Laura Rider's Masterpiece

by Jane Hamilton

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Laura and Charlie Rider have been married for twelve years. Although Charlie’s enthusiasm in the bedroom has worn Laura out, they are happy enough. Jenna Faroli is the host of a popular radio show, and after she and Charlie cross paths one day, she, he, and Laura begin an e-mail correspondence. Laura cannot resist using Charlie to try out her new writing skills. But the “project” quickly spins out of control—Jenna is transformed in ways that deeply disturb her, and Laura is transformed in ways that are hilarious, poignant, and beyond her wildest expectations.

Release date: April 9, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 224

Sample

JUST BECAUSE LAURA RIDER HAD NO CHILDREN DIDN’T mean her husband was a homosexual, but the people of Hartley, Wisconsin, believed he was, and no babies seemed to them proof.
They also could tell by his heavy-lidded eyes that were sweetly tapered, his thick dark lashes, his corkscrew curls, his skinny
legs and the springy walk, and the fact that he often looked dreamily off in thought, as if he were trying to see over the
rainbow. In the municipal chambers at a public meeting, a town councilman had once said that Charlie Rider needed a shot of
testosterone. It was a mystery to Laura that in Hartley, population thirty-seven hundred, people who had never been to a gay-pride
parade or seen any cake boys that they knew of outside of TV actors, were so sure about Charlie. She assumed that, like any
place, the town was laced with fairies, not visible to the naked eye, but Charlie, she could testify, was not one of them.
Laura herself had not been to a pride parade, but her personal experience included her flamboyant uncle Will, her outrageous
cousin Stephen, her theatrical playfellow Bubby from the old neighborhood, and also Cousin Angie, who had tried to shock them
all by having a lesbian phase in college. No one in the family, it turned out, cared.


Mrs. Charles Rider was the one qualified to set the residents straight about her husband, not because of her expertise with
her various beloved queens, but because of her long life so far with the man himself. Make no mistake, Laura would have liked
to say, Charlie Rider was crazy about women. Charlie was not squeamish. Charlie, if they must know, worshipped the pudendum.
She wanted to lambaste the town, to tell them that the cruelty he had endured through his school years had been grossly misplaced.
In the bedroom he was not only at the ready, always, he was tender, appreciative, unabashed, and, incidentally, flexible.
A night with Charlie was equivalent, both for burning calories and in the matter of muscle groups, to doing the complete regime
of the Bowflex Home Gym. Charlie emphatically was not fag, swisher, fembo, Miss Nancy, chum chum, or any of the other names
he’d been called since second grade. It had always impressed Laura that a town that thought it had so few gays had so many
labels for the aberration that was supposedly her husband.


The real problem was that, after twelve years of marriage, Laura had become permanently tired of his enthusiasm. She’d realized
that if you gave an inch you were in for the mile, that if you were even occasionally available he assumed the welcome mat
was always on the stoop. She disliked the whole charade of fatigue or preoccupation, but she hated, too, how the pressure
of his need had jumbled not only her body but her brain. She was losing her mind, losing her ability to stay focused and organized.
When he hung around her study after dinner, when his sighs seemed to blow through the house, she knew she’d have to give up
her beautiful, well-thought-out plan for a productive evening. And for what? Come morning, there he’d be, eyeball to her eyeball,
fresh, apparently, as a daisy, as if months, not hours, had passed since the last full-body slimnastic routine.


Both before and after she’d quit sleeping with him, she’d read articles and books about sexual fatigue. There were features
in women’s magazines, often with photographs of bombed-out wives, shoulders sagging, bags under the eyes, sitting on perfectly
made beds. Laura understood that she was among millions, that she was another casualty in what was clearly a national epidemic.
She had explained it to Charlie as kindly as she could, saying that, just as a horse has a finite number of jumps in her,
so Laura had used up her quota.


“No more jumping?” he said. “Not ever?”

“I can’t,” Laura said. “I love you, but I can’t.”

“What if we take down a few of the fences on the course? Lower the bars? Shorten the moat by the boxwoods? How—how about trying
a—”


“I’m sorry,” Laura said, and in the moment she did feel a little rueful. “Charlie, I am sorry, but can’t you see? I’m out
to pasture.”


Her secret fear about this new phase of their life was that, without his one superb talent, which, she granted, had given
her hours of pleasure and even, she would say, fulfillment—without that contribution to the household, she wondered if he
actually had all that much else to offer, if he would prove to be worthless. What a terrible thought! She didn’t mean it.
But might he be like a quarterback who, once retired, didn’t have the smarts to buy a restaurant chain or a fitness club?
When such ideas, unpoliced, crept up on her, she strenuously defended Charlie to herself. He had a multitude of virtues: his
help to her in their business, his sunny nature, his ability to make jokes about catastrophes, his flights of fancy, and the
fact that when they made up stories together about, for instance, their own cats, they were so united in their invention it
was as if they inhabited the same brain.


Aside from the Riders’ separate bedrooms, there were several details about Laura that the people of Hartley would have thought
they had no need to consider. They knew she was artistic with plants, but landscape and horticulture were subjects they believed
a girl could learn about by looking at seed catalogues. They did not know that she had lived with her sister for a year, and
nearly every day gone to the University Library to study garden books. Also, she read novels, a habit none of her friends,
and no one in the family, shared. It was a quirk her sisters would think was an affectation—Laura, the community-college dropout,
trying to show off. It was because of this imagined censure on Laura’s part that she was sensitive about—and, indeed, embarrassed
by her hobby. No one knew that she had read every single one of the TV Book Club novels; that is to say, she read them all
until the format changed, until the show featured only dead authors. Laura had stopped cold the summer the nation of viewers
were to read three books by William Faulkner. She quit after thirty pages of the first for reasons she believed that anyone
interested in a comprehensible story-line could understand.


In addition to her secret pleasure in reading, Laura enjoyed writing. Nothing serious or big or personal, no journal stuffed
between the mattresses, no shoe box filled with smudged pages,
no amazing blog that had made her famous in cyberspace. She was satisfied with a small stage, and had nearly enough bliss
using her talents to take care of the correspondence for the landscape business she and Charlie owned. She prided herself
on the connections she made with her customers through her e-mails and the newsletters, communications that were general and
at the same time, it seemed to her, confiding. It is to my great surprise that my delphiniums still keep coming up, year after year. This method of relationship was far more gratifying to her than speaking by phone or in person. For one thing, she was an
entirely different Laura on the screen; she liked herself far better in print. It was curious, that she was so much more interesting
and witty and sure when no other human being was present, when the correspondent was nothing but an idea. She wondered what
it meant, that she could only be her ultimate self when she was alone.


“Shhhhh,” she’d begin like a prayer when she entertained her most private fantasy, a vision, a gauzy thing she had never mentioned
to anyone. Where she used to fantasize about certain professional men and also about getting a collie, this innermost dream
did not flicker, did not fade. The strength of her yearning for it had only grown as the years passed. She would lie on her
bed in the spare room where she slept, and close her eyes, and she’d see herself sitting in a wing chair in a long pale skirt,
and a cashmere cardigan lightly studded with moth holes. Charlie would say, if she had ever told him, that she was having
a past-life experience, a life in which she did not, with utmost care, seal away her sweaters in the cedar chest. In her vision
there was usually a cup of tea on the table, and a burning cigarette in a flowered china ashtray, not that she had ever really
smoked. How could she describe this castle in the air to anyone? How could she explain how comforting this abiding image was
to her? She saw herself being still and thinking. That was it; that was the fantasy. Although she did not know anyone who
was a reader, although she’d spent her childhood watching television, and now Nick at Nite was often on until midnight in
the Rider house, Laura wanted, in a dress that came to her ankles and in robin’s-egg-blue high-heeled leather Mary Janes,
to be an author.


The first time the dream took on real shape, the first time there was an object in her mind’s eye, a material thing, pages
wrapped in a rose-colored dust jacket, soft and dense as velvet, was the evening she not only met, but spoke to Jenna Faroli
in the basement of the Hartley Public Library. Jenna Faroli! The host of the Milwaukee Public Radio Jenna Faroli Show. Jenna Faroli, the single famous person in the town of Hartley, not counting Tom Lawler, who’d been voted off after three
episodes of Survivor; a Mrs. America contestant; and a grandmother who had raised marijuana for her grandson, a dowager who had had to serve time.



Jenna Faroli’s husband, Frank Voden, was a judge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and though he was prominent, certainly, and
important, no one would have cared about him if he hadn’t had his lustrous wife. The pair had recently moved to Hartley, midway
between Frank’s court in Madison and the radio station in Milwaukee, in an effort to secure privacy and quiet. Hartley residents
tended to be conservative, and yet Laura had noticed a bragging tone in their complaints about the judge. Charlie, in a flash
of wisdom, had explained this by saying that the Faroli-Vodens, even if they were leftist fucknuts, were now Hartley’s own.


Whatever people thought of Frank Voden was of little interest to Laura. Jenna Faroli, she was sure, was universally loved
by her listeners. Because to listen to Jenna was to love her. There were subtle noises she made when she was speaking—nothing
as vulgar as lip smacking, but rather, what sounded like the softest parting of her lips, such delicately made plosives. You
could hear her smile, the creases of it; you could hear how she must be leaning toward her guest if he was in the studio;
you could hear the sweet urgency of her curiosity. She was an intellectual, someone with range, someone with breadth of knowledge.
One morning she might talk with Jane Goodall, and the next a potentially dull person like Alan Greenspan, and the day after,
David Bowie. She was able to make even the Federal Reserve interesting, because she knew that somewhere deep within every
subject was the land mine of human relations. Laura had analyzed Jenna’s method and had concluded that Jenna could find the
story in any topic because she understood that there was no such thing as happiness in the middle of the narrative. Narrative, as a matter of fact, was a word that Laura had learned from the great JF. It didn’t matter if she was interviewing Sharon
Stone or a half-dead senator, or a doctor specializing in cancer of the gums, or the man who had caught the largest fish in
the state of Wisconsin. Jenna Faroli seemed able to see into anyone’s life and so ask questions that articulated a problem
the guest might not even know he had. For some time, she had not been a household name outside of Milwaukee Public Radio’s
fame, outside of that small circle of the brainy, but five or so years before, the show had been syndicated, and Jenna Faroli’s
voice now rippled out into the nation.


Laura first met her the night she took eighteen potted plants, old and new favorites, to the Hartley Garden Club. The rumor
had started a week before: Jenna Faroli was going to join. Laura was going to stand before the twenty-five members, the Hartley
High Society, women to whom she would forever be in service. They had asked that she explain the virtues and care of each
perennial, and she also planned to show them a crafty way of cheering up a room with container gardens in galvanized-steel
buckets wrapped in sticky floral shelf paper and ribbon. As Charlie had said, “They love that shit.”


The Hartley ladies, with their garden club and book club, Friends of the Library, and their college-bound children, had no
idea how pretty Laura Rider, through the years, had improved herself, how a decade before, for instance, she had started listening
to public radio because an older woman employee, a crank, had insisted upon it in the greenhouse. When Laura listened to authors
talking about their books she could actually feel her mind, the ant colony of it, the bustle and movement up there, the building
of tunnels, the carrying of food. Her brain, she knew, was improving itself of its own accord.


She had never said a word to anyone about how she considered Jenna Faroli to be her teacher. Charlie, maybe, sensed her infatuation,
but not, surely, the extent of it. Here was another essential part of Laura Rider that she could not speak about. No one would
understand the solace and the thrill of that phantom place, 90.4 FM, made possible by a bandwidth, made possible by waves
as long as a football field. From ten every morning until noon she imagined that she and Jenna were alone in a sunlit room—yes,
just the two of them. Laura was at a child’s desk, with the top that lifts, and the deep well inside for crayons and neatly
stacked workbooks. Laura, obedient and shining. How she loved slipping into the dream, master and pupil bathed in the warmth
of their mutual regard. The idea, though, that in real life she might be in the same small room with Jenna at the garden club
filled her with such excitement and such dread she had to pull over twice on the way in order to steady her breathing, and
once for fear she might throw up.


Under any circumstances it is surprising and sometimes disappointing, and even unnerving, to see a radio personality, particularly
after feeling intimate with the voice, that voice which seems the whole of the person. Laura, unfortunately, had identified
Jenna at the grocery store a month earlier and so already had had the shock. She was prepared for the disjunction, for the
fact that Jenna was not, as she had imagined, a woman with an ample bosom in a cream-colored suit, a knot of blond hair at
her nape, milky skin down her throat, and medium-sized pearls glowing in her ears. Jenna in the flesh was awkwardly tall,
flat-chested, dark-haired, and her large wide feet, in her sensible shoes, were duckishly turned out. She was nothing like
the beauty her rich, warm voice suggested. Laura had thought how unfair it was that in the twenty-first century, when so much
help is available, smart women were still often not attractive, and yet, on the other hand, Jenna didn’t seem to make much
effort. She had looked as if she’d taken no care at all, a smudge of lipstick on her shapeless mouth, and two black lines,
also smeared, under her small gray eyes. The makeup did nothing to highlight what may have been her best features. She wore
silky sack clothing, the sort made for women who have given up. Laura had wondered if it was possible—could it be?—that Jenna
had even the smallest inferiority complex when it came to her appearance. How strange that would be, and yet Laura’s love
for her would be redoubled if it were true. The more she thought about it, the more she realized how awful it would have been
if Jenna were beautiful, how much more terrifying it would have been if Laura had to stand before the Jenna Faroli of her
imagination, a woman who was mythically glamorous as well as knowledgeable, wise, articulate, kind, and deep.




Jenna would have occasion. . .