Boundaries (6 page)

When Tanya walks in, the guys sit up. The secretary puts the manuscript on the table and leaves the room. Tanya sits at the head of the table, Tim to her right. She motions Anna to take the chair adjacent to hers. No sooner does Anna settle in her chair than Rita stretches her arm over the table toward her and says in a confidential whisper that is still loud enough for the others to hear, “Loved the novel, Anna. I think we can sell this one.”

Robert slides his back up on his chair. His eyes are shining, glittering almost. “Definitely,” he says. “Definitely.” He clamps his teeth down on his lower lip and shakes his head excitedly in rapid little movements. “It’s going to be a big winner. That adultery angle is just what’s happening.”

“Yeah,” Hakim chimes in. “Man trying to get away with keeping the wife satisfied at home and getting it on with the girlfriend. That’s a seller.”

The hesitation that had gripped Anna’s throat when Tanya gave her the news that the boys from the art department were buzzing about Bess Milford’s novel returns as alarm. She can feel her bottom lip beginning to tremble. Bess Milford’s novel is not at all like that. It’s not at all about a married man
getting it on
with his girlfriend. “That’s not the point,” she says. “It’s not about a torrid affair.” She presses her lips together to stop the trembling.

Tanya, who has not taken her eyes off Anna since Rita spoke, quickly interjects, “Let them finish the presentation, Anna. Hear what they have to say.”

“It’s about marketing, Anna,” Rita says. “We like—we
love
—the novel, but in the end it’s about marketing.”

“Show her.” Hakim inclines his head toward Robert. There’s a screen rolled up into a metal casing on the wall at the back of the room. Robert reaches for the string hanging from the center and pulls it down. The screen unfolds. “Lights!”

But Hakim has already turned off the lights and positioned himself next to the computer behind Tanya. Rita rolls her chair down and makes room for Tanya next to her. She invites Anna to sit with them.

“The cover,” Tanya says, and extends her arms with a flourish.

A picture appears on the screen. A black couple, a man and a woman, are locked in a passionate embrace. The man, like Hakim, has long braided locks, but they are not pulled back. They hang loosely at the sides of his face. He is a handsome man in his midthirties, with smoldering eyes, moist full lips shadowed by a thick mustache. His shirt and pants cling to his muscular frame outlining chiseled pecs and taut buttocks. The woman in his arms is equally chiseled. Full, firm breasts strain against the buttons on her tight shirt and spill out in perfectly shaped orbs. Her hair, long and straight, flows over her smooth shoulders. Her bottom rises and arcs downward to well-defined thighs encased in a narrow tight skirt. As she reaches up, lips puckered to receive the man’s kiss, the backs of her feet slip out of her red four-inch spiked heels.

“My God!” Anna gasps.

“Like it?” Robert is grinning. Like the proverbial Cheshire cat, Anna thinks with disgust.

“Well, what do you say?” Tanya asks. Hakim is smirking behind her.

Anna cannot speak.

“It’s going to be a big seller,” Rita says.

“That’s not it, that’s not it at all …” Anna stammers out the words, fighting to find the right ones. “Bess Milford … she wouldn’t—that’s not the book she wrote.”

Tim, who so far has been silent, swivels his body toward Anna. “It’s a postcard. You know the way a postcard makes you want to travel to the place you see on it? That’s all a cover is about.” He is speaking to her with exaggerated patience as if she is a child. “It’s just an ad to make you buy the book.”

“No!” Anna stands up.

“We don’t plan to change a word of the novel, Anna,” Tanya says. “It will be exactly as you sent it to me, exactly the way you edited it. It’ll be the same book.”

“I can’t believe you’d think this is right.” Anna is close to tears.

“I would have thought you’d want us to get an early start on the cover,” Tanya says.

“But not this one.”

“I want it for the galleys. We’re pushing advance production forward. You’ll see. This one will bring huge advance orders from the bookstores.”

“You’re going to ruin the book.”

Tanya places both hands on the table, the palms facedown, her fingers stretched wide. “It’s business, Anna,” she says. “Just business. You want us to publish this novel? I agreed, but I have to sell it. That’s my job.”

“Is this final? Has this been decided?”

“I thought you’d see it my way, Anna. I thought you’d understand. Like Tim says, it’s a poster. You still have your book.”

“Is this what you all think? You all think this is right?” Anna glances around the room nervously.

Rita lowers her head. The guys nod theirs. Tim throws up his hands.

“How will I explain this to Bess Milford?”

“That’s your job,” Tanya says. “Ours is to market it, and I think the boys here did a fine job. I think the book will be a success. Cheer up, Anna. Smile.”

Paul Bishop calls while Anna is in the conference room. She gave him the date of her arrival in New York, but has not yet contacted him. Was she waiting for him to call her? She is a grown woman, and it’s silly to play such a game. She likes him and he likes her. She does not need to test his affection for her to know he is likely to be as anxious to see her again as she is to see him. Still, she is reassured by his call. He leaves a message with her secretary. He will be in surgery until five but he has sent her an e-mail. Anna switches from the company’s server to the one where she gets her personal e-mail and logs on. There have been more than a few scandals in the office when personal e-mails were retrieved on the company’s server. There are rules, but people break them. Laziness? Out of foolhardy wishful thinking that out of all the e-mails flying through the Internet space, it’s a trillion-to-one chance theirs will land on their boss’s desk? And yet a marriage ended in divorce when an office affair was uncovered through the company’s e-mail; one man barely escaped jail in a Ponzi scheme.

Paul’s e-mail is brief. He misses her. He would have called last night, but after eight hours of surgery, he fell asleep, exhausted. Can they meet for early dinner, say about six? He names a Midtown restaurant, near to her office.

She wants to see him, needs to see him. She put on a brave face when she left the meeting, but her hands are still shaking. She was not cheered up by Tanya’s baseless promises. The book will be a publishing failure. Tanya knows it, and if she doesn’t, Anna thinks she’s less informed about the market for literary fiction by black writers than she should be. They have joined forces against her, the boys in the art department, the people in sales. Rita was sent to pacify her. They have hemmed her in and left her no choice. She is glad Paul contacted her; she needs a sympathetic ear.

The same man who put her at ease on the island is already sitting at the table when she arrives at the restaurant. He stands up to embrace her; his soft paunch pressing against her midsection feels warm and comforting. This is not a young man, a man inexperienced in the ways of the world. This is a man who has lived long enough to have survived the disappointment of a lost love, a marriage undone, a man who has been in the real world for years. He knows life can be unfair. When he nuzzles her ear, the tension of the day leaves her, relaxing her muscles. She likes that he does not use the newfangled scents touted by celebrities that suffuse the hallways of modern offices. She likes the gray hair at his temples. She likes that he has not dyed it.

“So here we are,” he says. “Fish out of our tropical waters.”

“Fish in cold water,” she retorts.

“Come now, it’s only fall.” He grins, white polished teeth against dark-plum skin. “Winter is still waiting for us.” He holds out the chair for her. An old-fashioned man. Tony, her ex-husband, was not an old-fashioned man. He wanted her to get on with the times.
Isn’t that what you women
want?
he would say.
Didn’t you want to be treated like men? Doesn’t
feel good, does it, when it bites you on the ass?

Tony was crude and inconsiderate; Paul is refreshingly polite and thoughtful. He stands up when she comes to the table. He pulls out the chair for her. He arrives early at the restaurant so she will not be kept waiting.

“So, how was your first day back at work?”

She wanted a sympathetic ear when her secretary gave her his message, but now in the intimate setting of the fancy restaurant Paul has chosen for them, she does not want to recall her humiliation from the conference room. She remembers their last night together, his arms around her when they danced on the deck of the restaurant, the sea below them glittering in the moonlight. What happened at work should not spoil her personal life. There is Paul sitting across from her, happy to see her again. There is her mother to worry about, the surgery she will face soon, her life hanging in the balance. There is the apartment to prepare for her mother and father. A plan gone awry in the office should not unsettle her; the novel will gather dust once the first three weeks of flurry in the sales department dies down and their misplaced marketing strategy backfires. But Paul asks his question again, and all the hurt of the day returns to her.

She has been disregarded, disrespected. They did not consult her. They made their decision with no consideration for her input. She should have been involved from the beginning. Now she is expected to accept the decision they have made for her, to be satisfied with Tanya’s patronizing remark.
It’s the same book
, Tanya said. But it will never be read as the same book, Anna knows. Readers who are interested in literary fiction will pass over a book with such a sexually explicit cover. Readers who simply want to be entertained and not challenged will discard it after the first page when the sentences become too complex, too intricate, too long, when the ideas they are invited to ponder are too complicated.

“It was hell,” she says.

“Your first day?”

She tells him about the book cover, the decision they made for her. “They could have called me. E-mailed me. Anything. They were all gloating, all those puffed-up boys in the art department.”

Paul listens quietly as she spills out her anger and frustration, and when she is done, he asks, “And your mother? Have you heard from her?”

For a second the questions jar her and her anger rises again. Her back stiffens and she pushes her chair back, widening the distance between them.

“But Anna,” he croons, leaning toward her, “in the long run, what does it matter?”

“What does it matter? Would you have liked it if the same thing was done to you? You are the head of surgery in your hospital. Would you have liked it, while you were away, if one of your doctors made a decision on your patient without consulting you?”

“No. I would not have liked it. I would not have liked it because it could be a matter of life and death for my patient.”

“And don’t you think it could be the same for my writer?”

“Anna, I think you’re being a little melodramatic, no?”

Old-fashioned. Why had she not considered the downside of being
old-fashioned?

The waiter approaches their table. “I’m not hungry,” she says spitefully, and the waiter’s face crumbles. He has just finished reciting a list of culinary wonders the chef is famous for. She has not eaten all day; her stomach is growling, but she says, “I’ll have the soup and salad.”

“That’s it?” The waiter stares at her, refusing to believe she has been able to resist his litany of mouth-watering treats.

“That’s it,” she says.

Paul orders from every category on the menu: appetizer—he chooses smoked salmon; soup—he’ll have the hearty lobster bisque; entrée—he selects steak, medium-rare; dessert—chocolate cake à la mode. But when the waiter leaves, he begins an apology of sorts. “Look, Anna,” he says, “I’m talking about perspective. I know what happened hurt you a lot, but you’ll get to live another day, to have another chance with another writer—perhaps even the same writer—to make things right again. In my profession we don’t always get that other chance. A patient may not be alive the next day for me to correct a mistake.”

He is right, but he hasn’t considered that she may be right too. He doesn’t understand. Scientists rarely do. In high schools and colleges, the humanities are expendable. When funding is questionable, courses in literature are among the first to be eliminated from the curriculum. Who took us to the moon? the scientists ask. Certainly not the novelist. Who discovered the human genome, the potential cures for devastating diseases? Administrators in business departments are no less distrustful of the usefulness of made-up stories, their term for novels. How do stories help the economy? they ask. Who invented the Internet? Not the storyteller. And so on and so on they prattle, until humanities courses become an indulgence to be endured on the way to serious studies.

“Books,” she says, “have influenced every great movement in history. Even atheists today are shaped by the stories Luke, Mark, and John told.” She goes down a list, incomplete she knows, but she wants to make her point. She names Homer, Sophocles, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Camus, Sartre. “And where would the civil rights movement have been without the inspiration and prophetic words of Ellison, Baldwin, Hurston, and Wright?” she tells him. “And without de Beauvoir and Audre Lorde, how long would it have taken the women’s movement to get off the ground? C.L.R. James gave us stories that helped us in the Caribbean begin to free ourselves from the shackles of colonialism. What our society needs is to be inspired again, to be reminded of the values that have sustained the human race over the centuries. Politicians cannot do that for all their talk of family values. Look where they’ve got us. Bickering in camps as to who can keep his pants on and who takes them off at the drop of a hat when a pretty girl passes by. It is writers who remind us of our human condition, that we are all in the same predicament together, all banished from Eden, all condemned to die, all flawed creatures who should be tolerant of flaws in others. That we should be our brother’s keeper.”