Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez

best seller, and to hell with making it a better book? Anna reaches for the phone and begins punching the numbers for Equiano but before she gets to the last one, she presses the off button. What’s the use? she thinks. He has already been given the authority. Raine has been assigned to him. It is obvious he does not intend to consult her.
    There is more in the e-mail. She reads the last lines: Of course, you will have the final word. I’ll be sure to let Raine know that.
    The final word about what? About how to make the sex scenes steamier? About how to make the women more alluring? Bigger breasts here, firmer legs there? About how to make the men sexier? Rippled pecs there, stronger thighs here, organs bursting out of skin-tight pants? A man rips off the bodice of a ludicrously curvy woman. He slits her skirt and exposes a thong barely covering the triangle of her private parts. The story is predictable: the woman struggles, but yields eventually. For the man is really a good man who is plagued by the demons of a deprived past. The woman is really a good woman; she will help him overcome his past. Together they will ride into the sunset. All the characters are stock figures mined from the erotic dreams of lonely women. They are beautiful, they are sexy, and if they are not rich at the beginning of the story, they will be at the end. And is that not the point? Is that not what lonely women want to read, curled up in empty beds with only the comfort of vicarious pleasures? For black women the statistics are grimmer than those the researchers at Harvard report. White women have until forty, but the axe falls on black women barely out of their twenties.
    Is that what Tony wanted her to understand when he told her she was lucky? “Look around you. How many black women do you see who have a man?” he said to her, his lips curled in disdain. “How many have a husband?”
    Did he expect her to stay silent and do nothing while he cavorted with his mistress? Paula had warned her when she said yes to Tony. “He is an American,” Paula said. “You are entering territory you know little about.” But Anna believed she knew all she needed to know. American men are monogamous; American men are happy to grow old with the woman they married. Before cable TV would expose this lie, such were the stories from America that her newly independent island aired on TV and showed in the movies. A well-ordered family is a mirror to a well-ordered government; one woman for one man and it follows, like day follows night, one nation under one God. That seemed the philosophy fueling the prevalence of these fairy tales.
    Anna was a child. Rationally, as an adult, she knew those stories of monogamy in America were false, but such is the power of lies imprinted on an impressionable young mind. They become myth, a sort of truth. An American husband would be faithful, and when her father betrayed her mother, she made up her mind she would not marry a Caribbean man; an American man would have kept his vows.
    Her father loved his wife, yet he had a mistress, fell in love with another woman. Her name was Thelma. That was what he said to Anna the day his traitor’s gift rolled off her mother’s skeletal arms. It was a diamond-studded bracelet he had given her mother for her birthday, not seeming to notice the veins that rose on her arms like hard wires or the two knots protruding at the top of her breast bone, or that her cheekbones had become scaffolding for her slackened flesh and her eyes were sunk in pools ringed with black circles. He was in love and that was all that mattered.
    When her mother had enough, she fought for him and won him back. He was remorseful; she was forgiving. Now he is an attentive husband, a loving husband. While his wife undergoes the pre-op tests for the mastectomy the doctor will perform on her left breast tomorrow, he waits for her in the lobby of the hospital. He is anxious, he is nervous, he is afraid. He does not want to