THE NIGHT BEFORE LAURA WAS GOING TO BE ON THE JENNA Faroli Show, she was working on the Prairie Wind Farm newsletter. It was a bad habit, she knew, to have as many windows open on her desktop as she did, and for sure a person could get confused. It was late, and although she was tired she was too excited to sleep, and also the newsletter was overdue. Best to get it done while she had adrenaline.
She’d been following Jenna’s correspondence more carefully in the last week, since, after all, she was going to be on the program. Not that there seemed to be anything particularly new, except that Jenna and Charlie must have had some kind of intense, intergalactic sexual experience. Mrs. Voden was more ardent than usual. If there was anything to be interested in, it was how free Jenna felt when she wrote, as if she believed she was always unobserved. Laura understood very little about her own software, but she was savvy enough to suspect that everyone could be observed: the server could spy on you, and so could the twelve-year-old neighbor boys, the local government, the federal government, and the terrorists. Jenna could get excruciatingly specific without, it seemed, the thought of a peeping Tom. That evening, in fact, she’d written a doozy.
It wasn’t so much the physical details that got to Laura, although she found them gross in the extreme. The way Jenna wrote about her pleasure, you would have thought that no one had ever touched her down there, that she’d lived her life in a convent. You would have thought that she’d only just realized, at age forty-six, why people had been making art about sex, and going to war on account of it, and jeopardizing their careers for it. Jenna and her lightbulb moment. That delayed revelation would have been enough embarrassment, without all the other mortifications.
The message that Laura had open on her screen while she was writing her newsletter mentioned the effect on Jenna of Charlie’s fluttering tongue, his focused tongue, all the facets of Charlie’s tongue. Jenna had gone on to confide in him, to tell him that she’d been having the fantasy of carrying his child. “Jeez!” Laura spat when she read that line. Jenna wrote that through the nights she’d been dreaming of a small boy on the lawn, running and shrieking with delight as his father, Charlie, chased him. In the mornings, as Jenna woke, the feeling of the dream was still with her, the joy of it, and she’d lie in bed, she reported, imagining that this baby would bring all of them together, that she and Frank and Laura and Charlie would stand in a loving circle in the nursery. “That’s sweet, I guess,” Mrs. Rider remarked to her laptop. “I know,” Jenna had written, “that the castle-building is goofy if not perhaps pathological.”
“Pathologically goofy,” Laura clarified.
If Jenna had been younger, Mrs. Rider might well have felt threatened, but as it was she registered the message as the work of someone who had gone far beyond reason. If the part about the baby and the other bit about oral sex hadn’t been enough for one message, Jenna also spoke about growing old together, being on the same wing of the nursing home:
I imagine you are down the hall, and the nurse will wheel me, poor old Jenna Faroli, to Charlie Rider’s room in the evening, and although I remember almost nothing it is you who I know, you who I recall, you who I love. I hope that in spite of the scarcity of men in nursing homes, in spite of the fact that all the old bags are throwing themselves at you, you still hold me in your heart. I like to think the nurses will be compassionate enough to lift me into your bed, that they will leave us, that they will shut the door behind them.
Laura hooted. Finally, the couple united! She clapped. Finally, the couple gets to spend the night together! More applause. She loved this last section—she adored this derangement—the marriage of the demented and the crippled. Some romance all right, the false teeth smiling at false teeth in two glasses, side by side, on the table. And what about Laura? Where was she going to be while the seniors diddled themselves? Was she having her heavenly reward? Or was she the remaining friend and relation, the long-suffering visitor, bringing mints and reading stories and making sure their drool buckets hadn’t gotten dislodged?
It was peculiar, she knew, that by day, when Laura was listening to the radio, Jenna Faroli was entirely separate from Charlie’s Jenna, from Mrs. Voden. Jenna Faroli was her usual enlightened and wise self beaming down upon them, educating the world. The other Jenna, the lunatic lover, was, in Laura’s mind, someone else. Laura supposed that she had learned a few things that would be useful to her for her book, but it seemed that Jenna actually hadn’t been that instructive; a romance, after all, was supposed to be empowering rather than confusing and nauseating.
She would later say it was an honest mistake. There were too many windows open on her desktop. And she was rattled because she was going to be on the show the next day. She had meant to paste into her newsletter a small piece she’d written about making autumn arrangements, including a photograph of a pot et fleur she’d done the year before with oak, maple, and a few deciduous azalea leaves. She absolutely did not mean to paste Jenna’s message into the front page, and even though she always proofread, the hour was late. She did not mean, without rereading, to send the newsletter to the 637 customers on the LISTSERV.