“Max?” I called after him. He turned around.
“You know him. What’s he going to do next? What should I do?”
He turned his back again and took a few steps, stopped, and turned to face me again. “I think you should stay with a friend for a while.”
“I don’t have any friends.” This was true, and it was the first time it struck me as odd. I had Lilly, and work, and Jane and Snyder. I didn’t want Ricky Luhrmann sitting outside either of their homes, trailing me to either of their doors.
Did I have Charles? No. Charles would say he could not compromise my reputation by taking me in; Charles would tell me there was nothing, really, to worry about. If Ricky showed up at his door, Charles Helbrun would have no more idea what to do than Snyder would. I didn’t want to see that. Nor did I want to even think of Ricky Luhrmann on my sister Janey’s front steps.
That left no place. Before this moment my small circle had been enough, and now I saw that it wasn’t.
“Well.” Max stood and considered for another moment or two. “My department research vessel has a cabin that’s pretty comfortable and nobody expects anybody to be sleeping in it. Slip four at the Charlestown docks: the Rubber Duck. You could use it nights. Stay there irregularly so you were hard to predict.”
“I’m not afraid of Ricky Luhrmann.”
“I know that. It’s why I offered you the Rubber Duck.”
“I’m not hiding on your boat, Max.”
When I was no more than a block away I had to brace myself so I wouldn’t look behind me in the rearview mirror. I looked anyhow, and was rewarded with the sight of him still standing there watching me, perfectly still with a box of dead dog in his arms.
I told Lilly about the dog, certain that it would end any connection that bound her to Ricky. I could see her withdraw inside herself someplace far from me. “Lilly, you aren’t still in touch with him, are you?” I know I sounded alarmed when I said it, even though I was struggling to sound like a rational bystander.
“No.” Then she added, “But he gets in touch with me. His old number’s disconnected. He calls me from pay phones.”
“He can find you, but you can’t find him. Listen to yourself.”
“I can handle him, Neave.”
Were her eyes shining? Was it possible that the thing inside Ricky Luhrmann that had left that dog on my car seat lit something up in her? “Lilly. He put your perfume on a dead dog. Please.”
She actually patted me on the knee. “It’s going to be all right.”
Then she smiled, not at me. It was a private smile and I knew it was for him, or for something that she was when she was with him. It was an in-turning thing, and as I watched it I knew I could have burst into flame right there in front of her and not caught her eye.
We were in the worst kind of trouble.
LILLY AND BOPPIT
How He Hates Her
“He hates her in this weird, unreasonable way,” Boppit observed.
“Well, I know that. It was like he had some raw spot inside him and every time they came together, she’d run a blowtorch over it. If she missed the raw spot he’d turn around so she could reach it better. Right from the start it was like that. Take the dinner I set up with her and Ricky to cultivate peace and harmony, me still thinking that was a possibility. Ricky brings up the subject of company ownership. Well, he says, of course as the husband I’m a legal owner of Be Your Best. Me, I would have let that just slide by. Who cares what he thought, because legally I knew that Neave and I had changed the paperwork after my first experience with a disappointing husband and locked every asset in the company into our names. Ricky didn’t have any legal access at all. But Neave has always had this dumb idea that it’s best to have everything right out on the table. She makes it clear to Ricky then and there: he’s got no say in the company at all and the profits are his wife’s. Not his. Bam.”
“Very bad,” Boppit agreed.
“Oh, it gets worse. She asks him if I’d ever actually spelled out the controlling parties in the business. Just try it and see what happens, Mister: that was her tone. He says he’s sure he can legally arrange for ownership to include him. She says she doesn’t think so. She doesn’t hear his tone or else she just ignores it and she plows straight on. She says even if he got me to go along with that idea that it couldn’t happen without her cooperating, and she was perfectly happy with the company ownership only including her and me.”
“Ricky was always just the littlest bit scared of her,” Boppit said to me. “That was coloring the conversation too.”
“He didn’t look scared at that moment.”
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t,” Bop says.
“If only she knew how to flirt, put guys at ease. Not Neave. She wants somebody’s attention, she waves a red cape. So she does this to Ricky, he snorts and paws and charges around, and when he’s stomped out of the room I tell her maybe she could have been more diplomatic. And who does she get mad at? Me. She wants to know how I ever let Ricky Luhrmann think he’d ever have a say in anything to do with Be Your Best. I just hadn’t seen the need to talk about it, I say. Easier to step over some subjects than go stubbing your toe on them. Why couldn’t she do the same? Now I had to deal with foul-mood Ricky, and sure enough, we’re getting ready for bed that night and I don’t even have my stockings unsnapped from my garters when he starts in. You’re going to a lawyer and change things so I’m a legal owner of Be Your Best like any husband in America would be. I rolled the stockings down real slow and I said Neave meant what she said. She wasn’t giving that kind of control to somebody outside our partnership—somebody, I added, who shouldn’t be burdened by all the work, the decisions, the responsibility. Just enjoy the profits, I said. Let me and Neavie do the work.”
“Which didn’t quiet him down,” Boppit said with a sigh.
“Of course not. He said Neave was a controlling bitch who hated men. He said she needed a strong hand.”
“He scared you,” Boppit said, which was true but I hadn’t wanted to admit that to myself at the time, so I hadn’t. The kindness in Bop’s voice made the taste of salt start in my mouth, made my throat feel like it was closing. He said, “That was something that had never happened to you before with Ricky Luhrmann, but it was going to happen sooner or later, Lilly.”
This was true and I’d known it then, all the way back then when I was refusing to know what I knew.
Bop talked like he was in my head. “You weren’t the only one afraid of Ricky. Max is afraid of him.”
“No he isn’t. I’ve met Max.”
“Just because Max would stand up to him doesn’t mean that Max isn’t scared of him. It only means Max has nerve.”
“Since when are you in Max’s head?”
He shrugged. “We don’t get to pick every place we end up.” Boppit sighed again. “You of all people should know that, sweetheart.”
LILLY