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.