Mr. Love: A Romantic Comedy

by Sally Mason

  She was swept away by the sheer force of his personality.

  And Daniel wasn’t at all creepy.

  He was humorous and likeable.

  A regular guy.

  Almost.

  Telling people what they were desperate to hear: how to be happy.

  Bitsy became a frequent visitor and spent a month at the Foundation in summer, attending classes and helping with fundraising.

  Daniel Quant had some money, it seemed.

  But he wasn’t wealthy enough to run the Foundation out of his back pocket.

  Bitsy, although she’d never been asked to, made a small contribution each time she visited.

  Today, as she drives past the Quant Foundation sign, she feels a lifting of her spirits as she always does.

  She parks the Volvo beside the other cars, SUVs and fancy sedans rubbing shoulders with old pick-ups, and makes her way into the hall, greeting a lot of familiar faces.

  Daniel comes in and although he smiles, he carries with him an air of seriousness, and the assembled group quietens.

  “I’m going to say this plainly. The Foundation has been funded both by me and by generosity of the wider community. It was revealed to me yesterday that a trusted advisor has been embezzling funds from my private accounts.”

  There are murmurs of shock and he holds up his hands.

  “The man confessed what he has done and has chosen to hand himself over to the authorities. But the money is gone never to return.”

  He looks around the room, his handsome face unsmiling.

  “Friends, the simple reality is this: unless we are the recipient of a windfall—and I’m talking a truckload of cash here—the Foundation is going to have to close its doors.”

  He shrugs.

  “I’m interpreting this as a positive challenge. As an acid test of where the Foundation is and where it is meant to be. And I’ve had to remind myself that holding on to the Foundation is like holding my breath—I’ll suffocate. So, I’m going to let go and hand it over to the winds and see where they blow us. Thank you.”

  He walks out, leaving the room in shock.

  People start to whisper and chatter and there is talk of cake sales and fairs.

  Bitsy is too distraught to join in.

  She walks back to her car, devastated, as if the central pillar supporting her world has been pulled loose, leaving her in a freefall that has her panicked and terrified.

  9

  When Gordon, crossing the East Devon square, finds himself patting his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, he realizes how nervous he is.

  He kicked the vile habit a decade ago.

  Passing a couple of sad stalls selling junk (trying for the Ye Olde Village market thing and not succeeding) he gets the pungent whiff of tobacco smoke and sees a pimply early-teenage girl with canary yellow hair selling used books, puffing as she bops to music on her iPod.

  Gordon has to restrain himself from bumming a cigarette from the delinquent.

  He takes a deep breath, trying to tamp down his twin terrors: that Jane Cooper will sneer at his novel and that his sentimental gesture of putting the picture of the old bridge on the cover of Ivy has led to his exposure and humiliation—a serious, literary novelist, reduced to writing women’s romance.

  Pushing these thoughts away, he does his best to stroll casually toward Grace’s Field to Fork.

  The eatery was known simply as Grace’s Diner when he was growing up in East Devon. Even dowdy Grace, with her beak of a nose and plow horse hocks has succumbed to cuteness in the expectation of the tourist boom that has never come to East Devon.

  Since his return a few months ago Gordon’s heard many explanations as to why the town hasn’t taken off like its neighbors: the road linking it to Route 7 is poorly maintained; the town is overshadowed by the just-too-nearby Brattleboro; there hasn’t been enough support from the various tourism associations.

  Oddly, the explanation that makes the most sense to him is his sister’s hocus pocus take on the situation: East Devon has bad feng shui, which she blames on a legacy of negative energy from a massacre in the town during the Revolution.

  He doesn’t buy the massacre thing but the town is depressing, with an all-pervasive atmosphere of gloom and failure.

  A good place to leave.

  Gordon, you are a harbinger of doom, he tells himself as he enters Grace’s, setting off a distorted electronic version of “Yankee Doodle” when he opens the door.

  Even though he’s a little early Jane Cooper already sits at a window table drinking coffee and eating a plate of Grace’s signature Red Flannel Hash with corn fritters and maple syrup.

  “Good morning,” Gordon says, sitting opposite the agent.

  “Morning.”

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “You weren’t kidding about the bedbugs.”

  “Commiserations,” he says, sounding like a pompous idiot.

  Grace appears with her notebook and Gordon asks for a coffee, too nervous to eat.

  Stilling his hands on the table top when he finds them fiddling with a menu, he leans forward and says, “So . . .”

  Jane Cooper sets down her cutlery and dabs at her mouth with a napkin.

  Her face, free of make-up, is delicately boned, and her eyes behind the Buddy Holly glasses (is this some trendy New York thing?) are a pleasing shade of violet.

  He wishes there was a smile on her unpainted but quite generous lips.

  “Are you an honest man, Gordon?” Jane asks, those violet eyes drilling him.

  He tries for levity.

  “As the day is long.”

  “Or the night?”

  “Hah,” he says, “touché.”

  “If I asked you a question would you give me a straight answer?”

  “I would do my best.”

  There is a suspenseful pause as Grace delivers Gordon’s coffee and tries to interest Jane in a slice of Vermont apple pie.

  The agent politely refuses but Grace persists and Gordon has to bite his tongue to stop himself from telling her exactly where she can shove her pie.

  At last she waddles off and Jane adjusts her glasses on her nose and fixes her eyes on Gordon again.

  “Ask away,” he says.

  “Are you Viola Usher?”

  The question that he has feared most robs him of his breath, and he tries to cover his distress by taking a sip of the coffee.

  A mistake.

  The java is scalding hot, getting him to spray it onto the table top in a fit of coughing.

  He scrambles for napkins and wipes up his mess.

  “My apologies,” he says, wheezing.

  When he regains his breath, he says, “Why on earth would you ask me something so absurd?”

  “You’re answering a question with a question,” Jane says.

  “Of course I’m not Viola Usher,” he says. “There, asked and answered.”

  He tries to meet her eyes but finds his gaze drifting out to where the geezer of a postman is in conversation with the local reverend.

  “You’re lying,” Jane Cooper says.

  “I beg your pardon?” he says, shocked at how forthright she is.

  “I said, you’re lying.”

  He stands.

  “I refuse to be insulted like this. I’m leaving.”

  “I doubt it,” she says, gaze unwavering.

  She could win a fortune playing poker in Las Vegas.

  Gordon subsides into his seat.

  “The only reason I’m staying is that I feel I deserve to hear your opinion of my novel.”

  “Which novel is that?” she asks. “Too Long the Night or Ivy?”

  “You’re toying with me.”

  Jane shrugs.

  “Well,” she says, “I read the first seven chapters of Too Long the Night.”

  “And?”

  “I was overcome . . .”

  “You were?”

  “Overcome with the realization that there were far too many glaring
similarities between it and Viola Usher’s book.”

  “This again.”

  “Okay, Gordon, indulge me. Both books have their protagonists leaving small towns in Vermont for unnamed Ivy League colleges.”

  “Hardly conclusive.”

  “Both Sarah Oatman in Too Long the Night and Suzie Ballinger in Ivy spend an awful lot of time talking about The Catcher in the Rye.”

  “Well, they’re both rights-of-passage novels of sorts, so is it terribly surprising that they would reference the greatest bildungsroman of them all?”

  “Did you honestly just say bildungsroman?”

  “I did.”

  “You’re pompous and a liar.”

  “I don’t have to sit here and be insulted,” he says, but he stays in his seat.

  “Gordon, I know about Suzie Baldwin.”

  He stares at her.

  “How?”

  Jane shakes her head.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Gordon points toward Grace who has her back to them, delivering an order to another table.

  “That old gossip monger told you, didn’t she?”

  Jane waves this away.

  “Look, I don’t want to trample on your feelings—”

  “Oh, think of them as little purple grapes and trample away.”

  “—but I know you and Suzie were close. Clearly, her death inspired you to write Too Long the Night.”

  “Wow, you are perspicacious. No wonder you’re a literary agent.”

  “I understand you’re upset.”

  “Upset doesn’t come close.”

  “Gordon, please: Suzie Baldwin, Suzie Ballinger? Is that a coincidence?”

  “Yes, along with all the others.”

  “Okay, I’m going to be straight with you.”

  “And what have you been so far?”

  “I was just warming up.”

  “Okay, fine, do your worst.”

  “I spent a little time Googling you this morning and charted the downward trajectory of your academic career. You were fired from some obscure college in South Dakota three months ago and I’d say your chances of employment are slim.”

  “I told you: I’m taking a well-earned sabbatical.”

  “And you’ve probably received a boatload of rejections already for Too Long the Night?”

  “Nonsense, I’m weighing offers from three agents.”

  “I sincerely doubt that. Twelve-hundred page literary novels are not hot ticket items right now.”

  She shrugs.

  “I’m sorry Gordon, I’m being honest here.”

  “Am I meant to applaud that?” he says

  “I believe that you wrote Ivy as a little money-spinner under an assumed name. The alias is a dead give away.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Shakespeare’s Olivia was a woman pretending to be a man. Come on, Gordon, how hard is it to join those dots?”

  Gordon feels sick, realizing how he has hoisted himself by his own petard.

  The photograph of Maple Creek Bridge.

  The clever-clever nom de plume.

  Not taking care to disguise Suzie better.

  Jane is speaking again.

  “Look at the upside, Gordon. Ivy is making you a ton of money and if you sign with the Blunt Agency you’ll get to a do a print version which’ll make you even richer. Then there’ll be the fortune you’ll earn from the movie rights. And we’ll get you a monster advance when you write the sequel. We can do all this for you.”

  Gordon stares at her.

  “No, you can do it for Viola Usher. I am not she. I did not write that book.”

  “You’re going to be outed, Gordon. I have friends in the media who would just love to tell the story behind Ivy. Walk away from me and I’ll set them on you like a pack of hounds.”

  Gordon, his legs shaky, stands.

  “Ms. Cooper, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Good luck with finding the elusive Viola Usher.”

  He throws a ten dollar bill on the table and strides out of the eatery with as much dignity as he can muster.

  10

  As Jane walks back toward the unspeakable B & B her phone rings and when she sees it’s Jonas calling she sends it to voice mail.

  She is in no state to speak to her boss now.

  To admit to him that she has been defeated.

  She’s certain that Gordon Rushworth is Viola Usher, but short of breaking into his house and stealing his laptop, she has no way of proving it.

  What worries her is that, sitting at the table after he departed, Jane had seriously considered burglarizing Rushworth’s home.

  Wow, the last couple of days have been tough, but come on . . .

  She’d played all her cards in the restaurant and played them well.

  She rocked Gordon Rushworth and got him close to cracking.

  But he rode it out and never broke.

  Her threat about the media was half-baked.

  She could speak to a couple of her journalist contacts and perhaps some of them would think it worthwhile to travel all the way up here in search of a scoop, but given that we live in a time of shrinking budgets, she doubts that editors would authorize the expense.

  And even if a journalist did unmask Gordon, all that would result would be an agent feeding frenzy, which Jane (or more likely Jonas) were not guaranteed to win.

  No.

  She was done.

  She was single again.

  And unemployed.

  And she knows that Jonas will poison all the publishing wells.

  There will be no job offers forthcoming.

  All that will be left for her will be the long road home to her parents’ house in Indiana.

  God, she’s as hopeless as Gordon Rushworth.

  At first she thinks her imagination has conjured his voice when she hears Gordon say, “Jane?”

  But when she turns there he is, dogging her heels, dressed in his baggy trousers and tweed jacket, his oatmeal-colored hair mussed—and not in a contrived, boy-bandish way, either.

  “Jane,” he says, “let’s talk.”

  “I thought we were done talking?”

  “Please,” he says, gesturing at a wooden bench on the edge of the village square, “sit down.”

  She sits but rises as quick as a jack-in-the-box when he says, “I’m not Viola Usher.”

  “Gordon, stop wasting my time.”

  “Sit. Hear me out.”

  She stares at him then sits.

  “I didn’t write that book but I know who did.”

  “Who?”

  “My sister,” he says. “My sister Bitsy wrote Ivy.”

  11

  Gordon self-medicates on red wine as he waits for his sister to return home, pacing the threadbare carpet in the living room, listening for the clatter of her Volvo.

  But all he can hear are the voices of doubt in his head.

  Is he mad?

  Introverted, withdrawn, wifty-wafty little Bitsy will never agree to Gordon’s plan.

  A plan that, no matter his empty assurances, would certainly thrust her into the glare of the media spotlight.

  All he has managed to do is stall that predatory she-agent, leaving her holed up in the B&B, waiting for him to call her to come over and meet Viola Usher.

  Not going to happen, Gordy.

  The sneering voice of the high school football captain, the bully who had terrorized him through his teenage years, who he had lampooned in Ivy.

  Ivy.

  God, why had he ever written that thing?

  “Because it’s the bomb, Gordo.”

  And there’s Suzie, smiling at him from across the room.

  “A bomb that’s going to blow my life to smithereens,” he says, rushing at her.

  She disappears, of course, and all Gordon can do is top up his wine glass.

  Not too much, he tells himself.

  You have to stay focused, in control.

&nb
sp; Tells himself this even as he drains the glass of wine.

  He’s ready to pour another when he hears the old Volvo wheeze to a halt outside the house.

  Gordon sits on the couch, legs crossed, fixing a smile on his face.

  The door opens and Bitsy enters.

  She stares at him.

  “What’s wrong,” she says. “Are you ill?”

  “Not at all,” he says. “Let me get you a glass of wine. Sit, have a chat.”

  “You are ill.”

  “Please, Bitsy. Join me.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Forgive me, Gordon, but I’m not in the mood. I’ve had a distressing morning and I think I’ll just do a little reading in my room.”

  “I have some very important news, Bitsy.”

  She stares down at him.

  “About your book?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  She perches on the edge of a chair, hands in her lap, long-suffering eyes on him.

  “Can I get you a glass of wine?” he asks.

  “Thank you, no. I feel a migraine coming on.”

  He pours himself another glass, takes a sip and tells her about writing Ivy and publishing it.

  Bitsy stares at him, mouth hanging open on her slightly protuberant front teeth.

  “Gordon, are you drunk?”

  “No, not all.”

  “Then surely you’re suffering some kind of breakdown? You don’t honestly expect me to believe you wrote that book, do you?”

  “Well, you did urge me to write something more commercial.”

  She shakes her head.

  “No, Gordon, I have no time today for silly pranks. Please.”

  She stands.

  He rises, too, and holds up his hands.

  “Okay, I’ll prove it to you.”

  “How?”

  He digs his laptop out from beside the couch and powers it up.

  Then he clicks open a folder and calls her across.

  “What is this folder called?” he asks.

  Bitsy peers at the screen.

  “Ivy.”

  “Yes. And look.”

  He opens the folder and shows her all the saved drafts of the book.

  Opening them at random, showing her the work in progress.

  Bitsy stares at the monitor, then up at her brother.

  “My gosh, Gordon, you’re serious.”