Personal Rejection

"Personal Rejection" by Ron Dionne

Issue 2.22 | Fiction

Cover Art: L. Erickson

Clyde trembled as the import of the message became clear, sliding by the mental callus of disappointment and chagrin that had formed over the long years of trying and trying again.

All of his countless rejections and few and far-between acceptances had also been via emails. Sorry but no. Close but not quite right. Strong and accomplished, but not for us—pass. And sometimes, very, very now and then: Congratulations, perfect for our autumn issue. . . .

But the meaning of this message now on his screen was clear. The provenance of the message seemed unassailable. It was undoubtedly from that very high-profile publisher, from its prominent editor himself.

A summons.

To come in and meet at their office.

To discuss.

Do publishers even have offices these days? This was a magazine, a frequent Pushcart and O. Henry prize-winning story farm, and they—no, indeed, he—wanted to meet him, Clyde, personally, in the flesh, in his office, occupying his same space, breathing his same air, taking up his same time.

Today!

These days, Clyde imagined, most such operations were at university English departments, or even produced remotely from laptops in cramped apartments or in kitchens in bungalows in the woods or by the seaside or way the hell up away from everything in the mountains. But this—this was in a high-rise office building, in midtown. Right here, in this city. 

Why? Could this be it?

“You okay?” said Arlene, his longtime girlfriend, just finishing her nails on the sofa beside him.

“Yeah. Yeah, fine,” Clyde said. He realized his hand was suspended above the keyboard like a hoverfly. He forced himself to relax.

Arlene had long ago sized up Clyde’s talent, he knew, and decided it consisted mostly of wishful thinking and stubbornness. They rarely, if ever, discussed his writing. She seemed content to move on to his other, more acceptable qualities: He respected her, wasn’t bad-looking, and was okay in bed. It was enough. She was an emergency room nurse and had seen plenty of people with real problems, she said from time to time when his complaints entered the neighborhood of self-pity. She’d hug him then, and tell him that, for her, a quiet cutie with delusions of grandeur was just what the doctor ordered.

Clyde typed his response. Yes, he would be delighted to come into the office. No, this afternoon was not too soon; he was glad he had checked his email so early. The hour requested was perfect and he promised to be prompt.

Send.

Wow. It had to be it. Finally. Recognition. Dare he think it—prestige! He itched to tell Arlene. But something . . . something told him it would be better to wait until after the fact. Then even she would have to admit there was more to Clyde C— than met the eye.

—

Clyde allowed himself to be one minute early. He did his best not to grin like an idiot at the receptionist as he told her his name and who he had an appointment with. The girl did not look at him, only her screen, and did not react other than to invite him to take a seat in a chrome and leather chair across the reception area.

Soon enough a willowy person of indeterminate gender opened the glass doors and said with raised eyebrows, “Clyde?”

“That’s me,” Clyde said, springing to his feet.

He was bid to follow down a long, wide hallway. Old school: window offices against the outer wall, assistants’ desks outside, all the assistants young and appealing. Clyde did his best to belong here, obviously, walk, but no one seemed to be paying him any attention at all. Well, they didn’t know who he was yet, clearly. Despite being easily old enough to be the father of most if not all of them, he was still a beginner. Well. Let them talk amongst themselves at some later, not-too-distant date about when was the first time they saw Clyde C— and, damn, had they actually missed it? He had irons in the fire, boy, bright, burning irons ready to scald the world. But first, this very first step.

They stopped outside a corner office. His minder stuck his or her head in and said a few words in a voice too soft for Clyde to hear over the thudding of his own heart, then stepped aside so he could enter.

And there he was. The editor. The editor.

Clyde, beaming, strode forward and extended his hand for a shake.

The editor did not take his hand. The editor peered at him, and Clyde’s world seemed to tilt a bit under his feet.

Through clenched teeth, the editor said, “Sit. Down.” He indicated a hard chair opposite his desk and Clyde complied.

“This,” the editor hissed, holding up a sheaf of papers, presumably Clyde’s manuscript. “What is this?”

The enormous mutton chops either side of the editor’s face fairly quivered, as if he was controlling, resisting, possibly about to fail to contain an outburst of rage.

Clyde struggled to maintain his composure, and as he replied he rued the fact that his voice was thin and reedy, not the sonorous mixed high and low throaty purr that sometimes impressed listeners when he read aloud.

“If it is from me, it must be my ‘Prawns upon Toast’ that I sent you about thirty days ago.”

“It is.”

The editor threw the manuscript down on the desk, then glared at him.

Clyde moistened his lips. “I take it you don’t like it.”

“You have no right,” the editor said, “no right at all.”

“Sorry?”

The editor leaned forward. If his eyes had had pincers surely they would have shot out and seized Clyde by the ears, and squeezed, possibly twisted.

“You are not smart enough for this,” the editor said.

“Not smart enough—?”

“You extremely clearly do not understand the things you’re writing about.”

Clyde felt himself reduced to a collection of nerves connected to a dry mouth and an anus. Somehow he found words to speak.

“I’ll admit I was striving for a bit of ambiguity,” he said. “The protagonist is uncertain—”

“You are uncertain! You are. Therefore completely and utterly unqualified. There’s Pretension, over here, smug and eager and absolutely certain it will get laid, and then there’s you.” The editor gestured to indicate as wide a gulf as the expanse of his arm reach would allow. “And let me tell you, you make Pretension even smugger because in comparison to you, he knows he’s at least got something to aspire to. You? You are just not good enough. Not good enough. You should be ashamed of yourself, trying an idea like this.”

He took up the manuscript and tossed pages without regard for where they landed until he came upon a passage.

“Take this,” the editor said, “here.”

He slammed the page down on the desk to face Clyde, a fat finger pinning it like a knife piercing a rattler. It was clear Clyde was supposed to lean close to read it, but he recognized the passage from a distance. He’d cried writing it.

“The . . . the unrequited love aspect—unconvincing?” he managed to say.

The editor grimaced and shook his head. “Have you ever even kissed a girl? I am very sorry to learn from your cover letter that any editor anywhere ever was stupid enough to publish anything you ever wrote, and I assure you that it will be a very long time, if ever, before I read even a word of anything you submit here after you dared to submit this impossible drivel.”

The editor rose to his feet. He was a large man, overweight but in a beefy way. Not someone a slim white ascetic like Clyde would want to tangle with, physically. Even verbally. Clyde did not like himself at times, and this was one of them.

“In fact,” the editor said, “I want you to come this way.”

He came around the desk and gestured for Clyde to get up and follow him. When Clyde hesitated, the editor gripped his shoulder hard and fairly lifted him out of the chair. Clyde was then propelled out of the office, not against his will but so thoroughly out of his own control that his will was irrelevant. Down the hall past all the lovely young editorial assistants they went, again none of them taking any notice of his presence, and right past the exit to the reception area and the elevators beyond where, until that moment, Clyde assumed he was being rather rudely expelled. They were now cleaving the subsidiary rights department, and soon enough penetrating Marketing. Then a quick right down a narrow hallway, past a tiny canteen full of stale-smelling coffee pods and unwashed mugs until at last, the editor pushed Clyde through a metal door into a tiny enclosed space, hardly large enough for the two of them to occupy together. A wan fluorescent light in need of a new ballast flickered in the ceiling above.

Two of the tiny chamber’s walls appeared to consist of sliding doors.

“Now,” the editor said. “At this company, we have a remedy for posers like you. Behind one of these two doors is a means to make you smarter, to make you possibly capable, if you work hard enough, to be worthy of the ideas you so ill-advisedly are pursuing now, in your current state of extremely pedestrian, barely literate, negligible ability. Behind the other door is a means to remove the impulse toward such inappropriate, self-humiliating misadventures. Which do you pick?”

So instead of triumph, it had come to this. This was exactly what Clyde had always been afraid of. That someone would one day call him on it. That he would be found out. That it would be revealed to all what he already secretly suspected— no, knew!—about himself: that he was nothing but exactly what this esteemed editor said he was: a poser. He supposed this was a common enough affliction among those who had the chutzpah to believe that anything they spent time writing in the privacy of their own homes could possibly be of any interest to any other living being. Got some time on your hands? Here, here’s what I think, and what I think you should think, too. Such self-congratulatory autoeroticism. It was deserving of the greatest degree of scorn that could be conceived.

And now here he was, face to face with it. It was why Clyde shaved in the shower, by feel, rather than by looking in a mirror.

“What’s so funny?” the editor said.

“I’m not laughing.”

“Looked like you were.”

“I’m not.”

“Better not be crying,” the editor said.

Clyde managed the shrug of one shoulder.

A long awkward silence punctuated by the large editor’s breathing. In such close quarters, Clyde knew that onions had recently been eaten.

“All right, then,” the editor said. “Which door do you pick?”

“Which is which?”

“I told you. One gives you a shot at realizing your ambitions. The other right-sizes you to fit your mediocrity.”

“Yes, I see—but, um, specifically, which door is which?”

The editor allowed a small smile. “One, or the other,” he said, nearly a whisper.

—

Afterwards, on the sidewalk just down the block from the office building where his almost-editor had so unexpectedly summoned him, Clyde by chance encountered a fellow traveler in self-expressing circles.

“Hey! You!” this younger female said to him. She seemed genuinely glad to see him; no false note of cordiality masking fear that an actual conversation might have to be endured. She was in one of his critique groups, very talented in a raw, not-quite-knowing-what’s-up kind of way.

She dared touch his arm. Not in that way. Rather, in a have I got news kind of way.

“I sold it!”

He blinked for a moment, knowing of course full well what it was she was talking about, but letting a bit of time pass to give the little grub the chance to worm down further into his consciousness. His calluses were no protection.

“My book! My agent just called me. I’m on my way to meet her! Oh, did I tell you I got an agent? It all happened so fast. Agent one day, three weeks later—sold! I can’t believe it!”

A bit of Clyde leaned against the wall for support while his corporeal self summoned tendrils of social nicety so as not to upset the very full cart of teetering self-confidence apples that the young lady was, with more innocence than alacrity usually allowed, pushing down the street at full speed, in public, for anyone with eyes to see it.

She nodded in acceptance of his felicity and even gave him a brief hug.

“Thanks for all your insights in group!” she said. “It no doubt helped a lot! They love the unrequited love angle, like you said! They’re already talking movie rights, if you can believe it. Can I put you in the acknowledgments?”

“By all means,” Clyde said. His smile was genuine, even if there was more behind it than the young woman could know.

And she was off, leaving a little trail of first blush success applesauce in her wake.

And Clyde went home. The wound in the back of his head left by the huge spider (that looked uncannily like Flannery O’Connor) behind the door he had chosen needed tending. He had tried to shut that door upon perceiving his oft-times muse presenting itself as such a monstrosity, tried to shut it to get to the other door, for nothing could be worse than those staring eyes, through those wing-tipped glasses, those beacons of insight and wisdom boring down on him above huge, slaying fangs—but he had been unable to extricate himself. And the injury had been endured, the metal door and the firm, implacable grip of the editor’s hand on the knob keeping him fast unto it.

Truth was, he wasn’t sure if the beast had granted him a bit of O’Connor-ishness or instead sucked his ambition to Death Valley dryness. All he knew was that his gait was slower now than it had been before the meeting. But no one was looking at him. No one would.

Back at home, his fingers hesitated above the keyboard, hesitated—

—

Ron Dionne's most recent work is found or forthcoming at The Baltimore Review, Die Laughing, BULL lit mag, 96^th of October, The Muleskinner Journal, Snoozine, and Macabre Magazine.