“Love is as strong as death, and I want you to know my love is as strong as death,” he’d written to her. “I want to be destroyed by you. I want you to be willing to be destroyed by me.”
This particular piece of poetry must have scared her some, as well as made her feel other things. I know it made me uneasy. She’d folded it up and stuck it in a box that she’d buried in a drawer. Three months after they met they had a terrible fight—something so bad it gave me real hope that she’d break it off. I never knew what caused the argument, but it seemed to be of a sexual nature. When she got home to Annie and me at her apartment that night she was enraged, her wrists darkening and one shoe without its heel. I told her it didn’t look right—any of it.
“I know that,” she said to me. “I let him know that he has to remember I’d leave him in a New York minute if I didn’t like how he was treating me. Maybe I scared him some. I don’t know. I scared myself.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the second I said I could walk away from him any minute, I knew it wasn’t true.”
“Sure it is, Lilly,” I’d said at the time. I’d seen Lilly walk away from a dozen men twice as rich and good-looking as Ricky Luhrmann. My Lilly could take care of herself. My Lilly could walk away from any man. Couldn’t she?
She said, “Ricky has this troubled place in him. He can’t change that. It’s what he is; maybe it’s things that have happened to him.”
“Oh, come on, Lilly—look at yourself spouting sentimental crap about his troubled past. Look at this thing on your wrist.” I reached out and touched the plummy bruise. The way I felt when I touched it ran up from my fingers and into my head: whatever this “dark place” was, it gave him his hold on her, and she wouldn’t or couldn’t see this. So she was powerless.
“You’ve got Annie to think of,” I reminded her. “Lilly. Walk away.”
“He won’t do it again. I’m sure of it. He’s sorry. Annie’s never seen anything but what a kid should see, Neave. I’m making sure of that. She’s fine. And he’ll get to love her. How can you not love Annie?”
“I don’t know, but I imagine it’s possible. And what about whether or not Annie likes him? Doesn’t that matter?”
“We’re working on it. It’ll all work.”
But what I heard was Lilly deciding that it was all going to work and forgetting anything that might contradict that fantasy. Granted, for months after that, Ricky Luhrmann was a model suitor. He made good money working for a contractor who renovated houses, and he liked to spend it. Yellow roses were his signature courting flower. He took my sister dancing, bought bottles of Champagne, and made reservations at the kinds of restaurants that had tablecloths and candles. It was as if he’d opened her skull and gotten a direct sightline on her fantasies. He might spend his days with a tool belt on his hips, but he knew how to wear a smart suit and order a Rob Roy. He could lead a woman across a dance floor and rivet every eye in the place on them. I’m sure he had other talents as well.
By the time he proposed, the memory of the fight, and the darkness about its cause, was far away in Lilly’s mind if not mine. She came to my apartment the morning after she took a ring from him. “He pushed me against the wall,” she said breathlessly, “and I said, ‘Luhrmann, let me loose,’ and he said Not until death do us part, kid, and he kissed me. Hard. Neave, it was like a ball of electricity moving through me. It just has to be right. Otherwise I know it wouldn’t feel like that.” She hadn’t even said the word “yes.” Apparently she hadn’t had to. He’d just handed her the ring, and she’d slipped it on her finger and come to show it to me so I could admire the shine.
“What about Annie?” I asked.
“She’ll wear patent-leather shoes and ten layers of petticoats. She’ll be adorable.”
“I wasn’t asking about her party dress, Lilly.”
“She’ll be so excited! And she loves sleepovers with you and Jane. You can take her for a couple days for our honeymoon, right? And when you and Charles are going out, Janey can take her, right?”
Of course. I shut up then. There was no point in trying to make Lilly Terhune dig at a situation to find its broken or cranky parts. That was my job.
He told her she was going to marry him before the month was out and that is exactly what happened. The wedding was small. I wore a navy suit. Lilly’s dress was a pastel rose silk. Annie wore one of those frothy things that make children look like cupcakes. There was no groom’s side or bride’s side—we huddled together like people trying to stay out of a cold wind.
“How could she do that?” my mother murmured sadly.
“What?” I looked around, genuinely befuddled. My mother approved very deeply of marriage. In her mind it ended the nerve-wracking dating period and settled things. Daddy’s feelings on the subject weren’t so clear. He’d avoided any talk at all of love with his children as being somehow inappropriate. He sat woodenly beside our mother, his expression detached and his thoughts, like they were so often, a mystery.
“It’s not white,” she said. “This is a wedding.”
“For chrissakes, Mom. She’s been married before. It’s close. Just a whisper away from white.”
“In matters like this, it is not possible to be close. Even if it’s a symbolic gesture. White. Not-white. That’s that.”
I looked at Lilly and Ricky Luhrmann standing side by side in front of us. His hand brushed her hip and the upper part of her body responded, snakelike, in a smooth little twist that brought her almost facing him. His hand moved to her collarbone and he whispered something to her that closed her off completely to everybody in the room but him. It gave me a rattled kind of feeling. I couldn’t name it.
Annie sat at the end of my row. She craned her neck to see something directly behind her. I followed her sightline to a man who looked remarkably like Ricky Luhrmann.
“Who was that man?” I asked her when the vows were done. “The one you were looking at.”
“That’s Max.” She waved discreetly.
“And who’s Max?”
Annie scooched over closer to me. She was almost but not quite whispering. “Ricky says no talking about him.”
“I see. Is he a friend of your mommy’s?”
“Ricky told mommy he’s a son of a bitch,” she whispered. “Max does go-search. He goes on the sea, and he searches.”
“What does he search for?”
“He said ‘Son of a bitch,’” she giggled. “He looks for snarks.”
“He searches for snarks? Honey, I think Ricky’s brother might be pulling your leg.”
Annie looked momentarily stricken, then thoughtful. “No, Aunt Neave.” The little girl shook her head vigorously from side to side. “He’s nice.”