The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

by Sharon Pywell

  His words flew directly to their mark and she met his gaze, both their faces alight. She contained the deep urge to touch him and sprang to her feet.

  “The Cat is driving towards us as I speak! They have taken the little xebec that accompanied this flotilla…”

  “They learned our location and have planned this distraction. I would bet my life that if we can reach the water, they will be searching for us. They are giving us our main chance. Come!”

  He led the way to the head, which opened directly to the sea at the boat’s lower levels. “Step lively, and step quick!” he called. “Trust me, Electra! Follow me!”

  He plunged before her, out of the ship and into the black waters. She hesitated not an instant before she followed him into the darkness.

  NEAVE

  Gay Divorcée

  Eleven months after the wedding to Ricky Luhmann, Lilly showed up at my door one rainy night with a suitcase to one side of her and Annie to the other. My sister had gotten quieter and quieter on the subject of her life. We could go for weeks without saying anything at all that wasn’t about back orders or salesgirls or payroll. The woman who came to my door with Annie clinging to her legs that rainy night was barely recognizable as my Lilly. Her hair hung clumped and damp, her eyes were sunken, and her expression was as frozen as a ceramic doll’s. Annie was very quiet, which scared me as much as Lilly’s looks.

  Before this night my sister had spoken in no specific terms about her marriage to Ricky Luhrmann, but from a few brief and sweeping generalizations it was clear that gradually things with him had changed. We got Annie to bed and I sat my sister down at the kitchen table. I asked her if she wanted a warm bath and she looked stricken in a way you wouldn’t expect when you offered a shivering woman a warm bath.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t want a bath. That’s all.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Tea?” She said yes to tea. “Tell me,” I said when I set the cup in front of her.

  How had this lumpy, hesitant ill ease between us happened? It was one of the things that Lilly’s marriage had accomplished. So thank God for Annie and the business, the shared countries where we both felt happy. They bridged the distance that had grown between the Lilly who was my closest ally and partner, and the Lilly who was married to Ricky Luhrmann.

  “He climbed into the bath with me tonight,” she whispered. “And he turned me around and he was a little rough and I was tired and I tried to put him off, laugh, say wait a minute, wait till later. But he just tightened his grip. He hurt me. He can be firm. Rough, actually. But something tonight scared me, Neave. I started to struggle, and that made things escalate. He liked it that I struggled.”

  She stopped talking. We both listened for Annie, wanting her to be far away and asleep because Lilly was going to take us someplace we didn’t want Annie to know existed. “He wanted it a particular way,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He pushed my head underwater, and I struggled. The more I struggled, the more … It excited him, Neave. He was like a kind of zombie, unreachable. And in another way he was completely there—I mean, more completely there than I’d ever seen him. I pushed back, tried to kick loose of him, because I was actually thinking, What will happen to Annie if he kills me? Until I listened to myself think those words, I didn’t admit that it was that bad. But tonight I actually thought he could. Maybe I’ve thought that for a while, but I just couldn’t listen to myself think it. But tonight it just shot through me and I got loose from him and pulled myself around.…”

  “And?”

  “I grabbed his private parts and I twisted.” She laughed in a way that made the word “hysterical” pop into my head. “Can you believe that? It gave me just enough time to get out of that tub, grab the clothes off the floor, get into Annie’s room, and lock the door. We climbed out the window listening to him banging on the door, screaming at us to let him in. I got us on the roof, and I pushed us off into the bushes. It felt like jumping off a cliff into a tidal pool a thousand feet below me. I told Annie it was a game.”

  “She couldn’t possibly have believed you.”

  “I know. She kind of went dark, completely quiet. Neave, when I heard myself thinking I might die I got so scared. Not for me. I thought, Well, Jane and Neave will take care of Annie. Neave, if I die, you will, won’t you?”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “But if I do, if a truck hits me or I fall off a cliff, Annie will be all right, won’t she?”

  “I don’t know if Annie will be all right, but I know that Jane and I will take care of her.”

  The laugh was thin and bitter, not a Lilly laugh. “So like you, sugar, to tell me the truth when anybody else on Earth would have lied.”

  “What lie?”

  “That no matter what happened, Annie would be all right. I know I don’t pay as much attention to Annie as Good Housekeeping says that all good women yearn to do in their deepest hearts. I never said I was Mother of the Year, but I love her. I might not stay home and knit her sweaters every Saturday night, but you know I’d throw myself in front of a bullet for her. You know that, right?”

  “I know it,” I said. “You’d step in front of a charging bear to protect Annie.”

  “Oh, shut up,” she said to me, but she said it like she knew that the jokey tone was just to give us some kind of safe surface we could use to skate over this terrible thought: harm coming to Annie.

  “Jane and I’ll be right behind you,” I nodded. “All of us taking on the bear.”

  We sat for a full five minutes in an aching silence before she said, “Why do they hate us?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Men.”

  “Only Ricky pushed your head underwater, Lilly. He isn’t all men.”

  “But the way he looked, I’ve seen it before in other guys. Guard yourself, Mom always said, and I laughed but I knew why she was saying it. I’d been in the backseat of a car. I’ve been pushed against a wall or two. Not every man in a backseat gets that switch flipped inside of him, but some of them do and it’s hard to tell, at the start of things, if he’s one of the ones who could hurt you. Maybe wants to hurt you. It’s harder to tell because they don’t know themselves. They just want to … do things to you. For some of them, some of the time, it’s not just sex they want; or if it is, the sex involves torn clothes maybe or a black eye. Or worse.” Now she hardened herself. Straightened out her face in a wooden, icey-eyed way.

  I’d never heard my sister talk like this—Lilly, the girl who’d been known to book three dates in a single weekend. The playful risk-taker, the woman in Chanel No. 5, the believer in Love.

  “Maybe I know why they hate us,” she murmured.

  “Yeah?”

  “They hate us because we make them feel,” she said. “We make them feel all kinds of things, and they can’t stand it.”

  * * *

  That night Annie slept in the small bedroom that had been hers when she and Lilly last lived with me. My sister and I slept in my bed. When we were little girls we kicked and elbowed to demand more room in the narrow space we shared, and woke up most mornings spooned. On this night we started right out spooned, but it took a long time to shut down the whirring pictures in my head, damp down the feelings that I didn’t want to be feeling, and sleep.

  Luhrmann came after her the next day. We woke up to the sound of the downstairs door being banged on, a splintering sound of the aging bolt being snapped off the door, then feet pounding up the stairs. I dialed the cops. Luhrmann reached us and began pounding on the door to the apartment. I told Lilly to stay put, but she didn’t. She marched right up to the damn thing and opened it.

  “You stole my car,” Luhrmann said—almost a whisper, eyes like a reptile with something in its prehensile sights. “I’m here to get it back.”

  “You don’t own a car. That’s my car! And you didn’t have any trouble finding another one to borrow real quick so you could come
over and threaten me.”

  “That car’s in my name. Which makes it my car.” Of course, everything was in his name except Lilly’s half of Be Your Best Cosmetics, carefully shielded from a moment like this. He was her husband.

  “Might be in your name, but it was bought with cash I made,” Lilly said evenly. “So—my car.”

  Even as inexperienced in the world of love as I was, I knew this was not the right thing to say at this moment. I had come up behind her, carrying a copper pan. When Luhrmann stepped over the threshold and put his hands on her, I swung—a satisfying, thumping whock—and he was down, looking up at us from where he’d hit the floor, dazed but scrambling like a squashed spider, struggling to get to his feet and make something bad happen. I stepped over the threshold and swung the pan over my head, clearly focused on his face. “Don’t do it,” I said softly.

  “You think you can get away with that?” The blow had left him vague and thick—slower but still dangerous.

  “Yes.” I kept my tone matter-of-fact because I wanted my ability to hurt him and get away with it to sound very much like a fact.

  “Bitch,” he said, the word coming out like a small metal thing with sharp parts.

  “You bet,” I answered. “Get out of here, Luhrmann.”

  Before the exchange went any further, flashing lights in the street below us from a police cruiser blinked up the stairway. “Up here!” I yelled. “Top of those stairs!”

  Two patrolmen slogged up the stairs to where Ricky Luhrmann lay, now moaning and making himself as pathetic as possible. I heard Annie open her bedroom door and turned to see her behind me, hesitant and afraid but purposeful, standing her ground. “Go back to your room for just a little bit, sweetie,” I said. “It’ll be all right.” She froze, uncertain.

  “Go ahead, Annie,” her mother called out to her. “Neave’s right.” The little girl turned and retreated. The police reached the door.

  “Did you see her attack me?” Luhrmann cried. “You must at least have heard that fucking pan hit my head, even from the bottom of the stairwell!” He kept talking. The cops stood there long enough to hear him swear he’d never give Lilly a divorce and she had a few things to learn if she thought she was in charge of anything besides lipstick, and she wasn’t in charge of him that was a goddamn fucking sure thing. “And if your sister thinks she can stick her nose in where it doesn’t belong then she’d better think again. I knew you’d come running straight to her.” The tendons in his neck stood out in a lizardy fan. Lilly silently held out her wrists to show the police the purple places spreading from what he’d done to hold her down the night before. There were marks elsewhere besides, she told them, if they cared to see them. Then they saw her spit right in Ricky Luhrmann’s face. Later she swore she did it on purpose because she knew it would make Luhrmann do something outsized stupid with the cops standing right there, and it did. He stood up, lunged at her and got her by the throat. The cops pulled them apart.

  “It’s a domestic matter, ma’am. If they weren’t married, maybe you could call it assault. But it’s between a husband and wife.” Then the bigger guy turned to Luhrmann. “Mister, I think you oughtta shove off until you cool down a bit.” The cop planted himself directly between Luhrmann and Lilly and rested one hand on his billy club. “Lady, just make peace with the man,” the cop said when Luhrmann had stamped down the stairs, out onto the street, and back to his borrowed car. “Better or worse, the guy’s your husband.”

  “Not for long,” was Lilly’s reply. Lilly Terhune had watched me see Ricky Luhrmann getting her by the throat. There was no pretending it had been anything but what it had been, and I was not a person who could be persuaded that I hadn’t seen something. And there was Annie, who had been protected from scenes like this in the past but who only a few minutes earlier had stood in a hallway and watched me threaten her mother’s husband with a sauce pan.

  Lilly didn’t care if Luhrmann wouldn’t cooperate. She didn’t care to wait around for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

  “Annie saw that,” she murmured when Luhrmann had gone.

  “Yes, she did,” I agreed.

  “She’s not going to see it again. If you’ve got no objection, Neave, Annie and I are moving in with you for a little while. I’ll wait till after the sales conference. But right after that I’m booking a flight to a dude ranch in Nevada and planting myself there for the six weeks it’ll take to get the divorce legal.”

  Made sense to me. We bought a plane ticket to get her to Nevada the day after the conference. I told her that a divorcée dude ranch was probably no place for Annie, and she agreed. Jane and I could easily manage Annie between us when she was gone and she shouldn’t look back. If I were going out with Charles or stuck at a business dinner, Janey would step in. In the weeks before she left for Nevada, Lilly and Annie and I fell into the habits of the early days of Be Your Best. We made vats of spaghetti, played Monopoly late at night when Annie had been put to bed, and plotted out new seminars for the conferences and more splashy sales incentives. We didn’t so much as speak Ricky Luhrmann’s name though the idea of him was everywhere.

  The upcoming conference was going to cap off the best year we’d had since we’d started the business. Ruga Potts had done away with the melting lipsticks that went rancid, the colors that changed within three weeks of purchase. The pace-setting salesgirls were supporting whole families now, and this year for the first time we were giving these chosen few real blue diamond necklaces. Lilly and I had waited for this moment for years. We went to the jewelry exchange on Washington Street together, picked them out and went to the Parker House for a celebratory drink. We set them on the table between us so we could look at them while we congratulated each other. Lilly insisted on wrapping them in pretty blue boxes herself and then we put them in the office safe. She had rented a white horse to help with the presentation—she was going to ride him onstage at the moment the diamond-necklace winners were announced. “Remember Barbara Stanwyck on that staircase in Double Indemnity? That’s the entrance we aspire to, baby.”

  The conference went off without a hitch. Lilly led the session on “Keeping Our Husbands Happy,” which she’d invented when we lost three solid sellers to husbands who wanted their wives home every night instead of running cosmetics parties. The blue-diamond winners included, luckily, a beautiful twenty-four-year-old wearing a very low-cut dress that got us a picture in the Boston Herald Tribune. Thirty new salesgirls came our way within a week of seeing that picture. I sent congratulatory letters to each of their husbands, including stories from husbands grateful for the vacations and refrigerators their families had bought with Be Your Best income.

  “Send them the ‘You can expect more sex if they work for us’ letter,” Lilly called out. Lilly had perfected this one, managing to convey the idea without mentioning the act at all. “Send them the ‘My wife is so much better groomed now that she sells for your company and she’s lost twelve pounds.’”

  “We don’t need to do that. These women are making money you can see—that’s enough,” I said.

  “Just shows what you know about men,” she said back. She rolled her eyes.

  “Next year,” I said, grinning after the last of the conference was wrapped up, “it’s going to be a powder-blue Cadillac as well as three diamond necklaces. Now—off you go to become a divorcée yet again.”

  “I’m aiming for ‘gay divorcée.’ I’d lay odds at about even.”

  That night Annie and I had a stuffed-animal tea party with sugar cookies and cucumber sandwiches, milky tea, and licorice. Annie suggested we add MoonPies at our next tea because the stuffed animals preferred them to cucumbers. I didn’t blame them, I said. MoonPies it is.

  * * *

  Lilly came home from the dude ranch a blonde with a taste for cowgirl shirts and boots. It didn’t last long, and I sort of missed the cowgirl shirts when they ended up wadded behind the Chanel suits. It took her a while to regain her mind. Annie clung to me when her
newly platinum-blond mother barreled into the apartment. It hurt my sister, but I could see it from Annie’s point of view as well.

  “I scare her,” Lilly said to me that first night after Annie had been dispatched to bed. “I’m the woman who pushed her out her bedroom window and told her to jump.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “You did. But I think the cowboy shirt and boots and yellow hair are more what she’s reacting to now.”

  “Why is it that kids like everything to stay the same? I can’t stay the same. I look at her looking at me like that, like I’m the Martian mother come home to push her out windows again, and it feels bad. Kids are so judgmental. Narrow. You know, I’d like to be what the child wants me to be but, then again, I don’t. It’s not going to happen.”

  “She’ll adjust. What’s that color you’re wearing now?”

  “The girls on the ranch called it Hell-Bent-for-Leather Brown.”

  “I like it. How about Lusty Wench Red? Night of the Ball Blush. Pirate Girl Pink.”

  “Snapping-Eyed Wench.” She laughed.

  “I’m not joking. What woman doesn’t want to have a little piratical streak?”

  “You don’t,” Lilly snorted. “Got any pie around here?” Lilly sighed. “Or bourbon?”

  * * *

  “She’s a little louder than she was when she was a brunette,” Charles Helbrun observed. People expected Charles and I to appear places together now and I was often at his side at his business events. He was a less reliable date for me at Be Your Best parties or Terhune family gatherings, but he showed up enough to be considered my own particular beau.

  A little louder? I knew that in his language, “loud” was code for “vulgar,” which was not a compliment. I’d invited him along on a walk with Annie and Lilly, and the afternoon had had some awkward silences—these might have made Lilly seem louder than she actually was when she tried to fill them in. Annie had started the day out being very charming but had gotten less so as her adult company got more awkward and she got hungrier, which made Charles impatient with her.