Original Love

by J.J. Murray

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Multicultural & Interracial Romance

Synopsis

Peter Underhill was smitten by Ebony Mills the moment she joined his street hockey team--a coal-eyed, tomboy goddess, as dark and dazzling as he was pale and awkward. That she returned his affection was a boy's dream come true. But despite a bond that grew into their teens, Peter's intolerant father and Ebony's meddling family finally forced them apart. That was twenty years ago--and Peter has been trying to find his way back to his first and true love ever since. . . When she was a kid, Ebony feared no one, not even Peter's violent, bigoted father. Back then, Ebony said she'd love Peter forever, and she meant it. It didn't matter that they couldn't share milestones like the high school prom together--what they had was the real thing, and nobody could take it away. . .or could they? Even now, Ebony doesn't quite understand how she and Peter disappeared from each other's lives. Has the hatred that surrounded them finally won? Ebony doesn't want to believe that, but she knows one thing: if she ever has the chance to reunite with Peter, she'll never let him go. Because you don't throw away something that only comes along once in a lifetime. You don't mess with original love. . .

Release date: September 1, 2008

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 414

Sample

I’m writing the synopsis to this novel while flying from Pittsburgh to JFK. Unlike many of the other passengers on the plane, I don’t need to look out the window after takeoff to catch a glimpse of where that plane of heroes went to its holy grave in a southwestern Pennsylvania field, I don’t need to look down through the smoky clouds at Ground Zero in Manhattan, I don’t need to see the ruins, I don’t want to relive that day, and I don’t stare at other passengers as potential terrorists carrying knives and box cutters.

I have so many other days to relive, so many other fires to put out, so many other ruins to explore, and I had already lost all the illusions that used to color my world at the tender age of thirteen back in 1976, the 200th anniversary of the dyslexic Untied States of America. The rest of this country is just catching up.

And if birds were frisked and inspected and made to wait in line for hours, they would never fly.

I stare at the folded and creased poem in my hands, a poem Ebony wrote to me twenty years ago, and I wonder if it’s possible to repeat the past, to renew an original love:

My soul loves you endlessly…my whole life

even before I knew you

you were what I wrote and hoped

things my day and night dreams were made of

original love.

You brought gentle peace…even in anonymity

the thought of you

the very idea of you

and me ever coming to be

was hope and power and love.

I wrote your name up there…in clouds

said it to myself out loud

made you more real to me

again and again and again

I craved you way back then.

You came to me…with splendor and glory

just like in my dreams

reigning strong and supreme

constantly giving what I’d need

making the you in me a necessity.

Like pen and paper…destined to meet

a joyous time to bear

to write you, ignite you

simply to delight myself in you

makes pure the air I breathe.

My soul loves you endlessly…my whole life

more hope than my head knew

my heart could ever have

dripped into my life on slanted autograph

original love.

No matter how often I read it, I still see Ebony Mills, the girl I left behind, the girl of my dreams who I fed only nightmares. Maybe we’ll be destined to meet…again.

 

After a harrowing trip from JFK around roadblocks, under flag-draped windows, and past closed-off streets in my rented Nova, I show the synopsis to my old editor, Henry L. Milton, at Olympus Publishing in midtown Manhattan. Light streams into Henry’s forty-third floor office, sooty clouds obscuring the street below. Aside from some classical harp music, nothing seems to move in Henry’s office, not even the air, as he reads.

Henry shakes his head, his gray ponytail swishing behind him, flashes of light reflecting off a tiny lightning bolt earring. Henry still thinks he’s a child of the sixties, even though he wears a blue Armani suit.

“Pete, this sounds far too depressing for a romantic comedy,” he says from his lavender leather swivel chair, stacks of red-lined manuscripts littering his desk, a smiley face screen saver dancing on his computer screen.

“I know it sounds depressing at first, but—”

“Unless this is an attempt at literary nonfiction.”

“It can be, but—”

“Literary nonfiction is played out, Pete. The market was simply glutted after Angela’s Ashes. Every dysfunctional European immigrant was writing his or her horrid memoirs. You aren’t Irish, are you?”

“English and Dutch, mostly.” That makes me Dunglish or Englutch, an American mutt.

“Did your Da leave you?”

No, and that in itself is a tragedy. “No.”

“Then you’re not dysfunctional enough.”

“My mother did.” And that was a miracle.

“Yeah? When?”

“Back in seventy-five.”

“Hmm. Liberated herself before the Bicentennial.” He shakes his head and sighs, cutting the air with my synopsis. “I get the ‘seasons of my life’ thing, Pete, and I’m sure there will be a flood of seventies books coming out, but this just isn’t something Desiree Holland would write and you know it.”

The fact is, Desiree Holland—my pen name—hasn’t published a book in more than five years. The hands behind her career have been playing solitaire, hearts, spades, and gin rummy on his computer while living on whiskey sours instead of writing anything of substance.

“Desiree Holland won’t be writing it, Henry.”

“She won’t?”

“I don’t want to be Desiree Holland anymore. In fact, I never wanted to be Desiree Holland in the first place.”

“You know why we had to do it that way.”

I know, but it still pisses me off. Ten years ago, the marketing department thought my novels, each with an African-American female narrator, would be taken more seriously if they were “written” by a woman with an ethnic-sounding name.

“You’re still one of America’s best-kept secrets.”

I’m not a secret—I’m nonexistent and unrecognizable. I’m tired of being a puppet and a plaything of the publishing gods at Olympus. “I want to write as Peter Rudolph Underhill from now on.”

“Too many letters, won’t fit on the cover,” he says with a laugh. “P. R. Underhill maybe. Peter R. Underhill? No, makes you sound too much like the author of a textbook. P. Rudolph Underhill? Too literary. What does Eliot say about all this?”

Eliot Eckleburg was my agent back in the halcyon days. “Nothing. We parted ways.” About five years ago. Henry is completely out of touch.

Henry frowns. “Eliot didn’t tell me about this. He’s looking great, you know. Got that laser eye surgery done—no more Coke-bottle glasses. We just had lunch last week.”

That’s one of the problems with using a pseudonym or pen name. No one knows if you’re living or dead, everyone knows little or nothing about you, the marketing department creates this monstrous lie, and you’re left outside the spotlight in the silence while your agent and editor plan your pseudonym’s career. My original contract with Olympus stated that I was Desiree Holland, writer of multicultural women’s fiction. My real name appeared nowhere on the contract until my signature at the end. No picture on the book flap, no bio, no interviews, no signings, no appearances. Yet “Desiree” has a Web site, complete with a female model posing as Desiree, and Desiree even “answers” fan mail. I am a secret with a Web site. I am the white guy writing African-American fiction using a false name the marketing department thought up over a few margaritas.

“You can’t just drop Desiree like a bad habit, Pete. Desiree has a following.”

“Five years ago maybe.”

“No, no. Her books are still selling steadily on our backlist.”

Her books. Imagine you’re a writer who can tell no one that you’re published. “What do you do for a living?” I teach high school English, and I write. “Have you ever been published?” Yes. “What have you written?” I use a pen name, so I can’t tell you. “Oh.” Then I get raised eyebrows, and the subject changes. People don’t believe you’re a published author when you tell them you have a pen name.

“We get letters all the time from people who are wondering when her next book is coming out.” He stares again at the synopsis, his red pencil dancing above the paper. “You have to write this new one from Ebony’s point of view. You’re so good at that.”

Both my narrators so far have been Ebony, and I could probably use her voice for many more years. It’s not that I hear voices when I write; they just won’t leave once I’ve let them into the conversation I’m having with the reader.

I sigh. “But, Henry, I’d really rather use my own voice this time.”

Henry blinks. “You would?”

That’s what I said, Henry. Get the ponytail out of your ears. He probably has ear wax stuck inside him older than me. “Yes.”

“You want to write a piece of African-American fiction…from a white man’s point of view.”

“In essence, yes.”

“That would be a mistake.”

“How so?”

“We’re the enemy, Pete.”

“Didn’t Updike write—”

“Yeah, 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 those damn papers. “The ink’s probably still drying in Pittsburgh.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I’m not. “Don’t be.”

“This is all so strange. You’re now a divorced writer of romance. We can’t let P. Rudolph Underhill go on the cover now. That would be hypocritical, wouldn’t it?”

Oh, no, we wouldn’t want hypocrisy in the publishing industry. So Desiree Holland, writer of sassy interracial African-American romantic comedies, is now a middle-aged, graying, divorced white man with no way of letting the world know he is a writer and no place to call home.

“Look,” I say as I feel the lint in my pockets, “I know this will be a lot to ask, Henry, but after the lawyers and all…”

Henry blinks at me. “A little tight on money?”

A boa constrictor couldn’t squeeze a nickel out of me. “Yeah, I’m strapped. I had to sell my Mustang to pay my lawyer and buy the plane ticket here.”

Henry still blinks. “Ouch.”

“So, would it be possible, you know, if—”

Henry stops blinking. “Say no more, Pete. I’ll see what I can do about a pre-advance advance.”

I’ve never heard of such a thing. “A what?”

“I’ll get you something to tide you over for a while.”

Which means that I’ll get some chump change until I produce.

He stands. This means that the meeting is almost over. “You have any working titles for Desiree’s next book?”

Desiree’s next book. I have plenty of title ideas for my next book, but I don’t share them with Henry. He’s promised to see about some money—which I might be able to keep one hundred percent of this time—and I don’t want to ruin that chance. I will simply write two books, one for Henry and one for me, and I’ll give them both to Henry. Or…I’ll give Henry his Desiree Holland book and go out on my own into the publishing world with my own name.

And that scares the living lint out of me.

“You have thought up some titles, haven’t you?”

“I don’t usually start with a title, Henry.” Besides, the marketing department or an editor usually titles everything anyway. “Uh, how about…A Whiter Shade of Pale?”

Henry smiles. “Funny, and very sixties. With a song tie-in to boot. Any others?”

“What about…Devil’s Dance?”

He nods. “Plays off The Devil to Pay. But your first novel didn’t have the word ‘devil’ in the title. Hard to market that unless we change Ashy to Ashy Devil. That can be arranged, you know. Might give that novel another boost, too, maybe get it a movie of the week or something. I hear BET’s doing its own movies these days. Give me a third title possibility.”

Henry’s rule of three is still in effect. Almost all the romance novels he edits have three parts whether the author intends to have them or not: beginning (back story), middle (rising action with lots of sex), and end (climax with lots of nasty sex). Once I begin writing my novel, I’ll have to send him chapters in batches of three, the first three loaded with back story, triple-spaced.

“Um, how about…Holding My Breath?”

He closes his eyes. “Kind of has a Waiting to Exhale feel about it.” His eyes pop open. “And we both know what happened to that novel. Great soundtrack and a wonderful movie.”

Having a book turned into a movie is Olympus Publishing’s dream. That way the movie will sell the book, and the marketing department can rest its weary minds and concentrate more on the margaritas or whatever it actually concentrates on.

“I’ll run these titles by marketing, see what they think.” He opens the door. “Where are you staying?”

“On the Argo.”

“The Argo?”

“It’s my sailboat.”

It is the only thing that my father, “the Captain,” left me that Edie let me keep. Dad had left me the house in Huntington in his will, but I had sold it to help pay for “Edie’s Dollhouse,” a 5,000-square-foot contemporary glass and metal monstrosity nestled in the woods back in Sewickley where it stuck out like a sore landfill. So now the money from my father’s death gives Edie a house I have no right to live in. I almost wish I had burned the Captain’s body on a funeral pyre on his boat—the old Viking way—to keep him from rolling over in his cremation box.

“It’s moored in Huntington Harbor.”

“I didn’t know you had a sailboat.”

The Argo is one of the few things I own outright besides my laptop and a carry-on full of clothes. “It was my father’s.”

“Was?”

“Yeah. He died a while ago.” In 1990. Where has the time gone?

Henry tugs on his ponytail. “And he named his boat after the ship from Jason and the Argonauts?”

I nod, though I know the Captain didn’t name the Argo. That was simply the name of the boat when he bought the thirty-two-foot Thistle back in the early 1960s. He didn’t change the name because “it’s bad luck to change the name of a boat that’s still afloat.” That made the Captain “Jason,” I was his only Argonaut, and we had a few adventures together. We never found the Golden Fleece, though we did fight a few squalls and bluefish together on the Long Island Sound.

“And you’re going to write a hot, steamy, romantic comedy on a sailboat in Huntington Harbor…in October.”

I shrug. “Why not? I’ll have few distractions.” Even if I will be writing in a ghost ship, at least it will be a rent-free ghost ship. I think. The Captain was always good about paying his yacht club dues.

Henry fishes in his pocket and pulls out a key ring. “You can stay inside where it’s warm at my summer place on Fire Island.” He slips off two keys.

“It won’t be that cold on the boat.” Except for the memories. Those will be cold.

“I won’t have it, Pete. You know where Cherry Grove is?”

I blink. Of all the places…“Yeah, I do, but I’d rather—”

“I’ve had a place there on Green Walk for years. It’s a one-bedroom, and you’ll just love it. We’ve even nicknamed the apartment complex ‘Elysium,’ you know, the resting place for the gods.” He hands me the keys. “It’s fully stocked with food, spotless, and it’s very secluded. And you’ll just love your neighbors, especially Coleman Muse. He’s quite a gifted poet. You have enough money for the ferry?”

This is going way too fast. “Uh, yeah.” I stuff the keys into my pocket. “Um, does all this mean that I have a chance for a contract?”

“Uh, no, not yet. You’re on spec until I see the first three chapters.”

On spec. Wonderful. Two fairly successful novels, and I’m writing on speculation. I’m almost back to the dark days when I was sending out unsolicited manuscripts to agents and praying for a miracle.

“When will you need the chapters, Henry?”

“Oh, as soon as you can get them to me.”

Great. “Okay. Uh, thanks for everything.”

“Don’t mention it.”

As the elevator plunges to the parking garage, I close my eyes. Here I am, a published author reduced to writing on spec, about to write an African-American romantic comedy in Cherry Grove, the oldest gay community in the United States.

Good writing, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.

I just don’t know if I can hold my breath that long anymore.

I drift along with the tide of cars escaping New York City, Walt Whitman’s “city of spires and masts,” letting the convoy of tattered flags and red, white, and blue bumper stickers carry me through the wasteland of Long Island, the supposed recreation area for the people of New York City, home to several million commuters and the infamous Long Island Rail Road. I float east with flocks of other idle dreamers and screamers clinging to steering wheels on the Northern State Parkway around lunchtime. From Massepequa to Montauk, where the Amistad landed only to be escorted to Connecticut, Long Island is the melting pot cooked down to the dregs.

Suffolk County: nothing but potato farms, ducks, and Grumman.

I hesitate when I see a sign to Huntington. I don’t want to go there yet. One ghost story at a time.

I waver again when I see an advertisement for Levittown, one of the places the Captain used to live before Levittown became marginally integrated. I don’t ever want to go there. I like homogenized milk; I don’t like homogenized neighborhoods. Maybe the melting pot went to Levittown to die. And all during junior high, Levittown was the only Long Island town listed on the big Cram map on the wall in geography class, the rest of Long Island obliterated by the letters of New Haven, Bridgeport, and Stamford, Connecticut.

Heading south to Plainedge, then east, I read signs announcing so many towns, so many names like Wyandanch, West Babylon, and Bohemia. Native American names coexist with biblical names east of Hedonism on this thin sliver of the American dream jutting out into the Atlantic. What the Dutch took from the natives then shared with the English is now one large faceless neighborhood divided by malls, restaurants, convenience stores, and the empty shadows of industrial parks.

Huntington’s main mall is the Walt Whitman Mall. What would Walt say as he walked around inside his own mall? Would he say, “I am large, I contain multitudes”? Could he bloom at Bloomingdale’s or contemplate leaves of grass at Garden Botanika? Would he echo the sufferings of men like me who don’t like to shop and say, “I am the man, I suffered, I was there” or “I stop somewhere waiting for you”? Would Walt “invite his soul” to observe the indoor sidewalk sales? Would Walt feel connected to all the atoms in the houses in planned neighborhoods on Long Island that look the same, two cars in every garage, a single tree in every yard? A couplet takes shape as I drive:

Welcome to a dark, suburban Hades,

where houses run into the 180’s…

I slip through the redundant Islips (West Islip, Islip proper, and East Islip), past Great River to Sayville, heading to River Road and the Charon Ferry Service for the trip across Great South Bay to Cherry Grove. That’s one of the many nice things about Fire Island: no cars allowed, only your own two feet or a bicycle to get you around. I park the Nova, grab my carry-on and laptop, and stroll to the docks, the scent of diesel fuel and salt air tingling my nose. Great South Bay, while not exactly a quagmire of whirlpools, has been known to belch sand onto the rest of Long Island.

Because the next ferry to Fire Island won’t leave until 2 P.M., I have half an hour to waste counting rows of red Radio Flyer wagons and analyzing the other passengers in a poem on the back of the car rental receipt:

A young man, hacking into a handkerchief,

leans against an older man who winces at every cough.

Another, dressed in black, sits by himself on the dock,

his feet splayed over the rainbow-colored water

while a man in red holds on to a piling for dear life.

Two crew-cut blond women work an old snack machine,

yanking and cursing at each knob,

while an older woman wrapped in a blue coat nods off on a bench,

her breathing as exhausted as her makeup.

An old song creeps into my head,

something about not paying the ferryman,

and I find myself humming “Come Sail Away,”

an even older song by Styx.

The other people waiting seem like fallen leaves in the chilly air,

like birds that flock to land, stretching arms out toward the bay.

We are all helpless souls of the unburied,

fluttering around these docks,

so many bones in New York not yet laid to rest.

God, my poetry is as depressed as I am.

After buying a honey bun that I know has been aging gracelessly in the machine since August, I read the ferry regulations, the print looking fresh on a wall covered with old nautical charts and faded boating notices:

In order to comply with United States Coast Guard regulations, the following baggage and freight procedures must be followed:

Two (2) pieces of hand luggage is allowed, no charge. A Tariff will be imposed on all additional items. Shopping Carts & Luggage carriers—Min. charge $3.00. Luggage only is allowed in passenger areas. Loaded wagons (e.g., Radio Flyers) will not be accepted. Absolutely no bungee cords can be used. Freight must be handled on and off the ferry by crew.

Due to quantity, size and weight of freight, limited space on board, weather conditions, loading and unloading time, and the safety and convenience of the passengers, the crew at times will limit the amount of freight carried on a trip.

I don’t have much baggage (visible anyway), and I look at the few others waiting around me. A couple of briefcases and a few handbags. Our own thoughts will echo on this ferry. The last item—Smoking is not allowed on the docks or the ferry—makes me laugh, because as the ferry approaches, I see the captain in the fly bridge of the approaching ferry puffing a big cigar.

After the crew tethers the burnt-orange ferry to the dock, the captain walks down the gangplank followed by a small group of people. Those waiting around me fade away like autumn shade, and I’m the only one left to take the next ferry.

“I got a lot of freight to load,” the captain says to me, “so you might wanna reconsider what you’re bringing cuz we may have to shoehorn you in or find you a smaller boat to get across the marsh.”

I look again at the laptop and carry-on. “I only have these.”

He taps the laptop bag. “No bombs, knives, or box cutters in there, right?”

“None.”

The captain, a strong, detestably smelling old man with bloodred eyes and sweat-stained clothing, bellows orders to his crew as they herd crates and boxes into the boat. His hairy ears, bushy eyebrows, and thick gray goatee make him look every bit like a demon. I almost wish I had a penny to give him for the half thoughts in his jowly head. Better to keep my penny and my own thoughts under my tongue.

Half an hour of stuffing and cramming later, a crew member searches my bag while I stand still. “Nine bucks,” he says.

Waterway robbery, I think, but I pay him and drag my feet up the gangplank, mainly because I don’t really want to go to Cherry Grove, where I’m sure to stick out like a sore heterosexual.

The captain tells me how lucky I am. “Normally I wouldn’t let you on, as full as we are,” he tells me. “Got just enough room for you. Otherwise you’d have to wait for my next run.”

I walk into the passenger area and take my seat in front of plexiglas windows filmed with salt. I guess if I had tipped the crew member an extra five I might have actually gotten a clear view of the bay. Upon inspection, the windows seem to have a mazelike pattern on them, like a labyrinth leading to a blackened glob of bird droppings.

Story of my life.

The trip is uneventful, the stagnant, shadowy water of Great South Bay no more than ten to twelve feet deep, the boat groaning with its heavy load. It’s not exactly an ancient Greek adventure, and I hardly feel like an ancient hero anyway, a stale honey bun my only sustenance, a void in my head where a romantic comedy is supposed to be.

And there’s really nothing funny about Great South Bay, the scene of one of the worst hurricanes of the twentieth century. It was so bad back in 1938 that they didn’t even have time to name the hurricane. The Captain was only thirteen and living in Montauk at the time.

“There wasn’t any warning,” he told me once while we were caulking the longest seam in the wooden hull of the Argo. He called the entire awful job “paying the devil,” because we had to squat in the bilges for hours. Hence the title of my second book.

“Nothing on the radio, Captain?” I was the only kid I’ve ever known who was not allowed to call his own father “Dad.” But it wasn’t so bad, and it seemed fitting on the Argo, where the Captain’s word was law.

“Nope. I remember it was a Wednesday. Your grandpa was out with the other bay men dredging, while I was paying the devil on Old Man Mudge’s dredge. I’d come up for air every now and then because we used hot tar on the devil back then, and I saw the gulls acting funny on the shore.”

“Funny?”

“Like they were in a hot pan about to be cooked, jumping around like popcorn frying.”

To this day, I check out birds when a storm is forecast. If they start “popping” off the ground, I find shelter in a hurry.

“We had just had two weeks of rain, so the ground was soft. Gray skies as usual, seas not as heavy as the day before, wind from the north at first, then about noon it shifted to the east, and it started to rain to beat the band.”

“Like a nor’easter.”

“Yep. Only this nor’easter was tearing off roofs and popping power and phone lines left and right. I left t. . .