Original Love Read online

  REUNITED

  “Ebony, I—”

  She stands on tiptoes and kisses my lips. “Not tonight.” She takes my hand. “I don’t want to talk tonight.”

  I slide my hand around her stomach, and it’s soft and firm. God, It’s like she hasn’t changed in twenty years! She lifts her shirt and places my hand on her smooth skin, my fingers tickling her gumdrop belly button.

  She leads me to the Captain’s berth, a single votive candle flickering from its holder on a desk crammed with nautical charts and map books. She peels off her shirt and lies on the Captain’s bed, both arms reaching out to me.

  “You haven’t aged a day,” I say with a trembling voice.

  She shakes her head. “Shh. We’ll talk tomorrow. Come to me, Peter.”

  “It’s been a long time,” I whisper as I ease myself on top of her, her skin hot, burning.

  “I’ve been waiting twenty years.” Tears well up in her eyes. “You’re my one and only love. Just don’t let me go this time.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  Books by J.J. Murray

  RENEE AND JAY

  SOMETHING REAL

  ORIGINAL LOVE

  I’M YOUR GIRL

  CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF YOUR LOVE

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Original Love

  J.J. Murray

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Once again, for Amy

  Contents

  Part One Ebony Lost

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two Ebony Found

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Ebony Lost

  Yet nothing can to nothing fall,

  Nor any place be empty quite,

  Therefore I think my breast hath all

  Those pieces still, though they be not unite…

  My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,

  But after one such love, can love no more.

  —from “The Broken Heart” by John Donne

  1

  I’m writing the synopsis to this novel while flying from Pittsburgh to JFK. Unlike many of the other passengers on the plane, I don’t need to look out the window after takeoff to catch a glimpse of where that plane of heroes went to its holy grave in a southwestern Pennsylvania field, I don’t need to look down through the smoky clouds at Ground Zero in Manhattan, I don’t need to see the ruins, I don’t want to relive that day, and I don’t stare at other passengers as potential terrorists carrying knives and box cutters.

  I have so many other days to relive, so many other fires to put out, so many other ruins to explore, and I had already lost all the illusions that used to color my world at the tender age of thirteen back in 1976, the 200th anniversary of the dyslexic Untied States of America. The rest of this country is just catching up.

  And if birds were frisked and inspected and made to wait in line for hours, they would never fly.

  I stare at the folded and creased poem in my hands, a poem Ebony wrote to me twenty years ago, and I wonder if it’s possible to repeat the past, to renew an original love:

  My soul loves you endlessly…my whole life

  even before I knew you

  you were what I wrote and hoped

  things my day and night dreams were made of

  original love.

  You brought gentle peace…even in anonymity

  the thought of you

  the very idea of you

  and me ever coming to be

  was hope and power and love.

  I wrote your name up there…in clouds

  said it to myself out loud

  made you more real to me

  again and again and again

  I craved you way back then.

  You came to me…with splendor and glory

  just like in my dreams

  reigning strong and supreme

  constantly giving what I’d need

  making the you in me a necessity.

  Like pen and paper…destined to meet

  a joyous time to bear

  to write you, ignite you

  simply to delight myself in you

  makes pure the air I breathe.

  My soul loves you endlessly…my whole life

  more hope than my head knew

  my heart could ever have

  dripped into my life on slanted autograph

  original love.

  No matter how often I read it, I still see Ebony Mills, the girl I left behind, the girl of my dreams who I fed only nightmares. Maybe we’ll be destined to meet…again.

  After a harrowing trip from JFK around roadblocks, under flag-draped windows, and past closed-off streets in my rented Nova, I show the synopsis to my old editor, Henry L. Milton, at Olympus Publishing in midtown Manhattan. Light streams into Henry’s forty-third floor office, sooty clouds obscuring the street below. Aside from some classical harp music, nothing seems to move in Henry’s office, not even the air, as he reads.

  Henry shakes his head, his gray ponytail swishing behind him, flashes of light reflecting off a tiny lightning bolt earring. Henry still thinks he’s a child of the sixties, even though he wears a blue Armani suit.

  “Pete, this sounds far too depressing for a romantic comedy,” he says from his lavender leather swivel chair, stacks of red-lined manuscripts littering his desk, a smiley face screen saver dancing on his computer screen.

  “I know it sounds depressing at first, but—”

  “Unless this is an attempt at literary nonfiction.”

  “It can be, but—”

  “Literary nonfiction is played out, Pete. The market was simply glutted after Angela’s Ashes. Every dysfunctional European immigrant was writing his or her horrid memoirs. You aren’t Irish, are you?”

  “English and Dutch, mostly.” That makes me Dunglish or Englutch, an American mutt.

  “Did your Da leave you?”

  No, and that in itself is a tragedy. “No.”

  “Then you’re not dysfunctional enough.”

  “My mother did.” And that was a miracle.

  “Yeah? When?”

  “Back in seventy-five.”

  “Hmm. Liberated herself before the Bicentennial.” He shakes his head and sighs, cutting the air with my synopsis. “I get the ‘seasons of my life’ thing, Pete, and I’m sure there will be a flood of seventies books coming out, but this just isn’t something Desiree Holland would write and you know it.”

  The fact is, Desiree Holland—my pen name—hasn’t published a book in more than five years. The hands behind her career have been playing solitaire, hearts, spades, and gin rummy on his computer while living on whiskey sours instead of writing anything of substance.

  “Desiree Holland won’t be writing it, Henry.”

  “She won’t?”

  “I don’t want to be Desiree Holland anymore. In fact, I never wanted to be Desiree Holland in the first place.”

  “You know why we had to do it that way.”

  I know, but it still pisses me off. Ten years ago, the marketing
department thought my novels, each with an African-American female narrator, would be taken more seriously if they were “written” by a woman with an ethnic-sounding name.

  “You’re still one of America’s best-kept secrets.”

  I’m not a secret—I’m nonexistent and unrecognizable. I’m tired of being a puppet and a plaything of the publishing gods at Olympus. “I want to write as Peter Rudolph Underhill from now on.”

  “Too many letters, won’t fit on the cover,” he says with a laugh. “P. R. Underhill maybe. Peter R. Underhill? No, makes you sound too much like the author of a textbook. P. Rudolph Underhill? Too literary. What does Eliot say about all this?”

  Eliot Eckleburg was my agent back in the halcyon days. “Nothing. We parted ways.” About five years ago. Henry is completely out of touch.

  Henry frowns. “Eliot didn’t tell me about this. He’s looking great, you know. Got that laser eye surgery done—no more Coke-bottle glasses. We just had lunch last week.”

  That’s one of the problems with using a pseudonym or pen name. No one knows if you’re living or dead, everyone knows little or nothing about you, the marketing department creates this monstrous lie, and you’re left outside the spotlight in the silence while your agent and editor plan your pseudonym’s career. My original contract with Olympus stated that I was Desiree Holland, writer of multicultural women’s fiction. My real name appeared nowhere on the contract until my signature at the end. No picture on the book flap, no bio, no interviews, no signings, no appearances. Yet “Desiree” has a Web site, complete with a female model posing as Desiree, and Desiree even “answers” fan mail. I am a secret with a Web site. I am the white guy writing African-American fiction using a false name the marketing department thought up over a few margaritas.

  “You can’t just drop Desiree like a bad habit, Pete. Desiree has a following.”

  “Five years ago maybe.”

  “No, no. Her books are still selling steadily on our backlist.”

  Her books. Imagine you’re a writer who can tell no one that you’re published. “What do you do for a living?” I teach high school English, and I write. “Have you ever been published?” Yes. “What have you written?” I use a pen name, so I can’t tell you. “Oh.” Then I get raised eyebrows, and the subject changes. People don’t believe you’re a published author when you tell them you have a pen name.

  “We get letters all the time from people who are wondering when her next book is coming out.” He stares again at the synopsis, his red pencil dancing above the paper. “You have to write this new one from Ebony’s point of view. You’re so good at that.”

  Both my narrators so far have been Ebony, and I could probably use her voice for many more years. It’s not that I hear voices when I write; they just won’t leave once I’ve let them into the conversation I’m having with the reader.

  I sigh. “But, Henry, I’d really rather use my own voice this time.”

  Henry blinks. “You would?”

  That’s what I said, Henry. Get the ponytail out of your ears. He probably has ear wax stuck inside him older than me. “Yes.”

  “You want to write a piece of African-American fiction…from a white man’s point of view.”

  “In essence, yes.”

  “That would be a mistake.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re the enemy, Pete.”

  “Didn’t Updike write—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, but it was set in South America, and it’s John Updike. The man could write out his grocery list and it would be a best-seller.” He shakes his head. “No. We’ll stick with the tried and true.”

  “But I don’t want—”

  “Hear me out first, Pete. I think if we make some adjustments to your synopsis, we might have a Desiree Holland novel here.” He scans my synopsis, marking and circling. “Let’s see…if we have Ebony fall in love with an Italian named…Johnny…you always did like writing about Italians, and you’re not even Italian…and if we change father to mother…oh, and if we delete all this religious nonsense…romantic comedies don’t have religion in them, Pete…if we do all this, we may have another Desiree Holland original here.” He turns the synopsis around to me. “See what you think.”

  I groan inwardly as I read the outline for a romantic comedy starring yet another sassy, educated, free-spirited African-American woman who loses then gains her mother’s approval in search of Mr. White who she will end up marrying on the final pages. I’d be writing the same story for the third time. Original, my ass.

  I notice Henry has left the last line intact: “I have to find the best part of me that I left behind.” Sad but true. I don’t feel alive anymore. I don’t feel the rapture that I occasionally felt as a child. My outer and inner lives have no meaning. I have to go back to when I was thirteen, to the time and place where my life really had meaning and promise.

  “You didn’t do anything to the last line, Henry.”

  Henry smiles. “The marketing department will love that line, Pete. They’ll probably put it on the cover in big, bold, fluorescent yellow type.”

  At the mention of the word “cover,” I cringe. Desiree’s first two covers were neon assaults on the human eye, book jackets that screamed in hot pinks and searing oranges at people as they entered bookstores. And the covers didn’t match the content of the pages inside. “They rarely do,” Eliot once told me. “Ninety percent of all book covers are eye candy to get the reader to pick up the book.” But is eye candy supposed to blind you?

  “And we’ll have lots of nice reviews of Desiree’s work to give the new novel a critical boost,” Henry says as he opens a drawer. “Something we can’t do for the unknown P. Rudolph Underhill, right?” He pulls out a dangerously thin folder and spreads the contents in front of him.

  “You could put my real name on the first two novels.”

  “Then the deception would be out.”

  “So? I thought controversy was good for sales.”

  “In this case, no. Trust me on this, Pete. It would get racial, you’d lose all of Desiree’s black readers, and Olympus Publishing’s reputation would be ruined. I guarantee it.” He flips through a few reviews. “You have some very nice reviews here, Pete.”

  “They aren’t all nice, Henry,” I say.

  “Sure they are.” He holds up a review from the Times. “‘A hilarious and fun read.’”

  “You’re leaving out the rest of the sentence, Henry. It says, ‘A hilarious and fun read at times.’”

  “So we edit the review a little. Everyone does it. We’ll just say Desiree’s writing is ‘hilarious and fun.’”

  “It’s not the truth.”

  “You write fiction, for God’s sake! Everything you write is false!” He laughs.

  But I don’t. Much of what I write is true at its core. Ebony’s voice is as pure to me now as it was twenty-five years ago. And somehow I have a white male editor editing that truth, rewording her African-American voice.

  Only in America.

  “Lighten up, Pete. So you took your hits on Ashy. All first novels get that kind of treatment. But even though we thought it would be a mid-lister, it sold like crazy, remember?”

  Floods of other critical reviews rush through my head: “She doesn’t get under the skin of her characters…She has occasional insights…She works with flimsy material…She caters to the least common denominator…Her plot is melodramatic and improbable…Ms. Holland must create stronger male characters.”

  “The reviewers slammed me, Henry.”

  He shakes his head. “They slammed Desiree Holland, not you, Pete. Don’t take critics personally. They’re slamming a woman who doesn’t exist. The joke’s on them.”

  “I have my pride.”

  “It’s not yours to have, Pete.”

  I blink at Henry. “It isn’t?”

  He leans back in his leather swivel chair. “Desiree wrote the book—”

  “I wrote the book,” I interrupt.

&nb
sp; “The critics don’t know that!” He leans forward. “And if critics didn’t condemn at least one book a week, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs. Their reviews didn’t hurt sales at all, did they? And they loved The Devil to Pay. It was a smash critical success—”

  “—that didn’t sell.”

  I have never understood nor will I ever understand the publishing industry in America. Ashy was a trashy, sex-driven novel with a sassy heroine, a novel with few if any socially redeeming qualities and relatively little meaning, and the public ate it up and asked for seconds while the critics ranted “Trash!” Then I wrote The Devil to Pay, which even Eliot thought was a well-crafted, focused, character-driven story with plenty of redeeming qualities and meaning, and the public yawned while the critics shouted “Success!”

  “Okay, so The Devil to Pay didn’t sell in hardcover, but sales picked up in paperback, and the trade paperback is a consistent seller. I’m sure one day some movie company will snatch it up.”

  Fat chance. Ashy collected dust and cigarette ashes for four years on a movie producer’s desk—or so Eliot told me—before the producer finally decided to pass. I doubt the producer even cracked open the book.

  “Aren’t you still getting nice royalty checks from both books?”

  “I’m only getting half now.”

  Henry wrinkles his mouth. “You’re…divorced?”

  I nod. Edie hated each book, and she even did everything in her power to keep me from writing them. I told her that each had been dedicated to her—“For E.” is all it said—but she didn’t believe me. I had made the mistake of telling her all about Ebony one night after a few too many glasses of wine. At the time, she said it didn’t matter what I did—or whom I did it with—in the past. It obviously mattered. She was jealous of what she called my “continuing relationship with that Negro,” and she did everything to sabotage my writing career. And for this she gets half of my money for books she despised.