She is aware he is listening intently to her. His soup has arrived but he has not touched it.
“Where did you learn this?” he asks.
“Graduate school. I was an English major.”
He picks up his soup spoon and twirls it around. For a while he says nothing, his eyes fixed on the movement of the spoon. Then abruptly his hand is still. He looks over at her. “Then, Anna,” he says, his voice grave, “you must fight for your writer.”
The tension between them dissipates. They are friends again. Their conversation afterward is low-keyed. They do not talk about her troubles at work; he makes no attempt to compare his profession to hers. He seems to be mulling over what she has said to him, but they do not go over that ground again. They talk about her mother, her parents’ impending arrival. He says he will come with her to meet them at the airport. He will arrange a car service to bring her mother to the hospital when the surgery is scheduled.
After dinner, he drives her home. He walks with her up the stairs of her building but he does not go in. He kisses her on the mouth. It is a satisfactory kiss, but not a passionate one. He is an old-fashioned man, but even an old-fashioned man would have pressed her to spend the night. Lying in bed alone, she wonders if she might have turned him off with her rage, with her pedantic arguments, thoughts long shuffled to the back of her mind since she handed in the last paper for her final class in graduate school. It has surprised her how much from those days returned to her, and with such force. How now, in the darkness, curled up in bed, her mind’s eye recalls the professor who brought her class to misty-eyed silence with his recitation of Hamlet’s speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in
action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of
the world! the paragon of animals
!
She chose a career in publishing because she likes books, because she wants to be among writers of books, but where has that gotten her? She edits work by writers who care only for the profit their writing garners, brought out by publishers with their eyes on the bottom line of their ledgers. Bess Milford cannot be compared to the Greats, to the writers who have sustained civilization through times of despair. It would be ludicrous to make such a comparison. But Bess Milford has written a novel that is more than plot driven, more than about an adulterous man getting it on with his sexy mistress. Her novel tells a story, but it also tells the truth about the human condition, about the universality of temptation, about the unending battle between reason and passion, about our proclivities toward the carnal in spite of our best intentions.
P
aul calls early the next morning. Anna is still in bed but she tells him she has been up more than an hour. It is not exactly a lie; she is awake if not out of her bed. She did not sleep well, her mind sifting through a sequence of images, none of which she can recall now. The sun was not up when she reached for the book on her bedside table,
The Collected Works of Jane Austen
. For years she has turned to Jane Austen when her nights are broken with dreams that trouble her sleep. The world seemed safe in Austen’s times, safe and regulated. Families stayed together in the same village, in the same country. Even when children became adults and married, they did not move far away. They did not immigrate to foreign countries unreachable except by long hours on an airplane across miles of ocean. Parents could be counted on. Neighbors could be counted on. No one died alone in city apartments, their bodies left for days, crawling with maggots, until the putrid stench of rotting flesh insinuated itself up the noses of the people who pass by. Women had disadvantages in Austen’s world, but in the end there were men with fortunes who married them and promised them good lives.
“What were you doing up so early?” Paul asks.
“Reading,” she says.
“Manuscripts for work?”
“Jane Austen. I find her stories soothing.”
“I know what you mean,” he says, surprising her. “Mind you, I didn’t read Jane Austen on my own. We were made to in school back home.
Pride and Prejudice
, that’s the one we studied. I remember thinking it was the British plan to make us passive colonials. Give us their stories, tell us how admirable their people are, and we’d be lulled into forgetting our stories, forgetting our histories, forgetting how they stole our island. All we would want is to be like them.”
“Don’t spoil Jane Austen for me, Paul,” Anna says, swinging her legs out of bed.
“How do you think they built those mansions they lived in? The famous Darcy! How do you think he got so rich? The slave trade. That’s how.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What I know is that it’s how England got rich.”
She has not seen this side of him, and though it irritates her that he has poked holes in her fantasy, she cannot say she hasn’t had similar thoughts herself.
“Well, I like Jane Austen.”
“Watch it,” Paul says, but he is laughing now. She laughs too. Would she have laughed if Tony had criticized her in this way, warned her of the perils of admiring the old colonizers? They have taught you self-hatred, Tony once said to her. But she and Paul share their island’s history of negotiation rather than confrontation. Their compatriots may have adopted British customs, but they did not give up their own. They have passed on their stories to their young; they have maintained their rituals, their dance, their art, their music. They are the creators of the only significant musical instrument invented in the twentieth century. Their steel pan is played all over the world, outdoors to the beat of soca and calypso; indoors at stately concert halls, mesmerizing audiences with symphonies by some of the masters: Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bach.
“I’m careful,” she says.
“About last night …” His tone has changed. It’s softer, warmer. “I meant what I said. I called to wish you good luck. With the book,” he clarifies quickly.
She is pleased he hasn’t forgotten. “I think I’ll stay home today,” she says.
“They haven’t beaten you down, have they?”
“I need to get the apartment ready for my parents,” she says. But she does feel beaten down. She had closed the book long before the telephone rang, Elizabeth Bennet’s cool defiance in the face of Darcy’s arrogance no longer boosting her confidence. She knows the story will end well: Elizabeth will see her error; Darcy will apologize; together they will ride into the sunset. This morning the happy ending is not enough to raise her spirits. She has been cornered. Paul says she must fight, but it is far too late. The die has been cast; Tanya Foster has made up her mind.
“Good idea,” Paul says. “In the final analysis, family is what counts.”
Family. Hers is so small she must do her best to preserve it. Grandparents on both sides dead, aunts and uncles in England, cousins she wouldn’t recognize if she met them in the street. She must make her parents welcome, do her best to ensure they will be comfortable.
She begins with the den—a second bedroom, the real estate agent claimed when she showed her the apartment. A bedroom fit for a child, she would agree, but Tony has left her, and she is thirty-nine, unlikely to have a child even in the unlikeliest chance she would find someone to marry again. She has made the child’s room into an office of sorts, shelves against the wall piled with books and manuscripts for work. A desk more neatly organized: inbox, outbox, a ceramic jar filled with pencils and pens, an electric pencil sharpener, a cordless phone on its base, a monitor on a stand, the computer on the floor next to a printer. Opposite the desk is a folded futon where she sits when she wants to be more comfortable. She has put a pillow and a thick quilt on the futon. Some nights she has fallen asleep there, her head on the pillow, the quilt drawn up to her neck. She opens the futon now. She will sleep here and let her parents have her bedroom.
She spends the day moving books from her bedroom into the den, washing the linens at the laundromat three blocks away, making the beds. She cleans the stove and refrigerator, mops the kitchen floor. The room facing the kitchen, which is painted off-white, serves as both dining room and living room. In the dining room are two chairs and a small table; in the living room, on either side of a glass-topped coffee table, are two brown leather armchairs and a matching leather couch with decorative pillows on either end. Colorful prints and posters on the wall are a perfect balance for the browns and beiges in the apartment. Anna dusts, she vacuums, she polishes. By late afternoon, her apartment is thoroughly clean. Her parents will arrive in six days, but tomorrow she must return to work and she will not have time to prepare her bedroom again, so tonight she will begin sleeping in the den. She makes one final inspection. Her apartment is attractive, better than most she has seen. She was foolish to panic at the thought of her parents staying here. Paula is right: they will be proud of her, or should be. She owns the apartment, and the neighborhood is fashionable. Or becoming fashionable.
At work the next day she calls Bess Milford. She tells her she has good news and bad news. The good news is that the salespeople are excited about her novel. They think it will sell well.
“And the bad news?” Bess Milford asks.
“You may not like the cover,” Anna says. Anna faxes the cover, and, as she predicted, Bess Milford blows up. “I thought writers had input about their covers!” she yells angrily into the phone. It is clear she means to implicate Anna.
Anna reminds her that she signed a contract giving the publisher the rights to market her novel.
“Aren’t you the bigwig at Equiano?” Bess Milford sneers. “Do something!”
Anna says she’ll try, but she’s not sure that whatever she does will make a difference.
“The cover is a lie,” Bess Milford says, her voice terse with indignation.
Anna knows her author is right but she also knows her salary is paid by the company that has decided on the cover for the novel. “It’s a poster, Bess,” she hears herself saying. “It’s an ad to draw readers to your novel.” Her words fall back on her ears. She is a hypocrite. She is trying to pacify Bess Milford with the very lie Tim Greene thought would mollify her. Anna had resented his patronizing solicitude and can imagine that Bess Milford resents hers too. Yet she does not want to raise her hopes. Tanya Foster makes the final decisions for the company; Anna cannot override her. She tells Bess Milford she will do what she can to change the cover. “Let’s see what happens,” she says.
Later she busies herself answering e-mails, avoiding contact with Tim. She knows he’s in the office. She hears the rustle of papers and the swishing of the wheels of his desk chair, back and forth in the cubicle adjoining her room. Her door is open and the sounds filter in. What work can he be doing? Anna does not know. He is an assistant editor assigned to her but she has not yet given him books to edit.
Tanya calls. She wants to see Anna in her office. She does not say why. Anna hangs up the phone and walks down the corridor.
“Sit, sit.” Tanya indicates the chair facing her desk and gets straight to the point. “I’ve given Raine’s books to Tim.”
Anna sits down and composes herself. She folds her hands tightly on her lap.
“I thought you’d like that. I know how you feel about Raine’s books.”
Books like Raine’s are not the ones she wants to edit, but books like Raine’s are the ones that pay her salary.
“I know you didn’t like editing her books,” Tanya continues when Anna does not respond.
Anna crosses her legs. “What about B. Benton?”
“I’ve given B. Benton to Tim also,” Tanya says. “Tim has a feel for those books, if you know what I mean.”
Anna tells her that she does not know what she means.
“He’s African American,” Tanya says.
“And?”
“And you are from the Caribbean.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Tim understands African American readers. He knows what they want.”
“And what is that?” Anna asks.
“I read the bottom line, Anna. That’s all. People tell me what they want; I don’t ask them what they want. The sales numbers give me all I need to know. Here, here.” She rifles through a stack of papers on her desk as if searching for proof, for the report on sales figures.
“You don’t have to bother,” Anna says. “I read the sales report.”
Tanya lays her hand flat on top of the papers and fixes her eyes on Anna. “You’re not upset, are you?” She wrinkles her forehead as if perplexed. “Because I thought …” Her voice drifts.
Anna is sure she is feigning bewilderment. She decides to ask the question that has troubled her since Tim arrived.
“Is Tim Greene to be my assistant editor or yours?”
“We work for the same company, Anna,” Tanya says, smoothing back the furrows on her forehead. “There’s no yours and mine. There’s only what’s best for the company.”
“For Windsor or for Equiano?”
“Anna, Anna,” Tanya coos.
“Equiano is my responsibility,” Anna says.
“And I am the publisher of Windsor. Equiano is an imprint of Windsor. I don’t think I need to remind you of that, do I?”
“So that is it?”
“You surprise me, Anna. I thought this would be what you’d want.”
“I want to publish more literary fiction, but that does not mean—”
“But that does not mean what, Anna? Are you saying you want us to publish more novels like Raine’s?”
“I’m aware those books keep us afloat,” Anna says.
“More than afloat,” Tanya says sternly.
“I’m aware they are profitable.” Anna cools down her tone.
“Good, good. Then you understand.” Tanya stands up. “If you take your emotions out of this, Anna, you’ll see this is a win-win for both of us. Tim knows the territory; he has a feel for the kind of books Raine and Benton write. He’ll make money for the company. It will be good for you and for me. I’ll have a better bottom line and you will have a better bottom line. Think it over. You’ll see how this makes sense.” She comes around her desk and places a hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Look, I didn’t mean to upstage you or usurp your authority or anything like that by speaking to Tim. It’s just that I thought it would be better if the assignment came from me. It wasn’t easy getting Tim to leave his company for us. I wanted him to know we appreciate having him here.”