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.
I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.
—Natalia Ginsburg
Camilla Clapfish pushed the lock of brown hair behind her ear with her habitual little twist, wrote the last line, and then slowly looked up from the manuscript she had just completed. Outside, beyond the open window, the dull gray cobbled streets of San Gimignano were offset by the vibrant blue of the Italian sky. Camilla sighed and put down her pen. She had given herself a week here, undisturbed, to finish the book, a book she had been working on for almost a year, and she’d achieved her goal a day early. She smiled to herself. It felt like “the hols”—what upper-class British schoolchildren used to call vacation. She looked across the rooftops to the crazy stone towers of the ancient hill town. She’d go out and celebrate. She could spend the little she had left of her money on a good bottle of wine and a slap-up meal. She wouldn’t eat at the hotel tonight; she’d find a really good restaurant. But first she would walk in the tiny park, climb the steps of one of the towers, and look out over the Tuscan plain.
Oddly, Camilla felt as much sadness as triumph over finishing the book. Writing had come late to her—well, if at twenty-nine anything could be considered late. She’d found how she loved to record what her eyes took in, to create with words instead of paints. She was a failed artist, an unsuccessful art historian, and a quiet person—not a talker. But words on paper had become her companions this last year, and the characters she had drawn had become her friends. She’d written about a group of middle-aged ladies on a bus tour. She felt she’d come to know and like them all, even the troublesome Mrs. Florence Mallabar. She would miss them.
Camilla added the last page to the neat stack of manuscript, rose from the table, and went to the wardrobe, where her plain brown linen jacket hung. She was tall, and her light brown hair and her dark brown eyes set the tone for her wrennish dress. Camilla was not one for bright carmine or aquamarine. She wore no lipstick. Too much early exposure to nuns, she supposed. You wound up dressing like either a tart or a novice. She was certainly of the novitiate school. And although her English skin and regular features were enough to draw some attention from Italian men, she didn’t—as her mother had frequently reminded her—”make very much of herself.”
Now she carefully locked the door to the sparely furnished hotel room and walked down the stone stairs to the lobby. The clerk at the desk greeted her in Italian and asked if she was having a good day.
“Si. Buono. Grazie.” Yes, it was a very good day. The day I finished my first novel, Camilla thought, but she merely nodded. Her Italian was passable enough to discuss the practicalities of life but not good enough to describe this quiet joy. The clerk, an older man with a grizzled mustache, smiled. To him she was only another tourist. San Gimignano was a famous tourist town, a perfectly intact fourteenth-century wonder. There were those who called it “The Medieval Manhattan of Tuscany” because of the beautiful and bizarre stone towers that graced it. Once there had been sixty or seventy of them, but now only fourteen remained, making a strange and beautiful silhouette against the green Tuscan landscape. She would go out and enjoy looking about.
She walked out the stone portal of the hotel onto Via S’Porto, the secondary street that led to the main piazza. She paused, took a deep breath, and rubbed her eyelids with the very tips of her fingers. She was tired but elated, and more than a little surprised. I didn’t think I could do it, but I did, she thought. I’ve finished it. I’ve finished my first book. She smiled and—for the first time in months—felt a pang of loneliness. Camilla was quite used to being alone. But now, without