brunettes are often saddled with, though Roberta’s hair had gone from brown to gray long ago. Now Roberta laid her hand on Terry’s ratty sleeve. Reluctant, Terry looked into Roberta’s sad brown eyes.
“I have some bad news,” Roberta said, but Terry didn’t need to be told. She’d seen it coming. Still, Roberta was from the old school, the one where people took responsibility for their actions and felt they owed explanations. She lived up to her name: Roberta Fine. “I don’t think I have to tell you that it’s not your performance, and that it’s certainly not personal,” Roberta began. “You know how much I’ve enjoyed working with you the last year and a half.” Terry, a writer, heard the nuance. She didn’t need Roberta to continue, though she did. “But even on a part-time basis, I simply can’t afford …” Roberta paused, shook her head, and briskly licked her lips for a moment, as if moistening them would make the words come out more easily. “The only other option …” Roberta began, then stopped.
Terry merely nodded her head. They both looked over at Margaret Bartholemew. Poor Margaret. Older even than Roberta, lumpy Margaret was hunched in the corner, awkwardly packing a box of returns. She lost her grip and half a dozen books fell to the floor, one of them tearing. No credit for the return. Roberta closed her eyes briefly and sighed. She lowered her already quiet voice.
“I can’t let Margaret go,” Roberta almost whispered. “She only has this and Social Security. Without a place to come to each day, people to talk to, well … I’ve been over it a hundred times, Terry, but I just can’t—”
Terry smiled and shook her head. “No problem,” she said. She tried to muster some humor. “I mean it. It’s not like you were paying me what I was worth.”
“A price beyond rubies,” Roberta nodded, her face still serious. She patted Terry’s pilled cuff. Then she sighed again. “The truth is, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep the store going. But that’s not your concern.” Roberta shook her head. “After twenty-seven years, you’d think that people would have some loyalty, that they would …” She paused. In all the time Terry had known Roberta, first as a customer at The Bookstall and later as an employee, she’d never heard Roberta bitter. Well, she didn’t hear any bitterness now, exactly. Just disappointment and, perhaps, a little hurt surprise. Terry knew all about both of these feelings.
Roberta just shrugged her birdlike shoulders as if to end the conversation and reached up to pat Terry’s arm. “You’re young and talented. You’ll move on to other things soon. But I’m so sorry, dear.” And it was that, the word dear, that made the tear slip out.
The tear had been Terry’s only surprise. She had seen the end coming—and not just the end of her little part-time job at The Bookstall. As she swung north up Columbus Avenue, Terry was numb. She carried her pilled sweater, a hairbrush, and a few other personal belongings in a biodegradable Bookstall bag—along with the copy of Alice Thomas Ellis’s new short-story collection that Roberta had inscribed and insisted Terry take as a gift. Terry felt no anger, no pain. After all, the job hadn’t given her enough to live on, not even in the limited way she lived, including the tiny income from the manuscript typing she did on the side.
Terry thought of Roberta and how the older woman had called her young and talented. So why did Terry feel so old and used up? After she had finished her Columbia dissertation, and after she’d spent the tail end of her loans and grants, she had managed to support herself for the last eight years on marginal jobs at copy centers, word-processing services, and then at The Bookstall, while she wrote, edited, rewrote, submitted, and resubmitted her manuscript, her magnum opus, the book that explained the world as she saw it. And she’d failed.
While friends around her took real jobs, got promoted, married, and moved on, she’d only written. And not just written—she’d also tried to sell her work. She wasn’t one of those slackers who was so terrified of rejection that they never attempted to be published at all. Terry had tried. She’d kept careful lists. She knew how to research. She’d figured out the best, most literary editors and submitted the book to them at the ever-dwindling number of publishing houses in New York, holding her breath while an editor considered her work, living through the rejection and watching her target shrink as one firm was subsumed by another. Well, the corporate-acquisition ballet hadn’t mattered in the end because they’d all rejected her. Some had shown initial interest but in the end considered her novel “too literary.” Others felt that it lacked focus and pacing. Or that it was too long. Or that the humor was loo coarse, too farcical. It was too political, too serious, too depressing. Some simply rejected it out of hand and advised her to get a day job. But most sent the standard rejection letter, the one that meant that nobody had even bothered to look at an eleven-hundred-page unsolicited manuscript that hadn’t been touted by an agent or bid on by Hollywood.
Terry actually smiled at that. Imagine Hollywood trying to film The Duplicity of Men! Hollywood was all about the duplicity of men, and they weren’t ready to give away any of their secrets.
She shook her head, switched her bag to her other hand, and waited at a red light to cross Broadway. At this point she was down to only one hope. The manuscript, edited yet again, had been out for close to five months at Verona Press, and a subeditor, Simon Small, had actually written her two letters, each with a few intelligent questions. This was the longest time anyone had considered Duplicity. But it had been weeks since her last inquiry, and he wasn’t responding to her calls or her letters. She sighed. It was a bad sign. She had almost nothing in the bank, and now she was unemployed again. Her hopes hung on a very small Simon because she would not, she could not, ask her mother for yet another loan.
Opal was still back in Bloomington, Indiana, still working at the college library and still foolishly believing that her daughter was a genius. Poor Opal, Terry thought. She’d already had so many disappointments. Terrance O’Neal had courted Opal but quickly revealed himself after marriage as nothing more than an Irish drunk. He then abandoned her and their infant daughter. Opal got the job as librarian but then was passed over time and again for promotion.
But Opal was a stoic from an Indiana farm family. Alone, she’d gotten herself through the classics, not to mention the library-science program at the state university. When her father wouldn’t “waste money on school for a girl,” she’d done it all herself. Opal had worked and raised Terry alone and helped her get scholarships to both Yale and Columbia. Opal had molded her daughter into the writer who would tell the world what men were and why they were the way they were. Opal had taught Terry that life consisted of pain, false hopes, hard work, and the exaltation of great talent. They had read Tolstoy together, and Trollope, Dickens, and Austen. Terry had been the only girl in the seventh grade to know that George Eliot was a woman. And that George Sand was, too. If it made her a bit of a freak, she didn’t mind. Terry loved books as passionately as her mother did and was grateful that Opal had shown her the door through which she could escape their limited world. Greedily, guiltily, Terry had stepped through it, leaving Opal behind.
But now, eight years later and with several initials at the end of her name, Terry not only found life as painful and tragic as Opal had predicted but had to bear the burden, the horrible realization, that perhaps the pain was not going to be ameliorated by the benison of talent. Books, her mainstay and her escape, had turned on her. Every published book taunted her. Words, which had been her comfort, her tool with which to weave a story, were now a chain that was dragging her down.
Terry had never meant to write a commercial book, a million-copy bestseller. Certainly not. If there was a God and that God looked into the deepest, darkest place in her heart, there wouldn’t be the smallest bit of envy for John Grisham or Danielle Steel. Terry didn’t want a six-figure publishing contract or her name on the bestseller list at the 20 percent-off rack at Barnes & Noble. She wasn’t that modest. She wanted immortality. She’d suffered loneliness and poverty to string her words together,
