by Bob Castle
Dear Bill,
My apologies for this late response. I recently discovered your SASE in our files. We've been swamped with submissions of late.
On a personal note, I wish to say that your story, in addition to being a well-written character study, had special meaning for me. It arrived around the time an eighteen-month relationship had ended with a woman I loved. I found it strangely comforting to find another who seems to have experienced similar difficulties. You have an excellent sense of timing! I know whereof Amos, your character, speaks when he says to Louise, "I did everything you wanted me to do." That he eventually won her back--through murder, not love--seems irrelevant. My girlfriend, Ellen, herself recited often the Billy Joel line: "I love you just the way you are." Amos and I were deceived by women's words.
Ellen and I, you should know, began to live together after dating four months. A short time? We had basically lived in bed together. I barely had time to edit the Review (Writer's Market commented about our submissions backlog being unable to live up to the claim that we commented on rejected manuscripts). I'm an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ellen's a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I edit the magazine at my office in the English building. Ellen helped me on Thursdays and Fridays. Late in the afternoon we would get cozy, lock the office, and make love in spontaneously chosen nooks and crannies, atop student compositions and the manuscripts on my desk, inside the metal closet, or in motion on my swivel chair.
Ellen, a tall brunette, often confessed to being bitchy, sarcastic, and like me, difficult to live with. Her confession was unsolicited and expected to convince me of its basic untruth. Most insidious were her putdowns of the University of Illinois when she asked how many Nobel Prize winners were on our faculty and, then, how many best-selling authors could we boast. I would tell her how her understanding of literature put me to shame. She wearied me with her knowledge of Serbo-Croatian, Zimbabwean, and Brazilian authors, as if she thought I would also pick up and read their works in the original languages. What could I say? That I had rejected a novella by Bellow or a book excerpt by Bloom? Hell, I'd tried to use her influence to get those bastards to submit!
Of course, this was the jagged intellectual edge to a love match that consciously shied from romance. We enjoyed movies, shows, even sporting events. We reciprocally mocked and longed for the small talk, the kisses over the phone (campus to campus), the trips to the supermarket, and "honey, I love you." We could barely say "love" with a clean conscience or without laughing. I'm over thirty and she's twenty-seven. It's sort of sad. Maybe this was why I couldn't understand why Louise didn't see through Amos' proposal of marriage at her fiancé's funeral. She had already rejected him. And couldn't she have suspected that Amos was responsible for the death? Or have I been dating graduate students too long? Or did Louise secretly desire her fiancé's death?
Yet, did I really know how Ellen felt about things other than authors, directors, and restaurants (German, Italian and French: her favorites respectively)? I did know that baseball was her favorite sport and that her favorite stars were Frank White, Ken Griffey Jr., and Randy Johnson. But did I suspect there was any depth to her feelings? Bill, would you have suspected that your girlfriend, wife, or female character in a story would develop a perspective on life through the game of baseball? A perspective irrespective the sport's stars? Wouldn't a Louise have admired Martina, Monica, or Gabriella? Would she take heart in their individual triumphs and never given the sport of tennis a second thought?
Ellen and I mentioned marriage, attended by the same snide remarks and haunted laughter we reserved for our other sentiments. Children? We jeered at the sight of elementary school kids. Yet, Ellen occasionally weakened and admitted that she wanted a baby. And she probably thought that I wasn't listening. But I heard. I contemplated action. One Thursday night, the Sox against the Mariners, I looked toward centerfield and got an idea. We would be attending a Saturday game in a few weeks. A friend of mine worked in the new Comiskey Park's ticket office and had connections. Ellen had signaled that she wanted a commitment. I would surprise her. Lifelong and romantically.
The White Sox were hanging on to a 3 - 2 lead against the Yankees, first and third, no outs, the crowd of forty-five thousand on its toes like hairs rising electric from the head. We were in the first base box seats. A man holding a port-a-camera emerged from the dugout and approached us on the gravel track. I casually said to Ellen, "It looks as if we'll be on the screen."
She glanced toward center and cried out, "Oh my God."
Ellen and I appeared gargantuan. I saw myself reaching for the ring in my pants packet. In the shade, we were easier to see on the screen. Then the screen went white, and dark letters individually formed my proposal: ELLEN, WILL YOU MARRY ME?
Fans had begun to clap as if the rest were a fait accompli. Ellen wouldn't look at me. I tried grabbing her hand. She broke into sobs. I asked what was wrong. Suddenly, she struck me across the side of the head. My eyes had momentarily been averted to the centerfield screen and didn't see the punch coming. I mouthed to the guy holding the camera: "Turn that fucking thing off!"
The stadium was silent. Then a singular cry carried over the diamond from the third base side of the upper deck.
"LOSER!"
Pockets of hooting and laughing followed. The relief pitcher hadn't completed his warm-ups.
"Four-eyed loser," someone yelled from the section beside ours.
"What's wrong, Ellen? I thought you'd be thrilled."
"IDIOT."
"FOOL."
"DOUCHEBAG."
She said nothing.
The Yankee bench players were doubled over. After tossing the infield ball toward the dugout, the first baseman, Martinez, turned to see if he could locate us.
"I can't believe you're doing this," I said. "Let's go."
"I'm staying for the last innings."
"I'm not."
I didn't want to see the bitch again. As I strode up the aisle toward the exit, a new chant had begun.
"Nah nah nah na, nah nah nah na, hey hey hey, goo-ood-bye."
That evening the telephone didn't stop ringing. Friends and relatives had heard I'd been on television. Some thought I was making a movie. Others called after Ellen and I appeared as the final story on the Ten O'Clock News.
"When are they getting married?" snickered the weatherwoman.
"In December," wiseguyed the sportsreader, "at Soldier Field when the Bears have an away game."
Another telephone call suggested that I turn on ESPN.
"The White Sox had better luck than this gentleman," said a stoic woman sportscaster, after showing my proposal and the ensuing headbash and the exit chorus:"Nah nah nah na, nah nah nah na, hey hey hey, goo-ood-bye."
At midnight, I received the third call of the evening from my parents.
They didn't have cable but it was on the local news in Nashville. My father was breathless. Someone had called them to say that I had appeared on CNN.
"Even they had it," I said listlessly.
My father had called earlier to say that theYankees-White Sox game was nationally televised because of a rainout in Boston. Then my mother called, worried that I might be suicidal.
"Worse," he said. "It was their 'Play of the Day.'"
This meant that they had shown Ellen's punch a second time in slow motion.
You, Bill, might have been part of that national audience to witness my disgrace. Even I have to admit, like those clapping fans, I had counted on Ellen saying yes. But you may be wondering why she reacted so harshly. We didn't speak for several days. I was incognito. She hadn't come near the apartment, and I didn't expect her to. When she called, her voice trembled.
"I'm sorry, Len, I can't explain it. I don't know whether I would I have reacted the same during a night game. It certainly would have been wiser for you to have proposed by candlelight in a corner of an anonymous restaurant with a bottle of red wine between us."
"I'll never understand." I paused. "Even Martinez was cracking up."
She was silent for a minute.
"I opened my heart to you," I finally said through tears, "before a national audience."
"You didn't have to make our engagement a public event."
"It was meant to be romantic."
"That monster television screen in centerfield isn't romantic. Christ, it's an abomination to baseball, to all sporting events. That Fanavision or whatever they call it, obtrudes into our full participation of the event."
"What's that got to do with our relationship?"
"It used to be special to go to a game. Watching the playing field, the players warming up and taking batting practice, the paths of flyballs to the warning track."
"What's this have to. . . ?"
"Now the people watch the screen. The batters approach the plate, and the kids, especially, watch them on the screen instead of watching them on the playing field. And the real plays themselves are no match for instant replays of those plays. Why does anyone come to the ballpark? What's on the monster screen seems more real to the fans."
"So what?"
"You put our relationship on the same level."
"What level? I loved you and wanted to marry you."
"I know."
"I tried to make it memorable. I thought you were waiting to be asked."
"I was and I wasn't. Not like that. It was as if you weren't giving me a chance . . ."
"A chance for what?"
"To tell you I didn't want to marry you."
"Even though you would have said 'yes' regardless."
"I deserved the chance to decline your offer. In private. You should have known I'd feel like that."
I never saw Ellen again. I wanted nothing more ever to do with her. She was the most unreasonable person I'd ever been involved with. And I've rooted against the White Sox and the entire American League ever since. Fuck the designated hitter. I reject women's manuscripts when women's names are on them. Any manuscripts Ellen recommended before our breakup, I have shitcanned. Indeed, a few that met with her disfavor, I have salvaged. That's how your story has made it this far. Ellen had hated Louise's lack of independence, plus the fact that Amos got away with murder. I instantly recognized that "The Lion Out of the Cage" had literary merit.
So you must be wondering why I have decided not to use it.
This is the worst part about commenting on a manuscript, giving a reason for rejection, rather than letting a form letter do my dirty work by saying the story didn't meet our current needs.
No editor wants to tell a writer that the writer can't write worth shit.
Nor can he say that the writer's work was moved aside because an associate editor wanted his or her story published or returned because we're one of the hundred magazines willing to publish Joyce Carol Oates (a good name is better than a good story).
None of this is the case with "The Lion." In fact, its literary merits are what pain me the most. Further, it DID meet our current needs. Just as I met Ellen's at the ballpark. And my response is to punch your literary face.
We publish forty stories yearly; this could certainly rank in the top five. I am returning it because I don't care how worthy it is. Should you be penalized because an editor's life is a mess and that he hasn't recovered from his rejection, and that he resents people recognizing him for one infamous occasion at Comiskey Park? Could you have foreseen these bizarre events at which you may have enjoyed a laugh or two many months ago? Could you know that my difficulties may have cost you not only publication but a Pushcart Prize nomination?
Well, I hold that laughter against you.
I will hold all "relationship stories" against their authors.
You may have thought I, an editor, was waiting for a well-written story.
Ha-ha.
You should have known better.
Cordially yours,
Leonard Simmons, Fict. Ed.
Lakefront Review
P.S. I don't quite believe the last scene, five years into their marriage, when Amos confesses to his complicity in her fiancé's death.