Boundaries (20 page)

She is sitting comfortably on the couch when Anna comes home, her legs propped up on the footstool, her eyes glued to the TV, the channel turned to
As the World Turns
. She is addicted to this soap opera. “Going to watch some sinning,” she says when she retires to her bedroom after lunch every day on the island. She is a good Catholic. She believes premarital sex is a sin; she was a virgin when she married. She believes adultery is a sin worse than premarital sex. Her husband went to confession after he ended his affair and she forgave him. Now they take Communion together in church on Sundays, proof of his fidelity.

Anna sometimes wonders if her father’s dedication to her mother is not part of the penance the priest imposed on him in the confessional, but such an idea is laughable; she has witnessed too many tender moments between them. The expression on her father’s face when he changed the dressing on her mother’s wound stirred her to the depths of her heart. Would that she could marry a man who would feel the same about her! If her father’s devotion was imposed, it is an imposition he has willingly embraced. He does not want to lose this wife he adores.

Her mother turns away from the TV when Anna greets her. “I can’t believe what those women get away with,” she says. She decries fornication and adultery in the real world, but the antics of lovers on the screen fascinate her. She will rarely miss an episode of her favorite soap opera and so Anna has asked Paula to tape the ones that aired while her mother was in the hospital.

“Only on TV.” Anna hangs up her jacket in the closet. “How was your day?”

“Nothing to complain about,” her mother says, and turns back to the TV.

“Did you have dinner?” Anna prepared the meal the night before and left it in the refrigerator.

“Yes,” her mother says, her eyes still fixed on the TV. “Your father served me. And washed the dishes too!”

Her father is in the bedroom watching the news on the other TV as he does every evening. Without work to keep him busy, he is often morose. Anna suggested he write his memoir. It took him two days to jettison the idea. She proposed reading and gave him books she thought he would like, but he was restless. In his youth, and until almost the end of his seventies, he was an active man—but now he has little patience for the stillness writing and reading requires. He prefers walking around his fish pond, dropping dog nuggets into the water, and watching his fish zoom toward them. He likes swooping out frogs from the pond with a net and taking them to the river. He likes going on long walks down the streets in their neighborhood and chasing off the stray dogs that nip at his heels with the gnarled stick he carries; only in the evening is he ready to sit still.

His addiction to the news is not unlike her mother’s addiction to the soaps. Her mother gets vicarious thrills from the scandalous antics of feisty women and he gets intellectual stimulation from finding faults in the arguments of pompous politicians, safe in front of the TV screen where he can rely on no one contradicting him as he sneers at their folly and criticizes their grand plans for improving the country. He used to love a good argument, winning, besting his opponent with his razor-sharp intellect. But his memory began to slip, and now he avoids conflicts that show him up, where he has little chance of winning. His pride is his worst enemy, her mother says. When he watches American TV, he tells Anna there is much he can advise the government on the fair treatment of workers, especially migrant workers. But he remains in awe of America’s apparent disregard for the social status of people who break the law. The Watergate trials riveted him. He was astounded by the near indictment of a president and the imprisonment of cabinet officials. “That would never happen on our island,” he said to Anna on one of her visits. “Here,
the wicked prize itself
/
Buys out the law
.” He was not dissuaded when Anna remarked that most of the time the wicked prize has the same power and influence in America too.

When she knocks on the door he flicks off the TV and springs to his feet. “So how was it to be back at work?” He walks over to her.

“I got flowers,” she says.

“From the office?” He kisses her on her forehead.

“No, from Paul.”

His eyes crinkle to slits, his thin lips spread. “Paul’s a good man like his father. No one could buy Henry Bishop. He was a union man, but above all a principled man. I think your Paul is just like him.”

In the morning, before she walked into her office, she would have stopped him when he said
your
Paul. She would have objected, not because she did not want Paul Bishop to be
her
Paul, but because she had learned to be careful. Divorce made her careful. Tony was
her
Tony and she was caught defenseless when he was no longer hers. But now there are tulips on her desk and a card with a message that promises so much that she pressed it to her heart.

“I like him too.”

“Carpe diem,” her father says and winks at her.

Later at night she calls Paul. “How did you know I like tulips?” she asks him.

He laughs. “I know more about you than you think.”

The warm glow that spread across her body when she opened his card returns. She does not want to spoil this feeling with talk of work. She was angry with Tim Greene, with his patronizing air.
Take that frown off your face
. Of course she was frowning; she was burning up. He was standing there cool as a cucumber. And why wouldn’t he be? He had the upper hand. He’d had the upper hand all along, believing he could trick her into submission with his sycophantic deference to her supposed position as his boss. How he and Tanya must have laughed at her behind her back! Tanya was humoring her when she asked for her opinion about the jacket for Bess Milford’s novel. Tim Greene must have been sure of himself at that meeting with the sales department, leaning back in his chair and speaking to her in that patronizing tone.
It’s just a poster, Anna
.

They had humiliated her. Perhaps she was wanting in her enthusiasm for the books that were the most profitable for the company, but she never rejected them outright. She still approved their publication. What she wanted was balance, balance between books published strictly for their commercial value and books one could appreciate for their aesthetic and intellectual merits. She believed that was why she was hired, why Tanya allowed her to publish two books of literary fiction every year. But two books have proved too many with the allure of dollars. The company needs a businessman. Tim Greene is the man they want.

Anna forces herself to push these thoughts to the back on her mind. She is on the phone with Paul, Paul who wrote to her that she remains in his heart.

“What do you know about me?” she says, aware she is asking for a compliment, for reassurance that her impulse was right: he is the man who could make her happy, the man she could spend the rest of her life with.

“Did you like the photograph?” he asks.

“Every time I return home, I go there,” she says. “It’s not the best beach for swimming; the water is too rough. But I like watching the waves. I like being so close to the Atlantic, knowing I am at one end of an ocean that links me to where I now live and to where I was born.”

“And which we crossed, chained in the holds of slave ships.”

She is momentarily taken aback.

“Oh, I don’t get depressed about it,” he says, when he notices her silence. “It’s just that you can’t look at the Atlantic from our side of the world without thinking about how we got there. We are like the coconut trees in the photograph.”

She knows the story about the coconut trees, though she had not learned it in school. The British were educating girls and boys to serve them; the history of the Caribbean was irrelevant to them. How else would an island empire thousands of miles away from the countries it colonized keep the inhabitants from revolting? There had to be a front guard loyal to the Crown that would hold the natives in check. Slavemasters in America were torturing the Africans they enslaved for reading, but the British had discovered the hard way the truth of the maxim,
Nature abhors
a vacuum. Fill their minds with your stories and they will adore you;
leave their minds free to roam and they will hatch plans to destroy you.

Anna found out about the coconut trees purely by chance. Once, on a visit to her parents, passing by a bookstore at the airport, a coffee-table volume about the history of the island caught her eye. It was in that book she learned that coconuts were not indigenous to the island. Their presence there was accidental. Over two hundred years ago, a ship loaded with coconuts on its way out of the Orinoco River had almost capsized in the waters near her island. It righted itself but lost most of its cargo. Strong currents swept the coconuts to the shore; within months they were sprouting leaves.

“They remind me of us,” Paul says. “We are transplants too.”

“But the coconuts took root on the island.”

“Except, of course, we have voluntarily transplanted ourselves again.”

“This time without our roots,” she says quietly.

“Now you understand why I know so much about you. We’re the same.”

He means their history is the same. It is not what she hoped to hear. She had hoped for something more romantic. She had hoped he would say he felt the same way she felt. All is quiet in the office when Anna comes to work the next morning. The receptionist says a perfunctory hello and swiftly casts her eyes back down on her desk. She shuffles through a stack of papers, flips one over, and studies it as if she has some pressing task she cannot interrupt with paying one more second of attention to Anna. Down the corridor, past rows of cubicles to her office, Anna can see bodies bent forward, eyes fixed on computer screens. No one looks up except two women who glance at her briefly, smile, and then abruptly turn away. Tim Greene is nowhere in sight.

Anna returns to the receptionist and asks if she knows when Tim is expected in the office. “He’s at a meeting,” the receptionist says.

Another meeting. There was one the day before too
.

“Having breakfast with Ms. Foster, of course,” the receptionist explains, responding to Anna’s query whether the meeting is in the conference room or in another building. The whiff of impatience in her voice borders disrespect.

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“They have to clear an office for him.” The receptionist continues to flip through the stack of papers. “Ms. Foster’s office.”

Anna returns to her desk. In the absence of the usual office conversations, the clatter of computer keys is magnified. The phone startles her when it rings. There’s an insistent buzzing in the air, not of machines nor of voices; it is the kind of vibration one feels when wires are pulled taut between rigid poles. It is invisible, soundless, but palpable. They know, all of them, Anna thinks. They are awaiting their fate; they are awaiting
her
fate, staying on the periphery until they find out where the axe will fall.

Fifteen minutes later, Rita knocks on her door—Rita, the butt of jokes among the men at the watercooler. She always wants to please, always has a kind word for everyone. “Loved the novel,” she had said to Anna, as if to deflect the blow she knew was coming from the boys in the art department who’d already decided what was to happen to Bess Milford’s cover. Anna wishes she could tell her that the tight pencil skirts she wears do not flatter her figure. Only the superskinny girls look alluring in those tight skirts. Rita’s hips are too wide, her legs too thick. She would look better in the sort of pantsuits Hillary Clinton wears no matter the occasion.

Rita has brought her a cup of tea. She has prepared it the way Anna likes, with milk, no sugar. “I don’t think things are as bad as they may seem,” she says, handing Anna the tea. “I think we’re going to be okay. I think things will be just fine.”

Anna is glad to see her. The silence in the office is unnerving. She is glad for this chance to bring everything in the open, to put an end to the tension she can feel rumbling down the corridor toward her like a stream gathering speed over loose pebbles. “I suppose you already know Tim’s going to be our new boss,” she says.

“Change is not always bad. Change can be good.” Rita recites these words like a robot on autopilot. She does not like conflict, head-on conflict especially. She wants to be liked. Anna has no doubt she agreed with the choice of cover for Bess Milford’s novel, perhaps even recommended it, but she left the heavy lifting for Tanya.

“Don’t worry about me,” Anna says. “I’m fine.”

Rita frowns and twists her mouth from side to side, and it occurs to Anna that though her colleague has come ostensibly to cheer her up, perhaps she has also come to be cheered up. Perhaps it is her own job she is worried about.

“Is the change going to affect you?” Anna asks.

“Oh, no! Tim has assured me …” She brings fingers to her mouth and presses them to her closed lips. Her eyes skim the floor.

Of course, Tim has assured her
.
Tim is the new boss.
Anna points to a chair in her room. “Sit, sit,” she says. “I’m glad to hear it. I’m glad you’re okay.”

“And you’re going to be okay too. I came to tell you that. I know it here.” Rita taps her chest where her heart beats.

“Know?”

“There’s no one who has finer taste. I loved all the books you picked.” She eases herself into the chair Anna offered.

“Finer taste is not in question here.” Anna surprises herself by the sudden bitterness in her tone.

“Even Tim said so.” A forced smile brightens Rita’s face. “He said the company was lucky to have you. There is no better editor around.”

So he has established her title: she is an editor. She is fully aware that this is her role, but she is also a manager, the head of Equiano. Anna does not know what angers her more: that he should so casually define her role publicly without giving her the courtesy of notifying the staff herself, or that he has so rapidly assumed his position as her boss when only days ago he was working for her and not the other way around. “It’s nice to know he has a high opinion of me,” she says evenly.