Crazy in Love

by Luanne Rice

  “Whooo!” he said to me now. Then he rose, hugged me hard, and left through the front door.

  I RAN DOWN Brewer Street to The Yard. Lily was making fast a long white ketch to a floating dock. Boom-Boom stood at the bow, a line in his heavy hands. He called my name, making it sound like “Ina” in his Australian accent, but I ignored him. “You have got to come with me,” I said to Lily. “Where’s Margo?”

  She looked at me as if I were crazy. “I’m in the middle of something here.”

  “You’ve got to come now.”

  Lily gauged the situation. She knew I didn’t often make demands unless they were urgent. Throwing the remaining united line to Boom-Boom, she walked along the dock with me. We found Margaret driving the Travelift, a huge apparatus used for moving huge boats. “Margo!” Lily called. “Come on down.”

  Lily was our middle sister, two years younger than I, but she had seniority over Margaret at the boatyard as well as in our family. Margaret hurried across the hot asphalt parking lot, and we went into a ramshackle shed at the far end of The Yard.

  “Una has big business,” Lily explained.

  “You won’t believe this,” I said. I remember twisting my hands, trying to find a clear way to tell them what had happened. I settled on directness. “I saw Dad.”

  “When?” Lily asked, her voice giving nothing away.

  “Today—ten minutes ago. He looks great. He misses us all.” I looked into both my sisters’ faces. Lily’s eyebrows were arched, her mouth thin and set. Margo ducked her head, patting the pockets of her khaki shorts for cigarettes. They both had wild yellow hair, unlike mine, which was reddish. The sun shined through the open windows behind them, lighting their heads like halos. I tried to breathe more steadily. “He was in the bathroom, reading the paper. I didn’t buy the Daily News, and I know you two didn’t, so how else would it be there? It’s right on the floor, soaking wet because he dropped it on the bathmat.” I gave Margo a dirty look because she was notorious for forgetting to hang up her wet bath things.

  “Dad hates scandal sheets,” Margo said.

  “He used to, but apparently he likes them now.”

  “What did he say?” Lily asked.

  “Okay. He said—” I laughed. “Typical. Guess what he said about Boom-Boom?”

  “‘Stay away from that no-good punk,’ ” Lily said.

  “‘Puke.’ He said ‘no-good puke.’ ”

  “That is typical,” Margo agreed.

  “He also said that the Candy Store is bad, and also that Mom should get the beam fixed.”

  “No kidding. The house is ready to collapse,” Lily said.

  “What else?” Margo asked.

  “That’s about it. We just sat and talked.”

  I noticed, of course, the looks my sisters exchanged. I couldn’t blame them for not truly believing me, no matter how badly I wanted them to; I hadn’t told them about the time at the Algonquin for that precise reason. But this time seemed more compelling. Our father had appeared to me in our apartment.

  “Listen,” Lily said. “We’d better get back to work. You can finish telling us about it later.”

  I walked back up Brewer Street’s small hill, disappointed that they hadn’t felt more inclined to keep open minds. My day stretched emptily ahead, until five that evening, when they would come home. All three of us were on leaves of sorts. They from Brown University, where they were both graduate students in the Art History Department, and I from my role as Delilah Grant on Beyond the Bridge, a soap opera that filmed five days a week, with occasional weeks off during which we were supposed to make public appearances at shopping malls and guest spots on game shows. But my character had disappeared for the summer. In September she would reappear, fleeing to Lake Huron, to an isolated cabin where she could forget a painful episode with her long-term lover, and where a psychopathic fur trapper would eventually corner her.

  It had seemed like a perfect time to reunite with Lily and Margo. Our father had died in January; except for the two weeks surrounding his death when we had converged on our mother’s house in Connecticut, we hadn’t lived together for eight years. Presence is everything.

  I used to say texture is everything, while Lily and Margo would say color is everything. We would have fantastic debates. Driving past the marsh at Black Hall, I would say the texture of the cattails and grasses, spiky and tubular, was the most beautiful. Margo and Lily would argue for the color: the shades of blue, green, and gold. (Although they preferred wilder colors with evocative names: apricot, persimmon, tea rose, vermilion, emerald, azure.) We invented names for our preferences. The color school was Karsky (named for a boy Margo had known in high school), and the texture school was Schlumberger (pronounced shlum-bear-zhay, an extremely textural name).

  Then we invented Vuarnet. Once when I went to Providence to visit them, we walked down Angell Street to the Rhode Island School of Design. The students there dressed like anarchists in black leather, skinny cotton shifts over black tights, white oxford-cloth shirts worn as dresses with studded leather belts, tight pedal pushers worn over plastic flip-flops. They had razor haircuts. They wanted to keep their skin pure white, so they wore sunscreen and walked on the shady side of the street. Margo and Lily told me the sunglasses they favored were Vuarnets and Ray-Bans, so we started calling that cool, new look “Vuarnet.”

  I remembered that day perfectly. They took me to the graduate student show at the RISD Museum. There were mammoth geometric paintings that resembled daggers on one wall; narrow, meticulously drawn architectural-type renderings which, when carefully regarded, showed men in lewd positions with each other; a video segment in which a TV screen was set into a doghouse and, when the viewer pressed the button, an image of feet pacing a room would appear on the screen and a whiny voice berating its father for neglect and mistreatment would blare out. One student had hired a crane to hoist a brand-new white Lincoln Continental into an interior courtyard, and that was his project. There were ceramic vases, enameled jewelry, furniture including a teak bed suspended from the ceiling in the midst of matching dining room table and chairs. Its title: Dining with the Invalid.

  One student was walking through the show with his parents. Margo whispered to Lily and me that the father reminded her of a coal miner from West Virginia: he was brown and wizened, as if he spent much time underground, and he wore a thin, short-sleeved, green nylon shirt with a pack of Camels showing through the pocket. His posture was stooped. He walked around the gallery scowling while his wife, a proud fat woman, walked ahead with her son. “How do you like it, Willard?” she asked the man, and he said, “Too many doodads.”

  That cracked Margo up. She wanted to think of a school we could call “Doodad.” We tried to connect it with Dada, but nothing sprang to mind. It seemed to overlap Vuarnet too much. On the way to their apartment, I stepped on a wad of gum. By the time I noticed it, it had stones, hair, and grass pressed into it. “My RISD thesis,” I said. “Very Doodad.”

  “Vuarnet,” Lily and Margo said at once.

  Crossing the Brown Green, students recognized me from Beyond the Bridge. “Hey, Delilah,” some of them called. Some of them just stared, but many asked whether I was planning to marry Beck Vandeweghe, my star-crossed lover and editor of the Mooreland Tribune. One girl asked for my autograph and said she had planned her entire spring semester around the show. I was used to such attention. I signed the autograph, secretly pleased that my sisters should see me adulated, but one thought nagged at my mind. As Delilah, I had another family: my father, Paul Grant, and his scheming new wife Selena, my sisters Nicola, Stephanie, and Bianca, my half-brother Scott, and my illegitimate baby Jennifer. But walking across the green that day, listening to people ask me about the Grants, I thought of my own father who had died two months earlier, and whose ghost I had seen the week before at the Algonquin. I was walking between my two real sisters, but that meant nothing to my fans.

  AT FIVE-THIRTY, Lily and Margo came quietly into the apa
rtment. They looked tired from working on the docks all day for the wages they stretched to cover their summer expenses. The sun, an orange ball over Newport Harbor, blazed through our west-facing windows. I was lying on the couch, with a smooth cotton sheet between me and the upholstery. Itchy wool upholstery.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Both sisters sat beside me on the floor. “Do you know you sleepwalk?” Lily asked.

  “I wasn’t sleepwalking. Go into the bathroom—the paper’s on the floor.”

  Margo walked out of the room, returning in an instant with a rumpled Daily News. “You sleepwalked up to Bellevue Avenue, bought the paper, came home and read it on the toilet, then sleepwalked down to The Yard.”

  “Unie, Unie, Unahhh,” Lily said, throwing her keychain at my legs. “You couldn’t have seen Dad. Dad got cremated, and now his ashes are in the ocean. You weren’t swimming, were you?”

  “Please don’t joke about it. He knew about Boom-Boom. He also knew about your birth-control pills, and I’m pretty sure he knows about the Wild One.”

  Lily looked terrified for a second, but then she relaxed. The Wild One was a French sailor, extremely handsome in a dark, mysterious, sex-crazed way. He had black curls and hooded eyes. He was noted in Newport for his reticence and distance. Currently he was seeing Lily exclusively, and that did not go unremarked on the docks. Margo and I, and even Lily to some degree, regarded the situation with mild disgust. That a man known for his aloofness to women could be so compelling to Lily.

  “Why do you think he knows about the Wild One?” Lily asked. She gave slight emphasis to the word “knows,” as though she wanted to convey true skepticism, but she was nervous. I could tell.

  “Because he seems to know everything. It’s horrifying, if you think about it. He actually read my mind at one point.”

  “What were you thinking?” Margo asked.

  “About Boom-Boom.”

  “God, to think that Dad could read our minds,” Margo said, shuddering. “After he died, I secretly hoped he would come back for visits. It seems lousy that he won’t know what we do for the rest of our lives. I mean, when Lily and I get master’s degrees, and when Una moves from the soaps to the movies. When we get married. In a way, I’d like to think that he could know about all that.”

  “I’d like to think it too,” Lily said. “But it’s crazy. It cannot happen.”

  “If that’s all there was to it, that would be fine,” I said, and suddenly my voice sounded as if it was blowing through a tunnel. “But he can read our minds. We’ll have to live practically like nuns.”

  “Nuns can’t do anything, so they think the dirtiest thoughts,” Lily said.

  “Una, are you dis or something?” Margo asked, peering at me.

  “Dis” was a word we had created years earlier to mean disgruntled, dismayed, disenchanted, distressed, disgusted, disheartened, disengaged, distant.

  “I think so,” I said. Prickles were racing around my lips and nose.

  “Do you think we should call Mom?” I heard Margo ask Lily.

  “No, we’ll keep her right here,” Lily said.

  I heard that, and then I went to sleep for two days.

  CRAZY IN LOVE

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Penguin edition published 1988

  Fawcett Crest / Ballantine edition published July 1989

  Bantam mass market edition / February 2006

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1988 by Luanne Rice

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-40612

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90225-9

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