Chapter 11

THROUGH THE SUMMER, THE LOVEBIRDS MET AT A MOTEL thirty miles north of Hartley on Saturday afternoons, and sometimes on Wednesday evenings, too. Frank, as Jenna had foreseen, had disappeared into the world of jurisprudence, writing the book that would be of interest to seven legal scholars, a book that would be intelligent and important and unread. Jenna herself would fall into a deep sleep while reading the introduction. Even Dickie would not read it in its entirety, although he’d have incisive comments and want to discuss. The writing took Frank to his office whether or not he was at work in the court, and he often stayed late in order to crank out another few paragraphs. This allowed Jenna the liberty to travel to the motel, the Kewaskum Inn, when she pleased. The Native American–themed rooms had dream catchers in every window, Indian corn tied with ribbon hanging on the bathroom doors, paintings of chiefs in headdresses, snowshoes fashioned out of twigs nailed to the walls, and lampshades made of faux birch bark. The TV remote was bolted to the end table. “I wonder why the injins don’t trust the white man,” Charlie said.

They would first rip the waxy bedspread from the mattress, and they might then sit primly like shy teenagers or crawl under the covers fully clothed, thereby making the struggle to undress somewhat violent, or they might hurtle themselves at each other, no holds to their passion. She couldn’t always recall the sequence, how they found themselves on the floor, or over by the bureau, how it was they got themselves back in bed. Afterward, Jenna, resting her head on Charlie’s firm, tanned chest, liked to ask about Mrs. Rider. She was curious about the woman who must be an entrepreneurial as well as artistic genius, not only to have dreamed up Prairie Wind Farm but to have made it a reality. Laura was in one minute wearing steel-toed boots and overalls, shoveling a bed of stones, and in the next going to a bluegrass festival wearing a gauzy blouse and a Prada skirt. It had been purchased, Charlie was quick to explain, on sale. He carried the photograph of his wife in that skirt tucked into his wallet, and Jenna, more than once in her postcoital repose, had asked to see it. Mrs. Rider in that small skirt looked indecent, but sweetly so.

“What’s your wife doing today?” Jenna often asked, after the first round.

Charlie, running his fingers up her arm, to her neck, and smoothing her hair, would say, “Running the world. Overseeing the planet. I love your calmness.”

“I’m not calm.” Still, she had lowered her voice so that it might sound even more like that of a serene person. “Sometimes,” she murmured, “I go into the resale shop in Hartley to buy a silly thing for my daughter, or a sweatshirt or jacket for myself, and I wonder if I’m buying an item that belonged to your wife. We’re different sizes, as you can see, but it gives me a strange feeling to imagine that I might take home a sweater that she once wore.”

Charlie kissed the top of her head. “She does take her clothes there,” he said, “to sell on consignment.”

Jenna raised up on her elbow to look at him. “Where does she think you are today? What does she think we’re doing?”

“Taking a walk in the woods.”

“An extremely long walk. We’ll be so tired!”

“Maybe we’re training for a marathon.”

“A triathlon, I think it is. So many different talents at work here.” She nuzzled his clavicle and his ruby-colored nipples. His penis lay flopped to the side of his leg like a tired dog’s tongue out the side of the mouth. I am the tired dog, she thought, and Charlie’s penis is my tongue. She thought, I’m losing my mind. She wondered, What will become of me? “Why,” she said, returning to his shoulder and shutting her eyes, “does she let you go, when there is so much to be done?”

Jenna’s phone, across the room on the bureau, sounded in the ringtone of Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 in C Major, K. 338. She buried her face in his neck. “Vanessa,” she whimpered.

“She needs you,” Charlie said.

Jenna heaved herself out of bed and tiptoed on the sticky carpet to the phone. “Hello, sweetheart,” she said, gathering with one hand the spare blanket that had been on the bed and draping herself with it as she settled into the wigwam print of the upholstered chair. “I’m not at home. I’m at the grocery store.” She rolled her eyes at Charlie. He opened the end-table drawer and took out the Holy Bible. He held up the book and mouthed, “It’s not bolted down!”

Periodically Jenna interjected. “Oh!” And “Did you talk to him?” And “Maybe you could ask for a meeting.” And “Did you sleep last night?”

There was very little that made Charlie happier than sexual intercourse. Long ago, Laura, when she had also liked sex, had told him that he’d been born for that single activity, that it was what he could do best. He had considered this a compliment, although he had since thought that maybe it was a put-down. Jenna had not only given him his greatest pleasure back, she had restored his confidence. Here was something he could not fuck up: he could not fuck up fucking.

“Honey, honey, listen,” Jenna was saying, “I feel a little strange talking here in the middle of the produce aisle. Can I call you later tonight?” A long silence. “I know you are, I know it. What did the therapist say?”

Charlie read random passages in the Song of Solomon. “Your navel is a rounded goblet; it lacks no blended beverage.” Rum and coke, he thought, gin and tonic, Jenna and Faroli. “Your waist is a heap of wheat set about with lilies.” He loved the sound of a heap of wheat but Jenna probably wouldn’t find that very flattering. “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.” Her breasts, if you were going to go the animal route, were more like young and very still rabbits. He already knew that when Jenna asked the therapist question she was going to be on the phone for another fifteen minutes. It didn’t matter to him how long she spoke to her daughter. When she came back to bed, she’d be hot and bothered and he would be ready, again, to take her mind off her troubles. He would tell her that her navel lacked no blended beverage, and even though he believed the poet had taken liberties, he also knew it was absolutely true.

A few days later, in the same room, after much the same routine—although it was always different; there was always a way he moved, or a position he wrapped her into, that astonished her—after that, when she was recovering in his arms, she had, not an idea, but an impulse. “Charlie,” she said, sitting up. “I’d like to do something for her.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Rider. I’d have you, but that would be complicated and nerve-racking and wrong—if you know what I mean. But I could invite her in for a gardening segment.”

Later, of course, she could not believe herself, could not believe she had made the unprofessional, the shameful, the baleful suggestion. She had an ironclad rule that she never asked her friends on the program, not counting Dickie, who had done two shows during his tenure as poet laureate. She would have asked the poet laureate even if he hadn’t been Dickie, was her defense.

“Laura?” Charlie yanked himself up. “Is that what you’re saying?” With both hands he pushed his curls off his forehead. “Laura on the Jenna Faroli Show?”

Jenna, perhaps not incidentally, had never, before that afternoon, had someone bring her to orgasm orally. “It’s one little thing I could do for you,” she said, “for the farm, for the business. More people need to know about the place. We do this kind of show now and again. We had Stephanie Anderson in the spring talking about garden style. I’ll admit it was fun because people called in trashing Martha Stewart, and Stephanie was queenly, as you might imagine, taking the high road, praising Martha for raising the consciousness of gardeners. We, in the studio, could tell how delighted Stephanie was, how gleeful.”

“Laura on the show?” Charlie said again.

“Your wife spoke well at the garden-club meeting in Hartley.” Jenna was trying to remember if that was true. Laura had seemed quite nervous, but her presentation had been straightforward, and she’d answered the questions without too much hesitation. This was such a small thing—fifteen minutes—that Jenna could do for the Riders.

“In August,” Jenna said to Charlie. “It wouldn’t be a typical end-of-the-season-type garden show, but something more whimsical, a segment about the names of flowers, or maybe a piece that dealt with the philosophical or, or spiritual tensions when brute labor is required to make a place of beauty, the—”

“I don’t think there is anything that would make Mrs. Rider more thrilled,” Charlie said, staring at the ceiling, “than being on the Jenna Faroli Show.” He was beginning to see the plan: it was occurring to him that getting on Jenna’s show had been Laura’s goal in this friendship thing all along. She had known that if Charlie did his amazing penis tricks with Jenna she would invite Laura on the program. He knew he was married to a force, but he had not realized just how Machiavellian she was.

“Are you all right?” Jenna said.

“I’m stunned,” Charlie said, “that you would do this for her, for us. That you would have her on the show.” Should he feel used? Or should he celebrate his wife, a woman who had developed a win-win strategy? Charlie was happy using his greatest gift, and Laura got a giant kickback. So good! He should be happy—he was happy!

“Don’t tell her yet,” Jenna said. “I’ve got to map out the program, check to see if it fits in the schedule. Please don’t mention it quite yet.”

Laura would go ape when he told her. “I understand,” he said to Jenna. Could he keep the secret? “Not a word,” he muttered, nodding his head solemnly.

Jenna did not tell anyone about the affair. Dickie was the only friend she might have confided in, but she wanted to talk to him in person. Surely he would be amused by the story, and he’d have a generous spin on her taking up with someone like Charlie, reminding her that she was only human, falling for a longshoreman, the milkman, the party-event clown. He’d bring up Edith Wharton’s love for Morton Fullerton, Proust’s obsession with his prostitute, Helen Schlegel’s coupling with Leonard Bast, and Lady Chatterley’s delight in her gamekeeper. Dickie himself, she knew, had had several transgressions, as one might expect of a poet laureate.

She was as careful as she could be, wearing a gray silk scarf and sunglasses, parking in the rear of the Kewaskum Inn, dashing, with as few steps as she could manage, between vehicle and door, into the deluxe dream catcher room—Jacuzzi, king bed, and wireless!—where Charlie, if all went according to plan, would be sprawled across the comforter, as naughty and inviting as a pinup model. When it came time to leave, she peered between the smallest parting of the curtains, to make certain no one, 90.4 FM listener or otherwise, was on the pavement. It did occur to her that the scarf and glasses fairly screamed ADULTERY, but she could not bring herself to drive to the motel and onto the premises without her flagrant disguise.

“Please don’t get caught,” she urged Charlie. “Please, let’s never get found out.”

Once, when she was leaving home on a humid Saturday afternoon, she locked herself out of the house and found, to her dismay, that she didn’t have her car keys, either. It was one of those days when she could hardly wait to get to him, when, if she was going to be reckless, it would be worth it for that moment, kneeling on the spongy mattress, face to face, fingers light and kisses deep, the holy time—go slowly, hurry, go slowly, hurry—before the deeper religious experience. But she was sitting in her hot car with no keys. She could not get back into her house. The sweat was soaking her clothes, and she was smeared into her seat. “Think!” she demanded. “Think!”

She remembered that one of her study windows did not have a screen on it, and that it was not locked. If she could get up to it, she could open it from the outside, and climb through. In the barn she found an eighteen-foot ladder that Frank had bought to clean out the eaves troughs, something in the end he had hired the neighbor to do. The ladder was aluminum and not terribly heavy, although it was unwieldy. Jenna managed to get it over to the house and, using all her strength, she was able to set it by her window. She had weights that she now and again made a halfhearted attempt to lift, but that was the extent of her exercise regimen. Setting the ladder had made her dizzy, and now she must climb, rung by rung, up and up and up. This was how she was going to die. She tried to focus as she had never done before, step, breathe, lift the foot, don’t look anywhere but hand and ridged rung. Don’t see the rosebushes underneath you, don’t dwell on the thick orange thorns which occur at murderously regular intervals along the stem wood. She would fall to her death because she could not get to her lover. Frank would come home and find her splattered parts speared through by the roses. Women were idiots! They had learned nothing through the centuries! How slick she was as she lost her nerve, as she clambered back to terra firma, sweat and tears trickling down the hot aluminum.

“Since when did Jenna Faroli lack courage?” Her own voice in her fevered ear as she glared at her window. “Get a grip.” She held tight and again began to mount the rungs. “Jenna Faroli, Queen of Tartoli.” The ladder seemed sturdy. Up another step, and another—“Jenna Faroli, the Dame of the Bandwidth.” Near the top she leaned over and, mustering her reserves, hoisted the sticky window, raising it an inch, another, another, resting, sucking in air, another inch, until it was open enough for her to get herself through. Now she had only to dive in headfirst. If the ladder held. If she didn’t slip in the wide space between house and ladder. If she didn’t fall once she was teetering on the sill, her top half in, her bottom hanging out.

There was no time that July quite like the window escapade, no time when she felt as reckless. Once she was inside her office, she sank down into the carpet, shaking, and sobbing with relief. She might have died. She might have died, and all for Charlie Rider. It would not have been worth it, such a death. Was she actually as strong as her feat proved her to be, or was she like a parent who performs a supernatural stunt in order to save her child? Her arms and legs were limp. Still trembling, she got up, changed her clothes, found her keys, and drove to the Kewaskum Inn, for a session that was, despite her fatigue and upset, possibly more profound than all the other assignations. How grateful he was that she had survived! How much he loved her for her near-sacrifice! When they were finished, she curled up next to him, and slept the divine sleep of the saved.

After the ladder incident, her message writing hardly seemed dangerous. What were a few smoochy e-mails compared with daredevil Jenna, seventeen feet in the air, catapulting her greasy self through a window? She knew she was writing, in a way, well beyond her feelings, and that he was, too, but the hyperbole was part of the game, part of the joy. And yet her feelings were basically sincere. She could blame the eleventh-century troubadours for inventing courtly love in the first place, for starting a tradition of excess. “I love you,” she wrote to Charlie. “I love you before the Big Bang, I love you into the wormhole, I love you after all nothingness, I love you into the darkest reaches of the cell’s intelligence, I love you into the mystery of the double helix, I love you into the repetition of the hexagon.” Her high-school English teacher every now and again raised her painted black eyebrows. Fuck you, Mrs. Billingsly. Fuck you, Strunk and White.

“Have you lost weight?” Suzie Raditz said to her one morning as they walked down the hall toward the studio. “You look like you’ve shed about a gazillion pounds.”

“I’m doing the South Beach for those—gazillion pounds,” Jenna said. “Biting the bullet before menopause. It’s brutal, but I guess it’s working.”

“I didn’t mean you needed to lose a lot of weight, or even that you had weight to lose, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay, Suzie. I’m on a diet, it’s effective, everything’s fine.” Jenna was having an unpleasant déjà vu, a clear memory of having had this same discussion about Suzie’s weight, before the affair with David Oberhaus had been revealed.

“I’m just always so impressed when people get thin without personal trauma or falling in love. Frankly, those are the only ways I’ve ever slimmed down, the only ways—”

“She’s in love with life, Suzie,” Pete Warner said, from behind. He smashed his large frame up against the wall as he sidestepped past them. “Even so,” he said to Jenna, “you still have a big ass.”

“She does not. Jenna, you don’t, I mean it’s—”

Jenna opened the door to Studio B. “He’s the only one around here who consistently speaks the truth.”

“Okay,” Suzie said, following her to the table. “Speaking of truth, I don’t think we should do another gardening show. It was about five minutes ago that we had Stephanie Anderson, and who’s this woman you want on—Laura Rider? Someone from your town? Phil is always doing the gardening-and- canning-and-fishing beat, and I swear to Jesus we don’t need any more of that crap. Stephanie Anderson was one thing, because she’s famous and she’d had her book, and she’s best friends with Calvin and Ralph, and all those important, stylish fashionistas. But this Laura Rider, she’s not anybody. I signed up for the Prairie Wind Farm online newsletter, and it’s well done, but nothing amazing. Who in California is going to care about some farm in Nowheresville, Wisconsin?”

Jenna straightened her papers and sat down on her red chair. She was relieved to be back on track with Suzie. “Laura Rider’s farm,” she said, “is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. It’s fifty miles from here—a terrific, undiscovered destination. I’m going to have her for fifteen minutes on August 30, for my own pleasure. We will have no trouble, I assure you, finding an interesting angle. It will not be the end of the world.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Thank you, Suzie. I appreciate it. Your instincts are good, and I understand your point. But I want to advertise something wonderful in our part of the state. For fifteen minutes, I’m not going to care about California or Massachusetts or Florida. Fifteen minutes.” Once more she said, “It’s not going to be the end of the world.”