Original Love

by J. J. Murray

“Bet you got an ‘outie’ with all sorts of green shit inside it.”

  “I got an inny, too,” Peter said, hurt.

  She squinted. “Prove it.”

  There on his driveway after a sweaty game of street hockey, Peter showed a girl his “inny.”

  She crouched lower to have a closer look. “Dag, boy, you got freckles like that all over?”

  Peter dropped his shirt. “Most of them aren’t freckles. They’re moles, like this one.” He touched the mole just above his upper lip.

  Then…she touched the mole under Peter’s nose. Her finger was cold from holding her can of Coke, and Peter nearly jumped out of his Chuck Taylors. “Does it hurt?”

  “N-n-no.”

  She pulled back her hand. “You cold?”

  “Your finger is.” And it’s electric, he thought. Her fingers are made of cold electricity.

  “Sorry.” She took a sip. “You got moles like that all over your body?”

  “No.”

  “Good, cuz they nasty.” She finished her Coke and handed it to Peter. “Thanks for the Coke.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She smiled. “See you around, Peter.”

  “Yeah. See you around…E.”

  Without thinking, Peter floated in through the front door of the house, a hockey stick in his hand. Then, because he was still thinking of Ebony’s licorice gumdrop belly button and her electric ice-cold finger, he tripped on the carpet runner at the base of the stairs, and the hockey stick clattered against the wall.

  “What the hell you think you’re doing out there, Pete?”

  Peter slid the stick into the hall closet, ripping off his jersey and throwing it up over the second floor stair railing. “Just slipped, Captain.”

  “Come here,” he said.

  Peter walked into the TV room, hoping his face didn’t look as wind-burned and raw as it felt. It seemed as if the Captain hadn’t moved from his La-Z-Boy since Peter delivered his mug of coffee a few hours ago.

  “I just slipped on the stairs, Captain.”

  “You been upstairs all this time?”

  Peter had already sinned by drugging the Captain’s coffee, so one more sin wouldn’t hurt. “Yes, sir.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Reading.” Okay, two more sins.

  “Oh.” He reached for and nudged his coffee cup, a little spilling over the sides.

  Peter held his breath. He’s hardly had any! Either I put way too much sleeping powder in his coffee, or he made another cup on his own and he’s really been awake all this time. Then he knows I must be lying!

  The Captain took a sip and nodded his head. “You make a fine cuppa Joe, Pete.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “It’s cold now.” Geez, I used too much! What did he have, one sip? “But it’s not bad. Maybe a little too much sugar.” He held out the mug. “You mind warming this up for me?”

  “No sir.”

  “Just set it on the little eye on the stove. It’ll heat up just fine.”

  Peter took his cup. White powdery particles stared up at him. I could have killed him! “Okay.”

  Peter was almost to the hallway when the Captain called out, “And we won’t be going to church this evening! Something on the TV I want to watch!”

  Peter nearly dropped the mug. They hadn’t missed a Sunday evening service since Peter was born, and today they had barely gotten up in time for the morning worship service.

  Hel’s departure was getting cooler all the time.

  Peter set the mug on the eye and turned the dial to medium, and while he waited, he focused on the coffee until it bubbled.

  He also focused on the girl with the licorice gumdrop inny and the perpetual tan: Ebony Mills. She bubbled, too.

  He had always been attracted to girls with tans. Whenever he and the Captain took the Captain’s Ford Country Squire station wagon down to the harbor and went out on the Argo, Peter would look for girls on other boats instead of paying attention to the Captain, which is probably why Peter never learned any of the ropes or how to properly sail a boat. He knew that he’d be a Seaman Recruit for life. Whenever they’d stop at any of the many marinas around Huntington, Peter would do his best to drag his feet whenever he saw some girls sunning themselves on other boats.

  Once, at a marina in Northport, Peter had watched two older girls in bikinis lying facedown near the bow of their boat. Neither had her bikini top fastened in the back, and when the Captain blew the Argo’s horn, the tanner of the two looked up at Peter, giving him his first glimpse of a girl’s breasts. Since all he knew about breasts came from the Song of Solomon in the Bible, Peter could only compare them to little fawns.

  I was so naive sexually. In sixth grade, Woodhull required all boys to sit with their dads or moms at a big sex education meeting complete with overheads, a movie, and a question-and-answer period, which was punctuated by a question asked by Timmy “The Squirrel” Bottomley, a bigger geek than me: “What happens if the male should urinate in the vagina of the female?” On the way home, the Captain had asked, “Anything you didn’t understand?” “No, sir,” I had replied. And that was the only time in my life that the Captain ever talked to me about sex.

  The girl’s breasts weren’t little deer at all, though they had two little button noses. Her breasts were two-toned—circles of white surrounded by bronze. And even after she flattened out and giggled something to the other girl, Peter was still staring. It wasn’t so much that he had seen a girl’s breasts; it was more that he had fallen in love with the contrast there, how the white part stood out against the brown, how the brown drew his eyes more than the white, how the brown made the white so much purer, more natural, more innocent and clean somehow.

  Which probably destined me to pick out the exotic, the sensuous, the tan for the rest of my life—except for Edie. What went wrong there? She didn’t have a cute inny, she didn’t have rough hands, she didn’t have long, shiny legs and flashing eyes. After Ebony, I had a cornucopia of the melting pot…but somehow I settled for Edie, who is whiter than this computer screen.

  Which made him wonder that morning, as he watched the Captain’s coffee boiling to a froth, if Ebony’s breasts looked the same…or were they tan all the way to those little deer noses?

  Jesus, twenty-five-year-old memories are making me horny. I have to cool off, and Henry needs another chapter.

  I know, I’ll introduce Edie the Ice Queen into Ebony’s classroom. That will cool me off. Edie could probably solve global warming just by being.

  Chapter 3

  Since I already know how to write, while Professor Holt rambles on and on about syllabus this and course requirements that and due dates the other, I take a closer look at Johnny. I don’t grit on him out in the open, though. I sneak peeks by slowly taking off my coat while looking at him, gradually rolling my pen toward him then catching it—and his eye sometimes—and painstakingly repositioning my chair until I am almost facing him. It’s an art that I learned from watching the seventh grade hoochies in my classroom. They aren’t nearly as subtle about it as I am, but they are effective. I know the little boys are popping boners left and right in my classes because of them, a few of them even having to sit at their desks after the bell rings until their jenks get back to normal.

  Johnny is sort of a C-minus in a lot of little ways, but the overall package is definitely a solid B. He does not have a handsome face—nose too big and bent, eyebrows looking like hairy spiders, ears sprouting gray hairs, skinny lips, cheeks and chin unshaven and scarred, hair too long and uneven in front. Taken apart, he’s a scary man. Put it all together under those coal-dark eyes, and he’s a relatively handsome scary man. His knuckles are bigger than they should be, big circular walnut-looking things, and his nails are way too short, like he chews them maybe. At least they’re clean. His arms have more hair than arms should have. I’ll bet I could comb and style the hair there. His arms are huge, muscular, his shoulders round, his neck pretty thick, his che
st…probably so hairy a bird could nest up in there. I won’t even imagine the hair on his back.

  Dag, he could be in the Mafia!

  But he doesn’t wear a bowling shirt and polyester pants like those Mafia guys do in the movies. He sports a light blue oxford shirt, clean white T-shirt underneath, a thin gold chain barely visible, faded blue jeans, and black Nike hiking boots. He dresses kind of Wal-Mart, like me.

  Then I see this pale blond girl standing in the doorway. She wears a tight light-pink T-shirt with the word “Angel” stenciled above her perky little breasts, the shirt leaving a gap where the whole world can see her pierced shiny white belly button. The girl has absolutely no hips, her legs are as skinny as broomsticks, and she’s standing with one pink shoe turned ninety degrees to the side, like she’s getting ready to do some ballet move.

  “Pale Edie’s in the house,” I say with a smile. Coleridge had her down pat: “Her skin was as white as leprosy.” Like paper. And she was always in some pose or other, as if she were the subject of some artist painting her in dreamy pastel oils. I swear that she used to dress to match the furniture in the house—pastels and white chiffon for the living room, earth tones for the family room. Sometimes when I looked at her lounging around the house, sighing mostly to herself, I envisioned her as a model in the pages of L.L. Bean and Lands’ End catalogues. And those sighs drove me up the freaking wall!

  I hear her sighing, only it’s more like a constant hiss, like air slowly escaping from a bicycle tire, like a foot sliding across a concrete floor, like fingernails scraping across a damn chalkboard, like the sound the Sidekick makes on cold days but I can’t find out where it’s coming from and the mechanic says I must be hearing things and it pisses me the hell off!

  It’s that kind of sigh.

  “May I help you?” Professor Holt asks.

  “I think I’m supposed to be in this class,” she says softly, almost in a whisper but more like a murmur. I know her game. She’s trying to get our attention so we can see her, her matching pink-and-white angel’s outfit, and the two hours of makeup slathered on to her face. All the girl is missing is a halo.

  Professor Holt falls for it, walking to the doorway. “I didn’t hear you.”

  And that’s the first thing I ever said to Edie Elizabeth Melton, only daughter and youngest child of Edith Elizabeth Melton and William Strong, sister to William Strong, Jr., and Horace Strong Melton. I was grading papers in my classroom at Sewickley Academy, and there she was at the door, murmuring something, posing, sighing. Out of loneliness and a need that I still don’t understand, I pursued her—and she was everything I didn’t want in a wife. She was a debutante and dancer, a bleached-blond sigher, a daughter of privilege with dollar signs for eyes, and an all-around angel from hell who owned a horse, a car, and a boat named Edie E. by the time she was sixteen. She owned that “waif” look long before Kate Moss was even born. Told she had a dancer’s body by some ballet director kissing William Melton’s abounding buttocks, she became anorexic long before the term was well-known, taking brutal ballet classes that reduced her toes to stumps of calloused flesh. Since William Melton was on the board of a Pittsburgh arts council, she was a shoo-in for a spot in the Pittsburgh Ballet. It didn’t happen, so she settled for me, a teacher at her old school.

  She smiles at the rest of us, as if we really give a shit. “I think I’m supposed to be in this class.” She hands him a piece of paper, jingling her fake-ass gold bracelets in the process. Oh puh-lease, honey. Get over yourself. You are just a late bitch who wants to make a grand entrance.

  “You are…

  Now what am I going to name her? Edith? Evie? Eden? Eve? If I make it too close to her real name, she’ll sue me for half of my money for the book. But at the rate I’m going, Edie wouldn’t want to admit that this character is her…would she? Who would admit, “I am that horrible person in that book”?

  Edie might, especially if it involves money she didn’t earn.

  I’ll just call her “Rose Goulet” for now. Where “Goulet” came from, I have no idea.

  “You are…Rose, uh—”

  “It’s pronounced ‘Goo-lay,’” she says.

  She isn’t a rose, and that last name isn’t fooling anybody. It’s probably pronounced Goo-LEE or GULL-et. This isn’t the south of France. This is southwestern Pennsylvania where folks drink Iron City beer and root for the “Stillers” and the Buccos after a long week at the “still” mill.

  “Have a seat, Rose.”

  I see her scan the room with her eyes, her light brown eyebrows probably painted on, her blondish eyelashes as thick as cat whiskers. She has tiny ears, tinier gold earrings, a button nose, and two eyes made out of green coal. I’ll bet that she bleaches her hair, because her roots are dark brown. Her eyes come to rest on the empty chair on the other side of Johnny. One of her eyebrows rises, her skinny pink lips wrinkle, and she moves in on my man…

  I look at the clock on my laptop: 3:30 P.M.! I’ve been writing for close to ten hours without food. Checking the word counts, I find I’ve composed over five thousand words. I haven’t written like this since—

  I’ve never written like this. Why is that?

  The white walls envelop but don’t distract me, the quiet focuses me, though the Poet’s loud wanderings on the roof sometimes have me writing in blank verse, the sheer purity of the view of Great South Bay inspires me, and maybe even the lack of food makes me hungrier to write. I’m losing weight and loosing words. I’m a monk in his cell transcribing founts of prose in fonts of Courier and Times New Roman. I’m a…

  I’m about all out of words for today.

  I log on to AOL and quickly click on a reply from Destiny:

  Peter:

  Sorry if I was rude by leaving so suddenly this morning. I am always late for work.

  How long are you going to be on Fire Island? Any plans to get up to Huntington?

  Destiny

  Which could mean that Destiny is in Huntington…or Ebony is in Huntington. I try Instant Message again and find that Destiny is still online.

  I have to catch my breath. I reread the script of the conversation. How the hell did “Are you in Huntington?” turn into “You are trying to ask me out, right?”

  This is getting weird. Destiny isn’t Ebony, yet she is the best lead I’ve had to finding Ebony after five years of searching. But has she told me everything she knows?

  Ouch. But she’s right.

  “It’s not a date!” I shout at the screen.

  “Geez,” I whisper. What kind of a woman is this?

  My pre-advance advance won’t cover a Huntington Bay Village ristorante. And at the rate coffee shops are extorting their patrons for a cup of double mocha capuccino, I may not have enough for a glass of ice water at Xando. My Visa is almost maxed out, but I have a Discover card I rarely use.

  “It’s not a date!” I yell again.

  I sit glued to the screen, my fingers sweating on the keyboard. I know Destiny knows more than she’s telling. Five minutes pass. Nothing. I check to see if she’s still online, but Destiny’s gone. I scroll through the conversation again and realize two things: I am being manipulated somehow, and Destiny is much better at this than I am. I may be in some serious trouble. And how am I going to escape Henry? And why did I set up a Saturday night meeting a long ferry ride and an hour’s drive away from here?

  But as the setting sun outside my window softly slips into the western horizon, I relax and feel the pull of the past calling me back to Huntington.

  Calling me home.

  6

  It’s early Thursday morning, “Thor’s Day,” and my head is pounding. I have to practically double my belt around my waist I’ve gotten so skinny. I need to eat, but I have too much to do.

  I edit A Whiter Shade of Pale and only change “grey” (the English spelling) to “gray” (the American spelling). I guess I’m more English than I thought. The rest I leave alone. I have to give Henry something to play with, something on
which he can bleed copious quantities of red ink. He seemed to enjoy working on Ashy more than The Devil to Pay for that reason. He gave me forty pages of suggestions for Ashy and only three for The Devil to Pay.

  I look over my outline for chapter four of—

  I don’t have a working title for my own book?

  I don’t have a working title for my own book.

  I always have at least a working title. This is strange. I open PRU7.doc. Why’d I name it that? Why didn’t I give it a working title at that point? I look at my first chapter. No title above, no pertinent information of any kind. I try to remedy it:

  Contemporary interracial/multicultural romance/memoir

  @ 100,000 words

  © 2001

  It will be somewhat contemporary, won’t it? So what if it takes place for the most part from 1976 to 1981. Is it more interracial than multicultural? I want to stir the melting pot, “God’s Crucible,” even if the poet Nikki Giovanni says that the melting pot never worked. Maybe it worked for me. As for the “romance/memoir” part, it’s getting there. So far, I’m a motherless white boy in love with licorice gumdrop belly buttons.

  Then I type

  Working title:

  and watch the flashing cursor, that vertical black bar that evaporates, returns, dissolves, reappears, departs, arrives. Maybe the cursor is being sucked into the whiteness of the screen, or maybe the vast expanse of white is emitting the voice of the black cursor, steady, plaintive, almost complaining. It tells me to type something—anything—so it can go to another line and repeat its demands. It’s just always there, beckoning. Sometimes I think it’s sneering, challenging, calling me out for a fight. Other times it’s like an invitation to dance, whispering, “Come here, come on, Peter, no one’s looking, I’ll help you, close your eyes…”