ON THE WAY HOME, JENNA FOUND HERSELF MORE INTERESTED in the idea of Charlie Rider than in the celestial spheres, the ionic disturbances, the travelers from Coma Berenices—whatever they were. The lights, she was sure, could be explained, and so, presumably, could Charlie Rider, and yet in the moment he seemed the greater mystery. He had wanted to tell her something, and he’d been both persistent and patient, both cocksure and pleasantly uncertain. He’d been earnest and whimsical, two qualities that do not always go hand in hand. She had not wanted to hear about his experience with the UFOs while she’d been with him, but the farther she was from him, the more curious she grew. It seemed to her good fortune to have watched the aliens with someone who could have passed for one himself, an alien who didn’t take his species too seriously.
Jenna had always been privately scornful of people who dabbled in the occult. As a child, she had not been able to get spooked by playing Mary Worth in front of a mirror or contacting the dead via the Ouija board. At the age of nine, she had understood that what bored girls do is try to scare themselves silly. She was willing to grant that victims of alien abduction had complex disorders, or at the least a vague cultural malaise, and shouldn’t be dismissed, but she couldn’t work up much sympathy for the type. She wondered if at the root of their troubles wasn’t the childish need to have a frightening element in their lives. She wondered what Mrs. Rider—the feverish, stylish, indomitable Mrs. Rider—thought about Charlie’s interest in the supernatural. She wondered if a woman who looked so mild could be more or less invincible. Did the Riders listen to the Jenna Faroli Show while they worked side by side in the greenhouse potting geraniums? She liked that idea, Mr. and Mrs. Rider, a part of her life without her knowing it, without her ever having to know.
At dinner, over veal birds, oiseaux sans têtes, Jenna described the lights to her husband. “They were blurry and bobbing,” she said. “It was so strange I pulled over to get a better look.”
“Weather balloons, no doubt,” Frank said, his nose to the cunning slices of veal he’d wrapped around a filling of mushrooms and butter and basil. He’d been a Rhodes scholar, and therefore as he sliced down through his ribboned creation he held his utensils in the continental style. There had been nothing more miraculous in Jenna’s life than Frank’s recent verve in the kitchen. He had taken charge when they’d remodeled the 1868 fieldstone farmhouse, insisting on eight burners, three sinks, two ovens, granite countertops, the overhead rack for the new pots and pans, and a pantry to store the gadgets. “Or they were earth tremors,” he said, “which cause electromagnetic fields. The intensity of the fields, of the luminosities, can be stunning. They can cause alterations in TV and radio reception, power outages—they can knock people insensible.”
“I could almost imagine,” she said, “if you were prone to that kind of thing, thinking that those lights were UFOs. They seemed to have an intelligence, bobbing and dancing in relation to each other.”
“The revolt of the soul,” he pronounced, “against the intellect. Goodbye, Jenna Faroli. In case you were thinking to retrieve an abduction memory, they are formed, you know, just as beliefs in witches, incubi, and Satan are. The United States leads in UFO reporting, because we have more practicing hypnotists than any other country in the world. But when there’s a real physical phenomenon, when there are luminosities which, as I said, have been known to give people tingling sensations and actual paralysis—why not”—he took a bite and chewed for a moment, his eyes shut—“call it the work of aliens? Do you think there’s too much paprika?”
“I’m weeping, Frankie. Can’t you see? I’m weeping because this is the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“It’s somewhat overboard on the paprika.” He drew a small leather book out of his apron pocket and wrote himself a note, tucked it back in the pocket, and returned his attention to his plate and his subject. “Whitley Strieber’s books have probably done more to standardize the alien experience for victims than possibly even Hollywood movies—”
“But you can understand the impulse to believe,” she said, her voice raised only slightly, “especially in people who have religious longings, people who are disaffected from their church. Maybe they can’t get interested in science. Maybe they want to do something contrarian or rebellious.” She could all at once imagine that Charlie Rider, a lifelong Hartley resident, had found his way to be an individual by having an experience with an extraterrestrial. She leaned over her place setting toward her husband. “And it’s not drag racing or drug addiction or gang mayhem. It’s harmless.”
“Harmless? Most abductees, a huge percentage, say that their encounters with UFOs have had a devastating effect on their lives.” With his mouth full he said, “And it’s not far-fetched to say that occultism has on occasion gone hand in hand with reactionary ideologies.” He swallowed, swiping his mouth with his napkin. “Maybe it’s harmless here, in our somewhat stable democracy. But you could make a connection without that much trouble, connecting, for example, Theosophy with Nazi ideology.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. She didn’t think that Charlie Rider had had a frightening encounter with his Silver People—as he’d called them—or that he’d turn his beliefs toward fascism. He was in the minority, surely, one of those who had tripped the light fantastic with the space travelers, who had had a jolly night out. “One could argue,” she pressed on, “that perfectly ordinary people need to detach religious impulses from any entrenched creed, and so they fall into the refreshment of the occult. But I’ll settle for the globes’ being weather balloons, even though I think I’m disappointed.”
There were several reasons Frank knew everything. In the course of a thirty-year career in the law, eight as public defender, four as district attorney, and finally holding forth from various benches, including now the bench of the state supreme court, he had seen cases that touched on a great many subjects. His capacious mind was superbly organized, and so there was very little he forgot, very little in the archive he could not access. But the real cause of his erudition, Jenna often said, was his abuse of literature. His addiction was a joke in the family—Frank the user, the biblioholic—and it was also something of a problem. He read, his wife thought, pathologically. It was fine to read the Russian novels again and again, fine to read criticism, the belletristic essay, military history, science, biography, collections of letters, and the occasional grocery-store mystery. It was not fine that early in the marriage they had had strife when Jenna banned him from reading at dinner, that she had to prohibit him from turning on the light immediately following sexual intercourse—as if for everyone postcoital entertainment always included V. S. Pritchett—and that she had once caught him in the shower, one hand thrust from the curtain, reading her father’s inscribed first-edition copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. She liked to tell her friends, and on occasion her radio audience, how frightened Frank became if there wasn’t printed matter near his person. Their car had once broken down, and for some unexplained—perhaps paranormal—reason, they’d had no reading material for the two hours they’d had to wait for rescue. Frank had almost gone mad. There had not even been the Saab manual. He sweated and he paced, reciting all the soliloquies that were his set pieces, roving through Othello, Lear, Merchant, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Hamlet, and a few sonnets as well. He had, however, learned to cope without a book over the sacred dinner hour, and in fact, when he had made a dazzling effort, driving to upscale markets to buy Chilean sea bass and cranking out pasta by hand, he was happy to linger at the table with his port and his wife.
If Jenna had to choose between the asset of Frank’s erudition and his pleasure in the new kitchen, she would be tempted, even though she relied on his intellect for her work, to tip toward Chef Voden. Many nights a week she walked in the door to find him in a blue-and-pink-striped denim apron pulled tight around his stout middle, his glasses fogged from steam or exertion, the two or three damp hairs on his pate flattened against his shiny scalp. The chops were simmering in their glaze, the rolls baking in the oven, the sliced Ida Red apples bubbling in their cider reduction, the wine taking one heavenly breath after another. Their daughter was grown, Frank was in the kitchen, and for as long it lasted, she, Jenna Faroli, was blessed among women. The beauty of his industry! Once summer was full-blown, he would begin working on his book about jurisprudence, a tome that would run, if his other books were any indication, to fifteen hundred pages. She would enjoy his gastronomic feats, his culinary acrobatics, while she could.
The night of the bouncing globes, Frank had gone on from the subject of aliens to tell her about a fistfight that had occurred between two men in Athens, Ohio. Jenna had a fair amount of work to do and was feigning interest as best she could. One fellow in Athens believed that the Earl of Oxford had written the Shakespeare plays, whereas the other, a Stratfordian, was defending the honor of the Bard.
“Uh-huh,” Jenna said again.
The trouble had begun in a chat room and escalated to the street, the two men, coincidentally in the same town, the two men, Frank said, surely yelling in iambic pentameter, while trying to puff up their puny chests. He flung his knife from side to side, crying,
“Pale trembling coward, there I throw my gage,
Disclaiming here the kindred of the king,
And lay aside my high blood’s royalty… .”
Jenna pushed back in her chair. In the morning, she reminded Frank, she had two authors, a British woman who trained dogs, and a memoirist who had acquired four springer spaniels after he had been in an accident that damaged his frontal lobes. Those two would fill the first half of the program, and for the second a neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins would speak about therapies for the impaired, and, finally, the actress Teri Garr would be in the studio to discuss her struggle with MS and her crusade to help those who suffered from the disease. The shows were often patchworks, including segments that invited callers, and others that were pretaped and edited. Tomorrow’s program was live throughout, but in any case Jenna always liked to be overprepared.
“You should invite the Shakespeare thugs in,” Frank was saying. “You’d get a tremendous number of callers, and there would be the threat of real violence to keep everyone on the edge of their car seats.” He was off again:
“’Tis not the trial of a woman’s war,
The bitter clamour of two eager tongues,
Can arbitrate this cause betwixt us twain.
The blood is hot …”
The Honorable Judge Voden leaned back and, dabbing his white linen napkin to his mouth, he giggled.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Jenna said. With a glass of port in hand, she walked around the table to his chair and bent to kiss his head. “Thank you, Frankest, for the remarkable grub.”
She did her best to read as much of her guests’ books as she could, but she had also, through the years, become adept at scanning the pages for the heart of the matter, and zooming in on paragraphs that her producers had highlighted, those that offered up suitable questions. Jenna’s standard line, when asked about her preparation, was that the author had put his time and talent and energy into his work and she would respect that labor by reading thoughtfully. It was said that she was thorough, fearless, and polite. This pleased her, and she hoped it was true. Her goal, always, was to find something to like in her guest no matter how distasteful his opinions, no matter if his book turned out to have wasted the nation’s resources. She tried not to care what a guest thought of her. The pact between them was obvious and implicit. She, by virtue of her interest in him, would ask questions that would showcase his expertise or his nobility or his wit. She would try to delve without being intrusive, in the hope that he would arrive at the truth of his experience, and he would honor her by being as lively and as fascinating as he knew how. There was no predicting how it all might go, how, for instance, the minute the on air sign flashed, a formerly talkative person might clam up, or a quiet one begin to jabber. Her job was to shape the interview, to keep the guest on track when necessary, to give the piece a flow when it was live so there was something of a narrative arc, and to manage the callers so that, without permitting them to rattle on, they felt heard.
When she was upstairs in the office thinking about how to approach the brain-injured patient with his spaniels, Charlie Rider came to mind again. “If I told you about the Silver People, you wouldn’t believe me.” What had she said to him? “You’d better get to work on your narrative skills.” At dinner, Frank had said that in some quarters abduction stories were judged not by the verisimilitude of the details, but by the sincerity and emotional distress of the teller. Jenna couldn’t help wondering if Charlie was a capable raconteur. She wondered what he’d have to do to make her believe, if his own doubt would make the story more convincing, if confidence would work against him. Maybe Charlie had come through the riptides of her thoughts, bobbing between the cranial waves, bursting free, and washing up on Highway S. He was silver within, the shine glowing from his astral core. Astral core? She liked the sound of it, and she pictured what such a thing might be: the deep, clear wishing well of the soul.
As she often did, she told herself that it had been a good move to come to Hartley, to leave the suburbs for this small farm surrounded by woods. She had grown tired of the women in particular in Fox Grove, tired of their fierce political correctness, the calcification of their righteousness, the competitive spirit of kitchen remodeling. She had once discovered a neighbor boy, a seven-year-old, sobbing in her scrubby bushes because on the occasion of his birthday his guests had been told to donate to their favorite cause rather than bring presents to the party. A donation to Greenpeace rather than a video game? What was wrong with the parents?
Jenna had come to the point in her forty-six years when she would rather talk with a doe-eyed elf, someone with an astral core, than have to speak over the fence to Janey Slauson about full-spectrum compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Frank and Jenna’s only child, Vanessa, had made the best of a good school system in Fox Grove, and finally, after college, when the girl had gone off to get her doctorate, they’d moved fifty miles from the city. They had bought small energy-efficient cars not only because they believed in them, but to assuage their guilt about the commute, and to mitigate, as much as possible, the criticism of people like Janey Slauson.
Jenna remembered Charlie saying to her about the bouncing globes, “They might be what you think they are.” Such an insolent alien! It would be difficult to do a measured show about UFOs, difficult to strike the right tone. She wouldn’t want it to turn into a free-for-all, the crazies jamming the phone lines with their testimonials, but she wouldn’t want them to be crushed, either, by the common sense and science of a psychologist and meteorologist. She’d done what she’d thought had been a respectful show about the community of Lily Dale, a place the spirits were said to favor. The show had been funny, in large part because the mediums she’d interviewed had had a sense of humor about their calling.
Charlie Rider had wanted to tell her a secret involving the Silver People. He was out of his radiant head, but why turn down a secret? Months away, she would ask herself what exactly propelled her to write him the first e-mail. The memoir about the spaniels and the frontal-lobe injury was, if nothing else, a testament to the human spirit, but lately Jenna was having trouble working up enthusiasm for that type of grit and endurance and good cheer; humans, she sometimes thought, had too much spirit. One of her producers, Suzie Raditz, liked to yoke together disparate subjects—in this case dogs and brains—but perhaps Suzie was having a dry spell. Perhaps Suzie needed a vacation.
Out the long windows of Jenna’s study, out in the darkness, there was not a light from human or sprite or alien. There were only the sounds of the tree frogs, their strange, mournful Gregorian tones. She loved her room, the high ceiling, the curlicues in the original molding, the built-in shelves, and the comfort of her books, which had been alphabetized in the move, Achebe to Zuravleff. In her aloneness there was the draw of that most private-seeming space, the small, bright, beckoning rectangle of a blank e-mail page. It was a page that would yield company, that would people her own little world. She wondered what Charlie was telling Mrs. Rider over their dinner, wondered what they usually talked about. She would write to him because she wasn’t severe and aloof, but someone who was interested in a small town personality, a woman who was investing in her new community.
It crossed her mind that by writing to him she was thumbing her nose at the likes of Janey Slauson and also Suzie Raditz. It was possible, too, that she was escaping, for just a moment, from Shakespeare; she was electronically fleeing from her husband’s dishwashing down the stairs, from the noise of his recitation of Richard II.