Mr. Love: A Romantic Comedy (2 page)

3

What gets Jane Cooper through the next couple of hours is a succession of lattes at her local Starbucks and a novel that’s absurdly trashy but as addictive as methamphetamine.

Ensconced
at her favorite window table she is able to forget her own misery as she loses herself in the life and loves of the wildly promiscuous, totally self-absorbed yet undeniably likeable (and believable) heroine, Suzie Ballinger.

And, best of all, she is reading it for work, so she can dodge any guilt at lowering herself into this
treacly ooze rather than sorting out the messy aftermath of Tom Bennett’s little walk on the wild side.

While waiting for her flight last night at Portland airport, Jane
had checked her email and found a typically terse communication from her boss, super agent Jonas Blunt, he of the Mensa-endorsed IQ and the Byronic good looks.

“
Read
Ivy
soonest & get back to me,” he’d written.

Jane had known about the novel, of course, everybody was talking about it at the book fair, all the agents bitching about how yet another self-published
writer had evaded them, denying them their juicy chunk of commission.

There’d been a lot of speculation about who
Viola Usher, the first-time author, was.

“Oh that
has
to be a pseudonym,” Jane said to a fellow agent she met in the washroom between pitches.

“Maybe. I went to school with a
Viola.”

“But Usher? Come on.
Who outside of Poe is called Usher?” Jane said, rinsing her hands at the sink.

“Have you read it?”

“God, no!” Jane said, yanking at the paper towel dispenser.

“I have.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And I have to admit, it’s not bad.
Kinda sexy and kinda smart.”

Jane had forgotten the exchange until the email from
Jonas got her clicking through to Amazon and downloading the book.

Why he wanted her to read the
thing she had no idea, but when Jonas spoke you listened.

On the plane
, once the warning lights had died, she’d powered up her iPad fully intending to follow her boss’s orders, but instead had been distracted by the latest revisions to a memoir she was desperately trying to get published, written by a woman doctor who’d worked for years in remote parts of Africa and Asia.

The book was
touching, affirming and beautifully written and had about as much chance of finding a publisher as tone-deaf Jane did of winning
American Idol
.

An hour out of
LaGuardia Jane had reluctantly shut down the memoir and opened the little potboiler that was making a lot of noise and a ton of money.

Within a few pages she could understand why the book was catchy as mono.

As its name hinted, it was set in a fictitious New England college where the heroine was a junior lecturer who, in the first chapters, initiated affairs with the married head of her department; the captain of the lacrosse team; an alcoholic grease monkey from the nearby town and the college’s writer in residence, a priapic septuagenarian Nobel Laureate.

By the time the plane was circling to land and a stewardess jabbed Jane’s shoulder and ordered her to kill her iPad, she understood the enthusiasm of her fellow agent back in that Portland washroom.

The book
was
smart.

And sexy.

What Jane hadn’t anticipated was that it was also surprisingly moving.

Or is it just tweaking her already fragile emotions
, she wonders using a napkin to dab her eyes at her table at Starbucks as she reads the final, heartbreaking pages.

And what does it say about
her
that the first tears Jane has shed since discovering her fiancé of two years—plans well advanced for nuptials in the spring—displaying a side of his character hidden deep beneath his preppy exterior, have been for the travails of a fictional bed-jumper?

But that’s it, isn’t it?

The success of this book.

It is a finely-tuned
soufflé of manipulation.

No wonder women everywhere are
shelling out their dollars to download the thing.

She guess
es that Viola Usher is the pen-name of some twenty-something graduate of one of those Ivy League colleges.

The details ring too true to be purely fictional.

That Viola Usher remains hidden, refusing to respond to any of the media attention, only increases the mystique of the book.

When Jane’s phone warbles
Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “Dream a Little Dream of Me” (the song she and Tom had already selected for their first dance at their wedding—God she’s going to have to change that ring tone pronto) she almost expects her errant fiancé, but comes quickly to attention when her boss’s name appears on caller ID.

“
Jonas,” she says.

“Well? Have you read it?”

“I’ve just finished it, yes.”

“I want to sign her,” he says.

“Viola Usher?”

“Yes. I want a piece of this action.”

“But she’s invisible.”

“Exactly.”

“So, how are you going to sign her . . . ?”

“You’re going to find her.”

“How?”

“I leave that up to you. I’m out on the coast and
Hollywood is hyperventilating over this book. Find Viola Usher and bring her to me.”

He’s gone without a goodbye.

Typical Jonas, holding up impossibly high hoops for Jane to jump through.

And little Janey with her
Midwestern resilience always grits her teeth and flings herself through them.

But this time
, surely, he is asking her for something impossible?

If the slavering media have been unable to track down
Viola Usher, then how is Jane going to do it?

She clicks through to the cover if the book and sits staring at it blankly while she sips the dregs of her coffee.

The cover is dominated by an ivy-covered brick wall.

Jane feels
as if she is bashing her head against it.

Then she registers a couple of other details.

There is a landscape to the right of the wall.

A
Fall landscape: a covered bridge over a creek, with colorful trees in the background.

The bridge that
Suzie Ballinger crosses when she flees her life of debauch and returns to the unnamed New England hamlet where she was born, to nurse her ailing mother and recharge herself, no doubt, for the sequel that is certain to come.

Jane stares at the bridge.

Is this a clue?

She copies the cover and emails it to her
younger brother.

She could never call him
her
little brother
, since he is morbidly obese.

Then she speed-dials him on her cell phone.

“Sis,” he says, answering after the second ring, “what’s up with this book cover?”

“You see the bridge?”

“Yeah, I see it.”

“I’ll buy you the game of your choice if you find that bridge for me.”

“Done,” he says and he’s gone.

Her brother is twenty-two
and weighs 400 pounds. He still lives at home with their parents, shut in his room, experiencing the world on-line and through Playstation, gaming his brain to mush.

Jane had always felt so superior to him, with her nice job and her nice apartment (which she can no longer afford now that her not-so-nice ex-
fiancé will no longer be carrying most of the rental) and her life in Manhattan.

She pays the check and walks the two blocks to her apartment and rides up in the elevator.

When she opens the door she almost hopes Tom is there with flowers, chocolates and apologies.

A
nd some excuse for his bizarre behavior.

But he and his freak show are gone.

Jane sinks down on the couch and feels about as desolate as she has ever felt.

When he
r phone rings the only reason she yanks it from her pocket is to kill that ring tone.

Her brother.

“Jimmy?”

“
East Devon, Vermont.”

“Huh?”

“The bridge. It’s in a town called East Devon.”

“How did you find it so fast?”
she asks, her heart sinking.

If it was some well-known tourist site, then it wouldn’t be much of a clue after all.

“Oh, I wrote a quick app that did a visual recognition match to all available covered bridge pics on the web.”

“In English.”

“Look, there’s only one picture of that bridge on-line. On some guy’s
Flickr
account.”

“
Is it that shot?”

“No. But it’s definitely the same bridge
.”

“Who is the guy?”

“Some German. Looks like he was touring New England a coupla years back. This bridge is seriously obscure.”

“Okay, email me
name of the game you want, Jimmy. Thanks.”

Jan
e ends the call and Googles East Devon, Vermont.

A village in the south of the state.

Not one of the bed-and-breakfast towns.

Not a tourist spot.

Just a little hamlet.

Like the one in the book.

It’s a long shot.

It may be a waste of time.

But something tells her that Viola Usher is in this town.

She calls
Jonas.

“So?” he says
, “have you found her?”

“Not yet, but I have a lead.”

“Yes?”

“I think she’s in a small
town in Vermont.”

“
Then why aren’t
you
in Vermont?”

“It’ll mean hiring car and
driving up. There will be some expenses.”

“
Why the hell do you have a company credit card? Just get going.”

Jane
, listening to dead air, lowers her phone and looks at the cheerless apartment, thinking how pleasant it would be to escape and take a long drive through New England in the Fall.

She dumps the soiled clothes from her wheely,
steels herself and goes into the bedroom, the tangled sheets and the faint smell of musk still hanging in the air nearly undoing her.

Hurrying, s
he finds clean clothes, packs her suitcase, walks out and slams the door.

4

Gordon Rushworth arrives at the Maple Creek Bridge without remembering how he got there, some internal GPS leading him along in his fugue state.

He hasn’t seen this bridge in the nearly twenty years since he crossed it when he left
East Devon for Harvard, swearing never to return.

The covered bridge is disused now, blocked off by
55-gallon drums and white stones.

East Devon
is connected to the world by a new road that skirts the river and the old bridge has fallen into disrepair, its wooden floor so rotten that the sluggish waters of Maple Creek are visible through it.

The
surrounding trees are dense and all that can be seen of the town is the skinny church spire, reaching above the forest that’s as gaudy as an over painted old hag.

Gordon is sweating, despite the crisp
Fall day, and breathes heavily.

When he si
ts on a rock to get his breath back he feels as if he’s sinking into his past.

As the
almost middle-aged Gordon sits staring at the old bridge, oppressed by feelings of failure and disillusionment, he can’t help but travel back in time to when last
he can remember being truly happy, and his memory returns the bridge to its former glory, pitched roof glistening, wood painted and varnished, twelve-year-old Gordon and his best friend Suzie Baldwin riding up on their bikes, laughing, the golden sun of that endless summer drawing them into the creek that they entered as children and emerged, wet, dripping, laughing as something else when they stood in the shadow of the bridge and kissed for the very first time.

The memory is so sharp and painful that adult Gordon is driven to his feet and he feels a salty sting on his cheeks that is not sweat.

Good God, man, pull yourself together
, he thinks as he dabs away the tears with one of the monogrammed handkerchiefs he favors.

But that kiss is as fresh on his lips as if it happened yesterday.

Gordon has had relationships with women, even came perilously close to marrying a few years ago, but he has never loved anybody the way he loved Suzie Baldwin, with her freckles and her cropped helmet of dark hair.

The last time he saw her the wisps that remained of her hair were hidden by a beanie, her face gaunt, eyes made ancient by the chemotherapy and the leukemia that killed her at thirteen.

What made the rejections of
Too Long the Night
doubly painful was that it was his love song to Suzie.

A
coming-of-age novel about a boy who watches the girl he loves die and then shuts himself inside his intellect, distancing himself from the hicks around him, fleeing across this bridge into a better life.

A life of ideas and ideals.

Of philosophy.

Of culture.

In the book Suzie Baldwin became Sarah Oatman and Gordon himself was Lance Prescott, a more handsome, smarter, version of himself.

Not smart enough, it would seem, for the publishing gatekeepers of
Manhattan.

The irony, of course, is that in the summer, when Gordon, left adrift and rudderless after being fired, found himself alone for a month when his sister went off to some New Age
boot camp, it was Suzie Baldwin who arrived unbidden and got him writing again.

Th
e Suzie Baldwin who had lived on inside Gordon’s head through his teens and into his twenties, always there with a joke, with advice.

Always there to kick him in the butt when he became lazy or discouraged.

She’d stopped visiting him as he neared thirty, no room in pompous self-important Gordon Rushworth’s life for an imaginary friend.

Or any other friends, the truth be told.

The Suzie who colonized his imagination this past summer had grown into a hottie.

A libidinous, fun
-loving girl with no patience for conventions.

A
s Suzie Ballinger, without much intervention from Gordon, she spun a picaresque tale of sex and seduction.

After the decade spent working on
Too Long the Night
, the book that became
Ivy
was a frothy romp.

Made all the
more pleasurable because it afforded Gordon the opportunity to take childish revenge on people who had slighted him.

The department head who had
scorned his master’s thesis was caught, literally, with his pants down when Suzie seduced him in his wood-paneled office.

The
high school jock who had bullied Gordon became the moronic captain of the lacrosse team, reduced to tears and laughable attempts at verse when Suzie dropped him.

The alcoholic grease monkey was a barely disguised version of th
e stepfather who had tormented him.

The
Nobel Laureate was a writer-in-residence at a college Gordon taught at years ago, who had read a chapter of
Too Long the Night
and dismissed it as “twinky trash.”

They were all there, gutted and emasculated by Suzie Ballinger, until she had disappeared from their lives to return to her small town and nurse her dying mother and
reunite with her teenage sweetheart in a treacly swirl of shame-making wish-fulfillment.

The book, a mere slip of a thing beside
Too Long the Night
,
was written in a three week frenzy, at the end of which Gordon was bearded, even skinnier than usual (in his sister’s absence he frequently neglected to eat) and sour smelling.

He accepted that this book was an expiation of sorts.

A dumping of emotional and psychological baggage.

Of one thing he was certain: it would remain on the hard
drive of his laptop, hidden from the eyes of the world.

Then h
is sister returned and brought reality with her.

There were bills to pay and his presence (although she was too kind to say so) was a burden.

Bitsy, divorced and childless, earned a living scouring Southern Vermont and Western Massachusetts for antiques and bric-a-brac that she sold to stores in the tourist towns.

She had an eye and could bargain with the best of them but her income was meager.

And Gordon knew that part of that income was tithed to these hocus pocus organizations she was drawn to.

One morning, eating breakfast (toast and coffee for Gordon, fru
it and herbal tea for Bitsy), his sister had said, “Gordon, may I ask a question?”

“Of course,” he said, crunching through his toast.

“Why don’t you try and write something different? Something more . . . commercial?”

When she saw how he was glaring at h
er she blushed and shrugged.

“I know you think I’m a philistine, but I see writers with no talent at all making fortunes.”

He slammed down his coffee cup.

“I could no more write some bestselling hokum than you could become Miss
Vermont.”

When he saw the
hurt on his sister’s plain, aging face, he felt a pang of guilt.

“I’m sorry, Bitsy, I misspoke.”

“No, I shouldn’t stick my nose into your business.”

“It’s just that I don’t write mainstream fiction. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Suzie Baldwin appeared right there in the kitchen, standing behind his sister with her hands on her hips saying, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

“Shut up,” Gordon said, speaking to the specter.

“No need to be rude, Gordon,” Bitsy said, standing up to clear the breakfast things. “You’ve made your point.”

“Forgive me,
Bitsy, I’m not myself.”

She nodded,
faked a smile and dumped dishes in the sink.

The clatter of mail through the slit in the front door drew her from the kitchen.

Gordon followed, and saw her lifting a couple of envelopes.

“Anything for me?” he asked.

“No. Just bills.”

She took the mail to her bedroom and closed the door.

A few minutes later she came out carrying the keys to her elderly Volvo station wagon.

“I’m going across to Pankhurst. The contents of an old house are being sold, I may sniff out a good piece or two.”

“Okay,” he said.

When he
r car rattled away down the road, he booted up his laptop and opened
Ivy
.

It took him two hours to read
it, and what he read filled him with distaste.

It was slick, trashy and superficial.

Filled with sex and sentimentality.

It shamed him that he had been able to write such a book, that th
ose cheesy tropes had come so easily to him.

He tried to console himself that even the greats wrote trifles.

Entertainments.

But this, he knew, was nothing but
garbage.

He used the cursor to highlight the file, right
-clicked on the touchpad and was about to send
Ivy
to the recycle bin when he saw his sister’s face as she entered the bedroom carrying the sheaf of bills.

Gordon, broke with no promise of employment, was skewered by guilt.

“Publish it.”

Suzie
appeared, leaning against the wall, arms folded.

“
Never.”

“It’s the best thing you’ve ever written and you know it.”

“It’s chick-lit,” he said.

“At least it’s not that pretentious drivel you usually write, all lofty ideas and philosophizing. It’s about flesh-and-blood people with feelings. And appetites.”

He shook his head.

“And it’ll sell like crazy,” Suzie said before she disappeared.

Even imaginary women, it seemed, had to have the last word.

Gordon
sat for a long time, staring unseeing at the wall, then he made a decision.

He’d publish the damned thing as an ebook.

Maybe it
would
earn a couple of dollars.

He spent the morning investigating how this could be achieved and discovered that the process was ridiculously easy.

What took the most time was the cover.

Gordon, a promising artist as a boy, put his rusty skills to use, found a photograph of an ivy covered wall on-line
and did a bit of work in Photoshop.

The name
Viola Usher came to him unbidden.

Viola
, from Shakespeare’s,
Twelfth Night
, (who had disguised her sex, a little joke of Gordon’s) and Usher from—of course—Edgar Allen Poe.

He stared at the cover and it
was adequate, he supposed.

Then something, some previously unacknowledged
superstition, had him searching through a box of his junk Bitsy kept in a closet in the kitchen, and he very nearly teared up when he found pictures of himself and Suzie.

He skipped them and found a photograph of
Maple Creek Bridge that he had taken as a teenager.

He scanned it, Photoshopped it a little, and set it as the background to the ivy-covered wall.

It worked.

By the time his sister returned, the rear of her car jammed with booty she had picked up for a song,
Ivy
had been uploaded and would appear for sale on-line by the morning.

Bitsy, her usual cheer restored by her successful day, made pasta and they split a
bottle of wine, and by the time a slightly tipsy Gordon fell asleep on the couch he had forgotten about the book.

But the world had taken note of it . . .

Just as Suzie had known it would.

“She’s dead,” Gordon says
, rising from the rock overlooking the bridge. “Will you finally get it through your head that Suzie is dead?”

He almost expects her to appear and contradict him but she doesn’t and
Gordon leaves the bridge and wanders home through the town that—though it has all the attributes that would seem to make it a tourist magnet—wears an air of failure like a blanket.

Stores are closed and boarded up.

There are potholes in the streets.

When he
arrives back at Bitsy’s house there’s no sign of her Volvo.

Inside he
boots up his computer to check his email and finds only the usual spam yelling about Viagra and holidays in Bermuda.

He sighs and clicks open the sales records for
Ivy
.

It has sold over two hundred thousand copies.