Her mother was stunned by this unexpected turn in the conversation—confused and hesitant now where she had been so sure of her feelings only a moment before. “You are changed,” she said at last. “I hardly know you.”
“Basil Le Cherche and I are to be married, Mother, at the spring flood. We sail for the West Indies the very night we wed, and it is possible that you and I will never see one another again. I never meant to hurt you,” she added gently. “But I must be free to be what I am. All that I am—and that involves Basil Le Cherche.”
“Nothing will dissuade you? You mean to marry this man?”
“Yes. I do.”
And so she did, swathed in white silk, her train streaming behind her like another sail as she stood by Basil’s side on the Cat’s quarterdeck and they swore before the world to love and cherish each other for the rest of their lives. Celebration spilled over the entire city and its harbor, for those who were grateful for the removal of Judge Henri Le Cherche from the face of the Earth sailed alongside, their rigging crowded with cheering men, and as they slipped from their moorings and into the great channel, a stream of accompanying ships fired a thirty-gun salute before unfurling pennants that signaled “Success in Battle.”
Just before they sailed Electra moved to the rail with a wax-sealed bottle. She cradled it like a live thing and when her lover asked her what she was doing she told him she was thinking of Polly. Who is that? he asked. Just a girl, she answered. And what was in the bottle? He smiled, amused at her little diversion. Nothing, she said. But she had written down the story of how love had cracked open the borders of her life and admitted more feeling and valor than she had believed the human frame could bear. Someone would come upon it, perhaps someone like Polly whose life had led her to believe that there was only darkness or monsters beyond the edges of their dreary rooms, their daily habits. Electra made up a prayer for the occasion and cocked her arm: Let such a seeker find this stoppered bit of blown glass and be changed.
And so they sailed for the West, toward their future—whatever they would know or understand of eternity that could be understood within the limits of the body, that mysterious portal through which we must move to understand joy.
NEAVE
Reader, I Married Him
The wedding: mythic ritual made of white lace, pink frosting, and tossed bouquets. I know the clichés but I never bought into the particulars. That’s a little girl’s dream and I am a grown woman.
I was married aboard the Boogie Woogie in a bathing suit, accented with a white towel wrapped loosely and knotted at the waist. Max wore a bathing suit too, a towel draped across his shoulders like a cape. We swore to be each other’s until death separated us, pulled off our towels, and jumped over the side for a swim. Most of the guests joined us.
Max’s entire oceanographic department was there. Ten of my sales directors and Ruga Potts were there. Janey and Snyder hugged each other and Jane cried. Annie was told not to dive off the back of the boat. She waved at us, promised she would not die, and jumped. Ten anxious seconds later she surfaced howling and splashing, terrifically pleased. Todd hoisted her back onto the boat. She flung herself off again, this time into a small crowd of doggy-paddling flotsamologists. I watched Todd assess Annie’s situation, decide she was safe, and turn to look at Jane. His face said that she was the gravitational center of the universe, which of course to him she was.
Ruga Potts was suddenly at my side. “That one,” she said, tipping her chin toward the splashing and howling Annie, “disobedient.”
“Sometimes,” I responded.
“Good. The obedient ones, when the men with guns come, they are the first to get shot.” Ruga swayed just the tiniest bit. “She will not be easy to shoot.” She squinted at some empty space to the right of me, and then brushed at my hip. “Dog hair?”
“Are you drunk, Ruga?”
“I am.” She swiveled on her heel and looked at me happily. “You are very beautiful today. The bathing suit, so perfect.”
“Thank you.”
“My wedding dress was blue, like the robin-bird egg.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“They killed him.” This revelation silenced me completely. Ruga lifted the glass to her lips and sipped, unperturbed. “It happened to so many. Yet I am here, alive.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes the men with guns win, my love, but sometimes we defeat them and stand in the sun with a glass of Champagne.” She sighed. “Look at you in your beautiful bathing costume.” She watched the horizon for a moment, and then the wedding scene all around us, splashing flotsamologists and flirting salesgirls, Annie perched on the bow with a plastic crown on her head and a wand that had appeared from somewhere, Todd and Jane holding hands on the bridge. “So lovely.” She sighed. Ruga lifted her glass toward Max, who was just about to jump off the quarterdeck. “Good legs,” she observed. She looked at me and I felt my face heat up, which made her laugh. “Blushing! So we have both beaten the men with guns.”
We had. Ruga clinked her glass against mine and lifted it. “To love,” she said. “To beauty. To hope. To employment and a lipstick that does not melt. All things yield to them. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, which we know for a fact because we are here now.”
I never told Max about Dead Lilly and Mr. Boppit. They were at my side the day he said he wanted to marry me more than he wanted anything on Earth. They stood beside me, invisible to the gathered celebrants, when I put Annie’s plastic tiara on my head and marched onto the deck of the Boogie Woogie to say I would. They were at my side the week before the wedding.
The moment I said “I do,” Bop and Lilly started to lose their density and color. By that day’s nightfall they had vanished. I have never seen them again.
And what of The Pirate Lover? The route to our highest hopes tends to run right through some dark, booby-trapped places. A girl needs a map and a light to steer her; she might need a flamethrower or a cannon as well. She might need a pirate lover. For now the dogeared little paperback is in a box at the back of a closet. But when it’s time, I’ll pass The Pirate Lover on and let Annie make of it what she will.
WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK
I met my first romance novel at the Talkeetna Roadhouse, where my daughter and I were staying the night. Most of Alaska and hundreds of tourists pass through this jumping-off town to the Denali National Park, and many left books behind for the Roadhouse lending library. Here they sat over the coffeepot on a shelf that ended in a few bear spray canisters, also on loan to travelers who’d forgotten theirs. Almost every battered paperback on offer was a romance.
I’m a New Englander, who until this visit had no experience with romances. I’d read the novels my teachers had given me, which were never romances, and I read addictively. But I was bookless when we got to Talkeetna, so I plucked one from the lending library shelf and took it to bed. My ignorance was dispelled; I was entranced.
When I got home, I headed to a library and got myself a big stack of books with titles like The Moth and the Flame; Dirty, Willing Victim; and Too Tough to Tame. The nice young man at the checkout counter saw my selections, leaned forward, and very discreetly offered to let me jump a waiting line of 248 (yes, really) people who wanted to read Fifty Shades of Grey. I just happen, he whispered, to have a recent return right here under the counter. If you’re interested.
Well, of course I was interested. I took them home and entered Romancelandia. Brio! Bad guys with mansions and castles! Great sex! Silliness! Sadism! Dominance. True love. Submission. Salvation. It was clear to me that under the heaving bosoms and wands of pleasure there was something elementally true going on.
In Romancelandia, sex and power were tangled, even interdependent. But wasn’t that the way it really was? Weren’t they also linked in The Taming of the Shrew, in Wuthering Heights, in the evening news reports of recent domestic murders? I hadn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey or Too Tough to Tame until I started all this, b
ut when I did, the struggle to control the lover or be controlled seemed like an old story, recast to play out in billionaires’ luxury condominiums or wooden ships on stormy seas.
And here’s where I thought the thought that became this novel: If someone set a romance plot side-by-side with a “real” story about love, would the struggle to dominate or be subordinated be the same in both worlds? Would both narratives suggest that a power struggle was central to sexual satisfaction? To love? Would both stories slip over a line and become deadly, or would they describe someone’s salvation? In other words, are romances true?
The novel is a romance about romances. It takes place in two settings: Romancelandia, and the post-WWII world of emerging cosmetics industries. Its heroines discover that the forces of evil often have a magnetic, sweet, bluntly sexual pull. They allow themselves to be pulled, and find that when they reach the edge of what’s safe and known, there’s an almost overwhelming urge to jump. Pleasure and danger—they’re an indelibly bound combination familiar to any hiker who plucks a dog-eared pink paperback to carry into the woods along with her bear spray. That’s romance.
Bring on the pirates.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my editors, Amy Einhorn and Caroline Bleeke, who were never wrong. Thanks to Bill and Liv Blumer at Blumer Literary for standing firmly by this book’s side (as well as mine). Thanks to Terry Grobe, Pat Mulcahy, Judy Karp, and Mark Feldhusen for reading and responding in ways that shaped the work. Information about the cosmetics industry is taken from written accounts of the business, particularly the parts of it shaped by Mary Kay Cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden, Madame Helena Rubinstein, and Charles Revson. Thanks to Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan for their Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance. The Jerry Weist collection informed some of the fantasy art descriptions. May his remains end up, as he wished, on Mars.
RECOMMEND
THE ROMANCE READER’S GUIDE TO LIFE
FOR YOUR NEXT BOOK CLUB!
Reading Group Guide available at:
www.readinggroupgold.com
ALSO BY SHARON PYWELL
Everything After
What Happened to Henry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Pywell is the author of two previous novels. She lives in Boston. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
A Few Words from Lilly: Where She Is Now
Neave: Lynn, Massachusetts—My First Job
Neave: Mr. Boppit, Wonder Dog
Neave: The Pirate Lover
Lilly: Where She Is Now
Neave: Monsters in the Movies
What We Call Romance: The Pirate Lover
Neave: Christmas
Mrs. Daniels and Me, Again: The Pirate Lover
Neave: What Happy Women Do
Lilly: Cape Ann. High Tide. Goodbye, Dog.
Lilly: Arnold Strato’s War
Neave: Jenna Louise
Neave: Mrs. Daniels Decides to Go
Neave: How Be Your Best Begins
Neave: Problems Arise, Solutions Appear
Neave: What Technicolor Did for Us
Neave: Snyder’s Universe
Lilly: We Launch Snyder’s Career
Neave: My Romance
Lilly: My First Husband
Neave: And Then, Ricky Luhrmann
Lilly: Janey Marries
Neave: Our Mother Dies
Neave: Gay Divorcée
Lilly: Meat
Boppit: Where We Are, Where I Want to Go
Neave: I Talk to Max Luhrmann
Lilly and Boppit: How He Hates Her
Lilly: What I Saw in Him
Neave: What Does He Have to Do?
Neave: What Could Be Worse?
Lilly and Boppit: Are You Made for Fire or Ice?
Neave: I Am Not Alone
Neave: You Should Be Married
Neave: Ponytail
Neave: Move to the Rubber Duck
Neave: The Rubber Duck
Lilly: What You Go With
Neave: Lilly and Boppit Break Through
Neave: Mr. Boppit and Lilly Dress Me for Success
Lilly: He Sees Us
Boppit: Snyder Gives Her Away
Neave: It’s Done
Neave: Message in a Bottle
Neave: Reader, I Married Him
Why I Wrote This Book
Acknowledgments
Also by Sharon Pywell
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE ROMANCE READER’S GUIDE TO LIFE. Copyright © 2017 by Sharon Pywell. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.flatironbooks.com
Cover design: Christa Moffitt, Christabella Designs
Cover photographs: girl © Susan Fox / Trevillion Images; ship © Eva Bidiuk / Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-10175-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-10174-7 (e-book)
ISBN 978-1-250-16109-3 (international edition)
e-ISBN 9781250101747
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First Edition: April 2017
The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 30