The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 13

  “We will have enough room and time to vanish for now,” Le Cherche said to Electra.

  “And in the morning, when they see they have lost us?”

  He answered this in a tone that seemed both resigned and faintly amused. “Earlier today I saw my brother aboard the flagship. He leads the chase himself, an entirely invested opponent. He will chase on.”

  Electra stepped closer to Basil Le Cherche—as close as she dared. His calm, his intelligence, his electric physical presence all drew her into his orbit and held her like a planet holds a moon. Now only a palm’s span from him she could feel the heat of his body. The smell of his sweat, the warmth radiating from his chest in the cool night air—these pulled at her in ways she did not choose to question. She sought his eyes, so alert, so keen and cool. What was the other light she saw in those eyes but could not name?

  “Mademoiselle, you seem so intent. What is it you see?” he whispered.

  His question summoned up its name. “Sadness,” she said. He turned away from her abruptly. Drawn to him, powerfully moved, she stepped close enough to feel the moisture of his breath. “I have placed you in danger by coming aboard this ship. I am sorry, Captain.”

  “I do what I please,” he replied, more than allowing her to come so close—in fact, moving just the slightest bit closer to her. “Not what pleases my brother.” She saw the vein below his jaw pulse, rapid and hot, and restrained the hand that began a journey toward that face, toward a caress down that cheek. He took a deep breath and stepped away from her. “You should leave me now, mademoiselle.” And when she did not leave him he said gently, firmly, “A captain’s suggestion on board that captain’s quarterdeck is an order, my dear.” And so she left him.

  The next morning’s light showed that, miraculously, Henri Le Cherche had found their trail. Two of his reduced convoy were hull-up on the horizon. “How could he do this? Is the man a warlock? Has he made some pact with the devil?” She stood beside Basil Le Cherche on the quarterdeck, both their eyes trained on their pursuer.

  “I believe he has, mademoiselle.” Basil smiled. “But the answer is simpler than that. Henri and I learned the sea together, from little boys in our tiny sailboat on the marshes to men captaining our own yachts and ships,” Basil said to her. “Perhaps more importantly, our instincts were similar even before we learned side by side. They were woven into an almost inviolable single force in that childhood, and now sometimes it seems we sail with each other’s minds. I try to imagine him imagining me. He does the same. Sometimes we cannot escape one another’s minds. Or one another.” He said this last in a thick tone, his hands clenched.

  Judge Henri Le Cherche’s flagship approached, three battleships behind him, all headed directly toward the Cat, all fast and heavily armed. Outrun, outmanned, outgunned, Basil Le Cherche knew that his best tricks had been deployed and failed. He waited on his brother’s approach.

  Henri Le Cherche ordered the Cat’s white flag raised and named conditions, which were simple: Basil Le Cherche and Electra Gates were to surrender themselves. No one else mattered to the convoy surrounding the Cat with its guns trained on her hull. The Cat’s sailors massed around their captain to argue their case. They could still fight their way free, they insisted. But Basil Le Cherche drew up to his whole height and made his orders clear: they could fight their way free, perhaps, but it would cost them half the lives on board. They were to do as they were told, take their freedom and use it to stay in hiding in and out of the many harbors along this coast. “This is not over,” he told his crew. “Speak to every fishing craft, every soul afloat you meet in the next weeks asking for news of our fate. Have faith in an escape. We will do everything we can to send some message naming a time and place to rendezvous. If in three weeks you hear nothing, you are to sail on without us. Do you understand? If you hear of an escape but have no message from us, search us out—but only as long as you are safe. You will not place the Cat and all your lives at stake beyond that.” Basil Le Cherche’s crew nodded and fell back.

  “Do not think that we are lost, Electra Gates. I will move heaven and hell before I let him have you,” Basil whispered in an aside to Electra. “I will find a way to make you free. Have faith in me.” And strangely, against all the evidence of the crowded ships of an enemy bearing down on them, against all the logic she could bring to bear, Electra did.

  NEAVE

  Snyder’s Universe

  Snyder lost the job that Lilly found for him with the fruit-and-vegetable-store owners. He’d done what he always did, scooting out on Fridays to get to the back alleys of New York so he could root through Dumpsters behind comic-book publishers before the garbage trucks got them. He made mistakes whenever he had the chance, undercharging for oranges and overcharging for turnips, mindlessly accepting deliveries of rotten potatoes. Our father did exactly what he’d said he would do and threw Snyder out. He was on our doorstep that night, Janey at his side and a suitcase in his hand. I resisted, of course. Jane told Snyder to go into the kitchen area and make us coffee and off he went, leaving her the room she needed to work on us.

  “Use the womanly charms God gave you,” Lilly said to her, “and talk Daddy into letting him come back. You can do it.”

  “I probably could, but Snyder and Daddy are never going to be at peace with each other. It’s a terrible thing to say, but Daddy just seems to hate him. Snyder needs to move out.”

  “That doesn’t mean he has to move here,” I protested.

  “And where else is he going to go?” Janey asked, but it wasn’t really a question. “The money he made, what little of it there was, went to fantasy art and books. He can’t afford an apartment of his own, or even a room in a rooming house. You have space, and you’re starting to make money. You’re his sisters, and you know it’s the right thing to do.”

  Janey was not somebody who would stare you down; she’d give you an openhearted meet-my-gentle-gaze kind of thing, which was much, much worse than a stare-down. I looked away from her.

  The next day Jane, Snyder, and I drove back and forth a dozen times, staggering up the warehouse stairs with posters (some framed, some in cardboard tubes, some flat), boxes of comics, and fantasy books. Lilly had managed, characteristically, to be too busy to help.

  “I’m hiring a carpenter and dropping more walls in this warehouse today,” I said to Lilly when she reappeared. “We’re going to put him in the back corner by the fire escape, and we’re plumbing another bathroom because I have shared my last soap dish with Snyder Terhune.”

  Construction started the next week. We told him to start looking for another job but I didn’t see any sign of effort. He was stuck. And he was living in my space.

  “Send him to that drugstore on Weiller Avenue that has the giant comic-book section,” our little sister suggested. “Tell him to find the guy who’s ordering all those comics. They’ll understand each other.”

  Jane was, as usual, right. Where Lilly had aimed only at getting Snyder employed, Janey was interested in making him happy, which she suspected might finally make him competent. At the drugstore he developed a following of the comic-book people. They adored him. The store owner noticed the heavier foot traffic when Snyder was around but got less enthusiastic when he realized that none of Snyder’s fans bought anything but comics. He kept our brother on a part-time schedule at an embarrassingly low hourly wage.

  “That’s not a real job!” I despaired. “He’ll never earn enough to leave.”

  “Oh, calm down,” Lilly said cheerfully. “Who cares about what Snyder does or doesn’t do. Look at us! We have outrun, out-tricked or outsold every trouble! We’ve got the Technicolor look nailed down fast and hard. Good lord, we have two bathrooms!”

  And so we did. The next thing I was going to do was get a decent stove to replace that piece of junk that had burned my last cake into a doorstop. Then shelving and something that could work as a butler’s pantry. Then a counter surface big enough for rolling out dough. Time passed. Snyder m
ade little or no effort to move out.

  Then one afternoon I walked upstairs from the “office” space to our loft living space, and found my older brother with my copy of The Pirate Lover propped in front of him at the kitchen able, eating a bowl of cereal at four in the afternoon.

  “That book was by my bed. In my room,” I said grimly. “Which is not your room.”

  He ignored me. I pulled the book out of his hands.

  “Don’t touch my stuff. Stay out of my room.”

  “‘Don’t touch my stuff,’” he mocked. “What are you, ten years old?”

  Someplace deep inside me the answer was yes, of course I was, and you stay out of my room! Snyder’s superpower was that he could drop me through a rabbit hole right back to third grade.

  He pointed to The Pirate Lover. “You used to keep this book at the back of the closet, right? When we were kids.”

  “What were you doing in the closet?”

  “It wasn’t your personal closet. We all knew you had stuff hidden back there. Big deal. I mean, I know you went into my room and got into my comics. You did, right?”

  This was true. I had.

  “You know, this story’s not so great. Nothing important happens except the sea fights. And ending with a wedding? Lame.”

  The book in front of him was lying open where he’d stopped. “How do you know the ending? You’re not even halfway through.”

  He shrugged vaguely. “I’ve read it a couple times.”

  “Really? How many times?”

  “A few.” He shifted uneasily.

  It felt so strange, imagining Snyder stepping quietly into my room, sifting through the books on the nightstand or the floor, plucking this one up.

  “I think it’s weird,” he said, “how you keep reading this thing over and over.”

  “It’s not half as weird as you reading it over and over. Why do you do that? Is it the pirate stuff and the guns?”

  “It’s…”—his feet shuffled under the table and he tugged at a hank of his own hair—“the deciding who’s in charge stuff. It’s the contest.”

  “What contest?”

  “Between the pirate guy and the electric girl. Whatsername. Electra. The contest about who’s the most powerful.”

  “What are you talking about?” Electra and Basil had each seemed to me to be engaged in the same struggle—the challenge of abandoning control; the challenge of opening themselves with complete trust to the other. My brother had turned the same pages that I had, but read an entirely different story.

  “He’s terrific but the girl’s really limp. What makes her special? What’s her superpower? Getting the right dress for a ball?” He snorted.

  “I wish you could hear how stupid you sound right now. Stop jiggling your foot.”

  “It’s not jiggling. And what if I feel like jiggling? What could you do about it?”

  “I could throw you out of the apartment.”

  “Jane won’t let you. Lilly won’t help you. And you can’t do it alone.”

  This was true. It would be useless now to break his nose or throw his books and clothes out the window and into the parking lot. Jane and Lilly would be very unhappy with me, and I would hate that. They’d lug his stuff right back up the stairs.

  It was so clear. My idea of the universe and my brother’s idea of the universe were at war. In his universe, control meant everything and the players used whatever power they had to achieve it. In my universe, relinquishing control was the goal. Love was the prize.

  Calm down, I heard myself saying to myself. Snyder Terhune is a dummy and you shouldn’t waste any time trying to make him less of a dummy. Something in the way I looked at him then caught him up sharply. He closed the book.

  “I was going to put it back before you came upstairs but you were early,” he said. “You wouldn’t even have known.” It was clear that this didn’t soften me any. “I’ll stay out of your room from now on,” he added. “Really.” He set book down and retreated to his corner of the apartment.

  Time went by. Then the drugstore owner sold out and moved to Florida, and the new owner announced that he was gutting the building and opening a restaurant. Snyder’s little trickle of part-time work ended, and he was once again entirely unemployed, a man with nothing in the world to do except wander around our warehouse and rifle though our personal things, a man who contributed not so much as one box of Wheaties to the group larder.

  If Snyder wouldn’t take care of his own destiny, we would have to do it for him. I called a meeting: me, Jane, Lilly. “We have to get Snyder a life,” I said, “because he has to get out of this apartment.”

  “He can’t go back home,” Jane insisted.

  And he couldn’t, not as long as Daddy was Daddy. Snyder was diffident and retiring, a 4F boy who thought comic books were important. He made our father nuts.

  I hadn’t made this warehouse into my home just so some of the things I’d come here to avoid could follow me, and that included both Daddy’s temper and Snyder’s dumbness. “Snyder’s got to figure out how to make money, and the only thing he’s good at is knowing which comic books and fantasy junk all the other comic-book boys want. So,” I finished, “that’s what he’ll do.”

  By this, I explained over the rest of that meeting, I meant that Snyder would buy and sell comic books and sci-fi/fantasy art. Jane had a friend who had an uncle who had a gallery on Newbury Street. She was given the job of prevailing upon him to let Snyder have a show. I could make him give me the list of all his old corner-store customers who’d come for his comic-book advice. Lilly could throw the party for the opening night. We put Jane in a blue dress of Lilly’s that had an interesting neckline and sent her off to see the gallery owner.

  She succeeded. After a two-hour lunch the man agreed to offer us his only unbooked week in mid-September in exchange for 50 percent of sales. Now all we had to do was get Snyder to cooperate. Again, we knew that Jane was our most effective negotiator. She resorted to her toughest strategy with Snyder: she cried. He gave in. In a rush of confidence she went back and renegotiated the gallery owner down to 40 percent. We took Janey out for her first beer. “Good girl,” Lilly said, tipping her mug against Jane’s. “You’re on the road to womanhood.”

  LILLY

  We Launch Snyder’s Career

  After Janey worked her magic on the gallery owner and Snyder, we got down to work. Neave rustled up a mailing list that included all the customers from the old drugstore that Snyder could name, all the old Monsters in the Movies members, and a list she bought from a mail-order house that sold back issues of Batman and Tales from the Crypt. Then I did what I did best: the gallery opening-night party.

  I got a little resistance over the Manhattan fountain rental. Jane said it would be vulgar and I said, “It’s alien invasions, for chrissakes. We’re gonna have a wall full of blow-up breasts and ray guns and we should worry about vulgar?” Neave sided with me. We got the biggest fountain they rented. All the salesgirls from the Lynn office came, as directed, with dates. They were told not to bring the men of their dreams but the men who dreamed about them—specifically, the ones who didn’t have much hope of actual success with them. The gallery was packed. Jane forgave me for the Manhattan fountain when she saw its supernatural powers. People with no previous relationship with the Princess of Mars were handing over wads of money for the poster-sized book cover art that featured her, with and without ray blasters or much in the way of clothes.

  I saw all this like I was in the center of the room in the middle of the moment, even though I was really here with Boppit, Where I Am Now. I was dead, and I knew in the logical part of my mind that all this was in the past, but here I was watching the former Monsters club members refill their cocktail glasses.

  “You made this happen?” I asked him. “You got me here?”

  “Oh, no,” Boppit said. “You took us here. I’m just in your tail wind.”

  It was truly, impossibly, the Snyder Terhune Fantasy Art collec
tion’s first sale. I was standing next to a man wearing what looked like his father’s bunchy pants. He turned away from the enormous seven-eyed thing on the wall he’d been examining and walked right through me to get to the next picture. “Oh my God,” I gasped.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Boppit said. “Or maybe not.”

  I was the invisible Dead Lilly me, and I was also the Lilly who had gone to that party in a pale-green silk, clinked my glass against the ice in the Manhattan fountain, and laughed at our success. Back then it all looked cheerful and bright, the big posters full of muscular half-naked heroes wearing red capes and blue stars, the outsized monsters and energetic space travelers protecting or attacking pneumatic heroines. But now … so many sharp blades! So much blood and so many breasts! It was a weird parade of chains and nipples and explosions.

  “Why didn’t I see it then, Boppit?”

  He knew what I meant. “You were a girl. This is the world that little boys live in. Some little boys, anyway.”

  When I was here in life, this party was nothing but a good time, a reason to be proud of ourselves. It made me laugh then. Now I feel a clammy something.

  “It’s the Ricky thing that makes it clammy-feeling,” Boppit said. “You hadn’t met Ricky yet. But now you’ve experienced him. Your perspective is changed.”

  It was. I had experienced Ricky, and Ricky had enjoyed what he’d done to me. I’d felt it even as it was happening, but I could only say I knew it as the truth from Where I Am Now. And I could feel it in the guys staring at the fantasy art now. More than half of Snyder’s choices for the show were covers from the war years: knobby-kneed Japanese soldiers with filed black teeth, snarling as they bent helpless American women over tanks or trucks and jabbed their rifles at them; Nazis shackling American women with chains; Superman ripping the deck off an enemy cruiser to free American WACs. Back then I’d laughed at the stuff on the gallery walls.

  “It’s okay,” Boppit said to me. He offered his hand and I took it. People flowed all around us, pointing at particular pictures and getting more and more excited as the Manhattans and the images on the walls worked on them.