Laura Rider's Masterpiece Read online

  All through the day, as she instructed her work crew, as she waited on customers, and later, when she was back at her desk doing accounts, she turned the burning question over and over: when she found out, how would she feel? The odd thing was, she couldn’t tell. She guessed she was removed from the potential pain because of the excitement and the challenges of the project itself. She didn’t know if that was good or bad, a mark for or against her. Did it mean she was a terrible person or a committed artist, or both? And another stumper: when Laura was not taking Jenna’s messages for granted, when she really thought about it, she was amazed by how easily Jenna had gotten caught up in the correspondence. That Jenna wanted to communicate with Laura/Charlie was definitely a boost to Laura’s self-esteem. But it was weird, too, that Jenna was wasting her time on Charlie, that she’d write him so contemplatively, that she’d bring up philosophical matters. On the other hand, she could be enigmatically brief. After she’d come to the farm with her friends, she had written to Charlie, “I saw you.”

  I saw you. Was the line charged? You had to wonder. Or was Laura reading too much into the sentence? The fact was that, so far, the radio personality was a mystery. What Laura had to remember was that Jenna Faroli was her subject. Studying Jenna was the goal. She must keep in mind that if Jenna, the most superior kind of woman, could love Charlie, then Every Woman was capable of loving him, and Laura would understand the universal female. Laura must always keep her eye on that prize. The tables could very well be turned in her romance, the woman, by her love, raising up the man to his fullest potential. Maybe her very own Charlie Rider was the man for the twenty-first century, a new model. A male who was not the slacker type, not a slob on a sofa making crass jokes but a man who was serious. A man in earnest about being submissive by day and a conqueror by night. A man who, when he went to war, would make the enemy laugh, a man who tried to become one with the chipmunks, a man who was at home in the universe, a man who loved his own sperm—one million and one, one million and two—because they were such good swimmers, and because nearly all of them died for nothing.

  “You should arrange to meet Mrs. Voden for coffee,” Laura said to her husband the next morning. “Ask her how her garden is doing. You could offer to go over there and take a look.”

  Charlie had the good fortune to have supple skin that did not go leathery in summer. He was looking well, she thought, not only because he was fit and bronzed, but because his eyes were going into the love mode. It was as if the love were a liquid that was filling him up to the eyeballs. So it was happening. She made a mental note to make a real note: Charlie, wet eyes, barometer of love. It hit her then, that this was it. Right here and now, this was it in real, actual life. Charlie was leaving her. Not physically, no, but in the other equally important ways, emotionally, spiritually, psychically. “Charlie,” she called softly. She put her head down on the table and stretched one hand across to his place. She wanted to tell him not to go too far, not to go beyond the garden gate. “Charlie!”

  He was at the sink, running the water, filling the coffeepot, knowing, without hearing the sense of her murmurs, that she was discussing a topic of great importance with the two cats who were sacked out at her feet.

  The third meeting of Mrs. Voden and Charlie a few days later, as told to Laura by her husband, went on longer than he’d figured. They had coffee at the one café in Hartley, called the Queen Bee. “I talked too much,” Charlie reported to his wife.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “About Mom and Dad-o. About—”

  “Drinking out of the bottle until you were seven?”

  “The whole story.”

  Women, Laura considered, would like that detail, the idea of little Charlie having breastlike comfort, and the idea that Charlie’s mother had been relaxed and loving enough to ignore the child-rearing experts. “Did you tell her about barely graduating from high school?”

  “Like I said, I told her everything.”

  Had that been smart? If Jenna liked Charlie enough, she would appreciate how intuitive he was even though people in Hartley thought he was at heart a loser and a fruitcake. But if Jenna was just passing the time with Charlie, for her own bizarre reasons, if she was having a conversational fling, she would probably think that Charlie was, in fact, a loser. Still, Jenna had experience with all kinds of people, and Laura’s guess was that she would be impressed by Charlie’s ability to make something of himself even if his high-school teachers hadn’t been able to get him to read the assigned books or do his written homework.

  Since the morning when Charlie’s eyes had been doing the telltale glistening, Laura had given herself many stern talkings-to, reminding herself that this, after all, was her plan, and reassuring herself, too, that she was pretty much in charge, more or less, because of her access to the e-mails. She wouldn’t let Charlie stray very far, and in the meantime she was going to learn so much from the experiment, the adventure, the gamble—the whatever it was.

  “What do you think Jenna likes about you?” Laura said.

  Charlie drummed his fingers on the kitchen table. “Is this Twenty Questions?”

  “Maybe.”

  “She likes me because, even though I’m scrawny, I’m a stud. She likes me because she has never met anyone as studly as myself.”

  “But besides that. Why else?”

  “Okay, okay.” He rested his head on his fists and thought awhile. “She likes me because she knows she’s not going to have to interview me about nuclear physics or international labor laws. She’s not going to have to keep—whatever they’re called—the Sunnis and the Shiites straight.”

  “She likes you because you don’t know about anything important?”

  “Bingo.”

  “You’re restful to be with?”

  “Restful, that’s it. Restful.”

  Everything he’d told his wife was true. There were, however, several details that Charlie had omitted in the story of his date with Jenna. They had not spent time in the café but instead had ordered their coffee and morning buns to go. He had told her he’d like to show her a favorite spot in a county park, about six miles south of Hartley. They had driven in his car through town, past the ice-cream shop, the bait shop, the resale shop, and the therapist’s house, which was also her office. He told her about the therapist, Sylvia Marino, about Sylvia’s troubles with her fifteen-year-old daughter. Every afternoon, the girl sat on the steps of her house—also the steps of the therapy office—with five boys, five lugs, who were her only friends, and seemed to be vying for her affections. Ariana Marino splayed herself across the steps, and the five enormous boys surrounded her, leaden moons to her gaseous planet. Periodically Sylvia would come out and shoo them away, but the next day there they were again, sprawled on the stairs. All the people who were in counseling had to step over them to get to their appointments. Jenna had loved that story, and he’d driven them around the block twice, looking for any sign of fair Ariana.

  Once they got to the park, they walked along the path through the restored prairie, and along the crest of a hill where there was a single tree, a stocky burr oak with generous lower limbs. Charlie scrambled up to the spot he used to come to after his grandfather died. He reached down to Jenna and helped her to sit beside him. She seemed unconcerned about getting her light linen pants dirty, a quality he admired in a woman. “How I love a pretty little girl,” he sang in his gravelly voice, “Lord only knows. She brought me a letter, and said she’d be mine, and I can hardly wait to love her all the time.”

  The trees were well past the delicacy of their leafing and into the full-bodied vigor of summer. How beautiful and strong the world was! How free Charlie and Jenna were, alone, away from everyone who loved them. “Sometimes,” he said to her, “I think of telling you secrets.”

  She was gazing out to a pond in the distance.

  “Sometimes I’d like to tell you that my wife won’t, you know, sleep with me. That she gave it up years ago. I’d like to te
ll you that this seems unfair …” Jenna was very still. She didn’t turn her head or make a sound or appear to be listening. “It makes me,” he whispered, “sad.”

  “I know” was all she said, after a minute.

  She didn’t tell him, not until several days later, in a message, what she’d been thinking. In the moment she could feel herself swimming in the cool water of the pond that was down the hill and past the cornfield. She was swimming in that imaginary girlhood, a childhood that had unfolded with Charlie, a long-ago life together. She could see it and hear it, the details, the plinth of their bond, a secret language, a place in the crook of a tree with chipped teacups, the escape at night through an old lake house, through the wet grass, to swim naked in the black water. It was that idea, up in the tree, perhaps more than the man himself that made her reach for him. There, the first kiss! He clasped her face—and between them there were astonished and grateful smiles. He kissed her cheeks, her brow, and then the second kiss, longer than the first, and deeper. Charlie did not think of Mrs. Rider much. How could he when he had Jenna in his arms, Jenna with her creased white eyelids solemnly shut and her tongue so shyly exploratory. Because he had always been prone to think in ecclesiastical terms when it came to love, he believed that he was nearing heaven’s gate, that he was about to be welcomed, after the long absence, back to paradise.

  Chapter 10

  ON A SCORCHING DAY AT THE END OF JUNE, JENNA WAS sitting in Studio B, just finished with the morning’s program, a show that had featured three authors of Hillary books, all of them patched in from around the country. The studio was dim in the corners and cool, and Jenna, by herself, felt miles from stalled traffic and fierce sunlight and the gang shooting that had occurred not far from the station at dawn, and presidential candidates, including Hillary, who in unlikely small towns were recovering from their pancake breakfasts and preparing for their picnics. She would have to get out in a minute, making way for David Oberhaus, who did the daily read-aloud show, but she liked sitting in the stillness, with her mike in front of her, the sleek cylinder that felt as if it were part of her, an extension of her vocal cords. Suzie Raditz had once told Jenna that in the post-show moments she could see Jenna’s on-air self—that large, generous, unfailingly curious character—get coiled up and put away, stored for another day’s use. Jenna had supposed it was an insult, and yet there was probably truth in it. The outsized on-air Jenna was not necessary back in the office preparing for yet another show.

  She could see Suzie through the window, at the control desk, talking to Pete Warner, the engineer. Gone were Suzie’s frumpy drawstring pants and plain T-shirts and worn-out sandals. She was wearing a summer dress, a yellow sleeveless frock that was not inappropriate, not really, and yet she walked with a self-conscious boldness, and she stood with defiance, her arms crossed under her breasts, her feet, in dainty heels, planted wide. It was her impenitence that seemed lewd. Jenna understood that there is no one as wildly happy as the middle-aged woman who has discovered or rediscovered her sexual self. She had seen the type countless times. There is perhaps no one as self-absorbed or as careless even as she takes pains to go in secret. Suzie, despite the new dress, however, did not look radiant or youthful or exhilarated. Her skin was gray, she had circles under her eyes, and the concealer she wore on her neck drew attention to the hickeys rather than masking them. It had been years since Jenna had seen a hickey. Had they gone out of fashion? Or was Jenna not around enough young people? She should ask Suzie if hickeys were making a comeback in the culture at large.

  It did not surprise her that as soon as she sat down at her desk Suzie was at her office door. She had felt the Raditz, as Pete Warner called her, coming on as one feels a headache or a bad cold gathering force. The weight loss had made the producer’s long nose seem longer, and her green eyes larger and closer together. Love, it seemed, was a starvation diet.

  “It’s interesting,” Suzie said, “that, no matter how well researched those Hillary books are, no matter how much time the author has spent following her around, you never really get a sense of who she is.” She closed the door and sat across the desk from Jenna.

  That morning, Pete had also barged into Jenna’s office, in order to deliver an oration on Suzie’s breasts, in order to hold forth about how the technologically advanced brassiere he believed she now wore, an undergarment that was intended to lift and separate, did not fit Suzie, and that, although her boobies were higher than their naturally sucked-out mother-tit selves, they also looked squashed, cramped, unnatural, and dangerous. The threat level of her breasts, he’d explained to Jenna, was ORANGE.

  “Thank you, Pete,” Jenna had said.

  Suzie plucked a tissue from the box on the desk—a bad sign, Jenna knew. “I need your help,” Suzie said, dabbing at her nose. “I really need your assistance. I’m in over my head, Jenna.”

  “What seems to be the problem?” Jenna was trying not to look at Suzie’s chest, trying not to remember what Pete had said about the threat level.

  “Let me just say that I know it’s not exactly fair to bring issues like this to you. I know that. You’ve always been clear about the boundaries. But you’re the only person who can help, the only one who can go—”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The matter is … the matter is David Oberhaus.”

  “David?” The professor of English who’d done the read-aloud half-hour segment at twelve-fifteen for as long as Suzie had been at the station.

  “I’ve been having a—a thing with David, a thing—”

  “Suzie.” Jenna tried to modulate her voice so that there was an undertone of warmth, a very quiet undertone, barely detectable, but present. She did not want to sound unfeeling, but she had no intention of encouraging Suzie, of falling down the black hole of need that was Suzie Raditz. “I can tell you’re distressed,” Jenna said. “You look exhausted. Do you need a few days off? A week? Or two?”

  “I need your help. Please, Jenna. You were so great to me when my mother was sick. You were there for me, and I’ve never forgotten it, I haven’t. It’s just that I need that kind of support again.”

  Jenna had made the error, early on in Suzie’s tenure. She had been young, too, and hadn’t yet understood that her staff could not be her friends. After the mother had died and Suzie had regained her strength, Jenna drew back, declining her dinner invitations and outings to the movies, and avoiding the heart-to-hearts. They had gone on together in what Jenna hoped was a rewarding working relationship for Suzie.

  “I’m worried,” Suzie was saying, “about David. I mean seriously worried. And if this thing gets out, and it looks like it might—”

  “I can give you time off. Go away with your husband. Take the kids to the Dells. Get yourself rested and grounded—”

  “You’re not hearing me.” She was crying now, pulling tissue after tissue out of the box. “I need you to talk to people in Administration. I need you to go to David, to make sure he doesn’t—”

  “I am hearing you, Suzie.” Jenna spoke evenly. Pushing the tissue box closer to her employee was the best show of support she could manage. “I’m not available to help you cover up your adultery. I hope that’s clear. The less I know, actually, the better. I’m not going to talk to Gary, I’m not going to discuss it with David. It’s none of my business.”

  “I’m trying to talk to you,” Suzie pleaded, “as a friend. Is that too much to ask? I’ve worked for you for sixteen years. I’ve always been—”

  “Invaluable,” Jenna said, standing up. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get involved with your scandal. If you need time off, let me know.” She went to the door and put her hand on the knob. “Try to find the thrill in sound judgment.” She paused, to let that idea sink in. “I’d prefer not to lose you. That would be terrible. You know how much I depend on your curiosity, your ability to probe a subject, and your gift for making connections. You know I couldn’t operate as I do without you. However, this is simple office
decorum. You understand the rule, that you don’t shit where you eat. I hope you can keep whatever situation you’ve gotten into under control.” In the moment, she had the small satisfaction of not having capitulated. “I know you’ll work it out.” She left Suzie sobbing, soaking the eyelet lap of her yellow sundress.

  Shortly after Suzie’s crisis, Jenna was making her way home from her first county-park assignation with Charlie. Frank was always in the backdrop of her mind, but she wasn’t actively thinking about him, and neither did she dwell on the three ticks that had come crawling down her arm, which she sliced to pieces with her fingernail. She tried not to think about more burrowing into her back and her scalp, tried not to think about the complications of Lyme disease. Instead, she pictured Ariana, the therapist’s daughter in Hartley, who spent her afternoons with her suitors on the steps of her mother’s office. How would the princess choose just one boy? She thought, too, of Suzie Raditz and David Oberhaus. What had Jenna said to Suzie? Try to find the thrill in sound judgment. What fly-by-night Girl Scout leader had that come from? David was genial, had a soft, feminine-looking mouth, and was an Americanist, specializing in Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Robert Penn Warren. Suzie’s husband was not so different from David physically, but he was an entomologist for the county extension. Had Suzie wanted someone she could talk to about books, or was David’s appeal unrelated to his love for the big cats of American literature? Whatever the attraction, Jenna imagined that Suzie had filled her dresser with black lace crotchless panties, that she’d hidden them under her extra-large T-shirts, which she wore as pajamas in her tired marriage to the bug man.