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.

Jenna’s biggest fear, as she drove home, in fact, was becoming someone who was even remotely like Suzie Raditz. If that should happen, she’d have to ask Pete Warner to shoot her. She wondered if the people of Hartley had seen her with Charlie: the people of Hartley in a straight line, including the garden-club ladies, and the Greek man who owned the Queen Bee Café, and Ariana and her beaux, and the postmistress—all of them advancing together up the hill to spy on Jenna Faroli of the Jenna Faroli Show. She thought of Pete, her one true ally at the station, one of the few people who did not want her job. She knew that if Pete were part of the Hartley Battalion he would think less of her; he might even feel betrayed. Enormous, bearded Pete, who was devoted to Jenna, who hadn’t had a girlfriend in a decade, who was a ham-radio and news junkie, who ate every single meal at Subway. It was the two of them who stood above the foolishness of the mortals at the station. It was Pete who, if he caught sight of Charlie, would say, “Him? You can’t be serious—that clown?” She could not imagine what Frank might think or say. It was far easier to conjure Pete, incredulous Pete.

She had had the privilege of meeting—of flirting, even—with remarkable men. Although hormone therapy had failed to supply her with heat and moisture, she now and again had a guest on the show who she suspected could do the job. But those people were not real possibilities. She had no interest in a long-distance affair, and she would never create a mess Suzie Raditz–style at the station. Frank and Vanessa and her work were plenty of happiness; they were, in fact, an embarrassment of riches.

She was relieved, after her expedition with Charlie, that Frank was not at home. She went out into the yard to look at the delphiniums, the spires of blue and purple and white blooms that, since she’d staked them, stood tall and straight, as if with rectitude. She had not considered how dangerous music could still be at her age, and certainly she had never feared the twangy songs of the mountains. And yet Charlie singing to her had been far more effective than hormone therapy, far more effective than her recent conversations in the studio with Robert Redford or Sting or the host of handsome legends who trooped in. She and Charlie had come down from the tree and had lain in the tick-infested grass for the better part of an hour, with all the sweetness and wonder of first love, and also the stirrings of mature and urgent lust. What strong force had held back the floodwaters, what steel gate had kept them at bay for so many years? In the arms of Charlie Rider the dike had broken. She had arched her back—arched her back!

Charlie, in response, had whispered, “Love, do you want to see … it?”

She had said she’d rather not. That is, she wanted to see it, of course she did, but not quite yet.

“Not that it’s anything spectacular,” he said. “I didn’t mean it was extra-special, I was only, you know, offering.”

“I want,” she said breathlessly, “to have a little more time to imagine it.” Was there any clearer invitation, any clearer signal than the arched back?

He had placed his hand at her lumbar, and she’d lowered down into his firm palm, the smallest gesture that suggested he could hold all of her. She had not been able to stop trembling.

At home, she went inside into the refurbished master bathroom—a long, narrow, empty room, with a white-tiled floor, a chandelier, and a tub on claws by the window. She took off her grass-stained linen pants and ran the water until it was scalding. In the bath, she examined her dimpled legs and the pudding of her stomach with a newly critical and dismayed eye. She cried out. She wished to be beautiful, and it was impossible. She could see that if she fell into this thing—as Suzie had called adultery—she would be filled with longing for what she could not be and have. She would yearn for Charlie, she would want him to write her several times a day, to call her, to come to her window. She would not mind if he took risks to see her, provided it turned out well. When he didn’t oblige her, she would be racked with sorrow. And she might now and again have clarity, as piercing as a blade to the heart, the passing understanding of her bad judgment. She would be as tormented as she was happy. She could also see far ahead, and so she knew that when she came out of the spell, after the potion had worn off, she would be left with only the deepest regret.

Three days later, they met again in the county park, this time at dusk. He spread a brown army blanket on a small clear space they’d found in a thicket. The evening was windy—an important bit of luck, because the breeze had carried off most of the mosquitoes. He dropped his shorts to the ground and up it sprang: Hello! Hello! It was a violent purple with one glistening drop at the tip. She had forgotten the splendor of eagerness, and she could do nothing but kneel before it, stroking it as if it were a soft midsized animal, kissing it, patting it on the head, before she brought its velvetiness to her mouth. When he begged her to stop, in order to pace himself, she did so reluctantly.

“Now you,” he said.

Together they got her out of her hemp pants. “Oh my God,” Charlie said, covering his mouth. He, a more or less perfect specimen, save for a rash on his back, seemed to be stricken by the loveliness of her body, by the indoor white lumpishness of her flesh; stricken by the welt of her scar, the rude reminder of her hysterectomy, stricken by her broad hips, her thinning pubic hair, and her ample bottom. She did ask herself, in the briefest moment of reason, how she had come to be lying on a scratchy blanket, naked, and probably resembling a small harpoonable whale. And yet she felt like an ingénue. The breeze on her skin was wonderful, and there was the smell of him, an endearing mix of cinnamon and baby powder and citrus. “Impale me,” she heard herself say.

“You are so beautiful,” he murmured.

What miracle had Charlie wrought? What miracle was he? Had she actually said, Impale me? Had she actually said to Suzie Raditz, Try to find the thrill in sound judgment? She would burn in hell for her hard, cold treatment of Suzie but she wasn’t going to—couldn’t—think about it now. Nothing mattered, nothing, except that she and Charlie were together in this unwinding of years. Backward they went as she arched again and he kissed her breasts, and then, while she held her strong thighs aloft, her buttocks lifted in what he guessed must be a yoga pose, he deftly secured the condom, tweaking the tip, and opening his eyes wide. “I love you,” he pronounced. Slowly he drove himself into the core of her.

A few minutes later, it was not the memory of her aunt’s china tea service or a plated runcible spoon that gave Jenna the most hallowed sense of the passing of the ages and generations, but herself on all fours, Charlie behind her on his knees, holding her hips and thrusting to a point of exquisite pain. Great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mother, Jenna, daughter, granddaughters, great-granddaughters, and on into the infinity of the future and looping around to the beginning of the world—how she hoped that all of them had been and were and would be fucked exactly, oh God yes, yes, like this.

How could she have forgotten the happiness born from such an unlikely thing? “ ‘I can live no longer by thinking,’ ” she said out loud in her car, on the way home.

It is perhaps not surprising that, after that simple, unlikely action, the message situation in the Rider household became somewhat confused. Charlie had told Jenna as they said their fond goodbyes in the county park that she should write her heartfelt messages, if she had them, to a new e-mail address, to CSRider. He had never deliberately lied to his wife, but it was necessary now to hide the more ardent communications in order to protect Laura’s feelings. Although he had sensed a motive in her insistence on his friendship with Jenna, he doubted at first that sex had been his wife’s plan. She had, he thought, wanted him to get out more, to expand his horizons, to live up to his social potential. But as time passed, he came to think it was possible that Laura, understanding what was missing in his life, was offering him this specific remedy. Laura the matchmaker; Laura, choosing a person for him whom they could both, in different ways, enjoy, and also someone who was not, most likely, going to upset herself or her own marriage over Charlie. Maybe Laura was allowing him Jenna as a way to diffuse her own guilt for not sleeping with him. Where was the therapist, Sylvia Marino, when he needed her? Each idea that came to him seemed equally outlandish and equally plausible. Certainly he had seen Jenna as an opportunity, one he could not refuse. Your wife hands you a lover on a platter and you’re going to say no? He’d never had a woman like Jenna, a woman who was so much—a woman. So wonderfully big and soft, someone you could plunge into, a great bowl of dough. Still, whatever Laura was thinking, he did not want to hurt her, and a new e-mail account seemed like protection for all of them.

Laura, naturally, was still writing her own messages to Jenna. They were as loving and heartfelt as Charlie’s loving and heartfelt communications. And so Jenna, naturally, often wrote responding to her, as full of feeling to crider as CSRider. What’s in a name? What’s in an address? When Charlie wrote to Jenna as CSRider about how gentle she was, about how her gentleness was the support for all her strengths, Jenna later wrote back on that topic to crider.

Subj: Calibrated exquisitely

From: JFaroli@wis.staff.edu

To: crider@kingmail.com

Dearest,

You have said that you were teased all your life for being a sissy, but it is your great strength to have both masculine and feminine aspects, the levels calibrated exquisitely. You have none of the bravado of the He-man, and none of the bitch of the She-woman, and yet you have a great store of tenderness—a quality we think of as feminine. All of this is within the you that is fiercely male. Thank you for writing to say that it is gentleness which is my scaffolding, gentleness which holds me up. I shall have to tell my producer this, as she believes I am without feeling.

Laura puzzled over this message. She didn’t recall Charlie’s writing to Jenna about her gentleness being her scaffolding, but it was a powerful statement. She had to hand it to him. Maybe Laura had overlooked it, a single message among hundreds. She had loved the recent one where Jenna explained that she felt as if she were a girl in a distant childhood with Charlie, that somehow they had been young together. It had been a time, Jenna wrote, when she was young and easy under the apple boughs, about the lilting house, and happy as the grass was green. That had been so beautiful. It had choked her up.

Could it be that Charlie, in order to be loved by Jenna, did not need a makeover? Did Charlie need no improvement? Was he, in fact, the ideal hero? Did Jenna bring those heroic traits out in him, or had Laura forgotten that Charlie was special, that he was calibrated exquisitely? Or was this it: was Jenna as screwy as Charlie? Calibrated exquisitely! Was Jenna falling in love? Was Jenna therefore insensible to Charlie’s glaring faults?

They were folding laundry one night, and Laura said, as if to make idle conversation, “How’s it going with Mrs. Voden?”

“You know how it’s going,” Charlie said.

“Do I?”

“You read the messages. You write the messages, for Christ’s sake!”

It was true, of course. An hour before, Laura had told Jenna that she loved her:

Subj: Re: No subject

From: crider@kingmail.com

To: JFaroli@wis.staff.edu

Darling Jenna,

I often just want to tell you and tell you again and yet again, that I love you, and that there are many reasons why I love you. I love the things you teach me. I have considered you my teacher for so many years, and now there is this new time, where you are before me in person, teaching me more than I thought possible. I love you, C.

Although Laura did not know for certain if they’d had sex, surely it was safe to say that Jenna was teaching Charlie many, many new things in the hours when he was away in parts unknown with Mrs. Voden. “I know I write the messages, some of them,” she said, laying out sock after sock on the sofa, “but I’m not the one meeting her for coffee—or whatever.”

Charlie finished the undershirt, two sleeves under, folding up the front, the way his wife had taught him, even though he didn’t care if his shirts were in a wad in his drawer. He put his arms around her and said, “You were right about Jenna. You are always right. She is a lovely friend, just like you told me she would be.”

There were moments, such as this one, when Laura almost thought she could fall in love with Charlie again. She rested her ear against his mouth.

“What Jenna doesn’t know,” Charlie whispered, “is that she loves not only me, but you, too. She probably loves me only for the you that is in the messages.”

And then they both gingerly lowered themselves to the sofa, so as not to disturb the laundry. They were laughing softly. Laura laughed at the idea that she was falling in love with the writer, Charlie, who was actually, in large measure, herself. She laughed harder. They were all insane! Charlie laughed because Jenna might love the messages but even more she loved how he took her from behind, she loved his endurance, she loved, she said, how in their motel sessions it was as if he was making up a symphony on the spot. He laughed because he and Jenna had been children together in a past life, growing up to screw their Victorian brains out. And so, for their own reasons, the Riders laughed together on the sofa until they wept.