Free Laura Rider's Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton

She often
     wished, when Vanessa called, that there were sisters for her to phone instead of the one helpless and perhaps overly indulgent
     and involved mother. Vanessa could have used a phalanx of siblings to absorb her complaints, but her busy parents had put
     off adopting, and finally it had been too late.
    Charlie’s e-mails amid all the chatter were less of an annoyance than Jenna might have admitted. She knew she should have
     been irritated by them, she who, like many of her contemporaries, felt that e-mail had robbed her blind, stealing hours that
     could have been spent reading. E-mail, she often said, had ruined her life, and yet there were always those most seductive
     questions in her approach to her desk: who would have written? What astonishing morsel, what wisdom, what battling wit might
     there be at the click of the mouse? It was out of largesse, she told herself at first, that she was writing to a stranger
     in Hartley, a stranger who did not always observe the rules of grammar—although, in fairness, he had used
pasta e fagioli
in a rhyme with ease. She might come from the studio to her office after a show to find a message from him, a bit of whimsy,
     or flattery so outrageous she actually did laugh out loud. What did it matter if he didn’t always use
good
and
well
correctly? Why should she judge? She knew enough people who were so vigilant about the use of the English language it was
     dangerous to speak to them.
    If her replies were acerbic, he seemed amused rather than offended. And when he was contrite about something he’d said, he
     was abjectly solemn about his error. She once signed off as “The Dame of the Bandwidth,” and he’d fired back with “FUCKING
     A!” Five minutes later his moniker reappeared:
    Subj: I’m so sorry
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Dear Jenna,
    Please forgive me for being a crass idiot. I should not have said F***ing A. It was so very crude. Please forgive me. I do
     hope you can forgive me.
    She replied:
    Subj: Re: I’m so sorry
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Dear Crass Fucking Idiot,
    The Silver People will smite you.
    And he returned with:
    Subj: Re: I’m so sorry
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Dame Bandwidth—
    I am smitten.
    She did not feel as if she were flirting with him, not really, nor he with her. That was impossible. She had succumbed to
     the silly exchange, and it was playful, that was all. She did not often feel a sexual charge, a condition she blamed on her
     hysterectomy, and she could also blame her hectic life. She and Frank had become accustomed to perpetual motion and perpetual
     exhaustion. Her private sadness had been with her so long, was so much a part of her, that she would have had a hard time
     separating the pure foundation of herself from the sorrow. At twenty-two, she had been rendered barren—such a desolate, awful
     word—and there was the other difficult piece, the fact of Frank’s indifference to her sexually after the crisis of Vanessa’s
     birth. Jenna had lost her drive, but he seemed not to mind. She had thought in the beginning that he was being careful with
     her, of his girlish wife who had been close to death, was nursing a squalling infant, recovering from major surgery, and suffering
     from mastitis in both breasts. Hormone therapy did not restore her passionate nature, but even when, out of consideration,
     she offered him the opportunity, he took up his book or made a halfhearted attempt.
    For some time, that absence in their lives plagued her. He was fifteen years older, pushing the advanced age of forty, and
     she wondered if he suddenly could have become impotent but was too embarrassed to say. Maybe he had not ever loved her physically,
     maybe in courtship he had put on a show of ardor and worship out of love for everything else about her, or maybe the bloated
     pustule of her mother-self was a permanent turnoff. Maybe at a simple