Read Online Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez - Free Book Online

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.

FIVE
    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,