chapter five

He called her in the early afternoon.

“Hello.”

She leaned back in her chair and began to rub her belly through her yellow cotton blouse.

“Where are you?”

“Brooklyn,” he said. “Outside a Senegalese place named Keur N’ Deye. I just left Moshood’s. I had to get a few things for my cousin and his girlfriend. Phil and I were supposed to be hooking up, but I haven’t seen him. But anyway I’m not here to see him. I’m here to see you. What are you doing?”

“Besides thinking about you?”

“Yeah. Besides thinking about me.”

“Nothing much. Work.”

“I heard a rumor,” he said.

“What rumor is that?”

“That you’re going to leave work early and spend the rest of the day with me.”

“Sure, if you hire me when they fire me.”

“They won’t fire you. Just tell them that this guy who really likes you has come a long way to see you. They’ll understand. D’you know what? Lemme talk to your boss.”

She told him to hold on and then did her impersonation of Virgil’s mumble. “Hello, Virgil Pucci speaking.”

“Hello Virgil, how are you today? Listen, my name is Mr. Likesylvialucasalot, and I’m really and truly infatuated with her, and would really like to see her. And I know that she’s a really important member of your team over there, but consider this—there are many people who can do what she does for you, but only one of her who can do what she does for me. So could you be a really nice guy and let her go, please?”

“You are so silly,” she said.

“Thank you very much, coming from you that is really high praise. But seriously. Take the day off and come and see me. It’s a Friday, they’ll understand.”

“I can’t, Fire,” she said, weighing various deadlines and the missing receipts. “Really.” She had to be sensible. She was alone. She had to remember that.

“Just tell them you’re sick,” he said. “Or that your mum died or something like that. But whatever you do … just come.”

“I think you’re insane.”

“I must be, right? To be doing this.”

“Or maybe you’re like this with every woman.”

“No, just every other one. It’s too expensive to be this nice to all of them. Only the top fifty-five get this kinda treatment. The rest get dinner at McDonald’s.”

She glanced at her bouquet, which was down to ten tulips. Boogie Boo had swiped two. “Thanks for the flowers, they’re beautiful, and it was just so nice of you. You know what’s so incredible about you? You’re like a witchman or something. You just have this way of reaching out to me when I’m feeling most vulnerable. Like that time you called my house looking for Claire and you were concerned about me … out of the blue … without knowing it was me. And then this morning … you don’t even want to hear what happened—trust me. I had the worst morning, and then I came outside and you were on my doorstep with flowers. You do realize we have to take you for genetic testing, cause real black men don’t do these things according to the news. Honestly, Fire, I didn’t take you seriously when you said you were coming. I just thought it was something nice to say.”

“Why’d you think I was joking?” he asked.

“Because … I mean … men just don’t do that. At least not unless they’re rich, which—don’t take it the wrong way—I don’t think you are. Or unless they’ve had sex and they know it’s good.”

“Which is sorta the case.”

“Don’t remind me. I’m so embarrassed.”

“About what?”

“Our … how do you say … office phone sex … or is it phone office sex?”

“Who knows, maybe you were faking it. You were probably soaking your corns and clipping your nose hairs.”

“Okay, lemme come clean. You’re right. But I forgot to tell you that I put you on speaker phone. Now the whole office wants to meet you.”

He laughed with her.

She liked that Fire could be so zany and self-deprecating then turn around and write a poem like “Person.” For the poem was not only passionate. It was good. It showed a clear understanding of form. Of course she’d known men who could have written that and even better. But that was not the point. They hadn’t.

“Fire … why are you doing this to me?” she asked.

“Doing what?”

“Making me want to leave my job and come and spend the day with you.”

“How am I doing that?”

“By talking to me. The longer you talk to me, the more I want to get out of here. You care about me, don’t you, Fire?” she half said, half asked. “I know you do. Where are you going to be in a half hour? I have to leave here. I’m feeling very sick.”

They arranged to meet on the Brooklyn Bridge, on a bench on the walkway above the road. Sylvia dragged herself there, burdened by the weight of the sky, which had fallen on this humid day from the weight of its own wetness and draped itself across the city. Exiting a cab at Chambers Street, she picked her way through the flowered triangle of City Hall Park, edging behind a press conference on the steps of the neoclassical box that anchored the green. Weaving through a band of demonstrators, she ducked under a barricade, crossed the street, and entered the walkway in front of the Municipal Building, a towering Beaux Arts masterpiece with an awe-inspiring colonnade. There, she reached for her sunglasses and then made her way up the incline, dodging bikers and joggers, alert to the movements of camera-wielding tourists, herds of them in J. Crew, who stopped without warning, obstructing progress with the fuck-you languor of cattle.

He wasn’t there when she arrived. Knowing he might be hiding, she wandered around the base of the huge stone columns that support the bridge’s arches.

She checked her watch. She was on time. He, of course, was late.

Reminding herself not to sulk, she passed the time by reading poetry—Midsummer by Walcott—passing through screens of imagery to another life, a life of razor grass and bougainvillea and rivers that frolicked instead of oozed like the one that slunk beneath her now into a dishwater sea.

Drawn into transcendent verse, she lost track of time. And when she was through she realized that she’d been waiting for an hour, which didn’t bother her as much as she’d expected, for it gave her time to think about her actions and their possible consequences. She’d lied to her colleagues and slacked off about the receipts. But more important, she was having an affair. Now, as she sat there, higher than most of the city, she felt his spirit filling her, fading into her marrow. And there, on that bridge, halfway between her home and her office, she began to understand why Aretha trembles that way when she sings “A Natural Woman.”

But all this for what? She could lose her job, or her relationship. Or both. For what reason? To spend a day with a man she barely knew.

She looked at her watch again. She should leave, she thought, at least on principle … she should walk away right now.

But she made no attempt to go. Because under the ambivalence and apprehension simmered a feeling—and whether it was intuition or hope she wasn’t sure—that meeting Fire on this August day would change her life somehow.

She turned her face on the runners and bikers trickling back and forth; she marveled at their stamina in the liquid heat. As she sat there, suffering pasty licks of tongues of breeze, a Japanese man in a Panama hat sat on a stool across from her and began to weave standards on his box guitar. She began to hum along … quietly … to herself … getting up to drop loose change in his collection plate. Did she have a request? She asked if he knew “You Go to My Head.”

And as he played it for her she closed her eyes and thought of Fire: saw him standing in the kitchen at Claire’s gallery in his red T-shirt and baggy jeans; felt the madness of that first kiss; saw him as she left him at the phone booth, neither of them expecting ever to meet again. What a weird thing, she thought, just meeting a stranger and feeling a charge and then finding yourself in “like.”

Suddenly she heard a loud collision, and she opened her eyes to see a wriggling heap of spandex, flesh, and metal. Hands from the gathering crowd picked through the bundle, helped the victims to their feet. The crowd began to grow, pressing sweaty bottoms in her face, wilting her with its collective heat. She’d been waiting for over an hour now. And she really hated to wait. Where the hell was he? He had better come soon.

The crowd was stirring now. People were arguing, maybe even shoving a bit. She couldn’t see. Then as a woman grabbed her child and scurried away, the crowd erupted into a helter-skelter. People flying like shrapnel.

Sylvia saw a glimmering knife and a splash of blood, and two men rolling toward her, heaving and throbbing. She lunged away in time and they crashed into the bench. She scrambled to her feet, her knee bruised and her slacks torn, and ran, leaving in her wake a clamor of thumps and bangs and curses.

On the Brooklyn side of the bridge she leaned against a wall to catch her breath, trembling like a severed limb. Sagging from heat and fright, she slumped to the ground, her knee popping like a hot coal, pulling on the thread of air she’d snagged between her teeth as a squad car raced up the walkway, sirens barking, lights ablaze.

After a few minutes she began to walk back to the bench, but stopped when she made the turn to enter the bridge proper and saw that the crowd had remade itself.

This is just too much, she thought. He should’ve been on time. She turned around and shuffled home.

There was no place to rest in that shambolic place, so she was forced to clear the bed, and this drew her into a larger action of sweeping, dusting, and polishing that was usefully distracting. At minutes after nine, she showered and went to bed, tired, anxious, and disappointed. She’d called him several times without getting an answer.

At five after midnight the telephone jolted her awake. The response to her grunted hello was Fire’s voice, recognizable but thinner.

“How are you? Where are you?” she asked anxiously.

“At the hospital.”

She gathered the sheets around her. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Phil swallowed some pills today.”

“Oh, my God. How is he?”

“Not so good.”

“Where are you?”

“St. Vincent’s Emergency Room.”

“Do you need me?” She was out of bed, ready to fling on some clothes.

“No, love, I’m fine. But thanks.”

“If you need me, Fire, I’ll come for you.”

“I’ll be okay.” His voice cracked. The fissure went right through her.

“If you need me, Fire, I’m there.”

“No … baby, don’t worry yourself.”

She didn’t know him well enough to know how to convince him. And she didn’t want to pressure him. He needed his energy for himself and his friend.

“Okay, but if you need me, call me, okay?” She began to lay out some clothes on the chair.

“I’m sorry about today,” he said. “I apologize to you from the bottom of my heart.”

“It’s okay,” she replied. “It’s okay.”

“I thought about you a lot today,” he said. “When I found out what happened to Phil I started to think about some of the things I want to do in this life. And getting a chance to know you was one of them. This thing between us is not ideal, Sylvia. I know that … this situation. But there is a certain logic to the chaos of the universe, and I don’t think our convergence is random. It has a meaning, Sylvia, and a purpose. And we owe it to ourselves to discover that … to find out what it is. Who knows, maybe this is the path through which we’ll become good friends. Or maybe we’re here to validate our respective involvements … to strengthen them in the long run. I …” His voice cracked again.

She sat on the edge of the bed. “I thought about you too, Fire. I was really mad at you today. While I was waiting for you a lot of crazy things happened—”

“Like what? Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I’ll tell you about it some other time. I was so angry … but now I’m so sorry, baby … so, so sorry. If you don’t want to be alone tonight … you can stay with me. Okay?”

“Okay … but are you sure? I mean, there are other people to consider.”

“Yes … it’s fine … no one else will be here. And anyone who wants to be here needs to call before coming.”

“Okay.”

She slapped her forehead. “I shouldn’t have said that … about coming to stay with me … I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to jump to conclusions. Oh, God, this is so weird. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m just tired. I’m like really tripping now.”

“Don’t apologize. I understand how you feel.”

She lay back on the sheets. “So come, then. Don’t stay alone. Come stay with me. I’ll look after you.”

“Thank you so much … I really need you right now.”

“Will you hold me, Fire, and tell me that it’s right to feel this way? Will you tell me I’m not out here on my own?”

“You’re right to feel this way.”

“I need you to say it while you’re holding me though.”

“I promise. But now I have to go.”

“Okay. But call me.”

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“I will.”

Sitting in the sickly spray of fluorescent light, Fire unbuttoned the neck of his shirt and prepared himself for the worst as the Filipino nurse approached him with the set jaw and blank eyes of a giver of bad news. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he followed her to an adjacent hall, where without preamble she presented the facts. Overdose of sleeping pills. In and out of consciousness. Serious condition. No sense in waiting. Go home and rest.

She turned and walked away, leaving him to stare at her figure being absorbed into the dull gray walls. At the end of the corridor, a pair of double doors opened slowly, admitting to the waiting room another frazzled soul, who would sit in a hard plastic chair under frigid lights and wait for the facts while learning to associate bleach with the odor of death. His hands behind his back, his head held erect, Fire tried to shorten his depth of field like a camera, not wanting to record in sharp detail the scene before him—the knotted faces, the whining children hurriedly dressed in the middle of the night—all of this while a drone streamed in through his spinal cord and up through the base of his skull, filling his head with nothing but the sound of its own nothingness. Then quickly now, as tears filled his eyes, the room began to melt from solid to liquid.

Margaret, who had brought him Ian’s letter, was almost upon him before he saw that she was the person who’d come through the door. How was she connected to this? But before he could ask or guess, she flung herself against him.

Phil, she told Fire, was her boyfriend. She and Ian had broken up.

“It was all so sad,” she said—her face was pressed into his chest—“because it had all begun so suddenly and was about to end the same way.”

The facts marched into his skull, where they shouted down the white noise. Phil and Margaret. Margaret and Phil. How? Why? In what time frame? All this while he held her, absorbing her shudders and convulsions, soaking them up with his body, adding more weight to his soul. He needed to go soon. He needed to be looked after as well. He was sorry, he said, thinking of Sylvia’s lap now, but he couldn’t give her anything more than facts.

Margaret began to give details about Phil and her, but Fire stopped her politely and gave her yet another fact. He had to go, and the clerks in billing needed to speak with someone. Would she deal with them? He had no idea how these things worked in America.

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she said, “it’s just that I don’t … y’know …”

“Know him?”

“Yes. I don’t even know his full name or his address.”

“Well, I have to go,” he said. “I’ve been here for thirteen hours now and I need to get away.”

He gave her his details and Phil’s information, then left.

He didn’t realize he was drenched in sweat until he went outside and the wind transformed his body hair to splinters. Standing outside on Seventh Avenue, he sensed what it was like to be a tree in a metropolis—to be a living, breathing thing that was ignored. As he looked around for something to call out to him, to pull him in a direction, he felt his feet being sucked into the earth below the concrete, felt his toes turning into roots.

He’d never known New York to be indifferent. There was always something calling out to the lonely. Good things and bad things, novelties and fixtures, bright lights and dark places, saviors and con men. But tonight, though, the city just went about its business.

Raising his head slowly, he looked up at the sky and couldn’t see the stars through the mustard gas of smog. Jesus Christ. This place would deny him now the basic right to wish.

“Whassup?”

He looked over his shoulder and saw a guard—a one-eyed youth with two gold caps.

“Why you looking like that, B? One o’ your boys up in here?”

He nodded.

“Whassup? He got shot?”

“He might have tried to kill himself. We’re not sure yet.”

“He white, right?”

“How’d you know?”

“Cause when niggers get upset they kill another nigger.”

Fire shrugged his shoulders.

“But yo, I gotta go finish my shift. I just came out for some air. I don’t know how they expect a mofucker to get well with that death smell they got up in there.”

Fire shrugged again.

“But yo, don’t worry about your boy, man. What’s gotta be gotta be. Go home and chill with your lady, man, and don’t give a damn about a thing.”

He slunk away. Fire found a phone and called her, tapping his feet as he dialed, trying to ignore his stiff chest and trembling jaw. She wasn’t picking up. He called again. Same thing.

He didn’t know what to do now. Didn’t know what to think. Call again now? Call again later? If so, how much later? Don’t call and just show up? Go to Brooklyn, then call again from Brooklyn Heights? Go to the hotel and sleep and call her the next morning? Is she sleeping? Is she out? Is she on her way here because she’s concerned about me? Is she home but doesn’t want to pick up because she’s changed her mind about me coming over? Is she okay? If she’s not okay, what would I do? Call the cops and send them there? Or would that be a job for EMS? Fuck, maybe Lewis came over and she doesn’t want to pick up? Or she wants to pick up but knows that she shouldn’t? What if she isn’t okay? Is she okay? What if he’s there? What are they doing? Are they talking? Are they eating? Are they sleeping? Are they making love? Are they fucking? If they are, is she liking it? Is she on top? Or is she on the bottom? On her back or on her belly? Are they standing up against the fridge? Is she bent over with her head in the fridge and her legs apart? Is she okay? Is she okay? Is she okay? Did she really mean to tell me to come over? Did she mean it then change her mind? What if I went over there now, what the fuck would we do anyway? Talk? Sleep? Eat? Make love with her head in the refrigerator? Or would we start kissing at the door then make love right there—half in, half out, half clothed, half nude, half sane, half mad—and roll down the steps halfway into the street and confuse a drunk driver? Is she okay? Is she okay? Is she okay?

He decided to call her again, but he was out of change. As he stood at the curb to cross the street to get some, a cab discharged a fare in front of him. He stood there looking at the open door, not knowing what to do until the driver, a Russian with limp brown hair, asked him where he was going.

“Brooklyn.”

“Where exactly, sir?”

He thought for a minute. Should he go to his or hers? He mumbled directions to the driver, leaned against the door, and went to sleep.

Like a higgler, he stood at the top of the steps with his shoulders straight, his back erect, his body aligned to ease the burden that weighed on his head. Through the door a bunch of keys were tinkling like a kora, and soft feet moved on the floorboards like mallets on the keys of a marimba.

She was home. A sigh curled him over like a bent blue note, giving him release, toppling the basket of woes at her doorway, where she was standing now, in slippers and white pajamas, framed by yellow light, needing only wings to be an angel.

“Come,” she said. “Come inside.” She led him to the couch and helped him remove his shoes, leaving him to return with a pail of water foamy with bath salts, aloe vera, and mint leaves. Working quickly but with care, she rolled up his trouser legs, exposing his calves, which were round and firm like cantaloupes, and helped him settle his feet in the warmth.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, standing now. She lit two candles and turned off the lights. “I was out at the grocery when you called. I needed some ingredients for something I wanted to make you.”

“Thank you so much,” he said, as bands of muscle laid down their arms. “You’ve gone outside yourself tonight.”

She went to the kitchen, pulling his eyes like smudged ink on wet paper, and returned from the oven with a saucer of cookies, trailing behind her the scent of almonds.

She slipped a cookie between his lips, allowing her finger to linger there as he licked it clean of crumbs and butter.

“You are too sweet to me,” he said, floating off to sleep.

She had begun to massage his neck now.

“So you’ve finally gotten your cookie then.”

“Finally … after such a long time. Can I have the recipe?”

“No. I want you to come here whenever you need them.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know what makes them special.”

“Oh do you?” she said, wrapping his hair around her fists like reins.

“Yes,” he said, languorously, lulled even more now by the scalp massage, by the ebb and flow of pulling. “Molasses.”

“How’d you know?” she asked. “I only used a drop.”

“A man can smell these things.”

He woke up on the couch, draped in bedding, blue-gray sheets like rain observed from a distance. The basin was gone, the plate cleared away.

As he rose he heard her breathing, sucking in and heaving out with concentrated effort as if inhaling and exhaling were not instinctive, but skills she’d learned from a teacher who’d told her to practice always—even in her sleep.

He followed the sound, and found her lying in bed, on her side, in a corner, with her spine against the wall, curled back into herself like a fist.

If he’d fallen asleep with her, would she be breathing easier? He felt his own breathing slowing down, changing its pitch, sounding like cassava being grated for a pone. And as he was swallowed by the rhythm of her back and forth, he sensed with his spirit and not his mind that maybe, if he just tried hard enough, he could breathe for her and lighten her slumber.

Pulling the door halfway shut, he took the phone to the kitchen and called the hotel to check his messages. There were three from Margaret. He called her and received good news.

Phil would be fine. The pills were an accident. And he’d be staying in New York for a little while because his audition would have to be rescheduled. This, she said, would give them time to know each other. The story was quite funny, she said, but it was best to hear Phil tell it.

“Phil.”

“Fire.” He was as happy as a dread with an ounce of weed.

“So how are you? Margaret said you’d be coming out in a few days. So what’s happening with the two of you, by the way? This is all quite strange and new. What’s going on? What happened with the pills?”

“It was an honest accident. The kind of thing that could happen to anybody. D’you know what feng xiu is? It’s the extract from the smegma of this rare Chinese deer. And they use it to make a pill called feng xiu xiang, which you can get in Chinatown.”

“What are these pills good for?”

“Long erections. You can pop one and stay up for twenty minutes. I was having some problems with Margaret and Ian told me what to get and where to get it. You can’t get it everywhere. It’s sold from this little hole in the wall in a cellar on Mott Street. And they’ll only sell it to you if you give them a code word.”

“What?”

“It’s really potent stuff. It’s illegal, actually. It has dangerous side effects.”

“Like what?”

“Well, taken without a meal it can shrivel your cock.”

“So how is this connected to the sleeping pills?”

“Well Margaret’s a hard revver—Ian says she’s the town bike but I don’t take what he says seriously—and we were supposed to be getting together later, so I figured I’d take an extra dose to make her happy. Well, I thought if I took a lot of them I could make her really happy. And I took the wrong pills by accident.”

“Whose pills? And where did this happen?”

“Oh, the pills are mine. I haven’t been sleeping well in the last couple of months. I’m a bit concerned about my career, actually. Good gigs are hard to come by. I’d just left a program at the New School and—”

“Phil, are you serious about all this? I don’t want to laugh then find out that you’ve got, as they say, issues, you know.”

“Fuck, I wish I were joking. But it was kinda cool though. Have you ever had your stomach pumped? Oh, it’s really cool. They hook you up to this big machine and they run a tube down your throat. You should try it just for the experience.”

“Phil, can I ask you a question? Does anything ever bother you?”

“Sure. Not having a gig. But I’ll be fine though.”

“So I’ll come and check you this evening then. I have to take care of certain things in the day. You need anything from the outside? Food or anything?”

“No, the food here’s great.”

“Phil, it’s hospital food.”

“The only thing better is airline food. It’s not the food so much. I like the way they separate everything into compartments. Okay, you could bring me something, but make it something that’s easy to fix up like that. Don’t bring a burrito or anything.”

“So by the way, how’s Ian taking this thing with you and Margaret?”

“Fine. He’s the one who arranged it.”

“Whadyou mean?”

“It started as a threesome, actually. Sort of like the blackbirds on the wall. Now there’s two. I think they’ve just gotten tired of each other, Ian and Margaret.”

“I see … Well, she seems quite nice. Very bright.”

“She knows a lot about music, too, man. We learn a lot from each other. But what are you doing over here?”

“A little business.”

“Give over, Fire. It’s Sylvia, isn’t it?”

“Just cool, man.”

“Come on, Fire. I’m not stupid y’know. I was the one who brought the parcel for you.”

“Just cool, man. I can’t really talk right now.”

“Come on, Fire. I won’t tell.”

He leaned into the phone. “Okay … but this is between me and you.”

After washing the dishes from the night before, and sealing the cookies in sandwich bags, he trawled her fridge and cupboards for a sense of her taste and went out to the shops to get ingredients for breakfast, leaving behind a note to say he’d soon return.

On the night when he’d dropped her off at home, he was remembering now, the driver had taken a route past some Middle Eastern shops.

After a few wrong turns he found it, the old Lebanese quarter along Atlantic Avenue near Smith Street—not so much a bazaar as a throwback to the civility of prewar Beirut—where men with dark mustaches and open-necked shirts sipped cardamom coffee at sidewalk cafés and women dressed by Macy’s ordered baklava and pistachio cakes in French as well as Arabic as their Segaddicted kids waited outside to make sure the cops didn’t ticket the Camry.

Inside Sahadi Importing, a neighborhood suprette whose informality seemed to mock the yuppies who wanted to insist it was gourmet, he edged around barrels of bulgur wheat and fava beans, and squeezed by counters lined with five-gallon jars of dates and figs and nuts and sun-dried fruit, choosing for his basket carefully by using his senses the way his mother had taught him—sniffing for signs of fermentation, squeezing for fitness, even listening. The sign of a good avocado is a rattling seed.

On the way back he picked up a shirt, some socks, and some boxers at a Gap on Montague Street. Once inside the apartment, he checked to see that Sylvia was fine and then went about prepping breakfast. He showered and changed and waited for her to rise, feeling quite at home now after taking a seat on her toilet.

In the living room again, he turned on the telly and switched back and forth between a key contest in Mexican-league soccer and an episode of Xena, wondering as he smothered his laughter who was the worse actor, the striker taking a dive in the penalty box or the gladiator trying to sound like Kirk Douglas in Spartacus.

Still tired from the night before, he nodded off to sleep, waking up a little after noon. She was still not awake, so he occupied his time by wandering through the apartment. She had a decent collection of art, including Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden originals. But it was clear that she hadn’t bought the work just for its investment value. A lot of it, he concluded, she simply liked. Crossing his legs on the floor, he rifled through her music, a collection that was deep and wide, ranging from jazz and classic soul to soukous and qawwali. She particularly liked Al Green and Marvin Gaye, and Cassandra Wilson and Sweet Honey in the Rock. Her library, though, was deep but narrow. Her tastes were decidedly American, and didn’t seem to stray beyond the French and Russian must-reads like Camus and Dostoyevsky. It’s fascinating, he thought, how difficult it is to predict people’s tastes. For judging from the art on her walls and the music in her racks he’d expected to see well represented the work of writers like Naguib Mafouz and Nadine Gordimer and Maryse Condé. But greatness was the dilemma of America, wasn’t it? It was a large, rich country with only two neighbors, so one could easily live here in comfort without considering the rest of the world—as the rest of the world has to consider itself in addition to considering America. His novels, for instance, had sold a million and a half copies in the Commonwealth, mainly in Britain, Canada, and Australia, but had done about twenty-five thousand in the States. Which didn’t bother him. Success in the States would come—if it did—like most things … in the fullness of time.

There were some photo albums on the bottom shelf. He took his time going through them, struck by the absence of childhood pictures or any group shots with family. Why is that? he wondered, adding this to the list of things he wanted to ask her later.

Gaps notwithstanding, the albums gave him a bit of context. And after going through them he felt as if he knew her a little better. He knew where she went to school. And had an idea of her career track. He knew now, as he’d suspected, that she’d traveled fairly widely, and also, as a photo in a carnival costume showed, that her bottom was fuller than it appeared in her clothes.

The scene looked like Trinidad or Barbados. His lashes licked her image from the page. Her body was in profile and her face was turned toward him, smiling, as if she knew, as the shutter sliced away this moment of her life, that one day a man would recognize this as the essential her—a lover of life and its possibilities.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by a rustling, and what he thought was her voice. But he wasn’t sure. For he’d heard it across time and space—from within the paper on which the picture was printed, on that layer just below the ink, where the life behind the image really exists, where he’d held her hand and danced with her behind a float, imbibing rum drinks and diesel fumes and salt-laced sweat, dancing on the street in a crowd with the same vitality with which he would shuffle inside her sweaty shabeen as soon as they were alone.

Going to her room, standing by the door, he found her still sleeping, and realized, as he watched her mumbling groggily, that the rustling had been the friction of her clothes against her skin. For she was lying on her belly, naked, her white pajamas crumpled with the sea green sheets, one leg splayed, the other drawn up the way women do when they want to feel a deeper heat.

Moaning from the depths of her unconscious, she rolled onto her back in a settling of shimmering flesh, falling now beneath his shadow, which splashed over her breasts, draining away through her cleavage into her navel.

As he leaned against the doorway of this quiet room whose drawn shades granted privacy, he felt every hair on his blood-hot body filling each pore in hers.

He pulled away. This place was hers. And therefore privacy wasn’t theirs until she’d given him permission.

He returned to the couch. There he pondered the possibilities of her body: the lean torso, the full calves, the firm thighs that melted like pitch into soft hips. And her bottom, which he knew now had not been overdramatized by a wide-angle lens. It was tight at the sides without dimples or blemishes, but filigreed, as women’s bottoms should always be, with stretch lines.

He channel-surfed, trying to get away from it, but it followed him to talk shows and sports roundups and cartoons and sitcoms and rescue reenactments … this big, brown batty on a string.

He heard her stirring again, and her voice calling his name, then a pause, during which, he could tell, she was dressing.

“Oh, it’s so late,” she said from the bathroom door, a little bit shy before brushing her teeth. “I’m sorry … I really didn’t mean to oversleep like this and pay you no mind. I’m being such a bad hostess. I hope you found ways to entertain yourself?”

“That you don’t have to worry about.”

“Good. I’ll be with you in a minute. And did I tell you good morning? Good morning.”

“Good morning to you too.”

“Are you hungry or anything?”

“Yes, but I’ve started breakfast. I’ll finish now that you’re up. Go ahead, shower and all that, then we can eat.”

“You’re making us breakfast. I was wondering what that smell was. Okay, two more points for you. I’ll be really quick then.”

In the shade of the cherry tree in the small backyard, in a corner by the fence, they spread a blanket and had a simple meal: buljol, chips of salt cod tossed in thyme and olive oil with garlic, diced tomatoes, chopped onions, and minced bell peppers; and bake, an unleavened bread made from flour and salt with a pinch of baking powder and butter. On the side they had avocado slices, cubes of feta cheese, and, to cool their lips, sugar and water with crushed ice.

“This is really good,” she said, with the first bite. “I never thought of feta cheese with codfish before. But it works. Who taught you to cook?”

“My mother,” he said. “I’d say she, mostly, and then there were other people that showed me little things. A lot of it too is just using your mind and trying new things all the time. Then you start creating like a music composer.”

“Right,” she said. “You can project how certain things will work together and adjust before you commit.”

“Yeah … exactly.”

“So,” she asked, smiling, “do you cook all the time or just when you want to impress people you don’t really need to impress because they’ve already fallen into you?”

“Well, for people like that,” he said, eyes radiating humor, “I extend myself beyond food.”

“Yeah? To where?”

“To drink.”

He took a lime from his pocket. “Now, in the hands of an ordinary man this would be a simple green ball,” he said with a straight face. “But watch magic happen.”

He wiped his knife on a napkin and sliced the lime. He pointed to her glass. “Now I want you to take a sip.”

She did.

He squeezed some juice in her glass and stirred it with his finger. “Now taste it.”

She giggled as she lifted the glass to her lips.

“Taste different, don’t it?”

“Yeah,” she said, playing along. “Wow, that magic ball was really impressive.”

“But it wasn’t the lime,” he said, reaching out and stroking her face. “It was the magic finger.”

Out on the street now, she in a red summer dress and he in a khaki shirt and pants, they walked along dreamily, holding hands and hugging like they were no longer humans with choice and free will but puppets—marionettes moved by wires to the keyboard of a grand puppeteer.

On the cobblestoned Promenade above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway they sat on a bench and looked out over New York harbor at the concrete forest of Wall Street. The sun was pinned to the creaseless sky—a medal on a soldier’s chest—and the East River was as alive with boats as it used to be with fish, big boats that seemed tiny as they sailed beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, whose cables from this distance were a giant spider’s web. In the foreground, right below them, old warehouses were stretched out on the water’s edge, basking, like caimans on a jungle embankment.

“Have you read Brazil?” she asked, taking his hand.

He had.

“And did you like it?”

He understood this for what it was: her way of saying that he shouldn’t think low of her for being here, because she’d been pushed to this … for the man—he wouldn’t use his name anymore—didn’t make her feel like being natural was enough.

“I like Updike’s work a lot,” he said, being careful not to claim him as an influence. That would’ve modulated the discussion. Changed its key. Made it about him. Which he didn’t want. Not that he was ashamed of being a writer. He just didn’t want to be defined by it. For he was many things, with many dimensions—all of which he wanted her to eventually see and know.

“In Brazil,” he continued, “you really see the things that make Updike great. Imagery and metaphor, and the keenness of detail. One of the things that make the book brilliant is the setting. In a Latin American literary context, baroquely ornate language doesn’t feel overwrought. Imagine if Brazil were set in the contemporary American west, and Isabel were the daughter of a white municipal banker, and Tristao a homeboy named Tyrone, from Harlem. I mean, Updike got so deep into the esthetic of writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Amado that the book almost reads like it was translated from Portuguese or Spanish—those eighteen-clause sentences and all that. No, man, that book is sheer brilliance, man.” He thought for a bit. “And then there’s the whole weaving in of Brazilian history and politics. And the masterful control of the time sense—”

“I guess I know who you’re casting your Nobel vote for,” she said, feeling weak now, as though she’d been standing beneath a cataract of words. Literary passions were so seductive. “Who else do you stalk at readings?”

“Fiction or poetry?”

“Both.”

“Well, Updike, as I said. Naipaul. Henry Miller. Márquez. Carpentier—”

“Who’s Carpentier? I don’t know him.”

“A Cuban writer. He’s kinda considered the father of magic realism. He wrote Explosion in a Cathedral and The Kingdom of This World.”

She laughed inside, wanting to hug him for reading good books, for being able to share this passion with her.

“Wow, there are so many,” he said, faced now with an embarrassment of riches. “It’s hard for me to think—but I’d have to add Toni Morrison and D. H. Lawrence. In poetry, now, there’s Walcott, Neruda, Guillén, Yeats, Rita Dove, Philip Larkin … Kwame Dawes down in South Carolina … different people for different moods.”

“Do you write a lot of poetry?”

“Not anymore. Only when I get the inspiration.” She leaned against him. “Only when I feel the vibes. And you?” he asked, placing his arm behind her, on the back of the bench, where it perched in waiting—a jaguar in a tree. “Who do you like?”

“In fiction … Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and of course Updike—I’ll never forget reading Couples the first time—and Margaret Walker. And in poetry, I’d say Maya Angelou, and Margaret Atwood from Canada, and Langston Hughes and Rita Dove and of course Walcott. The funny thing about Rita Dove, though, is that I love her almost as much as a novelist.”

“Oh, I didn’t know she wrote novels.”

“She wrote only one, Through the Ivory Gate. It was published in the early nineties. It’s about this black woman who grows up very poor in a small town in Ohio. Her parents are migrant workers from the South in this mostly white place. So this woman grows up having her own identity struggles—y’know, northern versus southern, black versus white—and then she goes off to college in Wisconsin where she studies music and theater in this almost completely white environment. She becomes a puppeteer and ends up being the only black person in a traveling puppet troupe, and this group becomes her whole world for a while, so all her relationships are with people in the troupe—which means with white men. Anyway, she ends up leaving the troupe and going back to her hometown, where she takes up an artist’s residency at a school. So the whole going home then becomes this process of exploration … y’know … coming to terms with her past … separation … identity … reconnecting.”

“Wow … I’ll put that on my list of things to read. Through the Ivory Gate. That’s what it’s called, right?” He was circling her with words, suspecting that she saw some of herself in that narrative. He was thinking now of her album … the missing pictures of childhood … the absence of her parents. And her voice—something he’d noticed the first time they met—it was suspiciously neutral.

“Where’s Rita Dove from?” he asked, approaching the subject obliquely.

“I’m not sure.”

“Somewhere midwestern, nuh?”

“That sounds right.”

“Have you ever been there? To the Midwest?”

“Yeah … on business.”

“Do you think you could live there?”

“No,” she replied. “I don’t think so. It’s too cold.”

If she were midwestern, he thought, she would’ve added something like “although I spent the first x years of my life there.” He had to maneuver some more now. Asking people where they’re from, he knew, was sometimes uncomfortable. People carry so much baggage from home.

“What about the West Coast or the South?”

“I like the West Coast a lot. California especially, for the ocean and the sunshine. The south … I’m not so sure about. I like a lot of it … like New Orleans and Atlanta … and the Gulf Coast beaches. But I don’t know about living there so much. In many ways I’m a spoilt New Yorker.”

“And in other ways?”

“In other ways … I don’t feel like I belong here.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Most of my life.”

“From where?”

“Guess.”

“I have no idea.”

In his mind he was walking through her house, looking for clues. On looks alone she could be many things. Latina. North African. Native American. But none of these were right. He knew that. He could feel it.

But as he pictured her at the phone booth rocking back on one leg and considered her name and her familiarity with the selections at the concert, he began to suspect she was Caribbean, and further, from one of the English-speaking territories.

But from where? It was hard to say on looks alone. The Caribbean islands are flakes of three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—ground up and dropped in the ocean like codfish cakes in hot oil, becoming in the process something new and exciting that is often hard to define.

“Trinidad?” he asked. She might be part East Indian.

“No,” she said. “Let’s put it this way, I could’ve been your next-door neighbor.”

“You’re Jamaican?”

“Yeah, man.”

Her shoulders relaxed, and she smiled.

“From where?” he asked, drawn even closer now.

“Kingston, I think. But I was only eight when I left and haven’t been back.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t even talk to you then.”

“Oh, stop,” she said, laughing with him.

“Y’is not me frien again,” he said, speaking patois now. “You lef de rock at eight and y’is hummuch now?”—thirty-four, she said—“An you doan touch back de rock? Shame o’ you.”

“Oh, stop, it’s a long story.”

“Okay, tell me, lemme seef ah fogive yuh.”

She wanted him to know, wanted him to connect with her, wanted him to know she was one of his, hoping this would make a difference. To whom? And in what way? She wasn’t sure.

“When my mother died my father sent me to live with a relative in the States, and while I was here, we lost touch. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. I’m an only child, so I never felt there was anything to return to, really.”

“Oh no.” He stroked her brow. “Oh, I really didn’t mean to make a joke about it.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry,” she said. “If anything, I should be sorry for bringing this up now … for imposing this on you.”

His arm, which had been waiting behind her, slipped around her shoulders now. She leaned over and wiped her face with the tail of her dress and leaned against him, shifting her weight to create her own space between his chest and arm.

“You remind me so much of that place, Fire,” she said, her face turned toward the sky. “You make me think about it in a way that had never been as important to me. I feel like that woman in Secrets and Lies felt when the child she’d given away as a baby comes back into her life as an adult. God, man. It’s all the luggage that comes with that kind of rediscovery. Fire … for the longest time … before I met you, I thought all that luggage was at the bottom of the sea, man. And then you—you come along flopping like a frogman in your scuba gear, going, ‘Hey, this grip has your name on it.’

“I remember thinking one day, ‘God, why do I feel this way about this man?’ And I guess the answer has something to do with the fact that, along with all the really wonderful things about you, you remind me of that place. Yeah, I know—Through the Ivory Gate.”

“So go home, then,” he said. “Go home and see what you might find.”

“I think if I knew people there it would be easier. But to go there as a tourist, I think, would make me feel even more alienated. Fire, I don’t even know the name of the place I’m from. I know it’s in Kingston and fairly close to water, and the people were shit poor, but that’s it.”

“What about the relative you used to live with? He might be able to tell—”

“He’s dead, the fucking bastard. Excuse my French.”

“If the people in your area were rich,” he asked, “would that make it any easier?”

She thought for a bit.

“I think so. Going home is one thing. Going home to bad news is another. The way I feel is the way a lot of African Americans used to feel about Africa. Before they knew of Africa’s greatness they were afraid to embrace it. Now they go there with joy. They sing and dance on the plane. It would be easier for me to go back if I knew I would find something I could be proud of. I know it sounds trifling, but it’s true.”

“Poverty for most people is an inherited condition, Sylvia. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Ignoring or taking advantage of poverty—now that’s a sin. We can’t choose our histories. When we come into this life the greater part of our history is already in place—race, class, gender, religion, sexual preference, wealth, access … the things that remain pretty much constant throughout our lives. It’s not like the opposite of poor is happy. So why kill up yourself? Come home, sweet girl … even for a day … to sit by a river and eat a mango and say that God is good.”

“I should, shouldn’t I?”

“And if you need a family, I can always rent you some o’ mine. Some o’ them I’d give you free. I’d even pay the shipping.”

“Oh, you are so cheesy.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Cheese is fat. Fat is comfort food.”

She kissed his nose, trailing a mist of moistness as she pulled away.

“So you know a lot about me, and I know nothing about you,” she said, standing in front of him, leaning against the metal railing, which was a few feet away from the bench.

Her life to this point had been a matter of avoiding history; she didn’t ask people about their lives because she didn’t want them to ask about hers in turn. So most of her involvements, both romantic and platonic, had been rooted in shallow earth. But with Fire she was feeling wet ground beneath her, layers of silt brought down from the hills of her fore-parents and laid down over thousands of years in a cycle of flooding and retreat, a pulling away that had left behind a treasure of minerals to nourish her like a tree. Her body was feeling damp now, from sweat, humidity, and the sap on the tip of her bud.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Let’s start with your family.”

“Well, I’m an only child—”

“Like me.”

“Okay … and I grew up in Portland, in a little district outside Port Antonio, until high school, then I moved to Kingston. After high school I came to the States to go to college.”

“And your parents, what are they like?”

“Nice people,” he answered, thinking now of what he should say, wondering how much he wanted to reveal. She was insecure, and he didn’t want his background to be an issue. It wouldn’t be fair to tell her the whole truth. Not now. Not when she was feeling this way. He wouldn’t lie, but he would reduce the facts to their most passably general.

“Oh, come on, now,” she said, kicking him playfully. “Where are they from? Where do they live? What do they do for a living? What’s your relationship like?”

“My mother’s name was Elizabeth. A really nice woman who liked to enjoy life. Could do many things. Was a tomboy, actually. Tall woman. I get my height from her. She was about five-eleven, and slender, and loved the arts and political debate yet was also good with her hands. Could fix cars and cut steel and clean and oil her gun. A very confident woman. She was decidedly left-wing in her politics—a democratic socialist—and really funny. Loved life, man. Smoked two packs a day and could knock back a six-pack and drive home on those dark, winding country roads with one hand on the steering wheel and the other one around my shoulders. She liked the excitement of cities but she always lived on a farm. She liked the idea of nurturing things, plants and animals and all that. People too … she was always getting a job for this one or writing a letter of recommendation for that one, or running down to the police station to get another one out on bail. Liz was nice, man. She was a real progressive in a place where she could’ve just gone with the flow and accepted the fact of privilege.”

“You say ‘was.’ Has she passed away?”

He nodded.

“Yes … a while ago. When I was fourteen.”

He saw restraint in her eyes. It was clear that she wanted to say something—sorry, perhaps—but didn’t want to seem maudlin.

“You said she was privileged. In what way?”

“Well, to be educated in any third world country is to be privileged. To have a piece o’ land to call your own makes you more so,” he said, thinking of his mother’s considerable acreage. “In all honesty, she came from a well-off family. But her father wanted to marry her off at twenty, and she said no and went to the bank and forged his signature and withdrew the money he’d been setting aside to give her at twenty-one, and bought some land out east. I grew up on that property until I was ten and ready for high school. Then I went to Kingston to live with my father. My parents got divorced when I was three.”

“What did your mother do besides farm?”

“Worked for Air Jamaica.”

“And what’s your dad like?”

“Humphrey is a nice guy in an ole-time kinda way. Calls himself a socialist. And he’s really progressive in some ways and really conservative in others. Thinks free college tuition is a basic human right, but can’t wait for them to bring back hanging.”

She cocked her head and spread her arms, grabbing the railing. Leaning forward now, her arms trailing like wings, she stopped her face inches from his and asked: “Okay, where’d you get the name Fire?”

“My father gave me that name when I was eight. I was playing with one of his welding torches and almost burned down the house.”

“Is he a welder?”

“No … he’s a teacher,” he told her—guiltily, veering toward a lie. “He teaches at the school of art in Kingston.”

True, his father had taught there for years. But he’d also been a professor of art history and painting at Cooper Union in New York and the National School of Fine Art in Mexico City, and his work was well placed in the best galleries in Europe. So to call him an art teacher was like saying Colin Powell had done some time in the service. Seeing doubt in her face—as if she were comparing what he’d told her to something that she’d heard—he thought, Fuck, she might know him. She collects art. But maybe not. He added, “And he paints and sculpts as well.”

She seemed satisfied.

“And you and Ian have known each other since childhood?” she continued.

“Through an uncle of ours, I-nelik, who’s a musician.”

A breeze flipped her dress above her knees, flashing her thighs, which were pressed together, forming a shape like the trunk of a cotton tree. He glanced at the strollers and sunbathers. If he were alone with her … or if the sky were darker … or, he was thinking now, if they were far away from her home, he’d slip his oarsman in her canoe and grunt her name as he paddled.

“I-nelik … I-nelik …”

One thought was overtaken by another, causing the first to stall then stop. She was standing with her legs slightly open, and the sun was shining through her dress. And it seemed as if—he wasn’t sure, for it was just a shadow, wasn’t it?—that she wasn’t wearing underwear. Because that shadow there, that murkiness below the fabric, was not a wedge of well-cut silk. It was triangular though … with wavy edges … like a delta seen from a mountaintop.

“You know bout I-nelik?” he said, wondering if she’d seen him looking. “I-nelik is my ole man’s youngest brother. I used to find every excuse to spend time with him when I was young. I used to think he was so cool.”

“What was so cool about him?”

“He’s only fifteen years older than me. So he was in his late twenties, early thirties when I was growing up. So I felt like I could talk to him about anything, especially guy-things I couldn’t really talk to my ole man about. Plus he was a romantic kinda guy. I-nelik was a dentist, y’know—did his D.D.S. at Tufts. He’d always wanted to do music, but the whole family was against it. Not because it was the arts or anything like that—they never fought against my ole man wanting to paint—but because he wanted to play reggae. And in those days—we’re talking like the late sixties, early seventies—reggae was street music. You couldn’t play it uptown. It was just a ghetto thing.

“The same people who are praising Bob Marley now used to fight it. So about four years after coming back and setting up a practice, and playing one or two sessions at places like Randy’s and Dynamic, rasta just buss in him head, and he just knew that he had to play music. That that was his calling. And he sold the practice and became a full-time musician. Of course there were some really hard times. He started growing locks and because o’ that people wouldn’t rent him a flat in a good neighborhood, so he just went and lived in the ghetto and did volunteer work two times a week at an area clinic. There wasn’t much money … but he was happier than when he was a fat cat named Jonathan Heath. But the thing is that he’s all right, now. After linking with Bob and all that, everything worked out. So anyway, I met Ian because he and I-nelik were neighbors. Then when it got back to my father that Ian was a prodigy, it became almost like trading places. Ian would spend most of the summer by me and I would spend mine by him.”

“I gather that you didn’t spend all your time in Jamaica,” she said, intrigued now, seeing in his personality the convergence of two others.

“I came here to go to college.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“Yale.”

“Impressive.”

“It’s a school.”

“Well, be modest. What did you study?”

“Painting and art history.”

“Like your father. Is that what you are? An artist?” Her voice rang out as if she’d made a discovery.

“Not anymore. I gave that up a while ago.”

It settled again. “Well, what are you doing now?”

“A little o’ this and a little o’ that? A little writing, a little farming.”

“Writing? What kind of writing?”

“Oh … I have an idea for a novel,” he said dismissively. This wouldn’t draw attention in New York, he thought, where ideas for books were as commonplace as ideas for films in L.A.

“Doesn’t everyone,” she said, proving his point. “Me too.”

“So there you go.”

“And this farming thing?” she asked. “What kind of farm is it? Where is it? How big is it?”

“Well, that’s a new thing. About a year now. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with it. It will reveal itself. Sarge, the man who grows that coffee I brought you, has some ideas. We’ll figure it out when I get back.”

“So you didn’t plan this whole farming thing?”

“No, it just worked out that way.”

“Is that how you run your life?” she said, throwing her hands in the air like a magician demonstrating that the dove has disappeared. “You just let things happen?”

“Pretty much.”

“That’s so alien to me,” she said, shuddering in jest.

“Different strokes,” he said, cocking his head and smiling, sure now that she was clothed beneath her dress. The flesh-colored panties were sheer and full-cut.

“So how d’you get by while waiting for this novel to write itself, and the crops to just spring out of the ground?” she asked, sitting on a lower rail. Her face had become serious now. Her tone was not unlike the one a cynic uses on the eve of religious conversion. Respectful but ironic.

“Travel,” he said, spreading his arms along the back of the bench. He crossed his legs, trying to make a joke of looking serious, then decided to go along with it when he saw that something in her was demanding to see that. “Read. Listen to music. Talk to people. Maybe take a stab at some writing.”

“How long have you been living like this?” she asked. She opened her palms, set to catch an answer.

“Like how?”

“Writing, traveling, painting …”

“Pretty much since leaving college.”

“Doesn’t this make you nervous? Don’t you ever start saying to yourself, ‘Time’s going, I better start living like a quote unquote adult and get a real job and settle down’?”

“No.”

“Don’t you worry about money?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because my needs are pretty simple.”

“What are they?”

“A place to live. Food to eat. Good friends. Good health. That kinda thing.”

“Oh, come on. If I didn’t like you so much I’d smack you.”

“Why?”

“Cause you’re full of it. Those shoes are a coupla hundred dollars.”

“But how many do I own?”

“I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Shoes total? Four and that includes a pair of sneakers.”

He stared at her. She held his gaze, then broke out laughing. He was joking, obviously.

“You’re such a liar.”

They talked for hours, sitting together on the bench, sometimes getting up to stroll, but talking always, about whatever came to mind—music and art and books and travel and history and politics and cooking—teaching, learning, questioning, and explaining, but always talking, the words splashing down with the authority of abundance.

An observer would not have seen in them the heat of new desire. For this passion that they were feeling now, but hadn’t yet announced, was old, having existed for thousands of years, in thousands of stories, in thousands of minds as a thought: If you were going to spend a month on a desert island and you could only take one person, who would it be?

That evening, the sun hit the water in a cataclysm of streaking pebbles. Orange balls with fluttering tails of purple, red, and gold.

Sitting on the bench, high above the water, Sylvia imagined herself far away. In her mind the Promenade was the terrace of a house on a hill. And the rippling waves, clay-colored from the sun, were the overlapping roofs of the nearest town—a hundred miles away.

She’d used their hours of conversation to shade in the sketch he’d given her. She knew now that he’d lived in several countries, had met Claire through Ian, and had published two collections of poetry with a small press in England. But more important, she now had a sense of his visions and values. He was an idealist. A romantic. If he weren’t so phosphorescently intelligent she’d be inclined to say naïve.

How does he function in the modern world? she wondered. He didn’t have a computer, and had no plans of getting one. He wrote in longhand, then transcribed on a manual typewriter. He didn’t even own a date book. He’d never held a job in his life, had never even tried, and had always done “this and that” to support himself as he pursued his art.

This and that. She chuckled to herself now, still surprised, as she considered some items on his résumé—bartender, English teacher, factory worker, translator, jeweler, cab driver, auto mechanic, florist, short-order cook, farm laborer, nightclub bouncer, roadie, encyclopedia salesman, market huckster. And what did he have to show for all this grunt work? Where was his payoff after the sacrifice? Where was his Wailers gig?

What did he have to show? she asked herself again, as if the answer were merely waiting on a prompt to reveal itself. A noncareer as a painter? A coupla poetry books and a piece of land he was thinking of farming?

And he clearly hadn’t settled down. What had he been doing in London? “Visiting friends,” he said, “and doing some writing workshops.”

There was something compelling in his madness, though … something inspirational … something noble in his pursuit. Because he was someone with choices who had chosen to do this, to live simply.

As she thought about this it occurred to her that she was feeling something for him that she’d never felt for any other man in her life. Respect. What she’d thought was respect in the past, she was realizing now, had simply been consideration and courtesy. She’d never been enthralled by their beliefs or opinions, largely because none of those men had equaled or surpassed her in intellect or experience. She had never wanted to be with a man simply for how he made her feel, she admitted to herself now. It had always been for other reasons, none of which, she thought as she looked back now, had been valid.

She looked at him, he was looking back at her … and as the air around them was empurpled by the twilight, she sensed the gap between their faces dissolving … and his breath searing her nose … and his lips steaming the wrinkles out of hers.

“Weren’t you scared all those years when you were living hand to mouth?” she asked as they walked along a path to Montague Street, where activity had begun to stir beneath the awnings that shaded the windows of the shops and cafés.

He palmed the back of her head and massaged her scalp, then slid his hand across her shoulder, allowing it to freefall down her back, where it seized the stem of her waist. “No,” he said. “I was able to buy all the things I needed. I really don’t need many material things to be happy y’know, Sylvia. Not a lot.”

“What are some of them?”

The taste of her lips still fresh on his, he steered her down a side street overhung with trees that seemed to drink from the pools of darkness.

“Cut flowers … not necessarily fancy ones either,” he told her, as his eyes scanned ahead for a recessed entrance where he could lean against her and squeeze the flesh on her hips as he kissed her wetly. “Freshly brewed coffee, two good speakers, enough money to buy a book and a couple of CDs a week. Throw in a nice white shirt and a pair of dress shoes. After that everything is gravy.”

“You believe that?” she asked, wondering if that ridge that she’d noticed on his trouser leg as he sat on the bench had all belonged to him, or whether he’d been assisted by a flattering accident of pleating.

“I’m not saying everybody should do this,” he replied. “But that is how I feel.”

“And you’ve always felt this way?”

“I’ve never had any evidence to the contrary. Americans are the richest people in the world—but are they happier than anybody else? Watch the talk shows or the evening news. Look at people’s faces on the subway.”

She began to think of herself now. A near six-figure salary, an Ivy League diploma, and no dependents. She should feel an incredible sense of possibility, shouldn’t she?

A young man on Rollerblades slowed down and gave them a flyer, then sped away into the night.

“Would you like to go to this?” she asked, looking at the flyer. “I know the place. I used to read there quite a bit at one time.”

They were standing beneath a hedgerow. They stared at each other, daunted by the challenge of forging a new alphabet to create the new words to describe this new feeling that was causing their skin to gooseflesh. Stymied, they reached out and held hands and began to kiss slowly, braiding their tongues like a poet plaits metaphors.

After walking down a hill through the urban campus of the Watchtower Society, they came to Old Fulton Street, whose old brick buildings had been turned into restaurants and bars. Holding hands, she led him as they ran across the wide street like kids on a great adventure, first to the median, then through traffic to the other side.

They walked down the gradient toward the river and the old ferry landing, which was marked by a lighthouse and a jetty—a narrow strip of planks where a wedding was taking place on the roof deck of a moored white barge that was strung with balloons and flowers. Beyond the barge, across the river the twinkling skyscrapers seemed to be moving toward them like a hundred tornadoes of light.

Just before they reached the lighthouse she led him round a corner, into a different world, a different time. Behind them was blacktop; here they walked on cobblestones crisscrossed by trolley tracks. Passing under the Brooklyn Bridge, they slithered past the skeletons of old warehouses and rehabbed factories, occupied now by photographers and artists, and filed beneath the Manhattan Bridge, continuing now along silent streets with broken hydrants and pavements overgrown with weeds. They stopped now and then in doorways to kiss and rub against each other, commingling their fluids and scents, till they arrived at a low brick building with arched metal doors, where a crowd of mostly young people were comparing the work of Baraka and Ginsberg. “But neither of them could exist without the jazz poetry of Langston Hughes,” a newcomer said. “So y’all better get him up in there.”

They paid their five-fifty and climbed a flight of dusty stairs to a third-floor performance space dreamily lit by hundreds of candles fixed in bundles to the chipped and moldy walls. Wading through the tide of dreadheads and baldies they stopped at the bar—two sawhorses and a sheet of ply—and got a lager for her and a stout for him and found a corner in the back, by a window ledge; there she sat with her legs apart and drew him into her private space.

Claiming him completely now she rested against his back, her chin on his shoulder, knotted her ankles in front of him and chilled. As a kid with yellow glasses freestyled with a three-piece band comprised of turntables, harmonica, and electric guitar, Sylvia wondered if Fire had noticed that she’d answered yes to the question: Do you feel like reading tonight?

Three hours later, at a little after ten, the emcee, a bodybuilder in carpenter jeans, called her name. As he leaned forward to give her way, Fire asked by puckering his lips, When did all this happen? To which she replied by blowing him a kiss, Wouldn’t you like to know.

This is me, she thought, as she made her way to the podium. All around her, hands were fluttering to mark her return. She felt sexy and powerful—a cat among a flock of birds. She felt so natural. Here in this place. With these people. With this man who understood her need to be there. Who could share it with her. Who’d appreciate it. Who could drink a beer with her and sit on a ledge between her legs in a place that smelled of mold, sage, sandalwood, and myrrh.

“Whassup, Brooklyn!” she said, waving her hand in a general salute. “It’s so good to be here again, after not taking this stage for … what?”—she turned to the emcee—“almost eight months?”—he shook his head—“eight months. But you know how it is. Nine to five and all that.

“This poem is something that I just wrote in my head on my way over here. Maybe some of you won’t get it because it’s really personal. The title is ‘Exile.’ ”

It is wanting to hear the lisp
of the sea, curled on the tongues of passersby.
It is wanting to smell wind, heavy
with rain, wrap itself in the skirts of trees.
It is wanting to see the sun slide
down banana leaves into the thighs of a valley.
It is wanting to taste beads of tamarind
that drop from terraced hillsides.
It is wanting to feel the pulp of star-apple,
its dark flesh, moist between my hands.
It is, it is wanting you.

The declaration startled them … scared them like an accidental discharge from a gun … warned them with a sharp report that Russian roulette was not a game for the faint of heart. So when they left, shortly after her performance, they refrained from touching as they retraced their steps past walls and doors still wet with the memory of slow-burning kisses that dribbled like wax. As they passed beneath the bridges, the tremor and hum of traffic was the sound of hot blood rushing through their veins.

“Did you like the music?” she asked, as a police cruiser slowed then continued on its way.

He said yes.

“Is that what you listen to mostly? Hip-hop?”

“I listen to very little of it, actually. But I can dig it.”

“Why very little?”

“Hip-hop is the only black music that doesn’t have a healthy engagement with women. It’s not self-assured when dealing with women. I mean, you can go from funk to blues to afrobeat … in black music, even when the lyrics are about heartbreak, the delivery is always from a place of awe, or at most fear, of the feminine—but never hatred. Don’t get me wrong, y’know, I still dig it … but not to purchase and keep in my personal space. But … it’s a new music, it will work itself out over time.”

“Why d’you think that is? Why’re they so angry at women?”

“They’re insecure about what it means to be a man. In a culture where manhood is defined by what you own, a youth without money is bound to feel insecure. I mean, men with money have always gotten more than their fair share … but the ordinary guy used to be able to pull a girl with sweet talk and nice ways. So to hedge against rejection, ghetto youth get defensive. And it comes out in the music.”

She found his perspective wrongheaded, but intriguing nonetheless. Most men she knew did not have opinions. Talking to them was like playing tennis and serving all aces.

“You said this culture defines manhood in terms of what men own—how do you define it?”

“Like the bible says, ‘As a man thinketh so is he.’ Manhood for me is about values, intelligence, courage, and imagination.”

“Whadyou mean by values? The term just sounds so … I don’t know … Republican and Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan.”

“Oh yeah … alla dat?” He chuckled at her overreaction. “Values for me is a simple thing, treating people like you’d want them to treat your mother.”

She patted his waist. He would know the right thing to say, wouldn’t he?

They came upon a production crew setting up for a fashion shoot. The models were hankering around the catering table, looking but not eating, their bodies nurtured to emaciation with amphetamines, coke, and cigarettes.

“How much do looks count to you?”

He looked at her. Is she allowing these clothes hangers to make her feel a way?

“As I-nelik once told a woman who was threatening to leave him for a Mr. Body, ‘With four months and a personal trainer I could be him. But how long,’ he asked her, ‘would it take him to be me?’ ”

Wary of going home, but not willing to admit it, they made a detour at Old Fulton Street and went to sit on the edge of the jetty, their feet dangling over the water that lapped at the pilings and gently tossed the barge, which seemed like an ark now, for all the guests were in twos, paired off against the railing, or dancing to the cover band, a pick-up side of tuxedoed jokers who played everything from Disco-Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes to Basia and the Doors.

“When you get to Oz, Dorothy, will you write to me?” he said of the twinkling skyscrapers on the other bank.

“This does feel strange, doesn’t it?” she replied.

“Good strange or bad strange?”

He was leaning against a mooring post with one leg drawn up toward him, his knee supporting his elbow as he twirled his hair. She was sitting with her legs over the edge and her body turned to the city. Her face, though, which glowed with the sweat of attraction, was turned to him.

“Good strange,” she said. “Like wearing Earth shoes for the first time. You just get a whole new idea of what fit means, of what comfort is, and you begin to think of all the shoes in your closet … and even the ones you outgrew or threw away … and you start to ask questions like, ‘How did I wear those for so long? What was I thinking? Can I ever go back to wearing them again?’ Do you know what I mean?”

He nodded, hearing in her voice the dirge of a premature decision. It was too early for her to say she wanted this, he thought. Him or his way. She was like Ian in some ways. She needed status and possessions to feel secure. The Earth shoes were a good comparison. Once upon a time they were the rage … now they too had been outgrown or thrown away. Time would tell with her. The real test would come when he went away. Would she want him then? Or would she want the life she’d gotten used to? She was lukewarm now, although she thought she was feverish.

She said something that he didn’t hear. He looked up, cocking his head interrogatively.

“I said you remind me of Bob Marley,” she repeated. “I saw him at the Garden with the Commodores. I’d never seen such charisma in my life. And … wow … I remember taking a hit off my first joint and thinking, ‘Oh shit, I’ve never wanted to get involved in a concert this way before.’ Whenever he would call out, I’d cup my hands over my mouth and scream the loudest. Wo-yoyi. Wo-yoyi. Wo-yo-yo-yo-uh. Wo-yo-yo-yo-uh. There was a sensuality to him … not plain sex appeal … but a spiritual magnetism … as if he were a shaman … as if he had the power to draw people out of themselves into this new space … his space, I guess … and make them do things they’d always wanted to do or never thought of doing before.”

“Bob,” Fire said, wondering how this was related to the discussion. She began to hum, and he recognized the bluesy air of “Turn Your Lights Down Low,” which the band on the barge was playing now, guiding the ballad with a torch of shimmering guitars.

She turned her body to him and drew her knees in to her chin, wrapping her arms around her shins.

“You look like the picture on Natty Dread,” she said. Her voice was soft but buzzy like the ripping of damp silk. “The hair is the same … not locks … but a mantle of Spanish moss. And your nose is similar and your cheekbones … they’re like fragments of rock. Your eyes are different, though, and your forehead. But especially when you’re sleeping, or thinking, the resemblance becomes uncanny.”

Her lisp, now that she was getting tired, was becoming more pronounced, investing even the most common words with an erotic sibilance. The mention of sleep aroused in him the memory of her nakedness. And as he thought about watching her through the doorway, he began to undress her with his narrowing eyes, drawing his lids closer so his lashes could coordinate more fluently as his eyes slipped the straps of her dress over her shoulders.

“Did you ever meet him?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Marley. Are you listening to me?”

In his mind she was lying on her back with her legs apart and his tongue was engaging her clitoris. Whispering to it. How are you? Nice to meet you. Are you shy? Is that why you wear this hood all the time? Here … let me help you slip it off. I want to see your face so I can kiss you …

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Yes … I’m listening to you.”

“What are you smiling about?”

“I’m just having a nice time … that’s all.”

“So … did you ever meet Bob Marley?”

He had. Several times. She wanted to know what he was like. Quiet, Fire said. Introspective. Listened more than he talked, and pretended to know less than he did. He didn’t like to lose, so he was always good at what he did. Did he have indulgences? None besides women and a beemer … not even guitars … and the beemer came late. For most of his career he drove a Volkswagen camper or a Bug. Was he a role model? Yeah … sure … he was roots but cosmopolitan, tough but humble, thrifty but generous, workaholic but laid back. And he didn’t take the easy route and go disco; plus he understood love in all its forms—spiritual, fraternal, and romantic. “Forever Loving Jah,” “One Love,” and “Is This Love?” Oh, by the way, did I-nelik play at the Garden? Yeah, man, he was the guy in the army fatigues on the other side of the drummer from the bass player. The one with the beard all up in his glasses? Same one. Oh, he was the coolest thing that night.

“Could I ask you a favor, Fire?”

“Sure.”

“My reggae collection is kinda weak … can you suggest a dozen or so CDs to build from?”

“Yeah, man … The Wailers, Catch a Fire; Bunny Wailer, Black Heart Man; Lee Perry, Super Ape; Bob Marley and The Wailers, Babylon by Bus; Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey; Steel Pulse, True Democracy; Black Uhuru, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; Third World, 96° in the Shade; Toots and the Maytals, Funky Kingston; Jimmy Cliff, Wonderful World, Beautiful People; and the Heptones, To the Top. And can you show me your breasts?”

He didn’t realize he’d voiced this until she exclaimed in surprise, “Here?”

He looked around—at the people on the barge and the traffic on the street—then looked back at her, the world around him intensified: the lapping water, the driving music, his breathing, Manhattan’s glinting lights.

She was biting her lip.

“Come here.” His voice was coolly insistent, like a razor.

She’d never been addressed this way before. Or received a request of this nature, much less in a public place.

She slid toward him. She imagined herself leaving behind a silver trail.

His face seductively serene, he reached out and stroked her nose with the magic finger, traced the outline of her lips, dipped it in her mouth like a fountain pen in ink, and made mysterious signs on his face with her saliva. He replaced it in her mouth. She sucked it in with a moan, flaring her lips, collapsing her cheeks around it, playing the role of fellatrix with the emotional truth of a Method actor.

“Come closer,” he said. “I want to be near you always.”

He opened his legs and she sat between them and placed her thighs outside his and crossed her ankles behind the mooring post. She placed her finger in his mouth and began to feel his tongue transform her tall man into a nub of erectile tissue, wondering, as she felt a shudder in her belly, if her arms would tremble more than her legs if he made her come this way.

Closing her eyes, she imagined her sweat as a film of yellow light, a yellow that was burning into orange now as his tongue investigated then traced the whorls of her fingerprint, the most complicated and privately guarded series of crevices on her body, even more so than the ones around her anus, which, she was thinking, she would surrender to his mouth if he asked.

She grabbed his hair as a wet heat spread from her fingertip. She began to screw his lips now, shoving in deep and backing out slowly, imprinting her knuckles on the walls of his mouth. Then, working slowly, she proceeded to rub her finger around the edge of his lips, teasing him … making him want to grasp it, which he did, pulling her tip to a sweet spot in the meat of his soft palate; then he moved his jaw in a slow rub-a-dub, locking into her groove, fusing their sense of time as the film of light became an iridescent red and the ball of pressure in her belly, on the verge of rupture now, sought release through her arteries, causing her arm to stiffen and tremble, then go numb, then sensate again, then numb again, as the light around her unwrapped itself from the rest of her and coiled itself around her arm, compressing itself to her elbow, then her wrist, then over her palm, to the root of her finger where it burst and surged to the tip, showing its electrical nature by overloading her nervous system and blacking her out for a second.

He held her tightly, rocking her, whispering her name. “Sylvia, Sylvia, my darling girl … it’s okay … it’s okay.”

“Oh fuck,” she repeated as he hushed her. “Oh fuck.”

When at last she calmed down, she kissed him gingerly and leaned back on her elbows, not caring who would see, allowing her thighs to fall open. She undid three buttons from the neck down and peeled away the fabric, exposing first her cleavage, then her breasts—a pair of droplets with the color and sheen of virgin olive oil.

“I think it’s time to go,” she said, directing him to the barge with her eyes.

He looked up. A couple had their glasses raised in salute.

“Let’s go,” he said with a smile, “before they ask for an encore.”

She took a bow as they walked away. She had never felt this sexy in her life.

As they arrived at her house, the pain that had been lying dormant in her knee began to stir, and she limped slightly as she moved up the steps. He asked her about it and she told him that she’d bumped her knee while she was cleaning, not wanting the story of the fight on the bridge to break apart their mood.

In the bathroom, which had peach walls and light blue fixtures, she peeled away the floral curtain and sat on the edge of the tub. He knelt between her legs on the mint green tiles and replaced the transparent bandage on her knee, whistling the theme from M*A*S*H.

“By the way, Hawkeye, I have more questions.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “By the way, did you ice it down earlier?”

She hadn’t. He went to the kitchen. When he returned she asked him to remind her how he’d met Claire. She’d forgotten, she said. Which was true.

He wasn’t sure about her motives though.

“Oh Claire,” he began, hoping that she wouldn’t delve deeply. Knowing he’d been involved with Claire might color their own affair.

“I met her in Lisbon,” he said, studying Sylvia’s knee. There was a small cut at the edge of the contusion. “By the way, can I use a piece of your aloe plant?”

She said yes and he returned from the living room with a leaf, which he sliced down the middle, creating two halves that glistened with off-white flesh. He wiped a cotton swab across the meat, dipped it in some hydrogen peroxide, and dabbed the nick.

“I met Claire in Lisbon, remember? I went there to live with Ian after leaving Brazil.”

The contact made her wince. He blew on the cut to soothe her, directing soft streams up her thigh.

“And you were painting in Lisbon?”

“No, trying to write a book.”

She laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, applying the ice now.

The coolness stoked her awareness of the heat between her legs.

“You make writing a book sound like something you just get up … and … feel like doing … and just do … like mowing the lawn or something.”

“Oh, I never feel like mowing the lawn,” he quipped.

“You know what I mean.”

She kneed him in the forehead. He pecked her on the thigh.

“So … did you ever finish it? That book?” she asked. She was harboring a smile in the corner of her mouth.

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever get it published?”

“No,” he told her, reminding himself to pull the manuscript out and revisit it when he got back to Kingston.

He made a monkey face, and she began to laugh and lost her balance, falling in the tub—a bundle of flailing arms and legs. He began to laugh as well.

“Help me up, Fire,” she asked, stretching toward him.

“Mr. Fire,” he replied in an Oxbridge accent.

“Okay … Mr. Fire, help … me … up, please.”

He was standing now, clasping his hands behind him. “Actually, it’s Sir Fire.”

“Okay … Sir Fire, help me up, please—why am I even doing this?”

“Because you have no other option. By the way, has anyone ever called you turtle before? Turtle.” He placed his index finger across his lips. “Hmmmh, now why did that come to mind.”

“I said Sir, didn’t I?”

He leaned over her with his hands on his knees. “Sorry, I meant King. Did I ask you to say Sir?”

“Oh … I’ll show you king,” she said, grabbing the edge of the tub to get some leverage. But he was quicker. As she raised herself to come out he turned on the shower and drenched her.

“Bye.” He slipped two ice cubes down her dress and chuckled as he left, flipping the light switch and closing the door, leaving her to yell and laugh in the dark.

“Fire … Fire … you better come back here! Oh you’re gonna get it so bad. Revenge is sweetest when cold, y’know. If I were you I’d take mine now. Fire … Fire … Fire, you bomboclaat!”

*  *  *

They sat in the living room watching television while he dried her hair with a soft white towel, he on the couch and she on the floor between his legs in a light yellow summer dress with a scoop neck and spaghetti straps and buttons down the front to the hem.

She inhaled deeply.

“Do you know what this feels like?” she asked, reaching back to wrap her arms around him.

“Tell me.”

“When I was a little girl, I had to spend some time in the hospital because of a breathing problem. And at the hospital I used to make up all these things that I wanted to happen to me, like having a grandmother who would do my hair for me. I had grandparents, obviously, but I never met them. They died before I was born.”

She cracked her neck.

“Anyway, when I came home—I was about seven or eight at the time—there was a new family living in the yard. I can’t remember where they were from. But now that I think about it, they might have been from Haiti. The grandmother—they were a big clan—was an old woman … black like ink, and her back was curled like a question mark. She didn’t speak a word of English, didn’t speak much at all, and she smoked a pipe nonstop. Gosh—when I think about it now she might have been smoking weed.

“One day my father was struggling with my hair, pulling on my scalp clumsily, trying to loosen my plaits to wash my hair—wow, all this is coming back now—and out of nowhere she just came and took me away from him and led me to the standpipe, pulled the plaits out in no time, and washed my hair for me. Then after that she took me to her back step. She sat first, then she gathered her skirt and put me between her legs and dried my hair for me, and parted it and oiled my scalp with Sulfur 8, and combed my hair with a sparkly comb … and brushed it. It was so beautiful. She began to comb my hair every day. I would just go stand outside her house and she would call me in with her fingers. And I began to call her Granny. I would sit with her on her back step every day without speaking, just sit there motionless while she did my hair …”

“Knowing that if you moved you’d get the back o’ the brush on your leg.”

“Oh, but you know it … and although she never said it or showed it in a huggy kinda way I knew she loved me.”

“Those old women never tell you they love you.”

“Of course not. You just feel it. You know what the feeling is, Fire? It’s the feeling that no matter what you do or turn out to be in life, good or bad, they will always love you. Their love is constant. They don’t love you for a reason. They love you because they just love you. They don’t know any other way to feel about you. And if you ask them if they love you they look at you as if you’re an idiot—”

“And if you ask them again they lick you with the brush.”

“But you know they love you.”

“Do you want me to oil your scalp for you, sweet girl?”

“Hmm-hm.”

“Go bring the comb and the oil for Granny. And don’t forget the brush. You just might decide to misbehave.”

She stayed between his legs when he was through with her hair, and they sat together watching a rerun of The Muppet Show, which he thought was one of the most brilliant TV comedies in recent history, along with Roc, Seinfeld, and The Tracey Ullman Show.

“Hey, Sylvia, you used to watch Sesame Street?”

“Yeah.”

“I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Cookie Monster. What’s his story? I mean Sesame Street is educational TV for kids, right? Is he supposed to be like a special ed monster? Everybody else is articulate. Even Elmo, and he’s only five or so. But grown-ass Cookie has a vocabulary of like nine words and his grammar is all screwed up. ‘Me want now cookie eat.’ What the hell is that? Really now, what is his story? I mean everyone pretty much knows that Ernie and Bert are a gay couple, but what’s up with Cookie?”

“I used to ask the same question,” she replied, laughing. “And one day a girl in my class solved the problem. Her name was Shaquina—I’ll never forget. Her claim to fame was that her parents used to be Panthers. Now according to her, Cookie was an African monster, that’s why he didn’t speak English very well. Cause if you checked it out he was the darkest one on the show. But in Africa, she claimed—and she said it all earnest and Cicely Tyson—Cookie was the biggest star on Sesame Street … bigger than Big Bird, who only went over in America cause he was a blonde.”

“Right on!”

“You know what else I used to wonder about?” she asked, enjoying the silliness.

“What?”

“Rastas. Now … there’s a religious basis for locks, right? So what happens when a dread starts to lose his hair? Does God overlook that, or does it count toward his time in hell?”

“Okay, people who look alike,” he said. “Yaphet Kotto and Koko Taylor.”

“Morgan Freeman and Jimi Hendrix.”

“Snoop Dog and Chuck Berry.”

“Denzel Washington and Al Green—”

“No way—”

“Yes, way. Look at the cover of Let’s Stay Together. Trim up that afro …”

He was not convinced.

“Okay, top five rub-up songs of all times.”

“What’s that?”

“A grind song,” he replied, patting her head.

“Of all time?” she asked, turning around and crossing her legs. “No eras or decades or anything? Okay … ‘Let’s Get It On,’ Marvin Gaye; ‘Reasons,’ Earth, Wind and Fire; ‘Me and Mrs. Jones,’ Billy Paul; ‘For the Love of You’, Isley Brothers; and ‘Close the Door,’ Teddy Pendergrass. Let’s hear yours.”

“ ‘Distant Lover,’ Marvin Gaye; ‘Don’t Ask My Neighbor,’ the Emotions; ‘Sweet Thing,’ Chaka Khan … and I haffe draw for some reggae now … Dennis Brown, ‘Your Love’s Got a Hold on Me,’ and Bob Marley’s ‘Sun Is Shining.’ ”

“I didn’t know we were including reggae,” she said. “Okay, lemme replace ‘For the Love of You’ with ‘Night Nurse’ by Gregory Isaacs.”

“You should’ve said this at Club Rio,” he replied, narrowing his eyes.

She blew him a kiss. “Everything … as you like to say … in the fullness of time.”

They stayed up after midnight, yapping away like bunk mates at a sleep-away camp, chatting about everything and nothing, erupting without obvious provocation into the raucous laugh of Caribbean peasants and market hucksters—a hand-clapping, leg-flailing, foot-stomping, head-rocking, back-jerking laugh that crouched in their bellies and vaulted through their lips in the form of roars, whines, wails, and rumbles that would have been a true source of embarrassment in different company.

And as the night went on, after they were sure they could really talk about anything without embarrassing either themselves or each other, they ordered a full-house pizza and progressed to higher degrees of outlandishness, rolling on the floor, bouncing off the furniture, banging on the walls, punching the air with their fists, and contorting their faces in visages reminiscent of New Guinean masks.

They switched the brand of humor at will with the intuition that the other would make the transition, like Cuban Americans switching from Spanish to English, or Pippen dishing off blindly to Jordan.

And in the middle of this, as they were both thinking how wonderful it was to be with someone whose interests ranged from Robeson to Robespierre, RuPaul to Romare Bearden, Sylvia looked at Fire, who was down on all fours to illustrate a story about crawling under the school fence to see what he billed as the greatest kung-fu movie ever, The Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin, and fell in love, with a snap, like that.

As soon as it happened, she knew that he knew what she was feeling, that he understood the capacity of the cloud that was seeping out of her mouth and floating over his head, ready to burst and shower him with trust and tenderness and patience and understanding. For he stopped his story and looked up at her, and she could feel him reading her mind, could feel his fingers slipping between the folds of her brain, stretching them apart to view the feelings she had hidden there.

She sat there on the couch and watched him watching her in silence, then reached forward, held him by the chin and pulled him toward her, leaning back, opening her thighs—into whose embrace he fell, his body trembling, like hers, with need and expectation. The lights were on, and the television. They both wanted silence and darkness, but neither was willing to move, to pull away from the other’s yielding flesh. They began to chafe against each other, finding crevices and surfaces to move over and under and in between, creating heat like hands being rubbed together over a feast.

Her ears, her nose, her chin, her brows—he studied them, using his tongue as a blind man would a finger, gliding over them slowly … pausing … retracing … then moving forward only when he was sure that he could sketch them in detail from memory. She kissed him as he licked her, dabbing his face as if he’d been in a fight and her lips were a pair of cotton balls soaked in healing oil. She nuzzled his chin, licked his throat, and nibbled his ears before kissing him, consuming his lips hungrily, trailing her fingers through the curls at the back of his head. His tongue searched the walls of her mouth for the soaked-in memories of other men, other kisses, which he tried to cleanse away with hot saliva.

She opened his shirt, peeled it away, and began to lick his shoulders, following trails of salt to his armpits and discovering a musty sharpness like the smell of cloves. Then she took his nipples in her mouth and traced extravagant flourishes on his skin. He stood up and removed his shirt, his eyes twinkling like slices of lime in ginger beer. He had the body of a laborer. Muscular. And hard. His muscles were like crocodile backs in muddy water.

“Tell me,” he said, kneeling in front of her and undoing her dress, beginning at the hem, “how do you want me to love you?”

She’d never been asked this before. Had always thought she’d want this. But now she didn’t know what to say. Self-pleasure had become such a part of her because of the failings of men.

“Do anything you want,” she said. “Explore me … teach me about myself.”

She let out a gurgle when his hands touched her thighs, gliding steadily toward her hips, shoving before them a thin wave of flesh, which broke over her pelvis. He withdrew his palms to her knees then struck out again, continuing to massage her as he spoke.

“When you touch yourself,” he began, “what do you imagine?”

She closed her eyes. “I’m a three-hundred-year-old mahogany table … and I’m being polished, and the slightest scratch would ruin my value.” She licked her fingers and stroked her belly.

“Okay,” he whispered in her navel, “my tongue is a length of silk.”

He began with her toes, each one, separately, then worked his way over her instep, around her ankles, over her shins and calves to her knees. He used his hands to wax her breasts as he trailed kisses up her thighs, oiled them with kisses, all the way up to the dampness where they lost a bit of their firmness and became soft, almost chewable—there, in the crevice where the smell of sweat, piss, and feminine lotions combined to make a powerful aphrodisiac. Insinuating his hands beneath her, he took the offer of her upthrust hips and rolled her panties beneath her pelvis. Waiting for him was his supper—what looked like a wet mango with a narrow gash where it had smacked the ground after falling from the tree. Nectar was pooled around the nick. He licked it.

“I like the way you taste,” he said as she freed herself into nakedness.

He immersed his face, smearing his cheeks, loving the wetness, inhaling the aroma, peeling away the flesh, exposing the melting pulp to his fervid breath, eating as much for his delight as hers.

As she bucked and trembled, he reached for his condoms, his tongue as fluid as a stream of water.

“Do you want to be inside me?” she asked.

He shook his head, pulled back her legs and tickled the rim of her anus, throwing a vault in her back, causing her limbs to stiffen.

“I want you inside me,” she grunted. “But I want to taste you. Will you let me taste you. Fire? Please say you’ll let me taste you …”

She kissed his torso as it passed her face, then gnawed at the hardness behind his fly, at once excited and afraid of the idea of penetration. She wanted to please him. The excitement came from this—the sweetness of surrender.

She undid his zipper with her teeth as she’d learned from movies, then leaned back a bit to appreciate the size of his wood, a sight as arresting as a macanudo clamped in the jaws of a child. She flicked her tongue over the tip as if it were the wheel of a lighter, then rubbed the whole length against her face, over her neck, marveling at its smoothness.

Tightening her lips like a vulva, and maneuvering her jaws to cushion her teeth, she placed a hand on his buttocks and drew him into her mouth, anticipating the fullness of having him all inside her. But he was too big. So she lavished her attention on the head, a scoop of guava sorbet—sucking it, lapping at it, using it to cool the muscles of her tired tongue.

“Let’s do it now,” she said as she found herself remembering Syd, as she often did while making love. “I’m worried that I might get uptight.” He undressed completely and took her to bed. She opened her legs when her skin touched the sea green sheets, and she reached for him, her palms upturned, calling him home.

He cupped her head and stroked her side and began to love her up, his bottom undulating fluidly like a fist directing a pen across a page, the movement subtle, the pressure slight, a grand expression of thought and feeling, like a poem or an essay, or a preliminary sketch for a painting. But still her skin broke out in beads of fear. She began to stiffen beneath him and she asked if he could hold her for a while.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She explained her anxiety.

“Do you know those stories about heroes slaying dragons?” he asked. She shook her head. “They’re metaphors for beating fear. You can’t keep running, Sylvia. You have to meet it head on and destroy it. Tonight, sweet girl, if you want, we can fight this one together. Come … come here … lie on top of me.”

She obeyed, hugging him tightly.

“Now,” he said, “whenever you’re ready, fit yourself around me. There’s no hurry, darling girl … we have all night.”

They lay there for a while, hugging, kissing, fondling, teasing. Then she reached between her buttocks and held him, guiding him to her wetness, feeling the displacement as he steered his way inside her, setting her shores a bit wider.

“See, it’s not so bad,” he said, kissing her face. “It’s not so bad.”

She smiled nervously, wincing as she sat upright with her knees on either side of him, her hands pinning his wrists to the bed.

“Now you must ride to meet your dragon,” he told her. “Go out there and hunt him down. Close your eyes and listen to me.”

She began to bear down on him with more of her weight, her waist stretching and compressing like an accordion, and he began to thrust back, filling her up, cocking his hips and dubbing her up, winding her like a clock. She let his wrists go and grabbed his hair.

“The dragon is near, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You can see him across the plain. Snorting. You can see his wings and the sun on his scales.”

“Yes.”

“So ride toward him … ride hard.”

She dug her heels into the mattress, arched her back, and snapped her hips, pricking him with arrows of sweat. Her moans becoming screams, she drew his hair tighter, holding him on a short rein.

“You can see him now … you’re up against him now … you can’t turn back …”

“No … no … but I’m scared.”

“Don’t worry, I’m with you. If you fall off your horse I will catch you. But you must slay the dragon.”

“Oh, fuck, my belly is burning.”

“That’s the dragon’s breath. Come on, Sylvia, you’re right on top of him now. I can tell. Take my sword and stab him—plunge it in his heart. Gather all your feelings and deal one deathblow. Stab him. Ram him. Jook the fucker now!”

She eased up and bore down with all her strength and the room turned white and began to spin, and her body was free from weight.

The doorbell chimed, as she floated toward his chest.

“Oh, no,” he said, “the pizza man is here.”

“Shit, what lousy timing.”

“Well, he’s not that bad. He could have come a few seconds earlier.”

“Forget him. I’m feeling too sweet to get up. Plus I want to hear you call my name when you tremble inside me.”

“I know, sweetness, but he’s probably some guy from Mexico who supports a whole family from tips. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“You’re right,” she said. She sliced her tongue between his thigh and his aching balls, which had not had release in over four months now.

The doorbell chimed again.

“Go,” he said. “Hurry. Don’t let the man wait like that.”

“Okay, Father Teresa,” she said with a smile. “I will now go and do God’s work.”

She threw on a T-shirt and went to get the door. He went to the kitchen for some water.

“Not too much of that,” she said, giggling. “Unless you’re prepared to work through cramps.”

He waved her away. She was still making funny faces when she pressed the buzzer to release the outer door. He headed for the bathroom to urinate, picking up his clothes along the way.

He stood over the toilet and removed the condom, which was fitting him loosely now, flapping about like the wing of a wounded bird. He held it up to the light to check for ruptures, filled it at the sink, checked again, then began to lose the rest of his erection as he considered the larger meaning of this sack—that there used to be a time when making love was about affirming life instead of defying death. He thought about his father. Wondered if he used them. They didn’t discuss that sort of thing. Private lives.

He dropped the condom in the toilet. Fuck, he thought, I don’t have another one. He hadn’t thought that sex would happen this soon. Now he’d have to go to the store. He could ask her—but no, he could not. Whatever she had was for her and the man—that is, if they used them. They’d better. This is fucked up.

And will she tell him about this? he wondered, as he pulled on his trousers. The urine had not come. And if so, what will it mean for them? What has it meant for her? What does it mean to me, all that has happened in these last few hours? Oh fuck! Phil! I forgot to take him his dinner. I didn’t even call. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

Would she understand, he wondered, noting the second toothbrush in the holder, if he told her that he was no longer in the mood? Would she take it personally, as some sort of affront to her womanhood, if he said that things had happened too quickly, and that he needed some time to think about what this means, and what, ideally, he would like it to mean?

This is a dangerous space for me, he said to himself. Again he was in love with a woman who was involved with another man.

He looked at his face in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. Are you in love? You, with that whitish glaze on your cheeks. Are you in love?

I am.

How do you know this?

The smell of molasses. It’s everywhere.

There has to be more than that.

Lemme put it to you this way, I know that I’m in love with her because I know deep down in my heart that if she asked me to be her man right now I’d tell her yes.

Why?

Because I believe we’ve connected for a reason … I can give her a lot of what she needs …

Her voice pulled him out of his thoughts.

“Who is it?” she asked, inquiring by rote. Who else could it be but the pizza man?

“Lewis.”

Fire sat down on the toilet and held his head in his hands, prepared to lie for her if the man came inside and found him. But what could he say? How would he explain being shirtless in her apartment at—what time was it? He’d taken his watch off. He always did while making love as a rebellion against the idea that sex had objective dimensions.

“Oh … what are you doing here?” he heard her say. Her voice was poised between guilt and anger. “Why didn’t you call?”

“I was in the neighborhood … sort of … having some drinks … I think I might have had one too many. So I was wondering if I could stay the night.”

His voice was timid but taut, as if the meekness was taking effort.

Fire finished dressing quickly, but without panic. The man didn’t scare him. But if the man needed a bed, it wouldn’t be right to cause the man to be denied. A drunk driver is a danger to himself and others. And in any event … he just needed to go … to get away from this mix-up and bangarang.

“Who were you having drinks with?” She sounded genuinely curious.

“Why can’t you just open the door?” Lewis snapped.

“I didn’t know we were still speaking to each other. I still haven’t gotten over yesterday, y’know.”

“So we have a petty falling out and it’s come to this, Sylvia? Jesus Christ!”

“Who were you having drinks with? Don’t lie to me.”

“Margaret.”

“I thought so. Oh, you know I hate that bitch. Are you sleeping with her again?”

“Listen, it’s nothing like that. She called me. She’s having some problems. And why can’t you let me in? Do you have company?”

“Don’t be ridiculous … listen … I was only up to get some water. I’m going back to sleep.”

“This is so … Listen, I have some stuff for you …”

“What is it? Can it fit beneath the door?”

“I guess …”

There was a shuffling sound.

“Oh … wow … thank you.” She was deeply touched by whatever it was. But what could it be?

“I heard there was a problem … I found them at the house.”

“Okay. But I’ve got to … go back to bed.”

“Okay … and listen … I’m really sorry about yesterday. You were right. I should have stood up for you. I love you, Sylvia.”

There was silence. Then her voice. Weaker than before.

“Okay … but now’s not a good time for this.”

So this is what it’s all about, Fire thought, as her footsteps drew nearer. She and the man had been fighting.

She knocked at the door. He told her to come in. He was slouched on the edge of the tub, his face as rumpled as his clothes. Redolent of sex and sweat, she leaned against the clothes hamper, clutching the envelope with the receipts. She was wearing a sarong now. Nakedness seemed inappropriate.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. Her voice was defensive but pleading. “I had no idea that he would come by … and … I didn’t want you to hear all that. I mean, it wasn’t fair to you. But the only other choice I had was to let him in. Which I think would’ve been worse. And why are you dressed? Don’t go.”

“What can I say,” he began, entangling his fingers in his hair. “I shouldn’t have even been here.” He was speaking more to himself than to her. He was blaming himself for the mess, and edging toward the conclusion that things could only get messier. “You’re involved and I should have just left you alone. I shouldn’t have forced things so much.”

She shifted her weight from leg to leg, her arms folded across her chest.

“I’m a grown woman,” she replied. “I can’t be forced. I must have wanted it just as much as you or else it wouldn’t have happened.”

“What is it?“ he asked without raising his head.

“I … don’t know.”

“What is it you don’t know?”

She began to think now. She couldn’t sleep with two men—well, not habitually—and in retrospect she shouldn’t have allowed this affair to happen. But what to do now? Choose, obviously. But she wasn’t prepared for that. If she didn’t have a history with either of them, the choice would’ve been simple. But this was not the case. She wanted one man in her life. That’s what she wanted.

“Could you please look at me, Fire? I hate when people speak to me without looking me in the eye.”

He looked at her. “What is it that you don’t know?” he reiterated.

She looked away. He sucked his teeth.

This is just completely wrong, he thought. It was best for him to go now and pick up the discussion the next day, when both of them had had some time and distance. But still, he was angry—less with her than with himself. And further, he felt clammy. Unlike her, he hadn’t showered since that morning.

“I need to bathe,” he said. “I feel sticky and miserable. May I have a towel, please?”

She returned from the linen closet with an orange one with white stripes. Her face was rolled tight like a cabbage.

Did showering mean that he was staying? She hoped so. But she was scared to ask. Scared of rejection. And embarrassed. He’d heard her lying. What did he think of that? That she lied all the time? She hoped not. Would he doubt everything she’d told him now … about herself and her life?

“Do you have the number for a car service?” he asked. “Or could you tell me how to get home by subway?”

“I’m not chasing you out, y’know.”

“I understand that.”

She was feeling abandoned now. Which made her angry.

“Is that your usual style?” she asked. Her lips were drawn tightly against her teeth. “To fuck women and leave them?”

“What’re you saying?” His voice was still soft and warm. That irked her. Made her feel as if none of this had mattered. So she provoked him.

“I’m saying that you feel as if sauntering out of here after fucking me makes you some kind of hero. You’re just like the rest, aren’t you?” Her voice was raised now. “You’re a sham, Fire. How could I have been so dumb—to get involved with a man I’d met on the street? I knew I shouldn’t let you fuck me. Now you feel you have some kind of power over me. Well lemme just tell you”—she jammed a finger in his face—“you don’t. Go ahead … I’m not about to beg you to stay. You got what you came for. You only wanted one thing.”

He allowed himself to be snide now. “Are you trying to get a rise out of me? Your ability to do that has diminished exponentially. I think you should desist.”

She began to reply, but held back when she felt tears starting. No. She would not cry in front of him. She had her pride.

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” he said. “I wanted one thing? I won’t even address that, because we both know that’s ridiculous … but let’s say for argument’s sake that is true. How many things did you want?”

“Let’s just drop it, okay? I’ll be in the living room if you need anything.”

She left him sitting on the edge of the tub, his face hard.

Fire felt a wave of resentment rise up in him. Sylvia seemed self-righteous and accusatory. Lumping this in with the fuzziness of her involvement with Lewis and her feelings for him made the prospect of getting closer to her less and less feasible—or desirable. He had planned to ask her about her relationship with Lewis. After they’d sprayed each other with their love. Not that he was calculating, but there are some things that one never risks while dangling on the brink of a great romance. As a man of experience Fire knew that nothing prevented a good fall better than firm and reasoned reflection.

As the water jets buzzed his head, he thought about how they’d met by chance, how they’d met again by greater coincidence, how he’d pursued her, how she’d resisted, how he’d charmed her, how she’d relented, how he wasn’t sure if she knew what she felt for him, how he wasn’t sure if she knew what she felt for the man, how he knew what he felt for her, and how vulnerable that had left him.

Something had to give.

She was sitting on the couch when he came out of the bathroom. He went to the kitchen for some water. Would she like some? he asked, dropping a wedge of lime in his glass. No, she wouldn’t, she said, without looking at him.

He sat next to her on the couch.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said, staring ahead at the TV.

“Okay,” he replied.

She didn’t move though. She was waiting for someone to say the right thing. Preferably him.

They were inches apart, but their attitudes projected leagues of distance, like black and white riders in a subway car.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, trying to make conversation.

“Not really.” He slurped the water.

“Do you want me to call to find out what happened to the pizza man?” She turned halfway toward him.

“I’m not hungry,” he said, without looking at her.

This flustered her. This lack of attention. “Well, you were so concerned about him and his family a few minutes ago, I thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes, that was a wonderful pie, wasn’t it? Pie in the face.”

“Do you still want that cab number? I can’t find it.” She was lying. She was only saying this to give him a path to come to her.

“I’ll just take the subway.”

She was angry now because he didn’t take the opportunity she’d offered. “So you’re leaving then?”

“I think it’s the best thing.”

“Go ahead. Do what you want.”

“At least I know what that is.”

“And what is it?” she asked quickly.

“I should correct myself. I know what I used to want.”

She stomped away to the bathroom and slammed the door. Fire finished his water, washed the glass, and left, as the sound of the shower filled his head like a round of applause.