The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

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.

“I want to be back the way I was,” I said. “Everything just light and funny. Not clammy.”

“It’s a loss.” Boppit nodded.

“Oh, look, Boppit, it’s Ruga Potts. Ruga!”

“She can’t see you, Lilly. Not the dead you.”

“I know. Good lord, I didn’t see what these pictures looked like then. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“One of your strengths when it isn’t one of your weaknesses. Look over to your left: Neave steering that six-year-old away from the picture of the just-about naked woman wrestling the just-about naked man?”

“What the hell is she hitting him with? And what’s that thing behind them?”

“A space pod. And she’s not hitting him; she’s paralyzing him, and then she’s going to roboticize him.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m familiar with the issue.”

You know, Charles is better looking than I thought he was when I was alive. That night I’d found him standing in front of a Frank Frazetta illustration of the woman with snakes wrapped around her and an enormous, muscular rope of a creature swinging its fanged head toward her. The woman and her snakes were arranged to draw the eye to her cantaloupe-sized breasts and rounded rear. I thought she looked great, standing there facing the monster with real moxy.

“Charles Helbrun III bought that print,” Boppit said. “His advisers told him to buy Frazetta because they expected it to get more valuable. Helbrun had no feel for that image at all. He only thought of it as an investment.”

“If Helbrun didn’t care about the art, why is he here?”

“To meet Neave. He’d read an interview with her in the business pages, and all of a sudden he was seeing the little blue Be Your Best bags everywhere. He was curious. He was impressed. Look,” Boppit said to me, pointing across the room. “There’s Helbrun writing the check for that print. Now he’s asking her for her phone number.”

I turned and followed the direction of his stare. “Yes,” I said. “It’s clearer from here. Is everything I thought I saw back then wrong?”

“Of course not,” Bop said. “What you saw from where you stood then was true, just like what you see now is true. It’s all true.”

“Helbrun had a good walk. People turned their heads to watch him go by. Nothing’s as attractive as a beautiful man who couldn’t care less about looks. He cared about business, and winning, and getting what he wanted. You know I love Neavie to death, but I was surprised that a guy like Charles Helbrun was interested in her.”

“You shouldn’t have been. He saw her as the businessman’s perfect partner.”

“Well, just goes to show you how little I saw back then. That event was the jumping-off place for Snyder. All those years we thought he was incompetent, but really he just wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing.”

Boppit said, “That huge studio that Neave found him after the show gave him storage room, a place to mount art, his own telephone line…”

“The answer to the Snyder problem was right there all along but we didn’t see it.”

“You weren’t really looking at him, Lilly.”

“Maybe. We were careless about lots of stuff, weren’t we?”

“You were careless. Neave wasn’t. Jane wasn’t.”

“It was great, being alive. I mean, look at me in that aqua number! I looked fabulous. But I was stupid.”

“That’s why I’m here, doll.”

“Really?”

“Well, partly,” Boppit said.

So we were able to take our considerable proceeds and help move our brother into a studio with enough square footage to store his prints and books, a workstation where he could mount posters and cut glass, and most important of all, a telephone so he could stay in touch with the first wave of customers he’d found at the gallery opening.

He was launched.





NEAVE

My Romance

It took forever for Charles Helbrun III to move from asking for my telephone number to asking for anything that could be called a date, but eventually it did happen. He had stayed in touch after Snyder’s gallery opening. Typically he had a practical reason for the call. He wanted to ask advice about hostess gifts for the wives at a client conference; a friend in a different business had asked him a question about packaging and he thought I might have valuable insights to pass along. Then, finally, at last, I returned from lunch to find two dozen roses and a card asking me to dinner. To thank me for all my help, the card said.

“Is this a date?” I asked my sister.

“Of course it’s a date. I think it’s a date. I mean, does the man ask an accountant who he hires for occasional advice out for dinner and send him roses? No. He sends him a check. It’s a date.”

I called his office and his secretary said she’d be happy to take him a message. I said tell him yes. She called back to ask if Saturday at eight was acceptable. I said yes. He arrived in a six-year-old solid black Ford, which surprised me since I knew what he’d spent on that print he’d bought at Snyder’s gallery and it was an astonishing figure. He didn’t expect the downstairs door to Be Your Best to be the first-floor entrance to my home, and he stood there knocking for a full five or six minutes until I heard him and ran down the stairs.

“This is the right address, isn’t it?” he asked. He was carrying another two-dozen roses and held them toward me when I swung the door open. “I didn’t realize you lived directly above the business.”

You wouldn’t expect that a few flowers bought by a man with enough money to buy the store where he found them would flatter me, but they did. I was new to flowers. “This is where we lived when we started out,” I explained, leading him into the warehouse’s living area. “We’ve put in a kitchen. Bathrooms. Sectioned off a couple bedrooms. I kept adding things instead of leaving.”

“‘We’? I thought your sister was married.”

“Just recently married. Lilly and I were here together at first.”

He followed me silently. This wasn’t someone who felt awkward with conversational lapses. Generally I wasn’t bothered by them either, and it was surprisingly easy to watch him look around. “Lots of light. Who decorated it?”

Decorated? “Me,” I said. “I guess.”

“Rather bohemian.” He walked through the front sitting area and into the wider spaces of the kitchen. “You didn’t strike me as a nesting kind of woman.”

“I’m not in this particular nest a lot. I work long hours.”

“I’m the same. If you want to get things done, it’s what you do.”

“What’s your house like?”

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