Mr. Love: A Romantic Comedy Read online

  Mr. Love

  A Romantic Comedy

  by

  Sally Mason

  Also by Sally Mason

  Rent A Husband: A Romantic Comedy

  Gone Hollywood: A Romantic Comedy

  © 2013 by Sally Mason

  All rights reserved

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

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without the express written permission of the author or publisher except where permitted by law.

  “Any fool can tell the truth,

  but it requires a man of some sense

  to know how to lie well.”

  Samuel Butler

  1

  When Jane Cooper—exhausted after catching the red-eye from Portland—enters her Manhattan apartment at 6:30 A.M. and hears the muffled thud of ancient disco she assumes it’s her vile neighbor and is about to bang on the wall with one of the high heels she’s just ditched (what had possessed her to travel in those things?) when she realizes the strains of “Love To Love You Baby” come from her bedroom.

  She has to laugh at the image of her live-in fiancé, the oh-so-buttoned-down lawyer Tom Bennett, doing his morning workout to the soundtrack of Donna Summer, something he would never let her witness.

  Adorable!

  As Jane approaches the closed bedroom door and hears thuds and bumps she’s pleased she made the impulsive decision the night before to avoid the closing cocktail party of the awful book fair in Oregon—three days of desperate wannabe authors trying to foist their unreadable manuscripts on a real live New York literary agent (okay, junior agent) at the interminable pitch sessions—and fly home twelve hours early to surprise Tom on the morning of his twenty-eighth birthday.

  She slips a gift-wrapped first edition of The Firm from her wheely suitcase and approaches the door. Tom is a big John Grisham fan, which she’s almost learned to forgive him for.

  The only good thing that happened to her in the last few days was finding this book in a Portland Salvation Army thrift store.

  As Jane throws open the bedroom door and shouts “Surprise!” she sees something boiling beneath the covers of the bed and is presented with the sight of a pair of naked female butt cheeks dashing into the bathroom.

  “Tom?” Jane says.

  Her fiancé surfaces from under the comforter wearing a smile designed to win over juries and says, “Janey! Wow!”

  Jane, blinking, sure she is suffering some kind of sleep-deprivation induced hallucination, says, “Tom, what’s going on?”

  Which, really, has to be the dumbest line ever.

  Until he speaks again, that is.

  “Babe, this isn’t what you think,” Tom says.

  Staring down at her fiancé, Jane is aware that the shape under the covers is too bulky to be just that of the slender Tom Bennett, so she whips off the comforter and reveals a blonde woman in some kind of black rubber S&M outfit crouched over his loins like a feeding predator.

  Jane, who appears bookish with her glasses and her pale skin, was in fact raised on a diet of sit-coms and edgy stand-up (she knew who Lenny Bruce was long before she made the acquaintance of his near-namesake in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men) and has the habit, when she is stressed, of spewing one-liners.

  “Okay, Tom,” she says, “please tell me there isn’t a large lady with a strap-on hidden in the closet?”

  The door to the closet creaks and Jane turns to see a very beefy naked woman sporting a mullet, something oily and obscene jutting from her midriff.

  Jane feels her legs turning to liquid and has to put a hand to the wall to stop herself from toppling.

  She closes her eyes and breathes away the dizziness.

  When she opens them Tom, covering himself with a pillow, stands before her.

  His freak show friends, including the blonde who has emerged from the bathroom in Jane’s toweling robe—eew, this, somehow, is the grossest violation of all—lurk behind him, staring at her.

  “Janey,” Tom says, “let’s keep calm now.”

  She slaps him through the face with the Grisham novel and he’s so shocked that he drops the pillow when he lifts a hand to his stinging face.

  Another Jane takes control, and this Jane has her iPhone in her hand, shooting off a succession of pictures of the tableaux that would have made Diane Arbus blush.

  “I’m going downstairs to get some coffee,” the new Jane says in an admirably calm voice, “and when I return you, your little friends and all your possessions will be gone from my apartment. Drop your keys in the mailbox on your way out. Do you understand, Tom?”

  “Janey,” he says, “come on, now. Don’t do something you’ll regret.”

  “The only thing I regret is not having the stomach to John Wayne Bobbitt you.”

  This gets a laugh from the blonde, who must be at least fifty, the only one old enough to remember the emasculated Mr. Bobbitt.

  “If you’re not gone,” Jane says, wagging her phone in Tom’s face, “these happy snaps will be emailed to the senior partners in your law firm. Are you hearing me, counselor?”

  “I’m hearing you.”

  Jane spins, collects her shoes in the passageway and leaves her apartment.

  Alone in the elevator she closes her eyes and rests her face against the cool mirror until she reaches the lobby.

  2

  That Gordon Rushworth opens the front door of his sister’s cottage onto a vista straight from the pages of a travel brochure goes unremarked by him.

  He is immune to the charms of the Vermont village—white clapboard houses with picket fences; a picture-ready church with a spire sporting a clock and a weather vane; a cute little Georgian firehouse—and blind to the vivid backdrop of Fall foliage: crimson maples, syrupy yellow poplars and russety oaks, garish in their profusion.

  He only has eyes for the postman, a crusty old party who humps his satchel through the streets of East Devon each morning, spending more time exchanging pleasantries with his cronies then he does distributing the mail.

  But here he comes, bony knees red as bobbing apples beneath his blue shorts (he seems impervious to the chill that hints at an early winter) and a horsy Puritan’s face shadowed by a baseball cap.

  Gordon, sipping from a mug of what passes for coffee in his sister’s house, pretends to be inspecting a listing wooden fence post, infested with termites, not wanting to appear overeager lest the postman pass the cottage by as he has most days this week.

  “Mornin’, Professor,” the postman says.

  “Morning,” Gordon says, trying not to let the use of the honorific rankle him.

  How is this cretin to know that Gordon’s once promising academic career that had begun at Harvard had fizzled and died in a hick college in North Dakota, where as an assistant English Literature professor, he was denied tenure and let go with little ceremony or regret three months ago?

  That, unable to find employment, he had to return to the loathsome town he’d fled as a teenager and was now camping out in his flakey sister’s living room?

  Or maybe he does know, this gossip merchant with his tight mouth and rheumy eyes, and uses the title with malice of forethought.

  “Professor, you hearin’ me?”

  “Huh?” Gordon says, focusing on the man’s hairy nose.

  “Said I got a letter for you.”

  Gordon all but snatches the envelope from the postman and hurries inside without a word of thanks.

  He scans the envelope
: that it’s addressed to G. Rushworth means nothing.

  His sister—who goes by the name Bitsy, from her middle name, Elizabeth—was baptized Gwendolyn, and he flips the envelope half-expecting to see the return address of one of the New Age charlatans who milk his gullible sibling.

  When he sees the name of New York’s most prestigious literary agency, he feels a tightness in his throat.

  This is it, the letter he has been waiting for.

  The letter from the most important agent to whom he submitted his massive, ten-years-in-the-writing novel.

  There have been rejections already, of course, by email, terse one line dismissals from lesser agents.

  But this letter is the one on which he has been pinning all his threadbare hopes.

  Too nervous to open it he sets the envelope down on the coffee table and seats himself on the sleeper couch that still holds a blanket and pillow.

  Gordon takes a few deep breaths and has just about summoned up the courage to rip open the envelope when the door to his sister’s bedroom creaks and she appears, sobbing, her eyes glued to her Kindle as she walks toward the kitchen.

  “This is just so beautiful,” she says. “So tragically, sorrowfully beautiful.”

  This is Ivy, the latest bit of self-published chick-lit trash that has captivated the nation.

  Even the august New York Times reviewed it a few days ago, praising it for its acute insights into the “post-feminist, post-modern, post-everything female psyche.”

  Bitsy sniffs her way into kitchen, eyes never leaving the glowing face of her e-reader.

  Gordon waits for her to disappear from view, mutters what passes as a prayer and opens the envelope.

  The page that he draws out is on fine bond paper, with a clean, almost vanilla scent.

  When he unfolds the letter and sees that it is handwritten, his heart pounds.

  A sign, surely?

  Would the great man wield a pen lightly?

  Gordon composes himself and reads.

  The single paragraph missive has the effect of a hobnail boot in the gut.

  Words like leaden and turgid and pompous assault him.

  But the last lines are the coup de gras: “Sadly, Mr. Rushworth, your ambitions outstrip your talent and this doorstop of a manuscript could benefit from a crash diet; perhaps if reduced to a modest short story it would be better digested? Too Long the Night is too long!”

  Gordon lets the page float to the floor and slumps back on the couch, feeling as gutted as one of the deer his savage stepfather had forced the young Gordon to dress on their nightmarish hunting trips.

  “Bad news?” Bitsy stands in the kitchen doorway, still holding her Kindle, drinking a herbal tea.

  “No, no,” Gordon says, using his shoe to edge the rejection letter and its envelope beneath the couch. “Just some correspondence from South Dakota.”

  “You’re lying to me, Gordy.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I can see it. When you lie your aura turns a nasty shade of puce.”

  “Oh, please,” Gordon says, standing, “spare me the tawdry metaphysics.”

  “Another agent has rejected your book, right?”

  He doesn’t answer, making for the front door.

  “How many times have I told you, Gordy, the world doesn’t want brainy novels full of ten-dollar words? It wants this,” she taps her Kindle, “love and light and romance. When are you going to take my advice?”

  Hand on the doorknob, he almost spins and says, “Oh, but I did, Bitsy. I took your advice. I hid here all summer when you were away at Camp Chakra or whatever the hell you call it, and in sheer desperation I banged out that execrable piece of junk you and your world can’t seem to get enough of.”

  But, of course, he doesn’t.

  He just walks out into the street, a thirty-five year old tormented genius in his academic’s uniform of corduroys and tweed jacket with elbow pads.

  And the fact that his shlocky piece of chick-lit, written under a female alias, is being downloaded at a rate of one a second—turning him into a very rich man—does nothing to ease his sense of desolation.

  No.

  If anything, it sharpens it.

  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 i
t, 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 guesses 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.