Boundaries (14 page)

Anna tries to quiet the fear that has set her right eyelid twitching. She has nothing to worry about, she tells herself as she rereads the last lines of Tanya’s e-mail. Successful publishers are always in demand. And Tanya Foster is a successful publisher. Windsor is doing well, but the Equiano imprint is turning in the stronger profits. Equiano was Tanya’s brainchild and Anna has no doubt that the returns on the investment in this imprint have made Tanya attractive to other publishing companies. But what will happen to her when Tanya is gone? It is Tanya who appointed her to her position. Will a new publisher support her the same way?

She has been suspicious of the sudden hiring of Tim Greene. What is to be his position when Tanya leaves? She had asked for a replacement for Tammy Mohun. Tammy was her assistant, her secretary. She answered the phone, checked the mail, filed, sorted. Sometimes Anna asked her to research some arcane point when she questioned the accuracy of the fact-checker. Sometimes Tammy took manuscripts home and returned them with extensive notes that Anna had to admit were very astute, but the young woman had not been hired as an editor. Tim Greene was. He was to be her assistant editor, Tanya Foster said, though Anna had not asked for an assistant editor.

The more Anna thinks of Tim Greene, the more incensed she becomes, and the more worried too. She emails him. She asks about his meeting with Raine and tells him to e-mail the ideas he indicated he had for improving the novel. She will take control of the books published under the imprint she heads, she tells herself, determined not to be undermined by a newcomer, an upstart. Let him send his notes. If he has disregarded her edits, she will demand that he retract whatever he has said or sent to Raine. She won’t be petty; she will consider his recommendations, but she will not allow him to disregard hers.

She finishes the e-mail and reaches for the phone. She must let Bess Milford know the jacket cover will not be changed. She has done her best, and there is nothing more she can say to Tanya that will make a difference. She begins to dial Bess’s number and she loses her nerve. She cannot bear to hear the disappointment that will certainly be there in Bess’s voice. Bess has pinned her hopes on Anna. Perhaps she should not have been so enthusiastic. Perhaps she should have been more discreet with her praise of the novel. Even a senior editor, the head of an imprint, must work with a team. The decision to acquire a novel and the approval of the budget to market it do not rest on a single person. Perhaps she should have explained these constraints to Bess Milford from the beginning. Instead she had been excessive with her compliments:
The best novel I’ve
read in years. This is a story that will resonate with people all over the
globe.

She had used that deceptive “c” word. “It’s a crossover novel,” she said. “People from every ethnic group, class, gender, and age will find something of themselves in your story. We all face this conflict between our private desires and public responsibilities, and your story gets to the heart of our dilemma.” But now she knows the novel will not be marketed as a crossover novel; it will be marketed as a black novel and there is little she can do to change that reality.

She takes the easy way out. She e-mails Bess. You can avoid the sting of direct confrontation on the telephone, but e-mails allow an even greater distance when the message you have to deliver is an unpleasant one. You can frame your words exactly as you want; no one will interrupt you; no one will point out your hypocrisy, the lie in what you say, at least not until you are done, not until you have had the chance to invent your defense.

Her e-mail to Bess is brief. She apologizes; she promises to make certain that the cover for her next novel will be appropriate. She is aware she cannot make good on such a promise, but she means to try. She ends the e-mail with what she knows is not the truth:
Your novel is going to reach a
diverse readership, Bess. Have no fear.

Afterward, she works on letters she will send to two of the other writers on her list. She is careful to boost their confidence and so she begins the letters with the usual praise that editors send to writers to nudge them into rewriting their novels, but she is also cautious. She reins in her enthusiasm.
I like your novel very much and readers will like
it too. Your characters are engaging and you hold the reader’s interest,
etc., etc., but …
She writes three paragraphs of buts.

It is close to midday when Anna finishes the letters and makes the last of her business calls. She logs on to her email again. There is no response from Tim Greene. He has read her e-mail; of that she is certain. She signs off, closes her laptop, slips on her jacket, and leaves the apartment to have lunch with her father.

It is a glorious day, the sort that causes inconvenient thoughts to drift through the mind of the unbeliever, tempting the unbeliever to reconsider firm convictions and entertain the possibility of a Prime Mover, some intelligent, supernatural force that has set in motion the Big Bang and the unending cycles of evolution that have created order and beauty in the world. It is the sort of day when, gilded by the sun, refuse assumes a strange beauty. Garbage bags heaped on sidewalks and even the slats of boarded-up windows of abandoned buildings in neighborhoods collapsing under the terror of crime and drugs seem to shimmer under a spreading arc of golden light. The sky is an infinite blue, clear and bright. The leaves on the trees will soon wither and die, but for now they glitter in the breeze in a kaleidoscope of reds, pinks, oranges, and golds.

Anna’s father too is struck by the gloriousness of the day. She finds him walking on the hospital grounds. “Anna!” he calls out to her. He is holding a plastic bag. Under his arm is a folded newspaper. “Your mother sent me to the gift shop to get a magazine for her,” he says when he catches up to her, “but I couldn’t help going outside. What a beautiful day!” He lifts up the plastic bag in his hand for her to see. “I hope I got the right one.” The right one would be a scandal magazine about American celebrities, one that gives her mother vicarious pleasure scoffing at stories of scantily clad, rich American women whose fourth or fifth husband has left them for a young starlet.

“It may be the richest country in the world,” she has said to Anna, “but they can’t do something as simple as keep a family together.” True or false, Anna often thinks this barb is directed to her. She couldn’t keep her family together. Her husband left her; she is childless.

Anna peers into the bag. “You’ve got the right one,” she says.

“I bought the
Times
too,” he says. In the evenings he reads sections of the newspaper to his wife before they go to bed. He wants to keep her current on the happenings around the world, he says.

“Did you sleep well?” she asks him. Her father’s pants are creased and the collar of his shirt has disappeared under the neck of his sweater, but for someone who slept in his clothes, he still exudes the air of a man of substantial social status. At home her mother chides him for wearing days-old clothes stained with the rind of oranges he picked from the trees in their garden, or from the pellets of dog food he fed to the fish in his pond, and yet no one would mistake him for other than a gentleman. He walks with his head held upright, and in his eyes one sees the confidence of a man aware of his worth and dignity as a human being.

“Like a baby,” he says. He is lying, of course. He cannot have slept well on the armchair next to her mother’s bed.

“And Mummy?”

“She woke up only once. The nurse helped her to the bathroom and then she slept until the morning.”

In the lobby of the hospital, they wait for the elevator. When the door opens, a young man stands aside to let them in. “Hope you have a good morning, sir,” the man says to her father when he exits.
Sir.
Even here people defer; they recognize John Sinclair as the gentleman he is.

Her mother is sitting up, her head turned toward the window, her fingers pressed to her mouth. She does not change her position when Anna and her father walk in the room. “I didn’t believe the sky could get so blue here,” she says. “Just like the sky at home.” The soft lines at the sides of her eyes fan out and the skin on her cheeks spreads upward.

Anna bends down over her and her mother raises a limp hand and touches her face. “You’re a good daughter, Anna,” she says. Anna brushes her lips against her mother’s soft skin. Her father, looking on, grins. Then in an instant her mother is her old self again. “Go, Anna.” She leans back on her pillow. “Take your father with you. He’s itching for a break.”

Her mother’s hand is no longer on her cheek yet Anna can still feel the traces of her fingers on her skin.

“Your father was all cramped up on that chair last night,” her mother is saying.

Anna is barely listening to her, her mind drifting inward.

“Did you hear me, Anna?”

She refocuses and is in the present again. “I’ll take him for lunch if he’s ready to go,” she says.

Her father drops the newspaper on the armchair where he slept and takes the magazine to his wife. “I wasn’t cramped up, Beatrice,” he grumbles. “It’s a comfortable chair.”

Her mother waves him away. “Take him to lunch, Anna. He needs the exercise. If he doesn’t need a break, I do. They’ll be bringing my lunch soon and I want to take another nap.”

“Still ordering me around, Beatrice?” her father says.

Her mother shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “Just leave the magazine, John.”

She will have to wait until he returns to read it. She has movement in one hand, but it will be difficult for her to turn the pages with the other hand connected to an arm that must be aching from the severed muscles on her chest.

Anna winces. Below the bandage poking out of the neck of her mother’s hospital gown are the sutures that close the skin left gaping apart after Dr. Bishop removed her mother’s left breast.

“Go on, John!” For all the harshness in her mother’s words and for all the rolling of her eyes there is tenderness in her command. She has sent her husband out to get a magazine she cannot read without his help and yet she is sending him out again because she’s worried about him, more worried about him than she is for herself. He needs the exercise, she says. Her husband is not a young man. The joints in his limbs get stiff.

“Go on!” she says again, and chases him away. “Anna must have things to tell you.” She wants her daughter to distract her husband. Anna must talk to him of things other than his wife’s illness.

Her father is a willing coconspirator. It is love that causes her mother to care for his welfare, love that causes her husband to do as she asks, but it is also character, a quality Anna fears has outlived its time. To have character is to have fortitude; it is to have courage, discretion—the better part of valor. But in these days, to value discretion is to be mocked at, to be laughed at. For husbands and wives openly discuss the most intimate aspects of their lives—what they do in bed and afterward—before millions on national TV and do not seem to care.

Her parents value privacy. If her father is worried about his wife, he does not reveal those fears to Anna. Whatever he and his wife have discussed will remain between them. At the hospital cafeteria, he inquires instead about Anna’s job. “Did you get much done this morning?”

“With the computer it’s almost the same as if I were in the office,” she tells him.

“The computer is beyond me. I’ll never be able to understand those newfangled machines. The fax was enough of a mystery for me.”

She laughs, remembering how he called her in New York from his home on the island to tell her that one of the companies that kept him on retainer for his management advice had given him a fax machine. “It’s amazing,” he had said. “You put a letter in one machine and it comes out in another, thousands of miles away.”

“Like the telephone,” she replied.

“At least I can understand the telephone. Voices transmitted through the airwaves make sense to me, but written words? It’s unbelievable.”

He still refuses to get a computer or communicate with her through e-mail or fax. He uses the telephone and occasionally sends her letters by post.

“You know,” he says “you shouldn’t work too hard.” Anna has bought a ham sandwich, but her father, accustomed to a full meal at lunchtime, has chosen meatballs and spaghetti. He is using his knife to cut the spaghetti strings. Anna watches as he patiently slices the strands into small bits, cuts the meatball, spears a piece of it with his fork, and loads the spaghetti on top of it with his knife. He will not eat the American way, with a fork, resting his knife on the side of his plate. This way of eating with the knife and fork may be a colonial import but he has lived all his life under colonial rule.

“I don’t work too hard,” she says.

“You are a grown woman. It may not be my business to give you advice, though …” He glances up at her.

She touches his hand. “I’ll never stop wanting advice from you,” she says reassuringly.

He casts his eyes back down on his plate and concentrates on maneuvering the spaghetti on the back of his fork. Some of the strings slide off the tines.

“Swirl them,” she says.

He looks helplessly at her.

She reaches over the table to his plate and shows him how. “Try it. There is no other way.”

He tries. “I guess I’m being pulled into these modern times,” he says, and swirls the spaghetti on his fork.

“I don’t think Italians would agree this is a modern way to eat.” Surely he must know this, she thinks.

He sighs. “How things have changed since Independence.” His mind has drifted to other times, to the passing of an era. “Now the young people back home do whatever they want. They don’t care what the British think.
Which is
good
.” He says these last words emphatically, repeats them, and adds, “This is the way it should be.” He wants to be sure she understands he is not a mindless Anglophile. He has neither forgotten nor forgiven the brutality of slavery under the British, the torture of Africans, the genocide of Amerindians who once populated the chain of Caribbean islands. He will never accept the arrogance and greed of the British that led them to assume they could own his island and the people on it. He puts another forkful of spaghetti in his mouth, and after he has swallowed, dabbed his lips with his napkin, he says, “But you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”