“Are you speaking from direct observation or something else?” I asked.
“You know, I’m not sure,” he said. “I only know I know it.”
When the moment came, I stood at the podium and looked out at the sea of hopeful faces, all those bow lips and shining flip hairdos beaming back at me, and I felt myself pulled toward them. I started talking. I told them that Be Your Best couldn’t make anyone fall in love with anybody all by itself, but it could help women remember the selves that could command true love: their best selves. I believed every word that I said. I could feel them believe me back in waves of scented energy.
So much desire! How could I have worked by Lilly Terhune’s side and built this business and felt so little of what was flooding that room just then? I told my rapt audience that I had something to show them. Cued, my two most beautiful, fur-coat-clad staffers drove directly onto the stage in a powder-blue convertible whose license plate read BYBEST. They raised their hands to wave at the crowd, and a spotlight caught the diamonds in the bracelets at their wrists. The winners of these trophies, I sang out, would be announced at the closing-night candlelight dinner. But Be Your Best treasured each member of its sales force!
This was the catechism of Lilly’s conferences. Every single woman who attended must leave with something beautiful, even if it was just a powder-blue clutch or a blue cut-glass necklace. Every single one of them was going to sit down to a candlelit dinner and be waited on by handsome young men. Every single hotel room had a welcoming card with an inspiring message propped against its vase of blue hydrangeas. “It’s our job to make them feel beautiful,” Lilly had said. “Cherished. Important. It’s what they’re selling, so they damn well better know what it feels like.”
On closing night the trapeze act had pulled two hundred screaming women to their feet. The Cadillac had been driven away; the diamonds had been awarded. The conference had been declared fabulous. That night I drove to the Rubber Duck and lay down on its bunk. Eventually I peeled off the French bodice under the silk suit that Dead Lilly had jammed me into that morning. I pried off the heels that Mr. Boppit assured me, as he shoehorned them onto my feet, looked like glass slippers. I lay down feeling more exhausted than I ever had in my entire life.
“Hard work, letting someone else inside you,” Mr. Boppit said to me. He’d appeared at the end of my bed. He was scratching himself briskly behind one ear, his mouth open and his tongue resting on the lower teeth. “Hardest work in the universe.” I looked at him and thought, I feel so tired I might be dead—Dead Me, in heels.
“No, no,” he said, bouncing onto the end of the bed. “You’re just Neave, changing. That’s all.”
LILLY
He Sees Us
Boppit was right. Whenever Ricky Luhrmann thought about her, whenever he started to drive in the direction of Be Your Best at the end of a workday when he might have followed Neave’s car to the Rubber Duck, we dreamed him away from her. We concentrated. We slowed him down. By the time he was parked in the street, looking up at her apartment windows, she was halfway to the docks. She still followed Max’s instructions to watch the rearview mirror and take a different route every time, to pretend to drive to Janey’s or Snyder’s if she even suspected someone was following. Sometimes she took a bus. I got better at it. The concentration now was like dreaming. We’d dream Ricky Luhrmann asleep or dream him into a bar when Neave crossed his mind, and he’d find himself so tired or angry or drunk that he was seriously slowed down. He’d get to her apartment and find himself too late to follow her. We’d dreamed her into her car and gotten her on the road already. Ha!
“Will we be able to do this forever?” I asked Bop. “Keep him and her apart?”
“I can’t say.”
“She’s so different, Boppit. She looks like dynamite. She’s taking charge at the office, and everybody’s treating her like…”
“You.”
“Yes.”
But it wasn’t working completely and it couldn’t work forever. When our concentration flagged, we could feel Luhrmann circling. Once or twice his car had even driven slowly past Be Your Best early in the evening while staff were still around. He was like a circling raptor.
“I put her in all this danger,” I said at one point. “I did this!”
“Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself, Lilly Terhune. Aren’t you dreaming alongside of me, concentrating, keeping him away? Haven’t we made Neave larger and stronger? She’s absorbed you. When she has to face whatever it is she’ll have to face, she’ll be bigger.”
“So she will have to face something? It’s definitely going to happen, even though we’re protecting her?”
“I suspect so.”
“But we’ll be there when she needs us?”
“That’s not always the way it works.”
“You said you were here to protect her, that you’ve always protected her.”
“I have, Lilly. That’s how I know that it doesn’t always end well. I’m just a dog in the world, and it’s a wicked, wicked world.”
So we kept on, eating bologna sandwiches with her on the Rubber Duck, talking about things like what food we’d bring to a desert island if we could only eat that one thing for the rest of our lives. We waited. We concentrated. We dreamed.
*
Max kept the Rubber Duck schedule and watched Neave’s movements as carefully as we did. She didn’t know that he’d kept up the habit of sleeping two boats down with a crowbar under his bed when she was on board the Duck. He tried to never pass her on the docks, to never let her see him climbing into the other department boat. Any conversation about the schedule or what was stocked in the Rubber Duck pantry took place over the phone during daylight hours. They avoided actual physical interactions with each other. They pretended the kiss never happened while all along neither one of them stopped thinking about it. That’s how it works. You lie to yourself.
Things got so peaceful that we let our guards down. Maybe we concentrated a little less. Actually, we did concentrate less. Then one morning maybe twenty days after the conference we were standing in front of the Be Your Best building, Boppit distracted by a bag of clothes one of the secretaries had tossed into a Dumpster.