Boundaries (24 page)

On the table is a red leather-bound copy of Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
, and next to it, a black plaster cast of Rodin’s
The Thinker
. It would be easy to assume this is the office of man who has fine taste in literature and the arts, and not a man who purchases books as he would any other commodity, buying and selling them with only one purpose in mind: money he can make for the company.

“Well, what do you think?” he asks, taking the armchair opposite hers.

“It’s different,” she mumbles.

“Different good or different bad?”

It is clear he expects a compliment. “Of course, good.

Different good.”

“I want people to be comfortable when they come to my office. We are one big family. That’s the way I want to run this company. Families may have their internal quarrels, but they present one united face to the world. You know what I mean?” He bends toward her and extends his hand forward as if he is about to touch her, but that is not what he intends to do at all. What he does is let his hand drop to his knee, the palm spread wide, clutching it. He smiles. It is a smile Anna believes is meant to put her at ease, to soothe her, to make her forget how he had deliberately set out to deceive her, as he probably thinks he can do again.

She is glad she chose a black pantsuit to wear to work and not a dress, that she is dressed for business, as the professional she is. “Yes,” she says, buttoning her jacket, “
happy
families stick together.”

He does not miss her emphasis. He raises his eyebrows. “Happy?”

“Not all families are happy.”

“Surely you don’t—” He stops in midsentence and bites his lip. When he resumes, his tone has changed. His voice is weighted with concern. “Speaking of families,” he says, “how is your mother?”

“She’s recovering well and quickly, thank you.”

“They don’t make them like they used to.”

“My mother is a strong woman.” She is about to elaborate, to say that her mother is doing so well she’s decided to return home to the Caribbean, when he declares that his mother also had a big scare.

“They had to do a biopsy. Turned out to be nothing. Calcifications. But we were all worried.”

Anna does not say the obvious: that for her mother it was not a big scare; it was the real thing. “You must have been relieved,” she says.

“My mother too. I have to give it to you, Anna. I don’t think I’d have been able to concentrate if the diagnosis was different.”

Does he mean to praise her, or is he suggesting she hasn’t been able to focus on her work? “It wasn’t … It isn’t easy for me,” she says.

“But you managed. All those e-mails. I didn’t answer them all, as you must have noticed.”

“I noticed.”

“About Raine … Well, as you know now, there was no need—”

“To answer my questions?”

“I was not at liberty, Anna. You have to understand that. The merger had not taken place.”

“But you knew there was to be a merger.”

“Until the ink had dried, there was nothing to tell.”

“You could have warned me.”

“I did.” He crosses and uncrosses his legs.

Was it hubris, overconfidence in her value to Windsor, that had blinded her? Or was it plain stupidity that had allowed her to be lulled into the false hope that when Tanya left she would take Tim Greene with her? Anna rubs the space between her eyebrows. “You lied to me,” she says. A sudden pain shoots up the back of her neck.

Tim Greene stands up. “Those are strong words, Anna.

I’m trying to make this as easy as possible for the two of us.”

“I saved the e-mail you sent me.” The pain in her neck has not subsided but she resists the urge to massage the throbbing muscle. She must remain focused. She cannot allow him to think he has defeated her. “
You are my boss
, you wrote. You knew that was a lie when you wrote it.”

Tim Greene walks over to his desk and comes back with a piece of paper. “I had hoped this would be easy, Anna, but I see it’s not going to be.” He waves the paper at her. “Bess Milford is threatening to sue us. She doesn’t have a chance, of course. She knows as well as I do that when she signed her contract she gave us the right to market her book the way we thought would make it most attractive to buyers.”

“So long as what you did was tasteful,” Anna says.

“So long as it was not offensive,” Tim Greene responds.

“Bess Milford thinks it’s offensive.”

“And what about you, Anna? What do you think?”

“You know what I think about that explicitly crude and erotic cover. It has nothing to do with the story Bess Milford wrote.”

“You work for the company, Anna. You are part of our family. You can’t fight with outsiders against the family.” He sits down and folds the paper carefully, sliding his nails along the creases.

“This is not a family. This is a business,” Anna replies tersely.

“I’m sorry you think this way because Tanya cares about you.”

“Cares so much she gives you my job.”

“She didn’t give me your job, Anna. TeaHouse Press is a new company. You were not the head of TeaHouse Press.”

“A matter of semantics,” she says.

“Look, Anna. I asked to meet with you because I wanted to talk about your role in the new company.”

“Tanya said I’ll still be in charge of Equiano.”

Tim Greene emits a low guttural sound, a growl it seems to Anna, but his lips are smiling. “Tanya, Tanya,” he coos.

“She said my position will not change.”

“She is too nice.”

“You said that too. I remember your exact words. You said,
You are still the boss of Equiano
. That’s what you said to me.”
Still
. Suddenly the word stands out from the rest.
Still
, as in the past, as in the present, at that moment—not meaning in the future.

He straightens up. His back is as rigid as an iron pole. “But you must have known better, Anna.”

“Better than what?”

“Come on, Anna. You must have read between the lines. Tanya was trying to let you down slowly.”

The tea leaves. Tanya expected her to read the tea leaves
.

“And what about you? Did you expect me to read between the lines too?”

“I thought it would be obvious to you. With TeaHouse Press there will be no need for Equiano.”

We believe what we need to believe, what we need to believe to
stave off despair, to keep on functioning.
The moment Tanya told her about the merger and that the new TeaHouse Press would acquire all McDuffy’s titles by writers of color, she should have figured out that Equiano would be shut down. She had fallen for the old ruse the British had perfected in their colonies. Give them half a loaf and they won’t resist. Give them schools, lower-level jobs in the civil service, keep them hoping for advancement that will never materialize. They won’t risk losing the crumbs they have. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Still, she is surprised that Tim Greene would use the same strategy. But human nature is human nature, no matter the physical trappings. She is a woman; men have pacified women for years with their baseless promises.

“And if there is no Equiano, what happens to me?” she asks.

“First, let me say, Tanya is not to blame. The new configuration for the company is my idea. I am sure you can see it makes no sense to have an imprint for writers of color in a company that publishes writers of color. It’ll be redundant.”

“Am I to be redundant?”

“You’re valuable to us, Anna. We want to keep you here as an editor, a senior editor. But I need someone working close to me who shares my vision. I want to form the Greene team.”

“The Greene team?”

“I need a managing editor, someone I can rely on, who can help me put this company in the black.”

“Equiano is in the black,” Anna says.

“We can do better. Conrad Hilton can help us do better.”

“Conrad Hilton? The owner of the chain of Hilton hotels?” She means to be sarcastic, but there is no edge in her tone.

Tim Greene reaches over to the coffee table and picks up the red leather-bound copy of
Invisible Man
lying there. “I think the problem with you, Anna, is you don’t have a feel for our readers. I can’t blame you. Sometimes I don’t understand my people myself.” He chuckles. “This man …” He holds up the book. “This man, he understood. He felt the pain of being invisible in America. What I want to do here with this company is to make us visible.”

“With chick lit and ghetto lit?” Anna does not withhold her alarm.

Tim Greene sighs. “What you interpret as chick lit and ghetto lit,” he says with exaggerated patience, “I see as stories about my people.”

My
people. He has said it, made it plain to her. No more guessing, beating around the bush: he has excluded her. She is not included in
my
; she is alien to
my
, an alien in America, though with the legal right to live and work in America. On her U.S. passport she is defined as a naturalized citizen, a distinction that never misses the immigration officers whenever she reenters the country.
Naturalized:
not born here
.
Not the real thing. Not the real American.
Fingers tap on the computer keys, eyes glance over her and back to the screen. Seconds pass. Finally her passport is stamped. Welcome to the U.S.!

For Tim Greene, chick lit and ghetto lit are stories about his people. It wouldn’t matter if she told him about the mirror and the lamp. It wouldn’t matter if she said to him that she agrees that fiction should mirror life, but that the lives these books mirror are a tiny fraction of the lives his people really live. That he is perpetuating a pernicious stereotype by promoting these books as if they reflect the lives of the majority of his people. It wouldn’t matter either to argue that books have the power to give us insights into the past, the present, the future. To give us something to reach for. That books can inspire us to be more than what we are. If she should say these things to him, he would respond that he is working for a company that does business for profit. Neither Windsor nor the new TeaHouse Press is a philanthropic organization. Neither is in the charity business. His job is to keep his eyes on the bottom line.

As if he has read her thoughts, he says, “It’s not just about the money, Anna. It’s about literacy too.”

She stares at him in disbelief.

“Young people like these books,” he says. “At least these books get them reading.”

She has heard the argument many times before—though it still shocks her that intelligent people, people in positions of leadership, with the responsibility of guiding the young, still promote such drivel.
At least these books get
them reading
. It is an expression of despair, of the failure of schools to educate the young. Test results of black children in the inner-city are dismal and blame is cast on the powerful, seductive force of the visual media. Educators throw up their hands and surrender. The battle against the lure of cable TV and video games is one they cannot win.
At least
these books get them reading
. But reading what? Young people, like young people throughout the ages, get pleasure from the stimulation of their imagination, and Anna is convinced that no other medium stimulates the imagination more than reading. For the reader must transform black and-white symbols into colorful pictures in his mind. He must bond with people he has not met in the flesh or seen on the screen. He becomes judge and jury in battles between good and evil. If all we can say is
at least they are reading
, we have failed to pass on to the next generation the pleasures that come from good books that challenge us to imagine lives we have not lived, to empathize with those we do not know.

Books, Anna believes, are our defense against those who would lead us like lambs to the slaughterhouse. Books teach us to think, to use our intelligence to sort out right from wrong, good from bad, the beautiful from the ugly, to make decisions based on what we know is right and just, not on what we have been told to do or think by powerful people concerned with their welfare instead of our own. Books can prevent wars, keep us from destroying ourselves and our planet. Why else do dictators and warmongers burn books in the public square? Why else was a fatwa declared against a novelist, calling for his execution?

“And is it enough that these are the only types of books they read?” Anna asks.

“It’s a good beginning,” Tim Greene answers. “These books open up the world of reading to them. They get to find out there’s fun in reading, and who knows?” He smiles brightly at her. “They may get to like the books you read, Anna.”

She does not think that reading poorly written, exclusively plot-driven books will lead a young person to seek out more challenging ones. She believes children have to be taught. She believes teachers must do the hard work of giving children the tools to decode words on the printed page, to appreciate the beauty of a well-turned phrase, to ponder the validity of ideas they have not considered before. She believes a society is in danger when good books are neither written nor read.

Was it reading the kind of books he wants to publish that turned him on to Ellison? Anna seriously doubts that. He went to good schools; he studied at Cornell. His teachers did not experiment with him; they did not ease him into appreciating Ellison by having him read novels by the likes of Raine and Benton. He and too many like him seem to lack faith in the possibility of remedying an inferior education, of resetting the clock for young men and women whose deficiencies in reading and writing have accumulated after years of neglect. Yet these are the vulnerable young minds most in need of inspiration and hope; these are the underprivileged youth whose notion of the good life will remain limited unless expanded by good books that could open the way for them to the beauties of the world.

“I don’t think that someone who reads
Ghetto Wife
will graduate to reading
Invisible Man
,” Anna says.

Tim Greene is still holding Ralph Ellison’s novel in his hand. Slowly and carefully he places it on the coffee table. Ridges form on the sides of his face. They contract and loosen, making tiny waves along his temples. Anna can tell he is trying to suppress his anger.
Ghetto Wife
is the title of Raine’s new novel, the book he most likely intends to promote at the top of his list for the new TeaHouse Press. “I need Conrad Hilton to start soon,” he says abruptly. He does not look at Anna. He clutches the sides of the book with the tips of his fingers and slides it back and forth on the table.