Laura Rider's Masterpiece Page 7

  “It was a pleasure to meet you,” she had concluded in her e-mail.

  “I love you,” he said to the screen.

  He printed out the message and bounded down the stairs with it. “She wrote me,” he called. “Laura! Where are you? She wrote me!” It did not, at this point, occur to him to suppress the information.

  His wife was back from her walk, from checking the irrigation rig, and had settled in her study, in the room Charlie had made for her when they’d bought the place. He’d ripped out the paneling, and made shelves for her books, her videos, and her collection of troll dolls, and he’d laid down hardwood that he’d salvaged from his uncle’s shop. At her bidding he’d painted the walls orange, a hot contemporary color that made him feel as if he were lying in the blazing sun with his eyes closed. It seemed doubtful it would suit her for her quiet moods, and at the paint store he’d asked the clerk to mix in a mere suggestion of white to cool it down. It was his small secret with the walls. She had a drafting table where she sketched her garden designs, and a desk for the paperwork, and a daybed for her reading. When he came through the door, she had her elbows on her desk, her hands at her cheeks, and she was staring at a thick plastic-coated library book. She looked up at him as if—for an instant—she didn’t recognize him. “What?” she said. “What’d you say?”

  “Jenna. Jenna Faroli. JFaroli at wis dot staff dot e-d-u. She, she fucking wrote to me.”

  The first thought that came to Laura was this: Jenna must not think Charlie is insane if she’s writing him only hours after she’s met him. “That’s great,” she said. He was wearing her plush pink bathrobe dotted with fat white sheep. “That’s—incredible.” He handed her the paper. “Don’t say fucking,” she said as she skimmed the message. She stilled herself and began again at the beginning. When she was done, she set the page aside, smoothing it with her fingers. “Now,” she said to her husband, “now we have to write her back.”

  “I know.” He had begun to jiggle, the thing he did that started in his knees, the spazzing that made his thighs wobble. “I know, I was just going to—”

  “We have to think what to say.” She opened her laptop. “We shouldn’t send it back instantly, though, that’s for sure. We should wait a few days.” He was eager, she could see, but she knew he was capable of being patient. He was like a good dog in that respect. She felt sorry for Muslim women in strict Islamic countries, sorry for submissive females, because if they were married to the Arabic version of Charlie it would be far more difficult to get things done. Under her direction, he had slaved away at realizing her vision for the farm. He had dug holes and hauled boulders and built fences and planted trees and pulled thistles. He would not, however, reroof the barn, because he was afraid of heights. She would never have asked it of him. “Charlie,” she said, “there’s this feeling I have.”

  “What feeling?” His wife, the realist, did not often have feelings, but when she did, all of a sudden Charlie was buying a farm, or plowing up a field for lavender, or hiring an old lady who’d seemed unlikely but would prove to be invaluable. Laura’s feelings were like dowsing rods.

  “I think,” Laura said slowly, “I think that you and Jenna should be friends.”

  He stopped jiggling. “How do you mean?”

  “I think maybe she moved to Hartley for this reason.”

  “What reason?”

  “To get to know you. It might sound nutty, but—”

  “To get to know me?” He pictured the stage again, the Grand Ole Opry, he and Jenna singing together with their backup girls. And then he saw the two of them standing on a hillside looking across fields and rivers and lakes, watching as the night velveted the sky, the stars one by one twinkling down at them. “Don’t you bet she’s busy all the time?” He said this wistfully.

  “There’s nobody like you,” his wife said matter-of-factly. That Charlie was one of a kind was the truest thing she could say about him. When they’d first met, she couldn’t stop taking pictures of him, and even though he had worn her out, she still thought he was beautiful. She remembered the way he’d used to look at her, the way the strength of his love, the love itself, she thought, had made his eyes wet and glossy. She knew she was getting ahead of herself, but she had to wonder what Jenna would think of Charlie, if a man like Charlie, that is, happened to aim his watery beams on her.

  Laura would have said that the first message was a collaborative effort, that if you had to talk in percentages her contribution was in the high seventies, and Charlie’s somewhere in the twenties. Charlie, she guessed, would probably come to imagine he’d written the entire thing, and that would be all right with her, it really would.

  “ ‘Dear Jenna (if I may):’ ”—Laura spoke as she wrote— “ ‘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.’ ” She paused, taking satisfaction that the voice sounded nicely self-effacing and complimentary, that it sounded enough like Charlie’s bull, and that in addition the content was Laura’s true feeling. Not bad. “Do we put a smiley face?”

  Charlie, forearms on the desk, his small, taut rear in the air, leaned into her. “No. She wouldn’t like it.” He was sure of this. “She likes words.” He read over what Laura had written and said, “What if Jenna quizzes me on her programs? I never listen to what she’s saying, I only hear how she’s saying it.”

  “She’s not going to quiz you.” Laura typed on in quiet for a minute. “ ‘You might be tired,’ ” she started up again, “ ‘of people telling you what you mean to them but it would require more … discipline than I have not to speak from my heart.’ That’s good! That’s great.” She could feel Charlie pressing into her side. “Do you want to tell her about the night with Petie Druzinksy and Bill Mabbit?” As if to herself she said, “I think so. I think you do.”

  “It has to be right, it has to be told in just the—”

  “You don’t want to make it sound too far out, like you were completely changed by it, like it wrecked your life. You want to make it seem like you could go either way, like it happened but maybe it didn’t happen.”

  “Which is pretty much accurate,” he said. “Most of the time I think that.”

  “How you sound depends on who you’re talking to. When you’re in the UFO chat room, there’s no question.” Laura had read over his shoulder once when he was online with the paranormal group, and she’d gotten so spooked, so afraid that the spaceship was going to return for Charlie, that she’d ended up taking a Valium.

  “I want to tell it—” he tried. “She said to tell—”

  “ ‘All of us,’ ” Laura was writing, “ ‘experienced an unbearable light come toward us. All of us remembered being … in the grip of it.’ ” She drew back to study her message. “Yes!” she said. “The grip of it!”

  She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the muskiness of Charlie’s deodorant, the mint of his toothpaste, the lavender of their bath soap. There was no trace of just plain man; hard to say whether Jenna would approve of his dueling layers, or if she was the kind who would try to sniff down to the original stink of Charlie himself.

  “The grip of it,” he repeated. Maybe that was all right. Maybe that was how it had been. He wanted Jenna to know it was real. He wanted her to understand how the light itself had picked him up, how he had been carried into something that wasn’t so much a place as a feeling. Not a Laura-type feeling, but the Charlie type. If you had to call it a place, it was like the inside of an egg, a smooth, transparent shell, warm and empty, beautiful, maybe, and terrible, too. At first he’d never been so alone.

  Laura was typing furiously: “ ‘If I were to believe in anything, though, it is that the Silver People arranged for us to meet.’ ”

  That was fine, Charlie thought, that was the truth. “Tell her,” he cried, “that she glowed. Because she did. She had a halo in the afternoon light.”

&nbs
p; “Not glow! That sounds like she was radioactive. ‘There was a light,’ ” Laura wrote, “ ‘around you on the pavement. My wife,’ ” she continued, “ ‘tells me I exaggerate, that I see things, but let me say that the light, the bluish light, seemed holy.’ ” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s laying it on heavy, but it is how you’d describe it.”

  “Say”—he was bouncing now, on his toes—“say, ‘You might not believe me, but it’s a fact. And say, ‘Whatever or whoever got us together, it was great to meet you.’ ”

  “ ‘Whatever or whoever,’ ” Laura typed, “ ‘or even if no one arranged our meeting, it was … it was lovely to share whatever it was, with you.’ She’ll be surprised, I’ll bet, and pleased, that you used the word lovely. Women like it when men use certain flowery words.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said.

  “Oh my gosh.” Laura’s hands froze on the keyboard.

  “What?” Charlie bent over so he was looking up into her unblinking eyes. “What’s the matter?”

  “Shush!” The understanding had come to her, a flash, so clear and then—gone. How to get it back? It was something about how her two fantasies were linked. They were linked, yes, because—because Laura’s notion that Jenna Faroli was her teacher and her daydream that she was an author were two parts of the same picture. Yes, yes! She could not be an author without Jenna, because Jenna was the guide into her book. That was what she had begun to see out in the Lavender Meadow: it was Jenna Faroli who would lead her up the glass mountain. All these years, Laura’s waking fantasies had seemed separate, but they were like Siamese twins, sharing organs, feeding off each other, the same blood flowing through the bodies.

  “What’s the matter?” Charlie said again.

  “Lovely,” she murmured. “I think Jenna already knows you’re not the average man, and so she’ll really appreciate the word lovely.” She stared not at her husband but at the screen. What category of hero was Charlie? Dreamer, yes; underdog, yes; artist, yes; bonkers, yes. She said, “How do we want to sign off?”

  “Yours truly?”

  “Yours truly—no. How about sincerely? ‘Yours truly’ sounds stuffy. ‘Sincerely’ sounds more … sincere.”

  “How about ‘very sincerely’?”

  “You always have to slather it on, don’t you?” She sighed. So let him have his way; let Jenna know he was both prone to excess and very sincere. Laura read the message through, stopping to change a word, to glance heavenward in thought, and back to the screen to correct the corrections. “I like it,” she pronounced at last. “I’m going to e-mail this to you, and then you send it to her. But wait a few days. She’s busy, like you said, and you don’t want to be pushy.”

  He had gone quiet, a dangerous sign, a sign that meant he was thinking.

  “Charlie,” she said softly, “she’ll be a great—a lovely friend for you.”

  Chapter 8

  BECAUSE JENNA AND FRANK LIVED OFF THE BEATEN PATH IN a place that seemed exotic to urbanites, and because through the years they had accumulated friends from all over the world, they often had houseguests. They considered themselves rich in good company, and they were usually not unhappy to host their visitors for two days—three at the outside. The week after Jenna’s woodland stroll at Prairie Wind Farm, Dickie, a former poet laureate, and his wife, Sally, the hematologist, came to stay for the weekend. Jenna and the poet began their Saturday morning sitting at the edge of her beginner’s garden in the floral lawn chairs that the former occupants had left behind. The chairs were too ugly to keep and too comfortable to discard, which in the future would be a problem in relation to the yard’s composition, when the fledgling plants took hold and became magnificent.

  Jenna and Dickie lounged next to each other, faces to the sun, as if they were on a cruise ship. Dickie was older than Jenna by twelve years, but his silky hair, which was still dark, and his small rectangular glasses, now back in fashion, made him seem nearly as youthful as he’d been when she’d met him, when she herself had been eighteen. He was Frank’s friend, but from the start, from their first dinner, there was no one she liked to talk to as much as Dickie Karmauth. In fact, she sometimes thought that Frank married her in large part because she fell into step so naturally with Dickie and Sally, his two essential pals. Dickie was a charming melancholic and, as Frank did, he knew everything, although his categories of everything were different.

  In the garden that morning, they discussed a biography they’d recently read of Leonard Woolf, which led to the predictable Bloomsbury tangents: their wish to visit the many sites, Sissinghurst and Charleston and Monk’s House; the work that was still circulating by Duncan Grant, available for purchase at a New York gallery; and Dickie’s eternal thanks to Jenna for a long-ago gift she’d given him, a sketch of Dora Carrington’s she’d found in London. It had been years since Dickie had recited the opening of To the Lighthouse to her, something he’d learned because it was the only book he’d had with him the summer he was stranded for two weeks on the Isle of Rassay, off the coast of Scotland.

  “ ‘Yes, of course,’ ” Dickie began, “ ‘if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.”

  Jenna closed her eyes, letting the sun do its damage, and listened. Virginia Woolf seemed to have perfect recall of how it felt to be a child, to be a boy with the prospect of an expedition, a boy in love with his mother, a boy filled with joy. Jenna, as always, was grateful for Dickie’s classy brain and generous heart. When he recited, Dickie himself receded, so that the work shone out, something that was not true when Frank spewed his soliloquies. The poet on the surface was softer, mellower than Judge Voden, but within he was tortured, although in a refined way. When he had his dark days, he went to his woodland cabin and read and listened to music and felt, he sometimes said, suicidal, but, he was quick to assure his friends, pleasantly so. His voice now was low and lulling. She wished he would recite To the Lighthouse all day long, recite as she fell asleep and stayed asleep, dreaming to the rhythms of Woolf’s sentences. An hour ago, she had gotten out of bed, but it didn’t matter that already she was limp and warm and drowsy. It was funny that, when she pictured the little boy in the book, James Ramsay, getting ready to go on his trip to the lighthouse, she imagined a young Charlie Rider. A delicate boy with brown eyes and curls, a boy who at first was quivering with anticipation.

  When she woke, for in fact she did fall asleep, the trees were shading her face, and she was covered with a thin blanket—the work of Dickie. Her guests were in the kitchen watching Frank pour a mixture of butter and lemon juice over the leg of lamb. Sally was saying to him, “Sweetheart, you’re caring for that slab of meat as if it’s a kitten.”

  “I love it more than a cat,” he murmured into the roasting pan.

  They were already drinking gin-and-tonics, although they had not yet eaten lunch. The afternoon would drift by them as they grazed and wandered from topic to topic. Frank would play the piano, accompanying Sally through her repertory of eighteenth-century Italian love songs. That Jenna wasn’t musical had probably been a disappointment to Frank, but she couldn’t help her failure. She’d been told in grade-school chorus to mouth the words, to make sure she didn’t actually sing. Frank, the Renaissance man, the overachiever, had minored in piano performance, and had not given up his chamber groups during law school. His greatest pleasures through the years had been accompanying Sally, and also making their daughter study the violin so he could play sonatas with her. Dickie and Frank, both single children who had adopted each other as sibling, had known Sally in college. There had been, apparently, a brief rivalry between the men over Sally, but she had resolved it for them, choosing Dickie while managing, nonetheless, to keep Frank close. Frank had never said, but Jenna knew that it had taken him years to get over his friend’s wife, the doctor, the soprano, the elegant blonde who still wore her hair in a French twist, the woman who had chosen the difficult poet with the silky hair ove
r the balding man of great reason.

  That morning, Sally and Frank had spent half an hour cracking open a hundred cardamom pods, after which he’d pulverized the seeds in the coffee grinder. He had approved the waxy cover of fat on the lamb and the soft purple muscle underneath; they all had been required to pay their respects. The windows and doors were wide open, and the fragrance of the roast in the mild June breeze added to their happiness. Midafternoon, they had ended up on the porch, deep into the wicker chairs, each with a book nearby, although no one was reading. Frank said to the guests, “Did Jenna mention that she saw a squadron of UFOs outside of Hartley?”

  “Lucky!” Dickie said.

  “Dickie’s the only person in the world who wants more than anything to have an experience with aliens but can’t because of his skepticism,” Sally said. “He always remembers that the little gray man he’s about to see is from that book The Andreasson Affair.” She let down her faded hair, curled it back up, stuck the four pins in place, and smoothed the top of her head. “He might be the only poet laureate who still reads science fiction.”

  “The dark secrets,” Dickie muttered.

  “What did you see?” Sally said to Jenna.

  “Frank’s teasing me. They were weather balloons.”

  “I thought for a while,” Frank said, “that I was losing my wife to the religion of alienography.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Jenna passed the tray of crackers and baba ghanoush to her husband. “I only said that I could understand, in this day and age, why people who want religion, but are disaffected from their own, would choose aliens to be their angels.”

  “Do you remember,” Frank said, “the mom and pop of abductees—Betty and Barney Hill in the early sixties? They seemed perfectly normal, perfectly sane. They had their abduction experience twelve days after they’d seen the ‘Bellero Shield’ episode of The Outer Limits.”