon with its yellow cast was not stern, as it sometimes seemed on a cold winter night. She
wondered again what Jenna Faroli had thought of Charlie and his cuckoo suggestion that he was the one to call if she ever
had a question about extraterrestrials. She had forgotten the purpose of her walk as soon as she’d stepped outside. Her shoes
were getting wet, but she didn’t notice. She would later think she was behaving like Charlie, lost in her own world, forgetting
what she was supposed to do, and not wearing her boots. She walked along the mowed path to the Lavender Meadow, asking herself
what kind of heroine Jenna would be. Hard-core professional, naturally, but deep down was she a Wild Woman, or had she once
been a Virginal Heroine? Not a virgin-virgin necessarily, but the type who is unconscious of her own passionate nature—until,
that is, she’s awakened by the hero. Did you have to be strict about your archetypes, Laura wondered, or could you mix and
match, at least a little bit? Could you have an Earth Virgin who was wild? Would you run into trouble if you allowed the characters
to stray from their archetypical traits, if you allowed them just to be themselves?

There was a list of workshops and conferences at the back of the romance manual, and she could see now that she might possibly
need some assistance. Maybe she could go to the four-day annual workshop over Labor Day at the Bear Claw Resort and Conference
Center in the Wisconsin Dells, which wasn’t all that far from Hartley. Years before, her family had said that she wouldn’t
be able to get the garden business off the ground, that she didn’t know enough, didn’t have the smarts, but she’d done fine.
She’d figured out where to get help, and she’d had the starch to hire Charlie’s sister, who had a master’s degree in landscape
architecture. And now she knew to sign up for a workshop, to tap into the knowledge of the experts. The workshop was months
away, however, and in the meantime she thought she could get started if she could somehow channel Jenna Faroli. If she became
friends with Jenna, if Jenna became a client, and then a confidante, she would tell Jenna her best and most painful stories.
She’d tell her about her parents, her despicable father, the notorious wife-beater.

They’d sit on the sofa in Laura’s study, both of them in stocking feet drawn under them, wrapped in shawls, drinking hot chocolate.
Jenna would be amazed and horrified, but she’d understand the very human element of the situation. Laura and her siblings
had never discussed the fact that their mother had killed their father. They all knew it, but they had never said it out loud
to one another. Laura would tell Jenna about how, five years before his death, her father had had a stroke, and her mother,
Betty, had called for an ambulance. When he got out of the hospital, when he had recovered sufficiently, he struck his wife
once, twice, again, shouting that she must never humiliate him like that, not ever, letting his community see him writhing
on the floor, incapacitated. She must never call 911 on him for any reason. So that when he was in danger years later, when
he choked on a hard, round piece of broccoli stalk, Betty watched him clutch his throat. She watched while he gestured wildly
at her. She sat still with her hands folded in her lap. She watched while he turned an unattractive, throbbing scarlet, and
while he made gasping sounds, and while the color drained from his face. The change in his complexion was gradual, just as
the sky’s light inexorably and seamlessly dims when the sun goes down. She watched while he made the stuttering gurgles of
strangulation, and she watched while he banged over onto the floor. The chair tipped, too. When she remembered it, the fall
seemed to her to have occurred in slow motion and without any clattering. She watched the blank space across from her for
sixty-five minutes, in order to be sure, before she called her son. No one, not her grown children, and not the men on the
rescue squad, all of whom had known Laura’s father, asked any questions. Laura was certain that there was no hero or heroine
category, not in the romance genre, into which an author could squeeze her mother and father.

Her manual said there had to be a story question, that finding the question, or settling on the question, was the way to begin.
She realized that in a roundabout way she had been asking herself, since Charlie came home that night, one essential question:
what, for Jenna Faroli, would be the ideal man? The manual had said to pay attention to your itches. Laura remembered, too,
that the manual stressed how important it was to do exercises to learn about your characters. She hung her arms over the fence,
and picked a long grass, and chewed on it thoughtfully. She wasn’t sitting in a chair smoking and drinking tea, but the fence
and the grass seemed, in the moment, close approximations to her fantasy props. The pieces of the story would fall together.
She didn’t know why or how she knew this, but all the same she was sure. What she had to do was discover what Jenna Faroli
needed, what Jenna Faroli longed for. Charlie had mentioned that he’d given Jenna his e-mail address. Laura, thinking of that,
closed her eyes and saw all at once a small opening, as if in the distance. A prick of light. It was the warm, well-lit tunnel
of cyberspace, and she could hear it, too, hear the scurrying, the hum of the channel that would connect Jenna and Charlie.
Jenna, she realized then, would somehow come to her through Charlie. There was mystery in creating a book world, the manual
had said, and she could already feel that it was so.

IN JENNA’S FIRST E-MAIL, SHE MEANT TO SAY LITTLE BEYOND
the fact that she’d enjoyed meeting Charlie. She mentioned her hydrangeas, their condition the result of the former owner’s
neglect, and how hopeful she was that with compost, informed pruning, and a watering schedule the bushes would flourish and
bloom. As she wrote, she had the sense that, although he was in the business, he was probably not someone who was interested
in her shrubbery. She went on to say that she felt as if she were developing a garden fetish, that whenever she was in her
office she longed to be outside. The cool air on her bare arms, she wrote, was all she wanted. Was this common in the middle-aged?
she asked, as if Charlie were a doctor.

In the matter of extraterrestrials, she said she thought the impulse toward belief was driven by awe, by the wonder at how
small our own lives are. She had paused while writing to listen to the frogs outside, such tiny creatures capable of making
such a racket, creatures that in their habits at first seemed alien, though their calling out for love, the cry of their selves,
should have been familiar. She wrote that to him, too. How many glasses of the Sena 2002 had she drunk? She didn’t really
wish to know Charlie Rider or to correspond with him at any length—heavens, no!—but it was neighborly to tell him she had
savored the moment, standing side by side, gazing at the solar disturbances. There was, Jenna went on, something comforting
about the idea of life out in the galaxy, the idea that the adventure of man, something we seemed to be botching up, was perhaps
not a one-shot deal. “I assume,” she said, “that your experience was not fearsome. Indeed, I hope it was not.” send, she pressed—oh
send, oh send! E-mail, she thought, was sometimes less like letter writing and more like finger painting, like a joyful, careless
spattering.

On the morning after, on Thursday, she did her show about dog training, the solace of puppies, and the human brain. Jenna
had two producers: Carol, who lassoed authors, actors, musicians, and politicians, those on the circuit with books, movies,
or CDs; and Suzie, who was purer in her method. She tended to navigate by subject, to find ideas they should explore, and
then see if there was anyone who fit the bill. Though their jobs overlapped, Suzie did more of the research, and was on hand
for Jenna during the program, channeling callers to her, and alerting her to station breaks, reminding her, if the conversation
strayed, to get back to a certain tack. Gary, the executive producer, usually edited the prerecorded segments, with Carol
and Jenna’s input. Suzie whistled through her front teeth and talked far too much about herself, and Carol could be unnervingly
quiet, but Jenna had grown used to their quirks and their failings. She meant to appreciate them, and she tried to reward
their efforts and loyalty. She also put a good deal of energy into mentoring the young people who came through doing internships
or those in their first jobs. It was her hope that none of them would have to fight power-hungry prima donnas and timid, intractable
administrators, as she had had to do when she was coming up. She did like the idea of herself as the grande dame, she who
was incapable of being threatened, she who welcomed and nurtured the next crop.