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, one by one, for more than a thousand pages. And all to 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