The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (10 page)

“
Your girlfriend Cat had some seriously nice stems,” O’Malley said seriously and nicely.

“
Thank you,” Gunn said thankfully.

“
Your roses were once lovely, son, but she’ll never see them,” O’Malley said blindly.

“
You don’t mean …”

Officer O’Malley nodded.

Gunn crumpled to the porch like a three-piece suit made of crêpe paper and recycled toilet tissue. “She’s blind? I just bought her that contact lens! Was it recalled without my knowledge? I thought most recalls were for toys and cribs covered with lead-based paint from mainland China, where pollution is rampant, freedom is just another word, and they have far too many people!”

“
Yes, they are, son.”

“
Dad?”

“
No.” Officer O’Malley helped Gunn to his feet. “I can see you have some deep seated father issues. I’ll just call you ‘me lad’ from now on.”

“
OK.”

“
Me lad, she’s not blind,” O’Malley said not as blindly.

“
St. Patrick be praised!” Gunn shouted trickily.

“
St. Patrick came to Ireland, me lad,” O’Malley said outlandishly. “Thus, he wasn’t Irish.”

“
Oh. Um, what was he?” Gunn asked all in one-syllable words.

“
Probably Swedish or Scandinavian,” O’Malley said unintelligibly. “He talked with an indecipherable accent and claimed he wrote Nobel Prize-deserving books.”

“
Oh,” Gunn said shortly.

“
So, she’s not blind, me lad,” O’Malley said visually. “It’s worse.”

Gunn crumpled to the porch like the Constitution during the first, second, and third Bush presidencies. “I am feeling severe angst.”

“
It will pass,” O’Malley said in passing. “She’s gone, me lad.”

“
Gone?”

“
She has left the building,” O’Malley said rightly.

“
She walked out on me?” Gunn cried out. “I mean, I have her new Geo Storm, so she would have had to walk on her seriously nice stems, and with all her second- and third-degree burns, I doubt seriously that she could walk very far.”

“
No, me lad,” O’Malley said in a negative tone. “She’s resting in the arms of Jesus.”

“
She ran away with my accountant?” Gunn gasped unaccountably.

Officer O’Malley shook his head. “I said Gee-zuss, not hey-Zeus.”

Gunn pursed his lips. “That’s the way my accountant says his name.”

“
Your accountant has a messiah complex, does he?” O’Malley asked with complexity in a messianic way.

“
Don’t they all?” Gunn mused. “His full name is Jesus God, if that’s any indication. His real name was Romulus Remus, but he paid to have it changed.”

“
Fascinating,” Officer O’Malley said irreverently. “But Cat didn’t run off with Jesus. She’s wandering Jordan’s bank and the Stygian shore, she’s pushing up peonies, she’s off to the happy hunting grounds, and she has sung her own requiem. She is defunct, non-operational, permanently stagnant, and torpid.”

“
You don’t mean …”

“
She is a stiff, she’s ripe for the cutting, ready the rib spreader, she’s primed to be embalmed, better call the funeral home, write that obituary, she’s prepared to biodegrade.”

“
You can’t mean …”

“
She’s dead as a doornail, she has kicked her last bucket, and she’s dead and gooey as the potatoes in Ireland during the blight that forced my ancestors to flee to Boston to root for the Celtics against our will.”

Gunn crumpled to his knees like Cost-Cutter aluminum foil, you know, the kind that never tears in a straight line, and no matter how careful you are, when you pull out exactly the amount you need, it still tears like snaggle-teeth and no longer fits the container you’re trying to wrap, and then you have to tear off another piece to cover the open spots, which is a conspiracy, I tell you, a scam that cuts less cost and even more aluminum foil!

“
I feel your angst,” Officer O’Malley said metallically and rapidly.

“
Why?!?!?!” Gunn exclaimed questioningly and markedly. “Why did she have to die?!?!?!”

“
Well, me lad, she bled out, stopped breathing, and became brain dead,” O’Malley said breathily in a brainy manner.

Gunn looked up. “She was kind of like that when she was alive!”

“
Not like this,” Officer O’Malley said naughtily. “I counted thirty-four bullet holes along with a fierce looking infected hangnail on her left ring finger.”

Gunn curled into the fetal position and sucked his thumb since he didn’t have a cigar handy to chew on. “What will I do with all the roses?”

“
They’ll look lovely on her casket, me lad,” Officer O’Malley said lovingly.

And they did, all eighty-seven dozen that had survived the windy trip to Gunn’s mansion. One of the roses, the very last one, the rose in his very hand, that rose …

Johnny smiled.
It’s about time I had a symbol to overdevelop and beat to death. That’s also part of the romance novelist’s “code.” Let’s see how nauseating I can make this.

One of the roses, the very last one, the rose in his very hand,
that
rose cut his palm as he gripped it while hugging the casket. The thorn cut deep into his very soul, into his very marrow, into even his DNA, RNA, a ribosome or two, and his endoplasmic reticulum, creating a wound from which he knew he would never recover, a wound he would take to his grave, a wound that his law firm would turn into a multimillion-dollar lawsuit just for the fun of it to tie up the American court system well into the second half of the twenty-second century.

“
Oh, my love, my love, my love … is like a red, red rose,” Gunn whispered readily.

Gunn suddenly had an epiphany, and it hit him like a bolt of lightning jolting a Sunday golfer right in the heel of his seven-iron.
Am I Scottish then? Who quotes Robert Burns at funerals but the Scottish, Presbyterians, and professors of British Neoclassic and Romantic poetry? I like golf. I drink tea. I look good in plaid. I walk around in a fog. I like skirts. Maybe I’m Scotch and Irish!

Only Gunn and Father Time, an ancient Italian priest, attended Cat’s funeral. Father Time said quite a few random things about Cat, like how he knew she was this and that and the other, almost as if he knew her very, very well, and this made Gunn feel even more angst.

I hardly knew ye at all!
Gunn whimpered dialectically in his mind.
If we only had more time! That’s all I wanted! More time! And more thyme! You made my life spicy! I wish this were leap year! I wish the earth would stop rotating on its axis so we’d all fly off the planet at 200 miles per hour!

Father Time shook Gunn’s trembling hands with eerily cold and clammy hands. “She was a fine woman, son.”

“
Dad?”

“
No. I am a man of the cloth.”

“
Oh. Um, cotton?”

“
Polyester blend,” Father Time said. “Cotton makes me itch.”

And then, it began to rain as it usually does at all movie funerals to provide the rainmakers jobs, I suppose, and lend gravity and mud and little dots of water to the camera lenses, all of which, I suppose, is to make the cinematic experience more realistic. The rain was heavy. It soaked him. Gunn was wet. He was sodden. He dripped. He felt the cold seeping into his bones. His bones ached. The rain had a sixty percent chance of turning into snow, and it did, instantaneously coating the mound of dirt under which lay his love, his soul mate, his sweet patootie, Cat Mann.

Gunn would never forget her. He would mourn her for the rest of his life. He would adopt kittens and tell them the epic story of his and Cat’s two-week-long torrid love affair over some catnip and Friskies Buffet. He would go on a pilgrimage to Katmandu. He would meet Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. He would never marry. He would become a Scotch-Irish priest who wore polyester blends and called men “son” to mess with their heads and put them into years of psychotropic drug therapy.

Johnny was beginning to despise Gunn and his sudden lack of testosterone.
How can I return Gunn, who is whining and moaning so pathetically, to his manly man status?

Johnny smiled because he was about to provide Gunn with another woman.

The next day, however, Gunn would meet Thais Knotts, and unbeknownst to her and to him, Thais Knotts would be his true truelove and mother of his unborn child, Sparky.

Johnny wondered if it were too soon for Gunn to love again. He had only known Cat for two weeks, but he had fallen so hard for her.
Besides,
Johnny thought,
I have two hundred and fifty pages to fill. I need to get to it. But shouldn’t Gunn grieve? Shouldn’t the reader feel his heartbreak for several excruciatingly painful chapters? Shouldn’t the reader be filled with Gunn’s immeasurable angst and go through several boxes of Kleenex and a box of Dove chocolates? Shouldn’t I make readers weep themselves to sleep and soak their pillows enough that they get off their backsides and wash the soiled things for the first time in months?

“
Nah,” Johnny said, startling the mice in the kitchen. “That’s not what readers want to read.” He stood and stretched his back, hearing several pre-arthritic cracks in his knees. “No. Readers do not want reality. They can get their own grief simply by waking up and turning on CNN or any top-forty radio station listening to the crap people call music. Why torture them with reality? They can watch carefully edited reality shows just full of carefully edited pain and suffering, complete with close-ups. Why—”

He slumped into his seat.

Oh yeah. Duh! Someone just capped Cat. I killed a major love interest on page eleven. I’ve had a fiery car wreck, a crime scene, and a funeral. I’ve already written the synopses for several current Hollywood films. Any critic who says this book isn’t realistic is crazy!
“Here we go,” Johnny whispered.

“
Life,” Gunn thought aloud as he moved realistically away from Cat’s grave like molasses in February. “Life has a way of getting rosy.” He stood beside the new Geo Storm and took out a Cuban cigar, lighting it and—

Johnny then remembered that it was raining and snowing at the cemetery. He deleted his last sentence.

He stood beside by the new Geo Storm. He took out a Cuban cigar but didn’t light it out of respect for the dead around him who were probably dying for a smoke and the fact that just owning a Cuban cigar could get him into trouble with the Feds. He chomped on the cigar while he mused about life.

“
Life is, indeed, a rose,” Gunn said in a lifeless manner. “You have to feed it expensive plant food, these little pebbly things that look suspiciously like a little boy’s boogers, but if you feed the rose too much, it will wilt like Republican hopes for the presidency through 2016. Life is thorny, especially if you live in the country where a simple walk in the woods can tear the snot out of your clothes. Life sometimes smells good, and sometimes life smells like rotted rose petals dripping with snail slime and half-digested berry-filled pigeon poop.”

A single ray of golden light broke through a crevice in the clouds. The crevice looked exactly like the scabby scar on Cat’s forehead. It was a ray of silken blonde, which didn’t match Cat’s hair at all except for a few strands she had bleached once on a whim when she was at band camp as a teenager. All the kids were doing it, so Cat streaked her red hair with blonde. She looked like the top of a merry-go-round for several weeks. Whenever she spun around quickly in a circle, her head would look like the world’s largest orange.

“
And now,” Gunn said juicily, “I’ve been sun-kissed.”

He bathed in that golden ray, he worshiped it, he burned in it.

“
My poor, poor, poor Cat. I wish we hadn’t fought over the Pomeranian. I will buy one in your memory and name it ‘Ouch,’ you know, that romantic word you’d utter whenever I hugged you. If we hadn’t fought and I hadn’t stormed out, I would have been home with you at the time of your death, which the police have said was 1:34 AM because of Cat’s smashed Mickey Mouse watch. Little did the police know, but Cat’s watch needed a new battery and always said 1:34. I would have protected you with my secret arsenal of mostly illegal weapons the NRA has let me legally own so I can hunt freely in this land of the free and the home of the Atlanta Braves.”