find her true friends, a small, serious readership. Now, after enough submissions to make her dizzy, Simon Small, a man she’d never even met, was the only one left who could grant her a chance at that.
She passed Ninetieth Street and the only neighborhood tavern that was still cheap enough for her to nurse a beer at. But Terry didn’t have the heart or the money for that. Soon it would be the unemployment line and a begging letter to Opal. No. She shook her head. None of that, none of that ever again. Opal had deceived her, and she in turn had deceived Opal. They had created a world of false hope. She had, like the girl in the fairy tale, tried to sit in a roomful of straw and spin it into gold. But she had failed.
Terry shrugged and turned left, walking along her block toward Amsterdam Avenue. This was one of the dicey streets where the West Side renaissance had not yet taken hold. A few brownstones, their façades raped in the fifties by white brick fronts, stood among nondescript apartment buildings too shabby to go co-op. Her own, the shabbiest of all, had been converted into tiny studios. She walked down the two steps that led to the entrance and through the narrow hall to her apartment in the back. Chinese take-out menus littered the floor, but today she had no energy to pick them up. Nor would Mr. Aiello, the super, who lived in the front. Terry stopped at the tarnished brass mailbox and took out her key. Maybe there would be a letter from Opal, filled with the small goings-on of the library and of her garden and her reading. Yeah, and maybe there’d be an overdue notice from ConEd, and another from the phone company. But once Terry inserted her key, her heart dropped. It was much worse than that. She saw the package that all writers hate and fear. It was a big envelope, and for all intents and purposes, it could just as well have been a bomb. Because it stopped Terry O’Neal’s life as completely as a terrorist.
She wrestled the package out of the narrow box, forgetting to relock the brass door. There it was, return address Verona Publications, 60 Hudson Street, S. Small. Terry had been submitting her work long enough by now to know what a returned manuscript looked like. Especially this one, her only one, which rah to 1,114 typed pages. And had been returned twenty-six times. No, she corrected herself. This would make it twenty-seven.
Terry hefted the package under her arm, walked down the dark hall, and fumbled with the keys to the apartment. She had rented the place eight years ago after finishing her dissertation and leaving Columbia. It was just a single room, but there were ornate moldings on the wall from when the broken-up space had been something more. There was a crystal chandelier, which miraculously no previous tenant had ruined or stolen, and a marble fireplace, which, though smoky, actually worked. The apartment was dark at noon, it had virtually no closet space, and the hot water was never more than tepid, but it had charmed her. Back then, it had echoed la vie bohème. In a hopeful, flamboyant mood she had painted it peacock blue with white trim.
Now the blue was faded and the white had grayed. The room looked not like a writer’s lair, an artist’s garret, but like a cheap, dark, and nasty place to have to begin or end a life in. Terry sat down on the Salvation Army sofa and tore open the envelope. The letter clipped in front of the manuscript was no surprise. There were never any surprises.
Dear Ms. O’Neal,
It is with real regret that I am forced to return your manuscript The Duplicity of Men. Despite some beautifully written passages and an interesting theme, the editorial board, upon consideration, has decided it is inappropriate for our list at this time.
I am therefore returning it to you with sincere regret. I would be most willing to look at any other novels you may be working on in the future.
Simon Small
Any other novels? In the future? For a moment, Terry almost laughed. She sat there, drained and empty. She was a big girl, and her heavy thighs sank into the sofa, her arms hanging between them. She didn’t move for a long time. Until she knew.
Enough is enough, she thought. Soundlessly, she pushed herself up and went to the battered file drawer where she kept the other letters, the rejections she had collected from Putnam and Simon & Schuster, from Little, Brown and Houghton Mifflin, from Viking, Davis & Dash, Random House, and Knopf. From all of them. There were dozens. Could she say that fairly? She was always exact with her words. To be sure, she counted them one last time. There were twenty-six, with Simon Small’s making the twenty-seventh. So, in fact, she could say there were dozens. And she’d done no better with the university presses than with the commercial houses. Well, what had she truly expected? She knew nobody and nobody cared to know her. She had poured all of her reading, all of her love of language, all of her experience of life into these carefully constructed, crystalline pages of prose and had been foolish enough to think that somebody would care enough to read them. Well, she was wrong. The whole folly was over.
Carefully, meticulously, she went to the fireplace and crumpled up some old newspapers and torn cardboard. She started a blaze. Then, slowly, a few pages at a time, she fed the manuscript to the flames. It felt surprisingly cleansing. It didn’t take long: less than a half hour perhaps. Certainly not long considering the thirty-three years it had taken her to learn to read, to learn to write, to imbibe the great works, to develop her own style, to have a story to tell, and to tell it. It had been a hard life, often full of pain and frustration. Now she had to add defeat. But, Terry knew, if she couldn’t live a writer’s life, she didn’t want to live at all.
Once her manuscript was burned she looked around, as if waking from a trance. She didn’t stay still long. It had felt too good to stop. Before the fire died, she fed an earlier draft into the flames, then her latest marked copy. Next she began to scour the apartment in earnest. She found every note, every draft, every partial photocopy, and fed all of it into the bonfire. After all, there was no point to saving it anymore. She had run out of publishers, time, money, and belief. And the anticipation—the waiting for the rejections—had been more painful than the rejections themselves because somehow she had always known that her vision was too dark, her world too sad, to be lauded by publishers or her professors. Terry had been the type of student who never found a mentor, who never shone in seminars, who never got to be the pet at workshops. She was too rawboned, too raw altogether, too unfeminine and clear-eyed. She was not likable, and her professors saved their compassion—if they had any—for others. She had lived in obscurity, and that’s just where she would die.
The fire was nearly burned out. Terry looked around the apartment. With all the papers burned there was very little else: a few nondescript skirts, a gray tweed dress, some reams of printer paper, her battered laptop, her good leather purse, a canvas book bag. Things that didn’t matter. She took the three back-up computer disks and placed them, last of all, into the dying embers. They stank as they melted and bubbled. The bitter smell in the air mingled with the fear at the back of her throat.
She thought about writing a note to Opal. But what was there to say? I was wrong? You were wrong? She’d written thousands of paragraphs, millions of words. It was enough for one lifetime. Yet she didn’t want her mother to feel her blame. So, when at the last, the very last, Terry picked up the carefully labeled file of rejection letters, she paused before consigning them to the guttering flames. She needed no other explanation, no other note. Almost gaily, she found some transparent tape and walked around the room, decorating the walls with the only visible reward of her eight years of endless, single-minded toil. The letters papered the room nicely. They proved she’d left no stone unturned. With all that done, she went to the window outside the kitchenette and cut down the clothes-line that, long ago, she had strung across to the fire escape of the next building. Terry dragged the kitchen chair to the center of the room and sat with the coil of rope upon her lap. Before she did anything else, she thought she’d simply sit back, staring at all the nos, all the negative votes, hanging on the wall and—in her own mordant way—enjoy the view.
