Original Love. J.J. Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      “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.

      “I’m so sorry. Last I heard, you were still separated. How, uh, recent is your divorce?”

      I had waited and wasted five years for Edie to sign СКАЧАТЬ