The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

by Sharon Pywell

  The salesgirls who would be in the conference audience wanted to hear more about the new strategy to fight weak sales in December, historically the darkest month for Be Your Best because every spare dime in customers’ purses went to Christmas. Boppit and Lilly described their battle plan for that: the Christmas Collection of Special Gifts for Him and Her, with every order accompanied by the adorable Be Your Best stuffed panda. “Tell the Directors that the December strategy is brilliant, that they themselves are astounding, and everything’s going to be spectacular!”

  I did. I was their superhero. More meetings with design and manufacturing, and voilà—shipping possible by November 15. We had a hundred Christmas Collection and adorable panda prototypes ordered to be ready to show off at the conference itself. By the end of that day every bit of energy had been wrung out of my body and my head lay facedown on my desk.

  Boppit stepped up to me and brushed a hair from my shoulder. “It’ll be fine. New colors. New products. You’re hitting your stride, Neavie!”

  “It’s you and Lilly. Not me.”

  “No, kiddo,” Boppit said, tugging me upright and straightening the seam line of the sleeve at the shoulder. “It’s you.”

  Boppit, Dead Lilly, and I had gone over the catering menus, the opening speech, the training-session schedules, the motivational games, the entertainment, the presentations on new products, and the final dinner and award presentation. “Now the last but not least task,” Boppit said. “Wardrobe.”

  They lifted me up and escorted me into my bedroom, dropped me on the bed, and began rummaging in the closet. When they stepped out, each of them had an outfit in hand. “Here,” Mr. Boppit said. “We’ll have to plan the outfits over the course of the entire conference so they build and reinforce the effect they make.”

  “I don’t plan, Boppit. I just get dressed.”

  “Exactly.” He nodded. “We’re here to do something about that.”

  We had deflected attention from Be Your Best’s vanished creative leader, Lilly Terhune. When an article in the Boston Globe used the word “disappeared” next to the words “glamorous business tycoon Lilly Terhune,” Dead Lilly was delighted to be described as a glamorous business tycoon but determined not to have being dead get in the way of her perfect sales conference. “Get on the telephone, Neave,” she said. “Call the directors and any influential salesgirls you can think of and talk up the new stuff—hint about the circus extravaganza. Let them hear that everything’s on target. Be sweet. Let them know they’re fascinating and smart and their voice sounds so good-looking. They’re all talkers, and they’ll talk.”

  I found that when the need arose and was clearly defined, I could flirt. Only a handful of attendees canceled.

  The opening address was Lilly’s trademark performance. “The trick is to look like exactly what every salesgirl on the floor wants to be,” Lilly told me. Mr. Boppit stepped around her and walked into my closet. “We’ll start with the shoes, because they are the foundation to any look,” he said briskly. “People who know what’s what look at the shoes first.” He kicked my feet. It hurt, which astounded me.

  “I can feel you!” I gasped. Up until this point Boppit and Lilly had been like the air. What was this dog but debris from my exploded confusion and grief, after all? Yet when he kicked me, a solid whummp argued against his imaginary state. “What’s happening here?”

  “You haven’t noticed. Yesterday I offered you a cigarette,” Lilly said.

  “So?”

  “You smoked it,” Lilly said. “We’re less distant to you … more solid.”

  I bent to take the shoes off, and when I got upright again Boppit whipped down my zipper. “Off,” he demanded briskly. “Now, then.” He turned to the closet. “Nothing in here will work. Except … perhaps this Ben Zuckerman suit. Look at this, Lilly.”

  She blew a series of smoke rings. “Love it. Of course, I should. I picked it off a rack in Jordan Marsh in 1952 and wore it the next day. Passed it off to Neave when my closet got too full. But that’s too sober for opening night. We’ll use it for the day-two sessions.”

  “Right,” Bop said, flicking it with one finger. “So—Neave, show me anything else in this closet that Lilly picked out or passed down.”

  I obliged. We stood shoulder to shoulder and looked over a lineup of about six dresses, two skirts, four blouses, and a clutch of belts. Boppit did a hard five-minute assessment, then stepped forward with perfect confidence and started laying out entire ensembles, one by one. “For the welcoming speech we need something splashy yet not intimidating; glamorous, but not so glamorous that the audience can’t imagine themselves in it. So—isn’t there something a little more … frivolous yet still elegant in there? Oh my God!” he cried, leaping out with his prize in his hands. He held out a silk broadcloth sundress, snug through to its tiny waist with a wide midnight-blue belt cinching everything above a skirt that must have had twelve yards of fabric in it. Red and aquamarine camellias flowed over the skirt’s white background. Boppit held it to his waist and turned so it moved like a current around him. “So, so perfect! A Molyneux frock! And you are not wearing one of those pointy-cone brassieres under it. We want you to look like you’ve actually got breasts. The pointy look will be so outré in five years. We are placing you at the head of that vanguard.”

  “How do you know what will be outré or not?” I ask.

  He rolled his eyes at me and handed me the dress. “Again with your narrow idea that things only go in one direction. What have you got in the way of underwear that accommodates strapless?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever worn strapless.”

  “Then why is this dress here?” Boppit demanded, swinging a silk sheath up off the bed to consider. “Lilly, this one was yours too?”

  Dead Lilly nodded. “It’s last season, Bop,” she warned.

  “Dovima was wearing this thing in the Vogue March issue so who the hell cares if it didn’t go down the runway last week.” He whipped around to consult with Lilly. “This is perfect for the awards dinner. What should we do about the underwear?”

  They located the appropriate underwear in the dresser that Lilly’d used when we lived together. She and Boppit yanked open the drawers and found strapless brassieres, corsets, garter belts, stockings—some still in their pearl-finish boxes with filmy tissue paper.

  “Now, the shoes … something delicate, reserved but lightheartedly sexy.” Boppit hummed, bent over and digging through the closet like a terrier. “Look at this pitiful collection. My God, you wear Buster Brown,” he whined, dangling a brown penny loafer between his thumb and forefinger. “Yet you are in the fashion business. This is just too strange.” He held the shoe up to show Lilly. “This kind of footwear might work if it were worn with an air of irony.” He looked at me doubtfully. “Do you think you can manage ironic?”

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  “We’ll say not,” Boppit said.

  “Here.” Dead Lilly drew me to a full-length mirror. “Look at yourself, Neavie.”

  I did. “Oh,” I said softly. “Oh.” And I started to cry, because something about the image in the mirror was more like Lilly Terhune than Lilly herself. Dead Lilly stood behind me and patted one shoulder. Mr. Boppit patted the other. “We can stand up there on that stage right behind you, Neave. Nobody’ll see us. Just you. Slip on these pretty little patent heels—a woman can convince anybody of anything in those shoes. Now let’s get your final conference plan-of-attack-meeting outfit ready, because those people will be in your office in an hour and you’re going to walk in there and tell them exactly what’s going to happen.”

  “You can do it.” Dead Lilly nodded at my reflection in the mirror as if it were truer to me than the flesh. “Look at you. So ready.”

  * * *

  On the opening day of the conference when I first stepped to the front of the room, a thick, soft silence greeted me. Some of the more clueless salesgirls were still looking up expecting Lilly Terhune to sweep up to the
lectern. But it was me. I looked out at them and it was as if I were suddenly looking out of Lilly Terhune’s eyes, believing the things Lilly believed—that selling Be Your Best cosmetics was a public service on the order of providing drinking water and electricity.

  “Tell them they are continuing practices that civilization has honored for as long as there has been civilization,” Boppit had said to me as we prepared. “Remember that before lipstick existed in that beautiful twist tube, the Mesopotamians applied jewels to their lips. The Egyptians used potted dyes. Cleopatra crushed carmine beetles to get the red she wanted.”

  “Are you speaking from direct observation or something else?” I asked.

  “You know, I’m not sure,” he said. “I only know I know it.”

  When the moment came, I stood at the podium and looked out at the sea of hopeful faces, all those bow lips and shining flip hairdos beaming back at me, and I felt myself pulled toward them. I started talking. I told them that Be Your Best couldn’t make anyone fall in love with anybody all by itself, but it could help women remember the selves that could command true love: their best selves. I believed every word that I said. I could feel them believe me back in waves of scented energy.

  So much desire! How could I have worked by Lilly Terhune’s side and built this business and felt so little of what was flooding that room just then? I told my rapt audience that I had something to show them. Cued, my two most beautiful, fur-coat-clad staffers drove directly onto the stage in a powder-blue convertible whose license plate read BYBEST. They raised their hands to wave at the crowd, and a spotlight caught the diamonds in the bracelets at their wrists. The winners of these trophies, I sang out, would be announced at the closing-night candlelight dinner. But Be Your Best treasured each member of its sales force!

  This was the catechism of Lilly’s conferences. Every single woman who attended must leave with something beautiful, even if it was just a powder-blue clutch or a blue cut-glass necklace. Every single one of them was going to sit down to a candlelit dinner and be waited on by handsome young men. Every single hotel room had a welcoming card with an inspiring message propped against its vase of blue hydrangeas. “It’s our job to make them feel beautiful,” Lilly had said. “Cherished. Important. It’s what they’re selling, so they damn well better know what it feels like.”

  On closing night the trapeze act had pulled two hundred screaming women to their feet. The Cadillac had been driven away; the diamonds had been awarded. The conference had been declared fabulous. That night I drove to the Rubber Duck and lay down on its bunk. Eventually I peeled off the French bodice under the silk suit that Dead Lilly had jammed me into that morning. I pried off the heels that Mr. Boppit assured me, as he shoehorned them onto my feet, looked like glass slippers. I lay down feeling more exhausted than I ever had in my entire life.

  “Hard work, letting someone else inside you,” Mr. Boppit said to me. He’d appeared at the end of my bed. He was scratching himself briskly behind one ear, his mouth open and his tongue resting on the lower teeth. “Hardest work in the universe.” I looked at him and thought, I feel so tired I might be dead—Dead Me, in heels.

  “No, no,” he said, bouncing onto the end of the bed. “You’re just Neave, changing. That’s all.”

  LILLY

  He Sees Us

  Boppit was right. Whenever Ricky Luhrmann thought about her, whenever he started to drive in the direction of Be Your Best at the end of a workday when he might have followed Neave’s car to the Rubber Duck, we dreamed him away from her. We concentrated. We slowed him down. By the time he was parked in the street, looking up at her apartment windows, she was halfway to the docks. She still followed Max’s instructions to watch the rearview mirror and take a different route every time, to pretend to drive to Janey’s or Snyder’s if she even suspected someone was following. Sometimes she took a bus. I got better at it. The concentration now was like dreaming. We’d dream Ricky Luhrmann asleep or dream him into a bar when Neave crossed his mind, and he’d find himself so tired or angry or drunk that he was seriously slowed down. He’d get to her apartment and find himself too late to follow her. We’d dreamed her into her car and gotten her on the road already. Ha!

  “Will we be able to do this forever?” I asked Bop. “Keep him and her apart?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “She’s so different, Boppit. She looks like dynamite. She’s taking charge at the office, and everybody’s treating her like…”

  “You.”

  “Yes.”

  But it wasn’t working completely and it couldn’t work forever. When our concentration flagged, we could feel Luhrmann circling. Once or twice his car had even driven slowly past Be Your Best early in the evening while staff were still around. He was like a circling raptor.

  “I put her in all this danger,” I said at one point. “I did this!”

  “Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself, Lilly Terhune. Aren’t you dreaming alongside of me, concentrating, keeping him away? Haven’t we made Neave larger and stronger? She’s absorbed you. When she has to face whatever it is she’ll have to face, she’ll be bigger.”

  “So she will have to face something? It’s definitely going to happen, even though we’re protecting her?”

  “I suspect so.”

  “But we’ll be there when she needs us?”

  “That’s not always the way it works.”

  “You said you were here to protect her, that you’ve always protected her.”

  “I have, Lilly. That’s how I know that it doesn’t always end well. I’m just a dog in the world, and it’s a wicked, wicked world.”

  So we kept on, eating bologna sandwiches with her on the Rubber Duck, talking about things like what food we’d bring to a desert island if we could only eat that one thing for the rest of our lives. We waited. We concentrated. We dreamed.

  * * *

  Max kept the Rubber Duck schedule and watched Neave’s movements as carefully as we did. She didn’t know that he’d kept up the habit of sleeping two boats down with a crowbar under his bed when she was on board the Duck. He tried to never pass her on the docks, to never let her see him climbing into the other department boat. Any conversation about the schedule or what was stocked in the Rubber Duck pantry took place over the phone during daylight hours. They avoided actual physical interactions with each other. They pretended the kiss never happened while all along neither one of them stopped thinking about it. That’s how it works. You lie to yourself.

  Things got so peaceful that we let our guards down. Maybe we concentrated a little less. Actually, we did concentrate less. Then one morning maybe twenty days after the conference we were standing in front of the Be Your Best building, Boppit distracted by a bag of clothes one of the secretaries had tossed into a Dumpster.

  “That woman is an absolute clotheshorse and she has impeccable taste,” he argued when I said I didn’t want to tip myself rear-end up into a trash can with him. “You don’t walk away from an opportunity like this—I don’t do this regularly anymore, Lilly. I’m discriminating and that woman’s castoffs are worth a serious look.”

  He didn’t even glance over his shoulder to see if I was behind him, because he was too preoccupied by what he was imagining in that bag. I wasn’t behind him. Today the sun was bright, the office staff was streaming in and out the door looking purposeful, and all was right in our universe. Then some little clang rang inside me. It vibrated somewhere in my stomach—low in my stomach—and I whipped my head around to find out what had set it off and the ringing feeling pulled my eyes right to him.

  He was in a parked car only feet from Be Your Best, watching the front door. He had a hat on and sunglasses, but it was him. His head was at that Ricky angle. His hands rested on the wheel and I saw a flash of wedding ring. I’d picked that ring out. I started walking toward him. The dog had tipped himself into the Dumpster at this point, pawing through the clotheshorse’s bag, but at almost the exact moment I felt the cl
ang inside myself, Boppit’s head popped up and he let the bag go. He slid down from the Dumpster and moved to my side. He’d felt it too.

  “There,” he said. We were already both looking in the same direction. “He’s so close,” Bop whispered. He started walking, and I walked right beside him because it felt like that was the right thing to do, all the way to the front of Ricky Luhrmann’s car. “Did you feel a weird kind of clang just before you saw him?” Boppit asked. “I thought I felt something clangy, kind of warning-ish.” Boppit was holding a shoe from the Dumpster bag. He tapped it thoughtfully against the knuckles of his free hand. “He’s never been this close, I mean, parked right here at the door.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  The dog shook his head back and forth in the I can’t say way. We were planted directly in front of the car’s grillwork. I didn’t expect Ricky to be able to see me, but I wanted to see him. We’d walked through the Be Your Best offices by Neave’s side a dozen times without a single reaction from anyone there, so I stood right in his line of vision and looked at him, sure he’d see nothing.

  At first he stayed focused on the door of Be Your Best, shifting for a better view when someone came or went. He was waiting for her. Then he began to get uneasy, glancing around, trying to find the thing that was making him nervous. Boppit was leaning on his hood, looking straight through the windshield and directly into the man’s eyes. Ricky took off the sunglasses and rubbed his hand over his eyes and forehead, hard. He peered out his windshield, right past Boppit, who was almost directly in his line of sight, and to the left—to me. And then everything in his face changed because he saw me. There was no doubt about it.