No Ordinary Love Read online

  Outstanding praise for the novels of J.J. Murray!

  Let’s Stay Together

  Named one of the Best Books for Summer 2015 by Publishers Weekly!

  “Murray turns improbable situations that require

  much suspension of disbelief into enjoyable and

  compelling romance about believable love.”

  Library Journal

  “A magical story . . . definitely a sensational read.”

  RT Book Reviews

  “Murray delivers a compulsively readable rags-to-riches

  love story brimming with memorable

  characters, magical charm, lively repartee and

  delicious passion. Fans of romantic comedy movies

  will applaud this heartwarming tale and hope for

  an encore performance.”

  Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Until I Saw Your Smile

  An Ebony Magazine Editor’s Pick for Summer Must Reads!

  “An endearing story of heartfelt love, refreshingly

  narrated by the hero. Unusual characters will inspire

  readers of this emotional yet joyful story.”

  Publishers Weekly

  You Give Good Love

  “Jane Green and Terry McMillan fans will enjoy

  this inspiring, warm, Gift of the Magi-inspired

  holiday romance.”

  Booklist

  Books by J.J. Murray

  RENEE AND JAY

  SOMETHING REAL

  ORIGINAL LOVE

  I’M YOUR GIRL

  CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF YOUR LOVE

  TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

  THE REAL THING

  SHE’S THE ONE

  I’LL BE YOUR EVERYTHING

  A GOOD MAN

  YOU GIVE GOOD LOVE

  UNTIL I SAW YOUR SMILE

  LET’S STAY TOGETHER

  NO ORDINARY LOVE

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  no ordinary love

  J.J. Murray

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Outstanding praise for the novels of J.J. Murray!

  Books by J.J. Murray

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Brooklyn, New York

  1

  2

  3

  4

  San Francisco, California

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Brooklyn, New York

  11

  12

  San Francisco, California

  13

  Brooklyn, New York

  14

  Brooklyn, New York to San Francisco, California

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  San Francisco, California and Los Angeles, California

  44

  Press Clippings

  Copyright Page

  For Amy

  Brooklyn, New York

  1

  On the surface, Anthony “Tony” Santangelo of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, New York, was a handsome forty-year-old Italian American with wavy black hair, dark blue eyes floating over a clean-shaven face, and broad shoulders topping his sturdy six-foot frame. To anyone seeing him riding the subway or rushing to and from cafés and coffeehouses in Brooklyn, he was an ordinary man.

  No one but his brother knew he had made a fortune as a songwriter.

  Under the pseudonym “Art E.,” Tony had written his first top-forty hit at the age of sixteen and added five dozen more over the next twenty-four years. He had earned thirty-nine Grammy Award nominations, to rank him just behind Eminem, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill, and Barbra Streisand. When he began collaborating with R & B seductress Naomi Stringer in 2011, his songs shot to the top of the charts and earned him three Grammy Awards in a row for best song and yet another nomination this year for Naomi Stringer’s “Love Me in the Morning.”

  Tony had watched Naomi collect all three of his awards on his behalf on television.

  “She is pretty,” he told his older brother Angelo the first time Naomi accepted his award in 2012.

  “Do you want to meet her?” Angelo asked.

  “No,” Tony said.

  “Why not? She owes you. Your songs have put her on the map.”

  “She is not on any map,” Tony said. “A person is not put on a map. Streets and roads and landmarks are put on maps. Mountains and rivers are put on maps. She is not a street or a road. She is too small to be a landmark. She is not a mountain or a river.”

  Angelo sighed. “It’s just an expression, Tony.” He pointed at the television. “Look at her, Tony. She’s gorgeous, and she’s single.”

  “She wears too much makeup,” Tony said. “She wears horse hair instead of her own hair. She does not wear underwear.”

  Angelo stared at the television screen. “You’re right. Look at that. You have to respect that.”

  “She should wear underwear,” Tony said.

  “Come on, Tony,” Angelo said. “That is kind of hot.”

  “Naomi should be cold without underwear,” Tony said. “She should not be hot.”

  Tony kept his awards in unopened boxes in the closet in his room, but not because he didn’t want fame to go to his head. Fame could never go to Tony Santangelo’s head because it was far too congested with music, lyrics, maps, colors, sounds, odors, mostly useless trivia, and forecasts from the Weather Channel.

  Tony Santangelo, aka “Art E.,” one of America’s greatest living songwriters, had Asperger’s syndrome, or AS, the mildest form of autism. Although he wasn’t physically clumsy and awkward, Tony had enough of the other symptoms to exist in the “mild” range. His voice was a monotone, and his hands were generally at his sides or jammed into his pockets. Until he discovered the piano, he “stimmed” to stay calm by constantly twisting and pulling on his fingers mercilessly while chanting rhymes like a Gregorian monk. He also perseverated, talking endlessly about the same topic for hours or even days at a time.

  Tony had difficulty having and maintaining friendships, counting his brother Angelo as his only friend because he had “selective mutism” around women. He could usually talk to other men once he got to know them, but as a child, he would remain completely silent around women, especially with his elementary school teachers and even with his mother.

  When he hit puberty and middle school, however, Tony began saying the most inappropriate—though truthful—things to his female classmates:

  “You are not ugly. A cockroach is ugly. Dog poop is ugly. Pollution is ugly. What is under my fingernails before I clean them is ugly. You are prettier than a cockroach, dog poop, pollution, and what is under my fingernails . . .”

  “You are not black. My shoes are black. My hair is black. My pen is black. You are brown and tan and red and beige and white. You should not tell people you are black when you are not black at all . . .”

  “You should not wear a bra yet. You do not have breasts . . .”

  Tony often left school with scratches, bruises, and welts.

  “I
told them the truth,” he would say while his mother wearily applied another bag of ice to his cheek or nose after school. “I told them the truth and they hit me.”

  “You told them too much truth,” his mother had said. “You must learn to tell the truth sparingly.”

  Tony also had the inability to make meaningful eye contact.

  “Tony, look at me,” his mother had said a few weeks before her death.

  “I can hear you,” Tony had said. “I do not have to look at you to hear you.”

  “It is rude not to look at someone who is talking to you,” his mother said. “You need to practice looking people in the eye.”

  Tony had widened his eyes and stared at his mother.

  “And it is also rude to stare like that,” his mother said.

  “I will be rude and not look,” Tony had said. “It hurts my eyes to stare.”

  With Angelo’s help, Tony learned to stare around a person’s face. “At least look in their general direction,” Angelo said. “You know, give them the once-over. You don’t have to look them directly in the eye. And don’t make your eyes so wide when you do. They’ll think you’re crazy.”

  As a result, if Tony made eye contact, he did so unintentionally, his eyes sluggishly crawling over another person’s face and body. This, unfortunately, made his teachers think he was lazy and inattentive. “He cannot seem to focus,” his teachers told his parents. “And when he does focus, he makes rude faces.”

  Tony also tended to take everything literally and had no concept of sarcasm. He had fallen down the stairs as a child, and Angelo had told him, “Smooth move, dork.”

  Tony had said, “Thank you.”

  And meant it.

  A female classmate told him, “Oh, you’re really funny, aren’t you?”

  Tony had said, “Thank you.”

  And meant it.

  She immediately punched him in the nose for his lack of understanding.

  Finally diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at thirteen, removed from middle school by his parents, and homeschooled by a series of tutors, Tony found refuge in front of an 1883 Mason & Hamlin upright piano that had been quietly gathering dust in the Santangelo cellar.

  Tony taught himself to play the piano in three days.

  His finger-strangling days diminished drastically.

  He became a musical genius in one month.

  “He is a prodigy,” Ivan Lubitz, his first and only piano teacher, told his parents. “I cannot keep up with him. He has mastered Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata. He has reinvented Stravinsky. He plays Boulez’s Second Sonata and only looks at the music once or twice. He is close to memorizing Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit—in my opinion the single most difficult piano piece ever written. You must get him a better piano before he destroys this one.”

  Tony did his best to make the piano fall apart. He played with such force and power that keys lifted and chipped and the bench splintered, cracked, and eventually imploded beneath him.

  Once his father had sold “She’s Not Here,” a song based on the passing of Tony’s mother when he was fourteen, to R & B crooner Walter Little and the song soared into the top ten as a love ballad, his father had a $60,000 Bösendorfer upright, the “upright that sounds like a grand piano,” delivered to the cellar.

  Tony ignored it.

  “Try this one,” his father asked.

  “This is my piano,” Tony said, his fingers flying over the Mason & Hamlin.

  “And so is this one,” his father said. “This is your piano, too. You can play them both.”

  “That is not my piano,” Tony said.

  “It has an incredible sound, Tony,” his father said, plinking the keys. “It has a richer, more powerful sound. It is the best piano that money can buy.”

  “I do not want it.”

  “I have to pay to have your ugly piano tuned four times a year, Tony,” his father said. “And the parts are hard to find. This new one will stay in tune for many years.”

  “I do not want it.”

  His father returned the Bösendorfer, and Tony continued to abuse the old upright.

  After his father died of pancreatic cancer when Tony was twenty, Angelo became Tony’s legal guardian. Angelo sold their parents’ brownstone in Carroll Gardens and bought an eight-unit apartment building in Cobble Hill, turning it into “the Castle.” Angelo paid numerous contractors to brick in all the windows on the first two floors, gut the interior, and turn the apartment building into a four-floor palace complete with a roof garden, a soundproofed music studio centered around the old upright, a theater with real theater seats and a state-of-the-art television/computer monitor, four bedroom suites with walk-in closets, and an extensive library of map books from around the world.

  Angelo was convinced that Tony owned the largest collection of map books in New York City. Tony pored over maps for hours, attempting to memorize every town, road, and hamlet in every country on earth. He was particularly an expert on Brooklyn and knew its every street and alley, from Red Hook to Greenpoint and from the Brooklyn Bridge to Bushwick.

  After twenty years of taking complete care of “The Sponge,” Angelo’s semiaffectionate nickname for his brother, Angelo wrote Living with the Sponge: A Biography of Art E. Because he wanted to preserve his brother’s anonymity and keep the generally meanspirited New York media from ruining his and Tony’s lives, he signed it simply: “by Art E.’s brother.”

  It became an international bestseller.

  It also won the National Book Award in 2013.

  “I wrote your story,” Angelo said, handing Tony a copy of the book. “I want you to read it.”

  Tony read the book in one sitting.

  “Did you like it?” Angelo asked.

  Tony handed back the book. “You left a lot out.”

  And that was all Tony would ever say about his life story.

  The biography chronicled Tony’s unconventional life, from his childhood to his most recent top-forty hits. It was hailed as “a bittersweet yet boisterously riotous description of a true American genius” by the New York Times and “an ode to brotherly love and affection, an epic tragicomic journey of one of the world’s greatest yet least understood lyricists” by the Village Voice. Publishers Weekly called it “one of the most inspirational and hilarious biographies of our times,” while Booklist labeled the Sponge “quirky, peculiar, odd, strange, funny, warped, twisted, and outrageous—yet ultimately endearing and lovable.”

  Angelo wisely kept Tony from reading the Booklist review.

  Though Angelo agreed that his brother was different, he didn’t think his brother’s life was tragic. It was, however, difficult to tell if Tony was happy or unhappy, because of his condition. The only time Tony was visibly unhappy was when someone or something interfered with his routine. Whenever the piano had to be tuned, Angelo had to remove Tony from the Castle for the piano tuner’s protection. “But he is doing it wrong!” Tony would shout while pulling and twisting his fingers. “If I had the right tools, I could do it!” During a fierce blizzard in 2010, Angelo had to go outside on the roof with a long broom to dust off the satellite dish every fifteen minutes so Tony could follow the storm’s progress on the Weather Channel. When snow-covered Angelo would come inside to get warm, Tony would tell him, “It is still snowing, Angelo.” During the lengthy power outage that followed Hurricane Sandy, Tony complained loudly that he couldn’t see well enough by candlelight and flashlight to study his maps.

  Angelo invested in a propane generator after that.

  Tony needed his routines to function. He ate a bowl of Cap’n Crunch with sliced bananas and drank a tall glass of pulp-free orange juice for every breakfast. He ate two pepperoni Hot Pockets and exactly sixteen Cheetos with a bottle or can of Hires Root Beer for lunch. He ate whatever Delores Hill, their cook, prepared for dinner as long as it involved pasta, mozzarella cheese, garlic bread, and meat sauce. Nearly every television was tuned in to the Weather Channel so Tony could watch the weather
wherever he was in the Castle.

  Tony’s daily life followed an exacting schedule. He woke at six sharp for a shave and a shower before brushing his teeth for ten minutes. Angelo bought toothpaste in bulk. Tony put on his underwear first, followed by his left sock and then his right—never the other way around—before putting on a T-shirt, pants, and a button-down shirt, which he always buttoned from the bottom up. Tony then composed lyrics, put his lyrics to music, studied his maps, or jammed on the piano between meals. He walked their mixed-breed mutt Tonto (and later Silver) five times a day. He went to sleep precisely at eleven.

  Under Angelo’s guidance, Tony had performed this routine for twenty years, and from all appearances, Tony seemed content.

  Late one night a few days after Thanksgiving, Angelo watched Tony using a magnifying glass to study a map of San Francisco on the long, shiny oak table in the library, a green banker’s lamp the room’s only illumination.

  “How’s it going?” Angelo asked.

  Tony traced something on his map. “I have memorized all the streets in Chinatown.”

  Angelo had learned that no matter how trivial Tony’s pursuits seemed to him, they were extremely important to Tony. “That’s great,” Angelo said. “I wish I had your memory.”

  Tony opened another map book. “This map shows the earthquake damage in 1906. The earthquake, fires, and dynamite killed seven hundred people and destroyed four and a half square miles of San Francisco in only three days.”