France, 1968
49. AFTER A LONG LAYOVER, they land at Paris-Orly a little before midnight. A hard landing that makes the plane lights flicker and some overhead luggage tumble, the passengers’ cussing quickly turning into applause as the plane hits the ground. Bonnie yanks her seat belt off, standing while the plane parks. She searches the bowed heads of the passengers until she finds Mansour toward the rear. Liam, some seats behind him, has somehow slept through the landing, his head resting forward on the seat before him. Bonnie raises her hand to catch Mansour’s attention.
He calls to her across the plane. “Bienvenue chez moi.”
She tries to smile back, but her last time in Paris is on her mind.
She loses Mansour and Liam at the crowded baggage claim, distracted by the sound of a roaring plane engine, the sight of people boarding, and the memories this scene awakens: the texture of her mother’s skin, soft and slippery from a mix of sweat and powder. The kiss that Bonnie didn’t know was a goodbye. Her mother walking down the tarmac away from her. Mansour finds her a half hour later sitting in the middle of the airport floor. When he comes down on the ground beside her and asks what’s wrong, she tells him that the flight made her motion sick.
And then, as they leave the airport, as she and Mansour say goodbye to Liam and go their own way across town, she watches from the metro-car window and feels herself being pulled back in time. A return to Claudine’s burnt pots of rice, her absence for days at a time from their apartment, liquor bottles clinking in the trash, the living room covered in stacks of thick paper. If it was not city forms and files, it was newspapers; if it was not newspapers, it was coupons she was planning to clip; if it was not coupons, it was tissue paper, paper bags, and old gloves she intended to repurpose.
The past keeps flooding her mind, so when Mansour closes the door to this apartment he’s subletting from an old friend and she hears it shut, she isn’t sure if she wants to stay.
“Water?” he asks her. She doesn’t answer, but he fills a cup anyway, after splashing his own head and face at the sink. She wanders over to the living room window and pushes back the lace curtain, heavy from grease. It reveals a pale night, metro tracks, telephone poles, and wires.
She watches from the wall with crossed arms. Mansour moves quickly about the place. He’s already barefoot, pulling a couch into the center of the floor, scraping dried food from the furniture, discarding the old baby clothes that someone left in the kitchen sink. He lights a cigarette, turns a toy truck upside down for an ashtray. In seconds, it seems, he has made the place his own. “May I?” he says, and when she nods with a slight smile, he unpacks her record player from its case at the door, setting it on the coffee table. She watches him pull Sly Stone from his collection, the cigarette flickering between his lips.
They dance until they’re dizzy, sweaty, falling back on the couch as the record ends. She lifts the stylus, slides the record gingerly back into the sleeve.
She’s out of breath. “That’s all you got?”
“What?” he pants.
“You peter out quick.”
“The record’s over”
“There’s still the B-side,” she teases.
Slouching on the couch with a knee up, he watches with a quiet chuckle as she treats the record with the tenderness one might show to a small child. She wipes the space before she places it carefully on the empty shelf, then throws her handkerchief over the record player.
He invites her to sit beside him by banging the sofa twice. She plops down. They smoke, watching the room from opposite directions, losing themselves in the darkness.
The building is eerily quiet above and below, not even the sound of a floorboard bending, not a kettle’s whistle or a radio. The silence reveals the mystery between them. It occurs to her that she’s traveled across the world with someone she hardly knows.
“You don’t like this city,” he says. “I can tell.”
She shrugs. “Do you?”
“I know it, anyway,” he says.
“Why not Senegal? Don’t you know it better?”
He shakes his head. She is desperately curious about the continent but hesitant to ask him more, worried he’ll close up again.
“Tell me about Senegal.” She dares to pry, gathering cigarette ashes on the tip of her tongue.
He is silent so long that she’s surprised when he answers.
“There’s a lot of rice.” His brow furrows as if the memory is vague.
“Rice?”
“Yeah, rice. That’s what I remember most.” He observes the surprise on her face and playfully rubs her hair, fuzzing up the pin curls she’d been so proud of. He gets up from the couch, and she doesn’t see him again until morning.