Laura Rider's Masterpiece (11 page)
When they got home, she went right upstairs to check her e-mail. Vanessa hadn’t written or called in two days, which was cause
for either celebration or worry. But instead of her daughter there was crider, with a short message:
Subj: Dream come true?
From:
[email protected]
Because I often imagine you walking along the grape arbor I cannot be sure if it was you, or if I was tricking myself. Either
way, vision or reality, your presence is a joy to me. Did I see you? Charlie
“Ridiculous,” she said, smiling—she was smiling. “You are ridiculous.” She wasn’t sure if she was speaking to herself or to
Charlie. Sally was starting up her singing again, this time the Italian song in praise of her lover’s mouth.
Un bocca bocca bella
, literally “the beautiful mouth mouth,” a mouth so glorious you had to repeat the word. That was the first occasion when
Jenna thought about Charlie’s mouth, the first occasion when she fixed on what she remembered, finding, to her surprise, that
she could see it clearly, the fleshy lower lip, and the thinner peaked line above. Her heart didn’t lurch, but she did feel
an ache, a pull that had old meaning to her, a feeling she’d let go of years before, a feeling, she would have said, that
was foolishness, and a sad one at that.
LAURA BELIEVED THAT THE BEST PART OF ANY ROMANCE WAS
the lead-up, the building of sexual tension even while both parties were uncertain about the feelings of the beloved. She
had watched
Pride and Prejudice
, and she had enjoyed her fright as the attraction between Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, and also the panic, escalated.
She happened to like stories where the heroine is in complete shock at the moment when the hero reveals his love: shock, because
her own emotions are unknown to her.
Charlie had told Laura his e-mail password, Beaver, the name of their dead dog, and so she had been privy to Jenna’s messages.
She sometimes wrote back to Jenna, always as Charlie, of course, when he was not around, but more often she composed with
him, her laptop on the kitchen table. At first she wished he wasn’t writing so much on his own, and she tried, tactfully,
to restrain him. “I miss out on the fun when you write to Mrs. Voden without me,” she’d say, or “Let’s write her another poem.
That first one was hilarious.” Or, more bluntly, “I’m feeling left out, Chuck.” She could see, however, that what was developing
between the two of them—or, in actuality, the three of them—was a conversation, and she could understand that when she was
busy and away he felt the need to keep it rolling along.
In her abiding fantasy she had always been the star pupil of Jenna, and although it surprised her in the beginning that Jenna
continued to write back, in a certain way the teacher’s attention felt normal to her. It seemed right. She did on occasion
have to remind herself that she was not Laura who was writing, she was Charlie; this did, now and again, take some effort.
But one of the unexpected perks of the project so far was the fact that she felt closer to Charlie than she had in a long
time, the two of them merged into the single character who was Jenna’s pen pal, who was “crider.” In this regard they were
like Vera Nabokov and her husband, the subjects of a Jenna Faroli program a few years back, spouse and writer working as a
team. Mrs. Voden, she and Charlie called Jenna—Mrs. Voden, their joint creation.
It had seemed right, too, that her husband from the start was worshipful of Jenna. He had always been a romantic person, not
only about love, but about goodness. If there was any quality that was girlish about him, it was that saccharine drip that
ran steadily through his veins; it was a quality that had taken an embarrassingly long time to annoy Laura. She wondered if
a person like Jenna would be scornful of Charlie’s wide-open spigot, the devotion spraying from him, Charlie the gusher, Charlie
the eternal geyser of love. After a few years of courtship, she’d wanted to put a plug in him. If you were vulnerable, as
Laura had been in her twenties, you were a goner with that kind of schmaltz, but if you were someone like Jenna, you might,
sooner rather than later, register Charlie’s fountain of love as nothing more than the penis wagging its tongue.
Not that Charlie—or she and Charlie—were making love through e-mail, or not exactly, not yet. But he’d drawn a portrait of
Jenna in ink, without the committee’s knowledge or approval, laboring over the picture for a week, apparently, and then he’d
scanned it into the computer and sent it to her.
“You drew a portrait?” Laura said at breakfast, when he’d mentioned it so casually, as if she had known all along. “You sent
it to her late last night?”
“Yup.” Charlie, watching his wife ripping the coated plastic of the coffee bag with her teeth, could tell that she was displeased.
“Is that against the law?”
“It’s a little pushy.” He hadn’t, after all, drawn Laura until they’d been together for three months. It was the portrait,
for her, that had sealed the deal, how he’d captured what he’d called her heartbreaking tenderness. There was no one more
full of shit than Charlie, even if sometimes it was in the
nicest possible way, and even though Charlie believed his own bullshit through and through. Over the noise of the coffee grinder
Laura said, “If you ever say ‘Fucking A’ to her again, I’ll have to bean you.”
“I apologized!” He had to shout to be heard. Why was she bringing up that old mistake? “I told her I was sorry. You—you didn’t
tell the story about the Silver People the way I wanted you to. You didn’t—”
“What?” The short assault of the grinding concluded.
“I said I apologized.”
“Did she like it?” his wife asked.
“You know what she said. After I said I was sorry, she wrote me something like ‘Dear fucking idiot.’ ”
“No—did she like the portrait?”
“The portrait?”
“What did she say about it, Charlie?”
“She said it was lovely.” That word, the one the girls were crazy about. He stirred his Froot Loops.
“What else?”
“She said she was going to have T-shirts made with the portrait on the front, and sell them on eBay, and also make her staff
wear them. She said with the proceeds she and I could run off to St. Barts.”
Laura flung open the cupboard and banged it shut.
It was possible to enjoy his wife’s wrath, but only if he was just as angry. When they’d fought in the early years, they’d
ended up in bed, but now if she was irritated she tended to stay in that mode longer than was any fun, and without the ultimate
payoff. He had plenty of reasons to get worked up, to blame her for taking over his story—he could get himself on a roll if
given another half a chance—but he thought it probably wasn’t worth it. “I’ll get the laptop,” he said, “and we can write
her back.”
The minute he set the computer before her at the table, she felt calmness settling through her, as if the screen itself were
a drug. Ah, she thought, and Okay, and Here we go. “Dear you,” she wrote. It was intimate to be sure,
Dear you
. “Even if you sold
T-shirts that only
said
Jenna on them, they’d make millions.” There had been, from the start, the question of how much of Charlie someone like Jenna
was willing to accommodate. Laura deleted what she’d written. There was not necessarily a delicate balance between slathering
it on and being honest, but there was a balance nonetheless. She suddenly felt warmth toward Charlie, toward the goof who
used the torch approach when a match was adequate. She turned to her husband. “What do we say?”
“We say, ‘Send the T-shirts to press. I would like Jenna Faroli’s beautiful puss next to my skin.’ ”
“Charlie!” She swatted him over the head with a place mat. “You’re terrible.” She started to laugh. “You’re disgusting!”
“I didn’t say
pussy.
I said puss. And she knows I’m just kidding.” He put his head down and sucked up the pink milk from his cereal bowl.
After breakfast, Laura had to sit herself at her desk and think the project through again. It did seem as if it was slightly
out of control, maybe, but she had meant, after all, for it to go in, or at least toward, this direction. She was realizing
that there were a couple of problems with the structure of the relationships. That is, in a traditional romance, the heroine
was supposed to be socially, intellectually, and financially inferior to the hero, so that in all areas the love was lifting
her up. If Jenna fell for Charlie, it wasn’t going to have anything to do with a wish to improve her status, and it might
not be about self-improvement, or self-knowledge. If she fell for him, it was going to be pure. The other uncharacteristic
part of the situation was Jenna’s marriage. Laura could see that it would be easier to fool around with a donkey if you already
had a stallion back in the paddock. If the experiment was going to run true, if she was to prove that Jenna could love Charlie
in an everyday kind of way, Frank—she laughed out loud—Frank would have to be killed. The book could be a murder mystery and
a romance!
But seriously: so many complications. So many difficulties. Laura had wanted to see if someone like Charlie—but wait, there
wasn’t anyone else like Charlie—to see if Charlie could be made into the man for Jenna. That plan had seemed ingenious at
the beginning, but she had failed to understand how she might feel if the romance actually heated up. That possibility had
seemed so remote, she hadn’t thought to factor her own self into the story. Therefore, the thing was, if it got sexual—say
it got sexual—how would she feel about it? Would Charlie cheat on his best girl? The girl he’d sworn to love on earth, in
outer space, in all of their incarnations to come, as he had loved her in past lives, including when they’d been prehistoric
birds and tadpoles and slime molds? Casting Charlie, for a moment, aside, could Jenna Faroli, deep down under her fully loaded
brain, be a vulnerable woman, a woman who was in need of a grand passion? Although any man looked sexy in a judge robe, maybe
Frank wasn’t the snorting, pawing stallion Jenna all through the years had longed for. If it happened, Laura was sure to know,
because Charlie Rider was an open book, because Charlie’s eyes would go shiny.
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!”
