Laura Rider's Masterpiece (7 page)
“That was less of a stretch, puppies to the brain pan, than I thought it would be,” Jenna said to the two women after the
show.
“We had spaniels when I was little,” Suzie said. “My father had our favorite put down, no explanation. That was when I realized
I was never going to forgive him.”
“Suzie,” Carol said, “you’ve lost weight. Stand up once. Your ass is about four times smaller than it was three weeks ago.”
“Twelve pounds so far,” Suzie said.
“It’s because we see you every day,” Carol said, “that we hadn’t noticed.” Carol was small and trim, with a crew cut and a
wandering eye, her distinguishing feature. Suzie had frizzy blond hair, the physical manifestation, she always said, of being
ADHD.
“The thing I’m doing—it’s an effective diet.” Suzie was shuffling through her papers as she spoke. “I’m going for another
twenty. It’s about time, don’t you think? How long can you hate your body? How long do you battle your self-esteem issues?
Maybe you just can’t go on forever being a fatso and complaining about it.”
The fact that Suzie had not been talking about this so-called diet of hers, the fact that she had lost twelve pounds in silence,
made Jenna suspicious. It is, after all, a universal truth that women lose weight when they fall in love. Suzie, Jenna realized,
had been wearing thin V-neck T-shirts—that was what was different about her. Suzie had been showing off her breasts. So, if
Mrs. Raditz was having an affair, at some point Jenna and Carol and the engineer, Pete, would suffer from her suffering, even
if Suzie didn’t tell directly. There would be crying in the bathroom, there would be unexplained running from her cubicle,
there would be no whistling in the hallway. Leave it to Suzie to make something that drove them all crazy into a habit they’d
miss.
“What time tomorrow,” Jenna said, “are we calling Al?”
“Ten-fifteen,” Carol said. “That’s all set. And, Suzie, you got the author of the book about multiple births, about fertility
technology, for Tuesday, right?”
“She’s on board. I’ve got the book for you, Jenna. It will be clear, after you take a look at it, that people should only
be allowed to have babies by screwing. Night screwing, day screwing, round-the-clock screwing. By breaking their headboards,
by falling out of bed. If you can’t beget a kid without screwing, adopt. No more assisted reproductive technology allowed.”
“I’ll be sure to bring that up with the author,” Jenna said. “I’m sure saying so won’t offend anyone.”
On Friday, for fifteen minutes, she spoke by phone with Al Gore. In the studio she had a scientist from the Climate System
Research Center, as well as an emeritus professor of meteorology, an expert on hurricanes, a global-warming nay-sayer. It
was the type of show she least enjoyed, the sort of program that could so easily turn into a shouting match. The phone lines
had gone berserk after the professor had said that chemicals and pesticides had helped make our nation the safest, the healthiest
in the world. From her seat in Studio B, Jenna looked through the picture window into the next room, where Pete Warner managed
the control desk, and Suzie, at her computer, screened the callers. Suzie had a knack for ferreting out the toxic and the
schizophrenics, and in addition she could anticipate Jenna’s thinking, often sending her a caller who would give the show
a forward movement. It was when Suzie was separated from her by glass, and in the heat of the moment, that Jenna felt at one
with her. Separated by glass, Jenna loved frizzy-haired, buxom, gap-toothed ADHD Suzie Raditz.
After the climate show, Jenna closed her office door, took her headache medication, and began her weekend rereading of short
stories by a woman she called “the Saint.” It was her proudest accomplishment, to have finally snagged an interview with the
woman she considered to be the greatest living writer. She had forgotten about her Wednesday-evening
e-mail to Charlie Rider, had not, in fact, thought twice about a response from him. On Saturday, she sat on the porch at home
all morning and into the afternoon reading through the Saint’s collections, alternately terrified and thrilled at the prospect
of Monday’s interview. She would have been no more nervous, she said to Frank, if she’d been called upon to interview Virginia
Woolf or Henry James.
“You’ll be terrific,” he’d said. “She’ll love you.”
“I’m not after love,” she said. “I just want to do her
justice.”
“When are you not terrific?”
Would that every woman had a friend in her corner like Frank. Jenna had kissed her husband’s freckled summer pate, and gone
upstairs to check her mail. Who would have written her in the hours she’d been away? What delightful communication awaited?
“Charlie Rider?” she said out loud. She hoped she would not have to write him back; that was her first thought. She hoped
he was writing a simple thank-you for her thank-you, and that would be the end of it. She remembered, already with a pang
of regret, that she’d written to him more soulfully than she should have.
Subj: Highway S
From:
[email protected]
Dear Jenna (if I may):
Might I say that I have always admired you? Your warmth and energy have been a bright spot in my day for years now, in the
potting shed, in the car, in the kitchen. You are a light (but not a supernatural one) that has followed me from home, to
work, and back again. You might be tired of people telling you what you mean to them but it would require more discipline
than I have not to speak from my heart. I feel that you do not judge people, and so I feel safe telling you about my first
encounter with those beings I have always called the Silver People. I was eighteen. It was a Saturday night in midsummer.
Petie Druzinsky, Bill Mabbit, and I were walking through Doc Webster’s back forty. You will assume that we were under the
influence but I swear to you we weren’t. We hadn’t had a puff, a swig, nothing. As clear-minded as usual, which I admit is
not all that crystal clear. We experienced an unbearable light coming toward us. All of us remembered being in the grip of
it. None of us can explain what happened during the four hours that we can’t account for. Was it real? Did it happen? I no
longer know. I say to myself that it only happened because I perceived it happening, but I also am willing to believe there
are whole realms, entire realities, that we are not aware of. Because of that incident, Petie Druzinsky found Jesus. Bill
drinks more than he should and will not talk much about our experience. He blames his troubles—bad marriage, drunkenness,
inability to hold down a job—on that night. As I said, I believe it, I don’t believe it, I believe it, I don’t believe it.
If I were to believe in anything, though, it is that the Silver People arranged for us to meet. There was a light around you
on the pavement. My wife tells me I exaggerate, that I see things, but let me say that the light, the bluish light, seemed
holy. Whatever or whoever or even if no one arranged our meeting, it was lovely to share whatever it was, with you.
Very sincerely,
Charlie Rider
“No wonder!” Jenna said, laughing. If Charlie had seen her shrouded in a holy light, he could easily believe he’d had an encounter
with aliens. She, the virgin, humble, submissive, incurious. She laughed again. She imagined the three boys in the field standing
before—what? What had it been that would overpower three teenagers on a summer night? And she thought, Anything at all. Anything
could happen to the young, which was part of the sadness of growing older. No one, not even an alien, would want to abduct
Jenna, and, perhaps more to the point, even if a human-sized toad with language skills from Planet Z happened to be at the
door, Jenna would not give it the time of day. There were enough problems on earth without having to scavenge for more heartache
out in the universe.
She went back then, to the Saint’s stories, to those heroines who were often as wise as God but trapped by their erotic natures.
This is a persistent theme in your work, dear Saint
. She had begun her list of comments and questions:
1. Your females often swing between two states—indeterminacy and male mastery—no middle ground for them, no other modes of
being.
2. Do you think feminism has made it easier for women to negotiate the pitfalls of romantic love and marriage?
3. Your stories have moments of radiance, but the fantasies are always provisional. Why is character after character charmed
by excess even as they long for balance and wholeness?
4. Why are your women nearly always led astray by their obsessions for crazy or infantile or difficult or cruel men, men they
can neither be with nor escape?
IT HAD BEEN A DELAYED SPRING, AND WHEN THE WINDS CHANGED
and the air warmed, the trees budded and bloomed in swift succession, magnolia to redbud to apple to lilac, a suspended time
of fragrance, and migrating birds singing early and late. Jenna realized that in her suburban life of lawn mowing and bush
trimming, administered by Yard Care Inc., she had lost the sense of headlong rush, the race: grass and weed and root and vine
vying to be biggest, the most lush, to spread the farthest. She hoped to make a small, quiet garden by the porch with spiky
purple salvias and fluffy pink astilbe, and a touch of golden coreopsis, to dazzle the coolness of the composition. She had
been reading garden books and felt she was learning the lingo, just as she and Frank, years before, had acquired the wine-tasting
jargon. In the shady wooded corner, she wanted the delicate, starlike flowers of sweet woodruff and the frothy white rodgersia,
and, behind, the black snakeroot, and the queen-of-the-prairie—all of it to be sublimely thought out and lovingly tended.
And then the rest of their acreage, fields and woods, could go as wild and tangled as it pleased. She wrote about nature’s
competitive abandon to Charlie, and he e-mailed back, “Lust is everywhere in front of you and I.”
She meant to be subtle rather than schoolmarmish in her grammar correction. “I’m not sure if the blush and burst of spring,”
she rhapsodized, “in front of you and me is lust as much as desire.”
In the two weeks before they met for the second time, there were thirty-seven messages between them. A few were paragraph-length,
but most were short, a line or two, including among them three LOLs. That was the extent of their wish to abbreviate. Neither
of them used emoticons. She later thought that if he’d used them she would not have continued to write him. She could not
take anyone seriously who littered his communications with smiley faces and frowns, the exchanges seemingly written by a primary-school
teacher to her charges. Jenna would rather her correspondents have been abducted by aliens than resort to picturegraphs, to
colons and parentheses to express themselves.
She hadn’t planned for an epistolary relationship with him, but when he’d written her back, telling her about the night in
the field, she had felt compelled to say a few more words. She was suspended, she said in her second message, in a pocket
between disbelief and belief, as perhaps he was, a space made possible, finally, by being in her forties. She was now able
to hold two opposing views in her head and see virtue and meaning in both—a trick youth hadn’t afforded her.
If she was writing to Charlie Rider so earnestly, it was because she remembered a quality of striving in him; it was that
quality to which she spoke. She had no doubt, she’d assured him, that he was telling the truth, and even if memory and experience
itself weren’t always to be trusted, there wasn’t much else a person could do but trust the fragments, the distortions, the
longing that is memory.
He had written back a rhyme:
Subj: Tartoli
From:
[email protected]
Jenna Faroli, Queen of Tartoli,
The muse of Men, Women, and Mice,
She sings, she dances, she makes pasta e fagioli,
She’s smarter than Jesus H. Christ.
There were eleven more stanzas, each beginning with her name, each in the same spirit of encomium, ending with:
Jenna Faroli, the Dame of the Bandwidth,
Knows not how the world loves her voice.
Beyond all her kin, beyond all her kith,
Ninety-point-four FM is the choice.
“I am sure,” she replied, “that no one has ever before rhymed bandwidth with kith. This poem is the closest thing made for
me that sounds like it has been, but in fact was not, written by Dr. Seuss. I am going to render it in counted cross-stitch
and hang it on my office wall.”
Jenna received two hundred e-mails a day at work, and was not in need of more correspondents. She had three accounts, one
of which Suzie vetted, and another for in-house station business, and, last, her private address, which of late had been flooded
by her daughter. Vanessa was working on her doctorate at Washington University in St. Louis, and she called her mother every
day, in addition to writing her, sometimes hourly. Her study of postsynaptic 5-HT receptors and offensive aggression in rats
was turning out literally to be a rat race. There were other troubles as well, including the two boyfriends in the last year
who had proved to be enormous jerks, and there were the inconsiderate housemates, and quarrels with the lab technician. There
was no end of misery for Vanessa, and Jenna was ever poised to listen and offer what little solace she could. She had come
to dread the phone ringing at home, because she knew that whatever Vanessa was going to complain about was news that Jenna
would then have to carry with her, another piece of unhappiness that daughter had carelessly unloaded on mother.
She had had Vanessa when she was twenty-two, ten months after her marriage to Frank, because she’d been told she would have
trouble conceiving. The child bride got knocked up immediately, but in delivery her uterus had ruptured, nearly killing her
and the baby. That Jenna had had a hysterectomy at such a young age was a great sadness in her otherwise lucky life. She often
wished, when Vanessa called, that there were sisters for her to phone instead of the one helpless and perhaps overly indulgent
and involved mother. Vanessa could have used a phalanx of siblings to absorb her complaints, but her busy parents had put
off adopting, and finally it had been too late.