1492 words

DEAR SIR…

Dear Sir, I wrote, I received your rejection letter today, and I must say, I think you’re a big fat jerk.

But, no, that won’t do, will it? Better to take the professional approach—rip the letter into tiny pieces, mix well with an eye of newt and toe of bat, then burn it to a cinder while I chant a curse upon every unfeeling, unthinking editor that ever has or ever will cross my path.

Extreme, I know, but rejection is hard the first time it happens, especially when I’ve managed to publish five novels without ever being rejected before. You see, I started writing romance novels while I was in college to help put myself through school. I had a regular knack for it, once I understood the formula. Every story in the genre is moving toward a predestined outcome. There is never any variation in how these books will end. Always, always, always there is a happily ever after, even if only implied.

It was comforting to a person like me, whose life has been lived in utter chaos, to chart a sure course for the future of the characters I invented. A variety of things might happen to them along the way—they could get kidnapped, robbed, stranded in foreign countries in the middle of revolutions, endure famine and hardship and be injured or become ill almost to the point of death. But death itself could never touch them because the inevitable moment was still to come when the hero and heroine would declare their eternal love for one another and the story would end bathed in the halcyon glow of the most perfect moment any of us will ever know.

But life, of course, isn’t like that. And when I finished my American Literature degree and went out into the world, it seemed that more than romance novels were expected of me. I wanted to write a book I could publish under my real name. But all that I had studied in college failed me when I sat down to write and the formula I’d mastered took control. Over and over my literary novels turned to sludge as the central characters became not quirky nuns battling the Vatican over women’s rights, but rather an ex-nun and a good-looking biker falling in love as she helps him to turn his life around. Instead of epic struggles and self-discovery, there was petty conflict and the age old misunderstandings that occur between men and women who are romantically attracted to one another, until I met Bernard and Cecile.

They were old—not a rippling bicep nor a perky breast in sight. Bernard rode his bicycle every day to the place in Washington Square Park where he sat and played chess with other old men. Before retiring, he had owned a cigar store for fifty years, where he sold the best Cuban tobacco to some of the most famous men in the world. Frank Sinatra used to come into Bernard’s shop whenever he was in town and once even brought his daughter Nancy, boots and all.

But the joy of Bernard’s life was not the cigar store, which he had loved with all the weight of loyalty and long-standing, but rather his wife Cecile. Cecile painted pictures in their third floor, one bedroom apartment, using the small kitchen as a studio. She painted flowers, though she rarely saw any in New York. Sometimes they were the blossoms of her imagination, in colors deeper and richer than any real bud that might bloom in the stale air of the city. But sometimes Bernard stopped on his way home from the park and bought fresh bouquets of sunflowers or some other bold, exuberant variety like Gladiolas or tiger lilies. He tucked them in the basket that hung from the handlebars of his old-fashioned bicycle—no gears, no special tires—and pedaled home to present them to Cecile.

Her paintings sold in a small gift shop in the Village. They didn’t fetch a handsome price, but to sell any kind of art in New York City was a triumph and, above all, Cecile had to find some way to get them out of the small apartment. There had been times when the stacks of canvases cluttered their living space so severely that Bernard and Cecile could not see one another from across the room.

Bernard loved her paintings, loved to study them over coffee in the morning, before he put on his wool cap and set out on his bicycle. He grieved a bit for each one that was sold in Tanta’s Florerium, but he knew that all things in life have their price, and the freedom to move about his apartment was worth a great deal.

It was indeed a blessing that Cecile had found this place to sell her paintings, for the creation of them was a thing she could no more avoid than breathing in and out. She was compelled to paint these flowers. In bold strokes and dashing colors, she depicted them in vases, in the wild, climbing charming rock walls, hanging over lovely landscapes, sprouting up in barren wastelands, or burning colors into bleak and dreary urban scenes. Cecile was an artist of the kind who is driven, not by rote, not half-formed by a mercenary desire. Cecile’s flowers would grow, canvas by canvas, no matter what else befell her or Bernard, or even Frank Sinatra. I envied her that.

Cecile was a character who’d sprung full force from the nether world of my mind, that extra segment of the brain writers are born with where characters incubate and grow and leap out when you least expect them. But there she was, with Bernard in tow. And I could not begin to think what to do with them. I began to write about Cecile’s flowers, but before I knew it she had reverted in age and become a stunning brunette studying art in the Village, about to meet a young, good-looking Italian named Bernard, who was struggling to rise above his family’s under-world associations and make good. Their story plodded along but soon began to sag. Who cares about them now? I thought. They had lost their shine, their charm. They were now no different than any other characters I’d known. I put them in a drawer out of site.

Until it occurred to me to write the romance of Cecile and Bernard as they were when I met them. They had settled into a life of comfortable sameness, accepting that age had worn away the edges of their lives, planing flat that place where the ridges of adventure and romance used to lie. But what would happen if Tanta’s Florerium closed, and there were no place for Cecile to sell her flowers? What would happen if Bernard were crowded out of his living room and Cecile began to smother under the weight of all the blooms that, stacked flat against one another, would never see the light of day? What would happen if Bernard enlisted those chess-playing old men in an ingenious plan to liberate Cecile’s flowers and, in so doing, fell in love with his wife and his life all over again?

So I wrote that story, and I wrote it well. I cried with Cecile and laughed with Bernard. I saw the canvases she painted and admired them just as Bernard did. I felt the triumph of the moment when her flowers were carried through the streets of the Village in a mass procession of old men, each one holding a canvas as high as he could, that made it seem like the whole city had come alive with blooms. And I felt the sorrow built into the knowledge that, despite their triumphs, there would be no happily ever after, for Bernard and Cecile were inescapably old and one of them had already been tagged by the hand of fate with a cancer that would prove terminal.

And when it was finished, this precious adventure with Bernard and Cecile, when it was as finely crafted as it could be, when I thought it had as much depth and feeling as one of Cecile’s flowers, I sent it along to the publishing houses.

And it was rejected. This is the first rejection letter I have ever received, and it was a stunning blow. I was sad—sad for Bernard and Cecile and for myself. But more than that, I was sad for the whole wide world of people who will get millions of copies of romance novels with predictable endings, but who will never know the glorious and unexpected love story of Bernard and Cecile.

So I guess what I want to say to that editor is this;

Dear Sir,

I received your rejection letter today and I just wanted to write and say that I am truly sorry for your loss.

Yours Sincerely,

Bernard, Cecile, Frank Sinatra, and Me.