Chapter 4

THERE WERE RULES ABOUT WRITING ROMANCE NOVELS, Laura discovered. Directly after the garden-club meeting, she had gone upstairs to the stacks in the library, and checked out four how-to books. Because the rules were strict, at first the enterprise didn’t sound that hard to her. If, say, your book was a Christian romance, there was to be no alcohol consumption, no magic, and the heroine and hero could not, under any circumstances, remain overnight together alone. The confusing thing was all the categories in addition to Christian: there was historical romance, futuristic, time-travel, paranormal, contemporary-comedy, chick-lit, suspense, and African American. Also gay and lesbian. What Laura wished to accomplish was more … global, maybe, was the word. She wanted to tell a story that would appeal to any woman, Every Woman. She understood that you were supposed to come up with archetypes such as Wild Woman, or Earth Mother, or Passionate Artist. She thought she could do that. Everyone was, after all, something.

There had to be an intriguing plot and an emotionally intense core conflict, and then what was called the Black Moment, when there seems to be no solution for the couple in love. The Black Moment had to be one of real terror—emotional terror, that is. The manual said that creativity played a huge role. Well, obviously. If she took an honest look at herself, she would say that, on a scale from one to ten in the creativity department, she was about a seven and a half. She was creative enough to give life sparkly moments, talented enough to make pretty, theme-based tables for her nieces’ birthday parties, but that sort of care and invention of course wasn’t what the manual meant. She was capable of vision, certainly; the gardens and the farm itself were testaments to her taste, and her dream life, and her ability to work past the point of exhaustion. But pulling a tale of two lovers out of thin air was altogether different—not that she and Charlie didn’t make up stories every day, about all kinds of things, including their four cats. The beasts had jobs and family concerns. They had supportive and troubled relationships. Their Maine coon cat, Polly, who had just gotten a new job as a bagger at the grocery store, was still in high school. In fact, big excitement: Polly was going to the prom this year. So perhaps the collaboration with Charlie was proof that Laura was not a complete beginner.

The manual that was most useful to her suggested that in order to get to know your character you could write a journal from her point of view, or have a friend pose as a reporter and interview you as your heroine. The journal was definitely the route Laura would take, after she’d determined what archetype her woman would be. She remembered a Jenna Faroli program with an author who had written a book about why women read romances, and she made a note to look it up in the online archive. As for the hero, he who provided safe harbor, she had considered for some time, long before she knew she wanted to write, what traits the perfect man should possess. It had been a purely academic question, a subject that had occupied her in the potting shed, in dinner conversations at the holidays, and through the nights when she could not sleep. Her sisters believed that women wanted to rule, but since Laura had that arrangement in her household she now and again thought it might be nice to be dominated, to live with a know-it-all who gave orders, took care of every detail, a man who was never, ha-ha, wrong. Either way, though, what most women wanted was a man who understood the rigors and rules of unconditional love. Wasn’t that it? A shower of affection at the right moment, continuous and sincere reassurance, a reasonable amount of interest, and above all a well-tuned sense of timing: knowing precisely when to back off. Most adults seemed incapable of such a thing toward people who weren’t their children. She wasn’t even sure most parents, if called upon to demonstrate it, wouldn’t have already used up their hard-worn store of love by the time their children were teenagers. That was one of the main reasons she was glad she hadn’t had a baby: she wasn’t convinced she would have been equal to the task.

She was pretty sure Charlie loved her as unconditionally as was humanly possible even though she had deprived him of the activity he most enjoyed. It was a terrible thing to have done to him, but the thought of returning to their old routine— No! She couldn’t bear the thought of any of it, the rattling of her bones, the jarring of her brains as he shook not only the bed but the foundation of the house with the jackhammer of his thrusts, and, please, never again, the assault on the rosy dumpling of her cervix. He coped in his own private way in his solitary bed, and he did seem fine. Not that she would ever admit this to anyone, but there was a chance that she loved her cats unconditionally—that is, more, maybe, just a little bit more than she loved Charlie. She wasn’t saying that it was true, only that it was possible. In her experience, women wanted to give and give and give, and then, suddenly, they were done, they were spent, they didn’t have another crumb to offer up.

Two weeks after she’d talked to Jenna Faroli at the garden meeting, on an ordinary Wednesday night in May, she had, before dinner, still been in the early stages of her romance research, not to mention vague about who her characters would be. Making his entrance into the kitchen for his supper, Charlie, as usual, took a running start in the carpeted hall, and then slid in his stocking feet across the linoleum to the table. When they’d bought the farm, Laura had gone to considerable trouble to find the boxy refrigerator in pale green, and a speckled green-and-white Formica table, and chairs with plastic seats, so that the old farm kitchen was true to a gentler and more loving time, a period when neighbor women gathered to shell peas and put up tomatoes and pickles. Not that Laura had time for those old arts, not that she had time, these days, for friendship.

“You’ll never guess,” Charlie said, landing in his seat, “who I saw on my way home.”

She was setting out two corn dogs for him, and a bowl of Tater Tots, baby carrots, and a glass of milk. For herself she had made a salad and a chicken patty. “Who?” she said.

“Guess.”

“Give me a hint.”

He didn’t want to make it too easy. “A person,” he said, “who never name-drops, far as I can tell.”

“Take a napkin. Your sister?”

He reached for a stack of green-and-white-checked paper napkins in the crock. “Nope.”

“Man or woman?”

“Woman—or hybrid, maybe. Every bit a woman but—”

“Bigger than a bread box?”

They had played this game for years. The bread-box line was standard.

“Larger, in her britches, much, than a bread box, but small enough, humble enough, to be a … beginner.”

“Big enough in her britch—” Laura lurched across the table. “Her?” She grasped his shoulders. “You saw her?”

He was happy for any occasion when she touched him, and wished she had not so soon gone back to her own side. “Saw her! I freaking watched the Silver People with her. I flipping talked with her for at least twenty minutes.” Laura did not like him to use profanity, and he did his best to avoid it in her presence. He picked up his corn dog on a stick and spoke into it. “Charles Rider and Jenna Faroli sighted a UFO convoy this afternoon on Highway S, in the township of Hartley. Ms. Faroli was skeptical at first but warmed to the idea that unidentified objects could be messengers from beyond our realm.”

“You talked to her?” Mrs. Rider absently reached for a carrot. What in the world had Jenna Faroli thought of Charlie? Laura had always imagined meeting Jenna, but somehow never expected Charlie to have the experience. Did Jenna think he was insane or lovable? It could go either way, depending, and Laura couldn’t always be sure what person would think which way. Was Jenna laughing at him—was she mocking him right now in the privacy of her kitchen? Charlie Rider, the ding-a-ling. “What do you mean, the Silver People?” Laura asked. “How Silver and how People-ish?” If he had told Jenna about the alien thing, she would for sure think he was certifiable.

He was tossing his Tater Tots, one by one, into the air, and seeing if he could land them in his mouth. It was funny, how lately she was thinking about her book all the time, even when she was doing tasks that had nothing to do with it, such as watching Charlie, his head thrown back and roving side to side, his mouth wide open, his straight little top and bottom teeth bared. The question that occurred to her just then came like a stranger knocking on her door: What kind of hero would Jenna Faroli want, and, more important, need? What kind of lover? It was as if, along with the question barging in, came Jenna herself in her wide-legged Chinese silk pants and a matching wrinkled jacket, and her messy hair. It was as if she were standing there on the welcome mat waiting for Laura to decide.

Would Jenna want the Hero Devoted to a Cause? She might, since she was always interviewing people who were bent on doing good works. Or would Jenna be drawn to the Weary Warrior, someone she could mother? Or could Jenna, deep down, have a basic need for the hulk, for the Alpha, the type who’d untie her from the tracks, or in the modern-day narrative donate a kidney to her and then do the surgery himself? The manual did say it was important to have a gimmick, and Laura was partial to the Alpha Medical Doctor idea. What had initially seemed relatively simple was getting more difficult by the minute. If Laura’s book was going to appeal to Every Woman, if it was going to be about Every Woman, that heroine had somehow to include the qualities of a Jenna Faroli–type intelligence.

“Charlie,” Laura said firmly. “Stop that. Use your fork. Tell me. Tell me everything.”

After dinner, she went outside to check the irrigation rig that had been giving problems in the west nursery. The air was warm and sweet, and the rising moon with its yellow cast was not stern, as it sometimes seemed on a cold winter night. She wondered again what Jenna Faroli had thought of Charlie and his cuckoo suggestion that he was the one to call if she ever had a question about extraterrestrials. She had forgotten the purpose of her walk as soon as she’d stepped outside. Her shoes were getting wet, but she didn’t notice. She would later think she was behaving like Charlie, lost in her own world, forgetting what she was supposed to do, and not wearing her boots. She walked along the mowed path to the Lavender Meadow, asking herself what kind of heroine Jenna would be. Hard-core professional, naturally, but deep down was she a Wild Woman, or had she once been a Virginal Heroine? Not a virgin-virgin necessarily, but the type who is unconscious of her own passionate nature—until, that is, she’s awakened by the hero. Did you have to be strict about your archetypes, Laura wondered, or could you mix and match, at least a little bit? Could you have an Earth Virgin who was wild? Would you run into trouble if you allowed the characters to stray from their archetypical traits, if you allowed them just to be themselves?

There was a list of workshops and conferences at the back of the romance manual, and she could see now that she might possibly need some assistance. Maybe she could go to the four-day annual workshop over Labor Day at the Bear Claw Resort and Conference Center in the Wisconsin Dells, which wasn’t all that far from Hartley. Years before, her family had said that she wouldn’t be able to get the garden business off the ground, that she didn’t know enough, didn’t have the smarts, but she’d done fine. She’d figured out where to get help, and she’d had the starch to hire Charlie’s sister, who had a master’s degree in landscape architecture. And now she knew to sign up for a workshop, to tap into the knowledge of the experts. The workshop was months away, however, and in the meantime she thought she could get started if she could somehow channel Jenna Faroli. If she became friends with Jenna, if Jenna became a client, and then a confidante, she would tell Jenna her best and most painful stories. She’d tell her about her parents, her despicable father, the notorious wife-beater.

They’d sit on the sofa in Laura’s study, both of them in stocking feet drawn under them, wrapped in shawls, drinking hot chocolate. Jenna would be amazed and horrified, but she’d understand the very human element of the situation. Laura and her siblings had never discussed the fact that their mother had killed their father. They all knew it, but they had never said it out loud to one another. Laura would tell Jenna about how, five years before his death, her father had had a stroke, and her mother, Betty, had called for an ambulance. When he got out of the hospital, when he had recovered sufficiently, he struck his wife once, twice, again, shouting that she must never humiliate him like that, not ever, letting his community see him writhing on the floor, incapacitated. She must never call 911 on him for any reason. So that when he was in danger years later, when he choked on a hard, round piece of broccoli stalk, Betty watched him clutch his throat. She watched while he gestured wildly at her. She sat still with her hands folded in her lap. She watched while he turned an unattractive, throbbing scarlet, and while he made gasping sounds, and while the color drained from his face. The change in his complexion was gradual, just as the sky’s light inexorably and seamlessly dims when the sun goes down. She watched while he made the stuttering gurgles of strangulation, and she watched while he banged over onto the floor. The chair tipped, too. When she remembered it, the fall seemed to her to have occurred in slow motion and without any clattering. She watched the blank space across from her for sixty-five minutes, in order to be sure, before she called her son. No one, not her grown children, and not the men on the rescue squad, all of whom had known Laura’s father, asked any questions. Laura was certain that there was no hero or heroine category, not in the romance genre, into which an author could squeeze her mother and father.

Her manual said there had to be a story question, that finding the question, or settling on the question, was the way to begin. She realized that in a roundabout way she had been asking herself, since Charlie came home that night, one essential question: what, for Jenna Faroli, would be the ideal man? The manual had said to pay attention to your itches. Laura remembered, too, that the manual stressed how important it was to do exercises to learn about your characters. She hung her arms over the fence, and picked a long grass, and chewed on it thoughtfully. She wasn’t sitting in a chair smoking and drinking tea, but the fence and the grass seemed, in the moment, close approximations to her fantasy props. The pieces of the story would fall together. She didn’t know why or how she knew this, but all the same she was sure. What she had to do was discover what Jenna Faroli needed, what Jenna Faroli longed for. Charlie had mentioned that he’d given Jenna his e-mail address. Laura, thinking of that, closed her eyes and saw all at once a small opening, as if in the distance. A prick of light. It was the warm, well-lit tunnel of cyberspace, and she could hear it, too, hear the scurrying, the hum of the channel that would connect Jenna and Charlie. Jenna, she realized then, would somehow come to her through Charlie. There was mystery in creating a book world, the manual had said, and she could already feel that it was so.