The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Read online

  When Pearl Harbor put all those boys in uniform, Susie B made it clear that boys in uniform truly deserved a girl’s respect and attention. Susie B couldn’t name more than three American presidents, and if you asked her where Oregon was she’d have trouble finding it on a map, but she knew how to brush by a boy in a way that left him a little breathless. Off she went to express her patriotism with several other young men, and Arnold couldn’t stand it. He convinced his mother to sign a paper that said he could enlist before his eighteenth birthday, and he got himself in uniform as fast as he could. He was just a few weeks short, he’d argued when his mother tried to slow him down. If local gossip was accurate, the uniform worked. Susie Brink awarded Arnold the final favors, or so whispers in the high school hallways reported. In the old world, the world before the war, that kind of whisper would make Susie Brink an outcast. In this new world, she was a patriotic and heartbroken young woman in love. She had given in to her feelings, which were understandable In These Times.

  Neave had had a crush on Arnold since forever. She’d have denied it, but that would mostly be because she didn’t recognize what she had as a crush. My sister was as dopily romantic and inexperienced as Arnold Strato. In a heaven where looks and gawkiness don’t matter, Neave would have snagged Arnold Strato easily. But she wasn’t living in heaven and those things matter in life.

  Then, war. Most of the guys who might have been interesting enough to date were enlisted. So when the USO had dances for the guys, we girls went to them as a kind of public service to the troops. At first it was fun. Then they started coming back from postings—overseas stuff as well as from training—and they were different. Rough. They didn’t pay attention to you when you told them to get their hand off your ass. They laughed, and put the other hand up your blouse. No class, no money, no manners, so as far as I was concerned, no reason to keep going to USO dances. I was not the kind of girl who thought a uniform gave you the right to keep your hand on my ass. The movies say that war turns raw material into noble men, but from the dance floor at the Charlestown navy station USO, it looked like it just turned a lot of them into pigs.

  It did less than that and more than that to Arnold Strato. Before he shipped out he got a diamond on Susie Brink’s finger. Neave and Snyder went with his family and Susie the new fiancée to stand on the train platform and see him off. Neave was there because of the crush she didn’t know she had. Snyder was there for his Monsters in the Movies colleague. Arnold gave Susie a deep, long movie kiss. She waved a handkerchief and looked mournful and poetic.

  We kept going to school, even though it didn’t seem important anymore. All the younger male teachers had enlisted the week after Pearl Harbor except for one, a history teacher we called Mr. Quaker. He told Neave’s class that war was just a struggle for limited resources, like land and women—part of an ongoing battle that the male of a species wins by expanding the size of his holdings, both geographical and genetic. Not so different, he said, from what dragonflies or wild horses do. That night at dinner Neave delivered almost the whole lecture, right down to imitating the teacher’s habit of clearing his throat every three or four words. He was, she reported, a conscientious objector.

  I listened but I just did what I do, which was to let Neave step in it while I stepped aside. She had to know how Daddy would react to talk like that. It was like he was a hornet’s nest and she’d whacked it. He said he was going to call the school superintendent and have that cowardly, godless commie homo asshole fired. “We are not monkeys or bugs! Man is made in God’s own image! What kind of man uses a lot of big words to back down from a fight?”

  “He said horse. Not monkey,” Neave corrected. Stupid girl. To which Daddy slapped his hand down on the table again, hard, and very close to her plate.

  Mom whispered, “So many young men,” and you could hear the concertina wire in her voice. She wasn’t thinking about species survival or monkeys or bugs. She was thinking about the flags in neighbors’ windows. She was thinking about where Snyder might have ended up if that ear had been in working order.

  “Exactly what do you think is the making of those young men?” Daddy was talking low but sharp. “You go to war a boy and you come back a man. Every man understands that. Women don’t understand because women never face it.”

  It took Daddy only about three weeks to get the Quaker teacher fired. Still conscientiously objecting, the guy drove an ambulance in France, where he ran over a mine and exploded himself the first week he was there. At school they held an assembly to honor his brave service.

  Arnold Strato got himself posted onto a submarine when he found out that sub assignments paid better than topside service, and sent his money home to his parents along with letters to Susie Brink about their wedding, which would happen the moment he got home from war. Susie’s love and the promise of his life with her, he wrote—these were what got a man from day to day. Eight months later arcing battery charges on Arnold Strato’s submarine blew the engine room into flames. The navy sent a letter saying he was getting great care. It said Arnold was a hero, and they were discharging him. Fiancée Susie was with the family when they went to collect him at the train station, little tears seeping prettily as she clutched a lace handkerchief. Neave was there, still with the crush on Arnold, still unaware of the fact that she had a crush. She described Susie in particular detail when she gave me the blow-by-blow later that afternoon. We hated Susie.

  Arnold’s family walked right past him, sweeping the crowd for something that looked familiar. Everybody was met, the platform was empty, and Arnold was still waiting for them to recognize him. When I went to visit him at home I got a close-up view of what his family saw. Half of Arnold’s face had melted away. What was left of his right hand looked like the business end of a club. The way that hand hung threw his whole body into a crouchy twist.

  Susie Brink didn’t last out the month. When she told Arnold that she could not love him anymore, when nobody in town could think of a job for him to do where he wouldn’t scare away customers or other employees, he went home and sat on his parents’ back porch. Neave, being Neave, started bringing him comic books, Supermans at first, but Superman was spending all his time nowadays fighting Japs and Jerrys, so they switched to comic book westerns for peace of mind. Daddy went to the Stratos’ once to pay his respects to the returning decorated hero, then came home and sat in the living room for a week without talking to anybody.

  Mom said that the church told us to visit the sick and that it was my duty to visit Arnold Strato, so I walked on over one Saturday morning and knocked. Mrs. Strato looked surprised to see me but said that she thought Arnold would be happy to get the copy of Laredo Law I’d brought. Neave had told me that Arnold hardly ever spoke, that they just sat side by side and read comics until she left. Sometimes, she said, he didn’t even say hello or goodbye. I figured I could deal with that.

  But he wasn’t silent with me. The second I stepped onto the porch, he started talking and he didn’t stop. “Lilly. Lilly, Lilly, Lilly,” he said. Half his mouth smiled, his lips all puppety and a line of drool on his chin. “I’m so glad you’re here.” No chitchat, no preamble. He launched in like he was just continuing a conversation that’d gotten interrupted for a second. He said, “You know what my CO’s favorite expression was?” I shook my head. “‘Faint heart never fucked a pig,’” he said. “He was a piece of scum.”

  I knew that inside this person was the Arnold Strato who’d kissed me behind the gym, the Arnold who’d come to Snyder’s dumb club meetings and been nice to Neave. But that Arnold had been replaced by this monster boy who sat on the Strato porch and scared people. Maybe the two Arnolds had always been there inside him and we just hadn’t seen the dark, shadow Arnold inside the light, sweet Arnold. “The fucking boat’s going down and he stands there and watches us hanging on to the rail in sixteen-foot waves, half of us burned and out of our minds with pain, and he says, ‘Hang on! Faint heart never fucked a pig, boys,’ and then, thank God,
he gets washed over the side himself. We couldn’t get to him through the waves.” Arnold’s lips twisted up into the closest thing he had to a smile. “The son of a bitch finally drowned. And you know what I thought when they hooked his body and dragged it aboard? I thought, Tough shit, man. Faint heart never fucked a pig.”

  I didn’t go back to visit Arnold Strato again. Neave did, and I’d ask her what they talked about and she always said the same thing: nothing. Did you talk about anything when you brought him Laredo Law? she asked me. Nope, I said. Not a thing.

  Arnold died of a heart attack at the end of that autumn. They said it was stress from respiratory problems—nothing to be surprised about in a man who’d breathed the fumes in a submarine fire. But that’s not true. Arnold Strato died of a broken heart. Love killed Arnold Strato, love and the desire to pass his own genes down to the next generation, like a monkey or a bug. You don’t think of it as something that can kill you, but I tell you, it can. If anybody knows that, it’s me.

  NEAVE

  Jenna Louise

  Lilly got her first job at Mr. Case’s corner store. Elly the counter woman had to quit because she couldn’t commute from her farm on their rationed three gallons a week anymore, and Lilly happened to be looking over some mascara wands when Elly gave her notice. Lilly stepped right up to offer her services. We lived within walking distance. Gas was no problem. Along with household needs, candy, personal hygiene products, and a lunch counter, Mr. Case’s spa had the largest selection of cosmetics in town.

  Lilly didn’t know anything about cleaning products, and she hated the penny-candy customers, but she could sell a tired farm wife or a baggy-socked secretary twice the Lash-O-Lizer the woman could afford then get thanked for taking her money. Her makeup aisle was a kind of tropical oasis of romance blooming in a desert of cleaning products and nail clippers. Every woman in town found some reason to drop by that spa and ask if she thought they were using too bold a lipstick color. They never were. Most of them left with a little package under their arms and higher hopes for themselves than what they’d had when they came in. Maybe they hadn’t put red meat or a frosted cake on their tables for a month, but that didn’t stop them from leaving with a new Lash-O-Lizer wand.

  One of Lilly’s best customers was Jenna Louise Bowles. Jenna Louise was in Lilly’s class, one year ahead of me. Lilly thought that girl was a genius. Jenna Louise knew how to get an eyeliner pencil line up the back of her leg perfectly straight, an invaluable skill when all the silk stockings in the world had sacrificed themselves for the war effort and become parachutes. Jenna Louise knew more about eyebrow pluckers and strategic placement of folded Kleenex than anybody in the senior class. Boys got stupid around her. Mr. Dextin in the science department once walked directly into a door after she’d breezed by in her cashmere pink sweater. She wore Chanel No. 5, a grown woman’s scent.

  Lilly probably remembered Jenna Louise for her beauty expertise, but Jenna called up something else in me, something scaly and dark—the kind of feeling Lilly would say I shouldn’t bother myself about. If Lilly Terhune had paid a little more attention to the scaly dark things, she might still be alive.

  One day I was at my locker, invisible in my saggy bobby socks and white cotton shirt. Jenna Louise walked by, unfurling herself as she blew past the football-team members who were clustered across the hall. Every boy’s head rotated around to follow her. The team captain made the sound first. It sounded hissy to me, but I knew it was a real word and not a hiss. He was a fat sixteen-year-old with pimples on his nose and a peanut-butter sandwich in his hand, team captain only because his father donated the money for the uniforms. He said it whispery but with sharp edges. The word was cunt. The boys’ eyes had been glassy and their feet were jiggling, and then I heard a soft b sound and then the scratchy twist at the “itch” before they saw me standing there and then all the energy just went cold. They drifted off in different directions. I looked on past them to Jenna Louise, who was just reaching the end of the hallway, that seam line running up the leg and vanishing at the skirt hem, the pretty little tip-and-roll that her high heels gave to her hips as she walked. Her skirt snugged in just below her butt to show her figure to best advantage. I went to history class.

  I tried to describe the way it made me feel uneasy and clammy to Lilly, who told me to ignore a bunch of stupid little boys showing off for one another in a high school hallway. But I couldn’t. That night after dinner I found myself holding The Pirate Lover. I opened it at random and the book fell open to Judge Henri Le Cherche, coolly assessing Electra’s breasts. I snapped the book shut.

  In the spring of her senior year, Jenna Louise disappeared after a school fair. At first the girls in our class whispered that she had run off with an older boy, maybe the mechanic from Peabody who somebody told somebody that she might have been dating. I’d read the newspaper account and put the paper down because the words describing the body that was found in a swamp behind the school had words in it that felt like they’d been made of razor blades: violated, burned, bound, nude. I’d never seen the word “nude” in print before in my life. At school the word “rape” was passed along the hallways like a dead snake. Then some of the bobby-socked girls said that she had brought it on herself, those skirts and the sweaters and the Chanel. Her own fault. Fast girl. Whore—that word was used too.

  The words seemed to protect them from what happened to Jenna, like an incantation that had to be said before they were able to move on to talk about algebra or hair spray. It seemed to work for them; it didn’t work for me.

  THE PIRATE LOVER

  Runaway

  Electra Gates fled the marriage that would destroy her. If a curving waist, a glittering jewel at the ears, and a dance all had worked to draw the repellent Henri Le Cherche’s attention to her, then better she were hideous, better to be poor and invisible! What was beauty to the one who was beautiful if she could not control its effects? No doubt her clear dependence upon her undependable mother had also drawn him to her. The Marais dress, the physical pleasures of dancing—she had experienced them as a source of power, but they too had betrayed her by attracting this monster.

  She hurried, panting, toward the sea in the darkness of a moonless night. At the quays she would find a boat that was just about to slip its anchor. She would put the sea itself between her and the monster Le Cherche.

  Two loiterers pointed her to a handsome black vessel with a new suit of sails a half mile out in the harbor. That one, they said, is the only ship in the harbor with its water and victuals already on board and a Blue Peter flying to signal its imminent departure. A British crew, for the most part, they said. She’ll be off at the next tide, they told her. Perhaps the captain would take a passenger. Who knew? But she must hurry if she wanted to let her destiny take this turn. For a fee, a very small fee, they would be willing to row her out this very minute.

  Her eyes swept the harbor, the deep-green water and then the disk of the horizon arcing so far away. No carriages or coaches leaving the city were safe. Henri Le Cherche could stop any of them. But the sea—there was freedom. Yes, she said. Yes, take me.

  So they did, taking from her first the few coins she offered and calling up when they reached the ship’s high tumbledown. “Hello, the Cat! Hello, the boat! Young person seeking passage asking to come aboard. Handsome piece too, mates!” The speaker turned to a blushing Electra. “Pardon the language, miss. No offense meant.”

  A row of grizzled faces looked down at them, all grinning to see the handsome piece. “Send her up!” called out one.

  One of her rowers hooted back, but the other turned to reassure her. “It ain’t no navy ship with navy rules, miss,” he said, “but you won’t do better than this ship here. It’s a handpicked crew of volunteers and they sail with the Cat because it’s got the best fighting captain among all the privateers. You don’t want to cross him, but he’s always got more volunteers than he can take. Only the best sail with him.”

  “What is
his name?” she asked.

  “Le Cherche. Viscount Basil Le Cherche. A fine seaman and a cunning sea wolf. No storm’s sunk him yet, nor no ship could take him with less than eight hundred pounds of metal to throw at him. Nobody’s forced his flag down, never.”

  Just then Basil Le Cherche himself appeared at the rail. His expression remained impassive and he looked down calmly. “Permission to come aboard,” he called at last. “We’ll drop a line.”

  Electra froze. Had she run from one predator directly into another’s grasp? She looked behind her at the port, considered her options, and stepped into the rope cradle. She allowed herself to be swung up and over the rail, greeted with hoots and then, under Basil Le Cherche’s cool and silent stare, respectful becks and nods from all hands. Le Cherche led her to his cabin, the only private space on the ship. A bank of windows at the stern reflected candlelight from tapers set on an enormous desk. The room was beautiful, even luxurious in a masculine way. It had the look of a country gentleman’s study, lined with books and furnished with Turkish carpets, polished wood chairs, a massive desk. A cello sat on its stand by the bookcases. He nodded to a chair and she sat.

  “I had not expected to see you so soon, Miss Gates.”

  She reddened, more in pride and anger than embarrassment. “If I had any idea that this ship was yours, you would not have. I am under duress. In fact, I am under duress from your own brother, who has convinced my mother to give me to him in marriage.”

  “He is a rich man. You are a poor girl.”