Boundaries (5 page)

“No, but you don’t let them see where you live either.”

“You’re not being fair, Paula. They are always busy when they come.”

“Have you ever invited them?”

Anna admits she hasn’t.

“The problem is that you resent your parents’ expectations for you. But your mother watches TV. She knows what’s going on in America. She’s not naïve. I don’t think she has the impressions you think she has. She’ll be proud of you. You live in a beautiful apartment that you own. Fort Greene is becoming the place to live in the city …”

“It’s not Manhattan,” Anna says, but she is merely faking petulance, for little by little Paula is easing her qualms. Perhaps her mother will not disapprove of the life she has made for herself in America.

“Look how much you have achieved,” Paula presses on. “Senior editor, head of Equiano Books! That’s no small achievement.”

“Tanya Foster left a message on my voice mail,” Anna says. “She liked Bess Milford’s novel. She told me the people in sales are excited about it too.”

“See, there you go! You’ve managed to make them take a literary novel by a black writer seriously. I see great things for you in the company, Anna. A vice presidency.”

“No expectations. Okay, Paula?”

“Okay. But if or
when
that happens, your mother will be thrilled.”

Tanya Foster sounds ecstatic when Anna calls the next morning. Her secretary tells Anna that Tanya has been waiting for days to hear from her. The news is all good. The woman’s heels click against the tiled floor in rapid little steps as she goes to fetch Tanya.

“Anna!” Tanya is so excited she practically shouts out her name. “We’ve missed you here. Six weeks is a long time. I don’t think we could have made it another day without you.”

Hyperbole, but it is exhilarating to Anna. “Well, I’m here now,” she says.

“Sorry about your mother. How is she?”

Anna tells her about the tumors, the one in her mother’s left breast, the one under her arm. “She let them grow so large, she needed chemo to reduce them before she could—”

“How old is she? Seventy?”

“Seventy-two,” Anna says.

“That’s a long time. She’s lived a long time.”

A queasiness rumbles through Anna’s stomach and the exhilaration she had briefly felt subsides. “Seventy-two is not that old,” she says.

“She’s had a good life, no?”

Her mother has indeed had a good life, but she is still alive; she still wants more years. Anna finds herself feeling defensive of the mother she left behind. Hadn’t her mother said she was no longer needed at home and urged her to go back to work? Hadn’t she seemed fine after she returned home from her final chemo treatment? She wasn’t nauseous; she had dinner at the usual time. Paul Bishop said her mother was strong. Even Dr. Ramdoolal approved, though he did ask if her business in New York was urgent, seeming to imply that only urgent business would take a daughter away from her mother when she was ill. But her business was indeed urgent. Tanya Foster tells her so now.

“You came back just in time. I gave the boys in the art department the summary you sent me of Bess Milford’s novel and they came up with a terrific cover. They’re practically buzzing with excitement.”

So quickly?
But Anna restrains herself; she does not give voice to the hesitation that grips her throat. She should be pleased; it has sometimes taken her weeks to get the attention of the art department for one of her books. What is it about this novel that has the boys in the art department practically buzzing?

“The salespeople are excited too. I know you’ll love the cover, Anna. I can’t wait for you to see it.” And as if suddenly remembering how their conversation began, Tanya adds, lowering her voice, “Look, don’t worry about your mother—your father is with her, right? I’m sure the doctors there will take good care of her.”

Anna does not say that her mother will be coming to New York. She does not say it will be a doctor here, not a doctor there, who will be treating her. She has a week, seven days, before her parents arrive; there will be time enough to let Tanya know, if she needs to tell her. For now she does not want to lose the momentum that seems to be building in favor of Bess Milford’s novel. It isn’t that she thinks Tanya is insincere. She believes Tanya truly sympathizes with her, but she knows her mantra: a hundred percent to the company for a hundred percent of your salary. Tanya would think she wouldn’t be able to give a hundred percent to the company if her attention is divided between work and caring for her mother. She’d think Anna would be distracted. Tanya is not married. If she has a lover, she has kept him a secret. She comes from the Midwest, Iowa. Her parents died when she was young. She has revealed nothing about siblings, if she has any, or whether she has aunts or uncles or cousins. She gives a hundred percent to Windsor Publishing Company. She expects Anna to give a hundred percent to Equiano Books.

So Anna tells her that her mother is in good hands on the island. She has the best oncologist there. She says her father is a very attentive husband. She says she isn’t worried.

“Good,” Tanya responds. “I knew I made the right decision when I chose you to head Equiano. When can you come in?”

Anna tells her she expects to be in the office before noon.

“Perfect,” Tanya says. “I’ll have the art department and salespeople come meet with you. Would one o’clock work?”

One o’clock, Anna agrees, would work well for her.

Anna spots the new man immediately. He is standing next to the Xerox machine with a stack of papers in his hand. He puts the papers in the feeder and presses the button. The machine makes a whirring sound and pages slide out to the basket below.

There is something about the man that arrests Anna’s attention. He is not wearing a jacket, which isn’t exceptional—only a couple of the male editors wear jackets—but his pants look like they should be paired with a jacket, the white cuffed shirt and striped tie part of an ensemble for a suit. None of the men wear suits to work, especially a welltailored, probably designer suit like the one this man appears to be wearing. He is obviously not an office assistant or one of the young men who are assigned the clerical tasks of delivering the mail, ferrying manuscripts from one editor to another, filing, and copying. He could be a visitor, but if he’s a visitor, he must be a close friend of one of the workers to have so casually taken off his jacket and be using the Xerox machine. As if this is where he works.

At the very moment this thought flits across Anna’s consciousness, she hears Tanya calling out to her: “Ah, Anna, you’re here!” Tanya comes quickly toward her and air-kisses her on both cheeks. “How good you look! The sun has done great things to your complexion. You positively glow. I should get some sun myself. I look like a ghost next to you.”

Tanya does not look like a ghost, but she has an ephemeral quality about her. She is not one of those rosy-cheeked Midwesterners with German roots. Her background is Scandinavian. This much she has said about her parents. Her skin is doughy-white even in the summer, her hair blond, straight, and lanky, falling to her shoulders, which are slight like the rest of her body. Her arms and legs are skinny, her hips slim, but her figure is in style these days when anorexic models are paraded everywhere on billboards, magazines, and on TV as beauties to be admired.

Tanya is quite proud of her figure and clearly has no intention of changing her size or her color. Anna has caught her several times gazing at the models in fashion magazines on her desk. In New York City, where the ethnic populations of Latinos, continental and diasporic Africans, olive-skinned Europeans from the Mediterranean, Middle Easterners, Indians, Chinese, and Koreans are threatening to overwhelm the majority, she stands out: an American of European ancestry with roots surely in the far northern climes. Anna thinks Tanya likes that distinction.

“Come,” she says, “I want to introduce you to Tim Greene. He’s our new hire.”

Before Anna can ask,
For which department? Where has Tim
Greene been assigned?
Tanya waves to the man at the copy machine. “Tim!”

He is flipping through the pages he has just retrieved from the basket. He pulls one from the stack and turns around.

“Come meet your boss,” Tanya calls out to him.

Tim Greene walks over to Anna. He holds out his hand and a smile crosses his lips but not his eyes. “Boss, nice to meet you.” Anna guesses he is in his midthirties, younger than she is by perhaps five years or so. He is tall, but not imposing. Like Tanya, he is fashionably slim. In fact, everything about Tim Greene is magazine fashionable—his clothes, his close-cropped hair, his long legs, his slim hips.

“I thought you could do with an assistant,” Tanya says. “You know, with Tammy Mohun leaving so abruptly.”

Tammy Mohun, an Indian from South Africa, was Anna’s office assistant until their colonial pasts became an impenetrable wall neither could breach. Under apartheid in South Africa, Indians were given an advantage over blacks; in the British colonies they were given five acres or passage back to India. Before her trip to the island, Anna had briefly discussed her need for a replacement for Tammy Mohun, but Tanya had said nothing about a new man on the phone that morning.

“Assistant editor,” Tanya clarifies, beaming at Tim Greene.

“Assistant editor?”
Tammy Mohun was a secretary
, Anna thinks.

“He comes highly recommended,” Tanya continues, still beaming at Tim Greene. “To tell you the truth, we poached him from one of our competitors.”

“Come on, Tanya!” Tim protests unconvincingly. “I wanted to be part of the great things you’re doing here. It’s exciting what’s going on at Equiano.”

“Tim’s the best,” Tanya says. A faint pinkish blush climbs up her neck and stains her cheeks. But if Tim Greene’s blood rose to his face with embarrassment over the praise Tanya has heaped on him, neither she nor Tanya would be able to tell. Tim Greene is dark-skinned, an African American. Of that fact, Anna is certain. There is not the slightest trace of an accent in his voice from anywhere else but America. He speaks with an Upper West Side Harlem accent: a New Yorker, but raised with relatives one generation away from that mass exodus of African Americans from the South. Anna recognizes the playful drawl, the ends of words disappearing in the back of the throat. The listener has to lean forward to hear him clearly, or must ask the speaker to repeat his words. A trick. A mask. Instinctive. It would not be easy to tell what he is really thinking.

“I plan to do my best,” Tim Greene says.

“Well, I’m just glad you jumped ship.”

A flicker of movement travels across Tim’s lips, the muscles hardening, but in the sweetest voice he says, “Your offer was too tempting to refuse.”

Tanya’s eyes widen, but she does not contradict him. “I thought what you need is an assistant editor,” she explains to Anna. “Things are moving and shaking here. You’ve done a terrific job! The books you edited are flying off the shelves. We can hardly keep up with the demand for all that chick lit, urban lit, ghetto lit. Isn’t that so, Tim?”

“Raine and B. Benton are your best sellers.” The smile on Tim Greene’s lips remains frozen. “I checked the figures. At last count, each of them sold more than a million copies.”

Raine is the queen of black exotica. Every page of her novels sizzles with explicit sex. In B. Benton’s books neighborhood gangs slaughter each other with as little remorse and as much glee as if they had crushed an army of cockroaches crawling through the crevices of their filthy apartments.

“And there are more in the pipeline,” Tanya says. “See what a good job you’ve done, Anna? You should be proud of yourself.”

These are not the books Anna wants to edit. These are the books that are necessary for Equiano to stay afloat, to remain in the black. Without them Equiano would fold, but she wants more. A better list. She has been in the publishing business too long not to know that literary fiction written by any writer, black or white, is a hard sell. But no one has questioned the intellectual capabilities of white people, no one has stereotyped them over four hundred years as intellectually inferior. One reads a strictly commercial novel by a white writer and one does not say, or secretly think:
This is to be expected. This is the best these people
can do; they are incapable of doing any better. This is who these people
are: the pimps, hustlers, thieves, golddiggers, abusive fathers, neglectful
mothers, and oversexed lovers.
One knows one can find in almost any bookstore a rich range of styles, characters, and stories by white writers. Anna wants Equiano to publish the same. Chick lit, urban lit, ghetto lit will pay the bills, but literary fiction is essential for advancing the culture, giving us hope. What if no one had published Baldwin, Ellison, Wright, or Hurston?

But perhaps Tanya is beginning to see things her way. She seems truly excited about Bess Milford’s novel. Her secretary stands patiently by the door of the conference room fluttering a stack of manuscript papers. Tanya turns toward her and nods. “Let’s go,” she says. “The guys are waiting for us.” The secretary opens the door.

Anna has seen the guys before. They are from the art department, more new hires who arrived just as she was leaving for the island. The old team left abruptly. Fired, the rumor went. They were apparently not hip enough, not in touch with X, Y, or was it the Z generation? Anna cannot remember which letter from the alphabet she heard in reference to their departure. Their replacements, Hakim and Robert, look fresh out of college, barely in their twenties. In the six weeks since she has been away, they seem to have settled in completely, as if they’ve worked at the company for years. They are sprawled out on their chairs next to each other at the conference table, both dressed casually in sweaters and jeans. Hakim’s hair is braided in long locks that he has gathered together in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. Robert’s hair is short-cropped like Tim’s, though faded toward the back of his neck. Rita from sales sits across from them. She has worked in publishing for years, though only the last two for Windsor. She is young, only in her midthirties, but compared to the guys she appears much older. She is olive-skinned, dark-haired, heavyset, a Mediterranean type, either Italian or Greek. Her close-fitting navy skirt suit hugs her wide hips and big breasts but also reveals a fairly narrow waist. She has not had children, Anna guessed correctly when they first met. Her stomach is flat like an ironing board.