On Monday morning, blades of light slipped through the blinds and slashed her face. Torpid from melancholy, she barely stirred. Fire was gone.
She’d made three calls to his hotel, leaving messages the first two times and discovering with the third that he’d checked out, which saddened her because there was so much that she wanted to tell him. She would not have answered the doorbell if she’d known it was Lewis; she’d wanted Fire to spend the night with her; she was feeling something for him that she had never felt before. But she also needed time to make up her mind because Lewis, after all, had been in her life for a while. They had a history and that had to count for something.
But there was something else that she was feeling, that she would not have said: that it scared her that he could be satisfied with just the basics in life. She aspired to more than that, and had achieved many of her aspirations, and she didn’t want to slip, didn’t want to be with anyone who she thought might bring her down.
That Lewis was ambitious was not insignificant, she told herself as she dressed for work. What was so wrong, she asked herself, for wanting to be in a relationship with someone who was driven in the same way that she was?
And further, was it pragmatic for her, as a black woman over thirty, a member of the demographic group that was least likely to be married—irrespective of looks, talent, or education—to enter a relationship primarily for love?
She left for work in a pensive mood. Her first stop was accounting, where she dropped off the receipts. Then she dragged herself to an editorial meeting, announcing her arrival with little more than a polite nod to her colleagues assembled around the conference table in Virgil’s office.
“Hey, Sylvia, what’s the matter?” asked the art director, a fey man in a pink shirt; he had a birdlike face to match his movements.
“Nothing,” she replied blankly.
“You need an aspirin?”
“Girlfriend needs some dick,” said the travel editor, whose three chins were dusted with four different kinds of doughnut sprinkles.
Virgil entered the room. Smarting from the DeVeaux issue and his on-again crush on Lewis, he opened the meeting by picking on Sylvia.
“What do you think about this idea?” he asked. “A four-page story on ecotourism in the Caribbean? Y’know, the Blue Mountains in Jamaica, the Caroni Swamp in Trinidad, the El Yunque rain forest in Puerto Rico—”
“I think it’s great,” she said, pretending to be excited. She knew better than to disagree.
“I think it’s crap, actually,” he replied, lighting a cigar. “Black people don’t like nature. It reminds them of cotton fields. Let’s feature the all-inclusives. They buy lots of ads.”
I need to get out of here, Sylvia said to herself as her colleagues championed Virgil’s idea, a story they’d done every January for the last three years.
She began to recede into herself as the meeting dragged on, wondering how she’d come to this. She’d had a sense of mission when she began. She’d actually believed that she could make a difference. Bring in better writers. Develop a global vision. Energize the copy. Galvanize the art direction.
Shit, she’d even thought she could be honest about the shortcomings of public figures who happened to be black, or more accurately, light brown.
Searching the faces around her for passion, she found none. Like her, the others were all there for a paycheck. Some of them, she remembered, used to come to meetings with ideas. But that lasted for the first year at most, by which time they learned the rules. If an idea didn’t start with Virgil, it was bad. After he’d claimed it, it was good. If an editor cared to debate this, she was bad. After a closed-door session, she was good—or fired.
But for all its drawbacks, the job had perks. A good salary, comp tickets to exclusive events, and a direct connection to the black power movement—leading figures in the arts, entertainment, sports, and business.
And in any event, it would be hard to leave. She’d gotten lax since she’d been there. Why pursue excellence if it wasn’t required? So her book of clips was less impressive than when she arrived from The New York Times Magazine four years ago. Further, Virgil banned the staff from freelancing, so she hadn’t been able to publish work of the highest quality elsewhere. Ideally, she wanted to work for a Time or a Vanity Fair or a New Yorker—a publication where she could stretch out and show true brilliance. Maybe then she’d be motivated to work on her novel.
But then there was something else to consider. If she left black publishing, she would lose stature, not in the larger world of professionals, but in the smaller world defined by race, where her status was inflated because so many talented black people lacked the access needed to gain the qualifications and experience she had. She was like a third-world student with an American engineering degree who can choose between an entry-level job at Bell Atlantic, where she can grow in value and experience, and going home to become Junior Undersecretary for Telecommunications with a villa and a chauffeur and direct responsibility for maintaining the four rotary-dial telephones in a far-flung province.
Which to choose? Satisfaction or status? She was thinking about this when the meeting came to a close.
She called Claire when she got in that evening, suspecting that Fire was there, hoping that he would answer, unsure of what she would say. She paced her room as she dialed, changing from her cream-colored pantsuit to a light brown shift.
She would apologize immediately, she said to herself as the phone rang. Yes, she would do that first … then … she didn’t know … she would just—
Claire clicked over from the other line. “Hallo.”
“Oh, hi Claire, how are y—”
“Fine, but I can’t talk now. I have to rush a friend to the airport. Can I call you back?”
“Oh, which friend is this?” she asked, taking pains to sound disinterested.
“Fire … I’m sure you remember Fire. You were flirting with him shamelessly on your doorstep.”
“Oh him? Oh, stop, we were just joking around. Tell him I said hi.”
She wished for the courage to ask to speak with him. But so many things were rushing through her head. He might accidentally say something to give Claire the idea that they were having, or had had—she wasn’t sure—an affair. What would she do then? Their world was so small. Claire knew Ian, Margaret, and Lewis. Margaret and Ian had recently broken up, and according to Fire, she and Phil were together now. That tramp. And of course Margaret and Lewis used to be involved.
“Do you want to tell him yourself?” Claire asked.
“No. It’s all right,” she replied. “Just tell him Sylvia says hi. Who knows? He’s probably forgotten who I am.”
She heard him in the background, urging Claire to get off the phone, and began to wonder if he knew with whom Claire was speaking.
“Listen, Sylvia, I’ll talk to you later,” Claire said. “We have to go, okay?”
He must know for sure now, she thought. In fact he must have raised his voice to make me hear it—to torture me. I opened up to him in ways I’ve never opened up to Lewis. He knows more than Lewis about my past, my insecurities, my passions, my sexuality. Jesus, how can he not know that I’m sorry?
“Listen … Claire … could you ask him …”
“I really can’t talk,” Claire said. “We have to go. He’s already missed one flight. Bye-bye.”
“Okay, but could you tell him that—”
Click.
She sat in silence with the phone against her ear, listening to the dial tone. She was in the kitchen now, sitting on the countertop with her feet on a stool. What if he’d answered the phone, what would she have said?
Would I have told him that I love him and miss him? she thought. She began to hope that she would have. She didn’t know. Suddenly she was feeling abandoned, and the hands of the clock on her wall were whittling time like a pocketknife, and there was nothing she could do with the pieces.