Just before they sailed Electra moved to the rail with a wax-sealed bottle. She cradled it like a live thing and when her lover asked her what she was doing she told him she was thinking of Polly. Who is that? he asked. Just a girl, she answered. And what was in the bottle? He smiled, amused at her little diversion. Nothing, she said. But she had written down the story of how love had cracked open the borders of her life and admitted more feeling and valor than she had believed the human frame could bear. Someone would come upon it, perhaps someone like Polly whose life had led her to believe that there was only darkness or monsters beyond the edges of their dreary rooms, their daily habits. Electra made up a prayer for the occasion and cocked her arm: Let such a seeker find this stoppered bit of blown glass and be changed.
And so they sailed for the West, toward their future—whatever they would know or understand of eternity that could be understood within the limits of the body, that mysterious portal through which we must move to understand joy.
NEAVE
Reader, I Married Him
The wedding: mythic ritual made of white lace, pink frosting, and tossed bouquets. I know the clichés but I never bought into the particulars. That’s a little girl’s dream and I am a grown woman.
I was married aboard the Boogie Woogie in a bathing suit, accented with a white towel wrapped loosely and knotted at the waist. Max wore a bathing suit too, a towel draped across his shoulders like a cape. We swore to be each other’s until death separated us, pulled off our towels, and jumped over the side for a swim. Most of the guests joined us.
Max’s entire oceanographic department was there. Ten of my sales directors and Ruga Potts were there. Janey and Snyder hugged each other and Jane cried. Annie was told not to dive off the back of the boat. She waved at us, promised she would not die, and jumped. Ten anxious seconds later she surfaced howling and splashing, terrifically pleased. Todd hoisted her back onto the boat. She flung herself off again, this time into a small crowd of doggy-paddling flotsamologists. I watched Todd assess Annie’s situation, decide she was safe, and turn to look at Jane. His face said that she was the gravitational center of the universe, which of course to him she was.
Ruga Potts was suddenly at my side. “That one,” she said, tipping her chin toward the splashing and howling Annie, “disobedient.”
“Sometimes,” I responded.
“Good. The obedient ones, when the men with guns come, they are the first to get shot.” Ruga swayed just the tiniest bit. “She will not be easy to shoot.” She squinted at some empty space to the right of me, and then brushed at my hip. “Dog hair?”
“Are you drunk, Ruga?”
“I am.” She swiveled on her heel and looked at me happily. “You are very beautiful today. The bathing suit, so perfect.”
“Thank you.”
“My wedding dress was blue, like the robin-bird egg.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“They killed him.” This revelation silenced me completely. Ruga lifted the glass to her lips and sipped, unperturbed. “It happened to so many. Yet I am here, alive.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes the men with guns win, my love, but sometimes we defeat them and stand in the sun with a glass of Champagne.” She sighed. “Look at you in your beautiful bathing costume.” She watched the horizon for a moment, and then the wedding scene all around us, splashing flotsamologists and flirting salesgirls, Annie perched on the bow with a plastic crown on her head and a wand that had appeared from somewhere, Todd and Jane holding hands on the bridge. “So lovely.” She sighed. Ruga lifted her glass toward Max, who was just about to jump off the quarterdeck. “Good legs,” she observed. She looked at me and I felt my face heat up, which made her laugh. “Blushing! So we have both beaten the men with guns.”
We had. Ruga clinked her glass against mine and lifted it. “To love,” she said. “To beauty. To hope. To employment and a lipstick that does not melt. All things yield to them. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, which we know for a fact because we are here now.”
I never told Max about Dead Lilly and Mr. Boppit. They were at my side the day he said he wanted to marry me more than he wanted anything on Earth. They stood beside me, invisible to the gathered celebrants, when I put Annie’s plastic tiara on my head and marched onto the deck of the Boogie Woogie to say I would. They were at my side the week before the wedding.
The moment I said “I do,” Bop and Lilly started to lose their density and color. By that day’s nightfall they had vanished. I have never seen them again.
And what of The Pirate Lover? The route to our highest hopes tends to run right through some dark, booby-trapped places. A girl needs a map and a light to steer her; she might need a flamethrower or a cannon as well. She might need a pirate lover. For now the dogeared little paperback is in a box at the back of a closet. But when it’s time, I’ll pass The Pirate Lover on and let Annie make of it what she will.
WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK
I met my first romance novel at the Talkeetna Roadhouse, where my daughter and I were staying the night. Most of Alaska and hundreds of tourists pass through this jumping-off town to the Denali National Park, and many left books behind for the Roadhouse lending library. Here they sat over the coffeepot on a shelf that ended in a few bear spray canisters, also on loan to travelers who’d forgotten theirs. Almost every battered paperback on offer was a romance.
I’m a New Englander, who until this visit had no experience with romances. I’d read the novels my teachers had given me, which were never romances, and I read addictively. But I was bookless when we got to Talkeetna, so I plucked one from the lending library shelf and took it to bed. My ignorance was dispelled; I was entranced.
When I got home, I headed to a library and got myself a big stack of books with titles like The Moth and the Flame; Dirty, Willing Victim; and Too Tough to Tame. The nice young man at the checkout counter saw my selections, leaned forward, and very discreetly offered to let me jump a waiting line of 248 (yes, really) people who wanted to read Fifty Shades of Grey. I just happen, he whispered, to have a recent return right here under the counter. If you’re interested.
Well, of course I was interested. I took them home and entered Romancelandia. Brio! Bad guys with mansions and castles! Great sex! Silliness! Sadism! Dominance. True love. Submission. Salvation. It was clear to me that under the heaving bosoms and wands of pleasure there was something elementally true going on.
In Romancelandia, sex and power were tangled, even interdependent. But wasn’t that the way it really was? Weren’t they also linked in The Taming of the Shrew, in Wuthering Heights, in the evening news reports of recent domestic murders? I hadn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey or Too Tough to Tame until I started all this, but when I did, the struggle to control the lover or be controlled seemed like an old story, recast to play out in billionaires’ luxury condominiums or wooden ships on stormy seas.