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 collection’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.”