Boundaries (10 page)

Paul reviews the list of pre-op tests Beatrice will have to take the next day. John Sinclair says he will go with his wife and stay with her until all the tests are done. Anna says she will stay with them too.

When Paul leaves, John Sinclair tells Anna it won’t be necessary for her to accompany them. They’ll be fine, he says. He has noticed her laptop and the manuscript pages she put on the table. “Stay here and do your work. Your mother and I can manage.”

Beatrice Sinclair waves away Anna’s objections. “It’s settled,” she says. Anna can walk with them to the hospital in the morning, but she should return to the apartment to do her work. “You have an important job. Head of a publishing company.”

“Head of an imprint in a publishing company.” Anna is quick to correct her.

Later, just as she is about to turn in for the night, her mother remarks that Paul seems taken with her. “He admires you,” she says to Anna. “I think things will work out between you two.”

“He’s doing this for you,” Anna says. “Because Daddy was so good to his father.”

Her mother does not try to dissuade her. “If you say so,” she responds, but there is no conviction in her voice. As Anna turns to leave, she stops her. “You looked lovely today in that red sweater, Anna. Red suits you, so becoming for you.” And blood rushes to Anna’s face.

SEVEN

T
rue to his word, her father manages. Anna leaves her parents at the department where her mother will have the first of her pre-op tests. The nurse tells Anna her mother should be ready to return to the apartment around three. She will call her when the tests are done. Anna tells her father she will collect them in time for tea together at the apartment. “At four,” her father says and winks at her. He is a stickler for punctuality, for the routines that mark the passing of his day: breakfast at seven-thirty; lunch at twelve-thirty; tea at four; dinner at six. At night he crosses off another day on the calendar he keeps in the drawer of his bedside table. He quotes Yeats. “
An aged man is but a paltry thing
. I shall sail to Byzantium,” he says.

Her mother does not approve. She tells him he is too morbid. “You have life now, and the promise of eternal life with God and the angels afterward.”

“I want eternal life here,” he says.

“Think of the promise.”

Now it is she who is facing the possibility of the imminent fulfillment of that promise.

“Oh, your mother can’t have anything to eat,” the nurse says to Anna. “Surgery tomorrow.”

Surgery tomorrow, but today Anna knows she must focus on work. Tanya Foster has been patient, but soon her patience will grow thin. She had already given her an extension on her vacation, two more weeks that allowed her to be with her mother until she had her last chemo treatment, but she cannot expect Tanya Foster to be as generous after her mother’s surgery.

At the apartment she opens her laptop and logs on. An e-mail from Tim Greene is waiting for her. It begins with a long preamble. He wishes her well. His prayers are with her that her mother’s surgery will be successful. He knows it will be, because the mother of his good friend was in a similar situation and she survived; now she is in total remission. He gives more details about the friend, about the mother. Blah, blah, blah … Anna skims through the lines. Her eyes catch the name
Raine
. She stops and goes back. He has finished the edits of Raine’s new novel and will meet with the author later in the afternoon. He has a few ideas on how Raine can make the novel more marketable. He makes no mention of Anna’s notes, her edits on the novel. He does not ask for her opinion.
I have some thoughts on how we
can make the novel a big seller
, he writes.

Is that all that is needed? All that has to be done is to make the novel marketable, make it a best seller, and to hell with making it a better book? Anna reaches for the phone and begins punching the numbers for Equiano but before she gets to the last one, she presses the off button. What’s the use? she thinks. He has already been given the authority. Raine has been assigned to him. It is obvious he does not intend to consult her.

There is more in the e-mail. She reads the last lines:
Of
course, you will have the final word. I’ll be sure to let Raine know that.

The final word about what? About how to make the sex scenes steamier? About how to make the women more alluring? Bigger breasts here, firmer legs there? About how to make the men sexier? Rippled pecs there, stronger thighs here, organs bursting out of skin-tight pants? A man rips off the bodice of a ludicrously curvy woman. He slits her skirt and exposes a thong barely covering the triangle of her private parts. The story is predictable: the woman struggles, but yields eventually. For the man is really a good man who is plagued by the demons of a deprived past. The woman is really a good woman; she will help him overcome his past. Together they will ride into the sunset. All the characters are stock figures mined from the erotic dreams of lonely women. They are beautiful, they are sexy, and if they are not rich at the beginning of the story, they will be at the end. And is that not the point? Is that not what lonely women want to read, curled up in empty beds with only the comfort of vicarious pleasures? For black women the statistics are grimmer than those the researchers at Harvard report. White women have until forty, but the axe falls on black women barely out of their twenties.

Is that what Tony wanted her to understand when he told her she was lucky? “Look around you. How many black women do you see who have a man?” he said to her, his lips curled in disdain. “How many have a husband?”

Did he expect her to stay silent and do nothing while he cavorted with his mistress? Paula had warned her when she said yes to Tony. “He is an American,” Paula said. “You are entering territory you know little about.” But Anna believed she knew all she needed to know. American men are monogamous; American men are happy to grow old with the woman they married. Before cable TV would expose this lie, such were the stories from America that her newly independent island aired on TV and showed in the movies. A well-ordered family is a mirror to a well-ordered government; one woman for one man and it follows, like day follows night, one nation under one God. That seemed the philosophy fueling the prevalence of these fairy tales.

Anna was a child. Rationally, as an adult, she knew those stories of monogamy in America were false, but such is the power of lies imprinted on an impressionable young mind. They become myth, a sort of truth. An American husband would be faithful, and when her father betrayed her mother, she made up her mind she would not marry a Caribbean man; an American man would have kept his vows.

Her father loved his wife, yet he had a mistress, fell in love with another woman. Her name was Thelma. That was what he said to Anna the day his traitor’s gift rolled off her mother’s skeletal arms. It was a diamond-studded bracelet he had given her mother for her birthday, not seeming to notice the veins that rose on her arms like hard wires or the two knots protruding at the top of her breast bone, or that her cheekbones had become scaffolding for her slackened flesh and her eyes were sunk in pools ringed with black circles. He was in love and that was all that mattered.

When her mother had enough, she fought for him and won him back. He was remorseful; she was forgiving. Now he is an attentive husband, a loving husband. While his wife undergoes the pre-op tests for the mastectomy the doctor will perform on her left breast tomorrow, he waits for her in the lobby of the hospital. He is anxious, he is nervous, he is afraid. He does not want to lose the wife he has loved for more than forty years.
Loves
, he says now to Anna, emphasizing the tense. Loves as he had always loved her, will love her until the end of time.

“My father was the last person in the world I expected to cheat on his wife,” Anna once said to Paula. “All that talk he gave me when I was growing up about integrity and character. And yet he couldn’t keep the vow he made to his wife before the church and the law. He expected me to empathize with him because he was unhappy, because in spite of years of happiness with my mother, he could not manage one brief spell of unhappiness. He could have turned to her; they could have worked out their problem together—whatever it was—but no, it was easier to get sympathy from a woman who had never lived with him, who had no idea what it was like to live with his flaws.

Like a child, he laid his head on the breast of another woman instead of facing his problems.”

“You’re too hard on your father,” Paula had responded.

“I’ve forgiven him.”

“It doesn’t seem that way.”

“I just haven’t forgotten. I won’t make the same mistake my mother made.”

“And what is that?”

“Marry a Caribbean man.”

“American men are no better,” Paula said.

“At least they believe in monogamy.”

“Serial monogamy,” Paula said. “They marry, divorce, marry again, divorce again.”

Tony is marrying again. An affair was the reason their marriage ended in divorce. He did not deny the affair; he did not apologize. He was unhappy, he said. Unhappy as her father claimed he was unhappy. But her father apologized. He did not leave her mother. Now her father does all he can to convince his wife of his remorse, to prove to her his undying love and devotion.

Tanya gave Tim Greene the manuscripts from Raine and B. Benton but she has not taken the others Anna acquired. By two-thirty Anna finishes the edits on one of them. It’s a story about a black surgeon in Georgia who saves the life of the wife of a prominent white official in the Jim Crow South when black doctors were not allowed to touch white women, even in an emergency. Anna is proud that she will be publishing this novel. She believes publishers should be the guardians of our culture and history. The novel about the black surgeon in the Jim Crow South is not one of those mindless books that Tanya Foster seems to think black readers yearn to read. It is a good book. It fills the missing pages of a history yet to be fully unearthed. Anna believes that if this novel is made available, there will be readers for it.
If you build it, they will come.
A line from a movie. It is her credo too.

She e-mails her notes to the writer, turns off her computer, and goes to the kitchen to prepare tea for her parents. She finds cutlery, cups, saucers, and plates in the kitchen cupboard. They are clean, neatly stacked on the shelf, but she washes them, conscious as she squeezes liquid soap onto the dish cloth how she is not unlike her mother. Lydia cleans the house, but Beatrice inspects with a duster in her hand. From the basket she brought with her Anna takes out the package of Crix biscuits, the marmalade, the box of tea, the Carnation milk, and the sugar. She places them on the table. Her mother can have the tea with them but not the biscuits. She makes a place for her mother between her father and herself. She has fifteen more minutes before she leaves for the hospital. She flicks open her laptop again and logs on. There’s an e-mail from Bess Milford:
You don’t
mean to just give up. I hate the cover. I HATE, HATE, HATE IT. It’s
insulting to me.

She cannot deny that Bess Milford is right. The cover is insulting not only to her but to every black writer who thinks of himself or herself as a writer who is black and not merely as a black writer. Anna e-mails a response:
I will do what I can.

She closes the laptop and reaches for her jacket. Through the window she sees her parents. Her mother’s tests must have finished earlier than expected, as they have decided not to wait for her to accompany them back to the apartment. They are walking arm in arm, close to each other. Her mother’s head is resting on her father’s shoulder. Anna cannot recall ever having seen them display such intimacy in public before. They are private people, people who subscribe to the conviction that character is built on a person’s ability to control their private thoughts, their private feelings. They believe excessive displays of emotions are character flaws. Nobody likes you to bleed all over them, Anna’s mother once said to her. She was only eight years old.
Keep your skeletons in the closet
.
Wash your dirty linen
in private
. So Beatrice Sinclair did not tell her husband that tumors were growing in her breast and under her arm, and even when they bled on her husband’s vest that she wore to bed, she kept her silence—though by then she knew he knew. Her husband too would wait until she gave him permission before admitting what he knew.

Vulgar
was the word her mother used to express her disapproval of couples who embrace in public. Now there she is, leaning heavily against her husband, embracing him in the open where everyone can see.

Is it age that has softened them? Fear that there may not be much more time left for them, time for proprieties now seeming foolish, inconsequential, given the brevity of life? Days and hours count for them now; they cannot waste them.

A sudden wind sweeps through the trees. The leaves shudder and turn on their backs; some flutter to the ground. Fall will not be far away. Her father pulls her mother closer to him. Perhaps she should not have tried so hard to persuade her mother to come to this strange, cold land, Anna finds herself thinking. Perhaps in spite of the inadequate hospitals on the island, the services that can be erratic at best, it would have been better for her mother to have surgery there. Perhaps on the island with her mind more at ease, comfortable in familiar surroundings, her mother would have a better chance for recovery.

Anna grabs her jacket and a coat she has brought for her mother. It was warmer when they left early that morning, and her mother had refused to put on the coat. “I’ll look like an old lady in that thing,” she said.

Had she looked like an old lady in that thing when she wore it two seasons ago? Anna wonders. Is that why Tony felt justified in walking out on her? “You’ve changed,” he had said. “You used to be so …” He did not need to finish the sentence. She used to be so stylish. She used to laugh. But it’s hard to be stylish or to laugh when in the third year of your marriage your husband loses his job, when your income spirals down and you can no longer keep up with the payments for the expensive condo your husband bought, or the Benz he liked to drive. She had to work harder, to earn her way up the corporate ladder. And didn’t she win the prize with her position at Equiano? She pooh-pooh’d Paula when she waved the flag of a vice presidency before her, yet it was exhilarating for a brief second to entertain the possibility. But Tony left her for someone younger, someone prettier, and in the end, he blamed her.