Boundaries (25 page)

“And when would that be?”

“As soon as possible.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.” He is no longer sliding the book. He gives it a final pat and puts it next to the plaster cast of Rodin’s sculpture. “If you could clear out your office by this afternoon, I’d appreciate it.” He sits back on his chair.

“And the manuscripts you have taken from my office?” Anna hears her voice but she is not conscious that it is she who has spoken. A dark haze takes over the room and Tim Greene merges into it.

“They will be Conrad’s responsibility now.”

Conrad
. Through the haze, a face shimmers before her. She has seen it before; it is the face of the man in the café sitting with Tim Greene, both of them huddled over a stack of papers. She had guessed correctly. It was a manuscript, not just any stack of papers. Perhaps Raine’s, perhaps Benton’s manuscript, perhaps the latest chick lit Tim planned to acquire. His plan was already in place while she was naïvely thinking that she was the head of Equiano and he was an assistant editor, and her only problem was to make sure he did not edit the literary novels she had acquired.

“I’ve seen you with him,” she says.

“With whom?”

“Conrad Hilton. At the corner restaurant having lunch. I saw you twice. You were so deep in conversation plotting my demise, you didn’t see me even when I waved at you. You must have been cooking up this plan a long time ago. What a big laugh you must have had at my stupidity.”

“Anna … Ms. Sinclair.” All talk of family has ended. Informalities end too. “This is not about you. Mr. Hilton and I weren’t plotting your demise.”

“You were plotting to close down Equiano.”

“To organize TeaHouse Press.”

“It’s the same to me.”

Tim Greene stands up. “Mr. Hilton will need your list of writers,” he says.

“Are you firing me?”

“Not unless you want to go.”

She needs her job. She has a mortgage to pay, bills that accumulate. She clamps her lips shut.

“There’s still a place for you here as an editor.” He walks around his desk toward her. He wants her to leave.

He does not have to say so. He is standing above her, his hands arched together, locking and unlocking his fingers.

She gets up. “To correct syntax and spelling, is that it?”

He neither affirms nor denies her assumption. “Mr.

Hilton will do the job of acquiring books for the company.

Of course, you can propose titles.”

“And my salary?”

“We have a limited budget. Until the company makes more money through the sales of …” He pauses, waiting for her to absorb the full impact of her folly. “You know, the books that bring in the money, the books you don’t like.”

She is in his power. She will be expected to support the books she does not like.

“Until then,” he says, his eyes hardened now, “you’ll have to take a 20 percent cut.”

Rita comes to help her clear her office. “Don’t take it so hard, Anna,” she says.

Anna is furiously ripping up sheets of paper.

“You don’t have to do that.” Rita places her hand gently over Anna’s wrist. “We have a shredder in the office.”

Anna shrugs off Rita’s hand. “I don’t trust the shredder. I don’t trust anything or anyone here anymore.”

“You don’t mean that, Anna. You can trust me.”

“Calling me boss while knowing all the time that he was going to take my job. That he was going to be
my
boss.”

“Did he fire you?”

“Oh, he said I was valuable.” Anna throws a letter she has just torn in half into the wastebasket.

“See, just as I told you. He knows how good you are.”

“At first he said I could remain as a senior editor. By the time we parted, he was talking about a cut in salary.”

Rita says nothing.

“There’s so much here.” Anna pulls open the drawer at the side of her desk. Her eyes travel aimlessly across the stacks of notes in the drawer. She does not touch them. “So much of my time and energy.”

“None of it wasted,” Rita says with exaggerated gaiety.

Anna shuts the drawer. “You know what he said to me, Rita?” She doesn’t wait for her response. “He said I don’t have a feel for our readers. A feel? What does that mean? What he really wants to say is that I am not an African American. Conrad Hilton is an African American, and so it stands by reason of his birth that Mr. Hilton has a feel for the readers.”

“It’s not about that,” Rita says. “It’s about gender politics. Sexism.” The word sounds odd in Rita’s mouth and Anna’s frown deepens. “This is still a man’s world. Tim wants a man as his right-hand man. He doesn’t think a woman is good enough.”

“Is that how things are for you here?” Anna asks. Rita seemed so passive to her, so submissive, so willing to stand in the shadows.

“I play the game, but I know the real score.”

“But isn’t that hard, pretending?”

“Women have pretended for years. It’s a way to survive.”

“There are other ways.”

“This way has worked for me. I’ve survived other mergers.”

And didn’t Anna pretend when she allowed Tim to comfort her with his lie?
Everything will work out all right. We’ll
talk. You’ll see.
But she does not believe sexism is his motive.

“Tribalism,” she says to Rita. “That’s his motive.”

Rita does not understand.

“We have the same skin color but we belong to different tribes.”

“Tribes?’

“Cultures,” Anna clarifies. “Our cultures are not the same. I’m not African American.”

Rita sighs. “Tim Greene is a complicated man. You talk about trust. I think Tim is the one who has problems trusting people he doesn’t know well.”

“People who are not African American, you mean.”

“It’s not as simple as that. He’s had a hard life.”

“He went to Cornell.”

“The story is that his mother’s boyfriend paid his way to Cornell. He was a white man. Married.”

A sort of scholarship
, Tanya had said when Anna ventured that Tim Greene had financial support.

“They say he never liked his mother’s boyfriend,” Rita adds.

“Because he was white or because he was married?”

“Both, I suppose. His father was never in the picture.

I suppose Tim resented having him replaced by a white man, and a married man at that, who had his own family and had no intention of marrying his mother. But his mother’s boyfriend paid for him to go to private schools and to Cornell.”

“He didn’t have to go to Cornell,” Anna says bitterly.

“He could have gone to a state university or a city college.

He could have worked and paid his way. Many people do.”

“His mother wanted him to go to Cornell. Her boyfriend went to Cornell. She wanted to prove to her boyfriend that her son was just as smart as him. I think Tim Greene has a lot of anger in him. He doesn’t show it, but—”

“So he takes it out on people like me.”

“You’re taking this too personally,” Rita says. “It’s business. A new boss comes in, he wants his own people. Look at it this way: you still have a job.”

“
If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?”

Rita stretches open her eyes. “With thee?”

“
Hamlet
,” Anna says. “Hamlet’s mother and her new husband try to convince Hamlet that death is common, but it is
his
father who died. It is particular with him because what has happened affects him personally. It is particular with me because what has happened affects me personally. It is not business to me.”

EIGHTEEN

W
hen Rita leaves, Anna stands forlornly in front of her bookshelf scanning the titles she acquired and those she agreed to publish only because Tanya Foster had insisted.
You still have a job
. This is the consolation Rita has offered her and perhaps she should be consoled. The publishing industry is not the same as when she first began at Windsor. Small presses are struggling to stay afloat and large publishing houses are consolidating. It shouldn’t be surprising that Windsor would be merged with McDuffy or that Equiano would be subsumed under TeaHouse Press. Print media is in trouble. All over the country newspapers are folding, the dailies in small towns a luxury of the past. Even in big cities like New York and Chicago cable news and the Internet are threatening sales. She has heard of layoffs at the
New York
Times
and the
Chicago Tribune
. The prediction is that soon we will read many of our books on electronic tablets, ebooks available at a lower cost than printed books. She is aware there are editors who have already lost their jobs. She should be grateful she still has hers. A 20 percent cut in salary will require belt-tightening, but she can manage. She has savings. And her cut may not be permanent; Tim Greene has implied as much.

What a hypocrite she is! How desperate she has become, hanging her hopes on Raine and B. Benton, her future in the company anchored on the expectation that their novels will become best sellers! For if her salary is to be restored, if she is to regain the 20 percent cut, it will be because of sales of the very kind of books she has decried.

Someone knocks on her door and, flushed with shame, Anna rushes to open it, grasping at the chance for relief from the mortifying thoughts that have overtaken her. It is the secretary. She brings a message from Tim Greene. Anna is to put on the desk any items she wishes the maintenance staff to move to the cubicle Tim Greene has assigned to her. The secretary throws her a pained smile in sympathy.

What is perfectly clear to Anna now is that she has a job, a source of income, nothing more. She will no longer acquire books for the company or be part of the team that will decide which books to promote and how. Her opinion will not count. She will be expected to follow orders, correct grammar and spelling, check facts, tasks that programs on the computer do more efficiently than humans. She will be … She searches for the word and remembers the one Tim Greene used when they spoke:
redundant
. She will be redundant, her talents not required, her experience irrelevant. Yet what pains her most is not the money, nor is it the humiliation she has had to endure with Tim Greene asserting himself as her boss. It is the end of a dream, the vision she had for Equiano. But she will not be lured again by the rope Tim throws out to her with every intent of cutting it the moment she tries to grab ahold.
Of course, you can
propose titles
. It is obvious to her now he does not mean a word of that promise.

It angers her that she should be dismissed so lightly, her years in the company so easily disregarded. She has worked her way up from the slush pile at Windsor, getting pennies for her labor, straining her eyes reading hundreds of manuscripts until she found the one that got her noticed. She earned her place at the head of Equiano not because someone liked her, but because she had acquired best sellers for Windsor. Perhaps she did not do the same for Equiano, but even the books she did not like she had made readable. Tanya Foster depended on her editorial eye to fix inconsistencies, to make narratives coherent, to give plausibility to characters. What has Conrad Hilton done? Tim Greene did not find it necessary to tell her. He is Tim Greene’s friend. They know each other; Tim feels comfortable with him. These are the only qualifications necessary to put Conrad Hilton on the Greene team.

Cronyism. The word pulsates in her temples. When her father was in a position of power at the largest oil company on the island, he was pestered by friends and even by relatives for tips on when to buy and sell oil shares. He refused them all. He even refused to write letters of recommendation for friends who sought jobs in the company. He would not be a barrier to a friend, but neither would he use his position to give a friend an advantage. On these matters he was unbending. One must have the qualifications for the job. Friendship was not a qualification. His insistence almost cost him his relationship with Neil Lee Pak, his closest friend.

Neil Lee Pak is the Sinclairs’ family doctor, though not the doctor who found the tumor in Beatrice Sinclair’s breast. Beatrice had strict rules regarding the extent to which a doctor was allowed to examine her. Anywhere, she said, except her private parts. Her breasts and the triangle between her thighs were private, off-limits to Neil Lee Pak. When the size of her tumor finally terrified her into reaching out for help, Neil Lee Pak was the one who referred the Sinclairs to Dr. Ramdoolal, the best oncologist on the island. This was the role Dr. Lee Pak played in the lives of the Sinclairs: he was first their friend and confidant, and then their consultant on medical matters. He was also John Sinclair’s fiercest opponent at chess, which they played religiously every Wednesday night. John looked forward to these evenings and would begin preparing for them days in advance, studying the chessboard and reading whatever he could find to gain mastery of the game. “Get ready for a beating,” he would inevitably say to Neil Lee Pak when he arrived at his home.

Neil would grin from ear to ear and reply coolly, “In your dreams.” Then the day came when Neil Lee Pak asked John Sinclair for a job.

The oil company kept a medical team on staff for their employees, and the doctor in charge was retiring. The job paid handsomely and the responsibilities were not demanding. The role was mostly an administrative one: to ensure that all employees passed the required medical tests and to refer difficult cases to the appropriate physicians on the island. Neil Lee Pak believed he should get the job when the doctor in charge retired. After all, he was a physician, and at the time John Sinclair was the personnel manager of the company, in an influential position to secure his appointment. And they were good friends. But John did not think Neil was the right person for the job. He liked the man. Beyond their Wednesday night chess games, Neil Lee Pak was a welcome guest at his home for dinner or simply for drinks and casual conversation, but he secretly disapproved of Neil’s easy acquiescence to his wife’s scruples. Neil was a doctor, and as a doctor he was responsible for his patients’ health and should have found a way to persuade Beatrice to submit to a full medical examination. But most of all, he could not, and did not, recommend Neil Lee Pak for the position because there was another doctor, a brilliant man, eminently qualified, who had worked with the doctor who was retiring and had served the company loyally for years.