I. A DROP OF GOLD

France, 1968

63. GIL RODNEY’S SCREAM gets between them: the piercing note that followed Carl Keifer into his grave. Within days of arriving in Paris, memories of the scream wrestle Bonnie and Mansour from hopeful lovers into housemates. Most times, the scream is hardly louder than a hum in Mansour’s head, but it seldom hushes. Then it colonizes Otis, Sly, and Aretha like a virus, expressing itself through their mouths, turning their records into toxins. He tells her none of this, so Bonnie decides she’s the cause when he abruptly trails away. For Mansour, what makes Gil’s sound so menacing, so unforgettable, is the surprise in it. It is a sound that makes Mansour see a man falling backward, falling where he thought there was ground.

In the humid venue, Mansour can’t stand beside Bonnie for long. A young and old crowd presses into each other to see Umm Kulthum. At this concert of his favorite singer, Mansour thought he’d be safe, but soon comes Rodney’s scream out from Umm’s lower register, overpowering her, like a background singer who didn’t know their place. So he eases his way out of the venue and pretends not to hear Bonnie calling his name.

Out on the street, with relief, Mansour savors the noises of the city. The dying transmission of a white-wheeled cab, a telephone line overhead that buzzes in the rhythm of a waltz. And Umm’s applause. Her applause follows him like a devoted sprite, keeping pace with him for a whole block, before he finally gives into it and lets himself feel the warmth of the people. It convinces him that he needs to get back on a stage if he is going to survive. But so far in Paris, work has been harder to come by than he’d expected. In the three weeks since they landed, there has been one gig, and Liam blew it. He played like he was in and out of sleep, stopping and starting, a palpable stage fright that was not characteristic of him. They talked it out on the phone some days later, Liam saying vaguely that he needed a break. A break from me? Mansour had joked, but he felt the sting of his own words when Liam didn’t answer.

Mansour is beginning to suspect that he is going to have to do this without Liam. He is going to have to navigate the music alone. It is a thought that makes the city vaster; he doesn’t know where to start. He keeps walking. A woman coming down the street alone gathers her jacket at the collar as if the summer night were chilly and walks harder, averting her eyes as they near each other. Women fear the wrong men, he thinks, a thought he’s had before, and then he remembers that he’s left Bonnie at the club alone.

When he returns, he pushes and shoves through the ravenous standing ovation, calling her name. But Bonnie is gone. He panics a little, as he asks after her, but people shake their heads: no one’s noticed a woman that tall leaving the venue.

Soon he’s wandering around the surrounding cobblestone blocks at a feverish pace. When he gets nowhere, he decides to try home. He arrives at the landing of their floor panting, and he exhales when he sees the light spilling out from beneath the apartment door. Once inside, he can tell from the slight crack of the bathroom door (it swells from the steam of hot water and is never fully closed) and the complete stillness of the house that she’s in the bathtub. She always does her reading in the tub, stays there for hours in silent concentration. Her clothes are flung across the couch as usual. (She’d pretended to be as neat as he was for about a week.) Angry with her for scaring him, he goes to the bathroom door and knocks, making a sound that comes out a little too honest in its loudness and meanness.

“What?” she says, stirring loudly in the water, startled. The force of his knock has opened the door.

He leans against the hallway wall so he can’t be accused of trying to see her without her clothes on—a boundary they haven’t crossed. If he speaks, the panic that still lingers from searching for her will spill out. And if not the panic, she will certainly hear his yearning.

“Bonne nuit,” is what he says, and nothing more.

_______

Their busy summer days in Goutte d’Or grow out of sync, and soon they are coming and going from the apartment at different times.

Her, first looking for work at the city’s music labels, but, after offers of nothing more than clerical positions, she decides to wait for something in A&R. In the meantime, she works at a textile shop right there in the eighteenth arrondissement, a job she keeps for the smell of rayon. (It takes her back to sleeping in the car with her mother near a tailor shop, a thing she won’t realize until after she has quit.)

She is full of stories like this. Stories of the cotton sheets that warble from the ceiling to the dirty floor and whip up a wind for the windowless room of sleepy workers. And the pay isn’t really worth it, you know? So maybe she will take Khadijah—the fellow left-handed girl who works across from her—up on her offer to apprentice at an upholstery shop and learn to repair Persian rugs. In the rare moments their paths cross, Mansour loves to hear her stories, the joy she finds in the quotidian, the scent from her body when she comes home sweaty that reminds him of dishwater, a cypher of the rawness in her that he finds irresistible.

But every time he catches her eye, shame calls him inward, and he wonders again what she knows about Keifer’s death and if he, in her mind, is to blame. Grief and mourning are not words he’d use. He only knows that his appetite for life is milder. He only knows that he, lately, prefers evenings to daytime, that he still must be careful what records he plays to keep Gil at bay. And that, despite his wanting, something in him wants also to push Bonnie away.

When he isn’t running errands for the bakery—biking for ten hours a day on local streets, where all the shop names are in Arabic (street signs he can actually read)—he is auditioning, backing up a singer here and there. Since the May riots in Paris, a student protest that had grown into a citywide upheaval, the police seem to patrol the clubs that dig his sound the most: those catering to the immigrants, the intellectuals. So the work is slow.

His steadiest gig becomes a solo one in the basement of a bank-turned-apartment building in Barbès, not far from the metro station. In the building’s basement, the youth of the neighborhood have established their own nightclub. Promoting their gig roster exclusively by word of mouth, on college campuses and in ghetto tenements, they run a thriving midnight world at the bottom of a steep marble staircase that’s invisible to anyone who isn’t in the know. It is not an entirely legal enterprise, but it goes on just the same. They call the place Goutte d’Or, “A Drop of Gold,” after the name of their neighborhood.

The basement club’s founders are also Mansour’s weekend football mates: sunset games where he and all the other brown boys from the Caribbean, from Africa’s North and West, lord over the streets, frustrating traffic and drawing a crowd, the game’s goalposts marked with kids standing guard and the poles of defunct streetlights. The police want no part in the neighborhood, so most nights they play for hours and hours in peace. He really plays for fun, but he plays harder around the time Bonnie walks up the block from work. One time, she’d stopped, watching him play with a gaze so penetrative that he was the first to drop his eyes.

The food at the Goutte d’Or club is Moroccan some nights, Syrian other nights, Belgian a few times. Always abundant, all payments in cash. They don’t sell much more than water in the way of drinks, but somebody always finds Mansour some hard liquor: the only item on his rider. The place is filled with miniature postcolonial flags, sketches of North African and Parisian protest slogans on napkins, handwritten tributes to murdered mothers and uncles hiding in water glasses with straws and toothpicks. A crowd as determined for revolution as they are for romance, the request is always for love songs.

Bonnie comes some nights, but less and less as August nears. He has felt her drifting from him, a thing he knows he is causing but can’t help. He isn’t sure how far he’s pushed her away until she turns up at the club one evening with a man. While the drummer solos, Mansour spots them entering. He usually is a master at playing it cool, but he feels weightless, caught off guard by the sight of them together, as if the heaviest part of him has already leapt from the stage. But he’s in the middle of a good show, with an audience he respects: a deterrent from his worst instincts. As the drummer grooves, Mansour assesses her companion: Moroccan; grass-blade thin; likely a Marxist, judging by the pained expression on his face; and, considering his slacks and glasses, a college boy.

College boy guides Bonnie to a table near the stage, a bit of a forceful tug by the hand, as though he meant to indicate to the room that she belongs to him. Mansour knows then that this is maybe only their second time out together at the most. The boy doesn’t know Bonnie at all. (If he did, he’d know that forcefulness wasn’t going to work in his favor.) And then Mansour composes himself enough to look at her finally. He is expecting guilt or some look of defiance—it would have been easier to accept—but she smiles and waves at him like a friend.

She is staring up at him with that mix of awe and coyness, the way she’s always looked at him. But he clearly sees longing, a somberness in her gaze, like she’s missed him.

Somebody shouts from the corner: “Are you gonna sing?”

The band is staring at him, the people too. He laughs a little, at how completely she’s undone him.

“Come on, are you gonna sing?” the man says again.

“I’m gonna try,” Mansour says. He closes his eyes. Opens them again. Looks right at her.

“What do you need?” he says.

She is startled, put on the spot in front of the quiet room. But she smiles her anti-smile, tightening her mouth like she’s fighting to keep it in.

“Maybe something slow.”

He turns to the keyboardist, asks in French for blues.

Unhooking the mic, he starts to walk the stage, beginning to vocalize, testing notes, as the musicians build the sound. He sings for her, a sound warning her about the way he loves (he needs something slow too): a thing with pauses, with play and trepidation. Each note is careful, a brave step forward in the dark. And there, standing between the crooked posters of Elvis and Sam Cooke, Mansour sings and sings and sings Gil Rodney away too. When the evening ends around three or four in the morning, and the tables have been wiped and stacked with chairs, the collective pays Mansour a third of whatever they made on the door, cash collected in a woven grass basket a Congolese grad student donated for some fundraiser or another. By the time he wraps his set, Bonnie and the Moroccan have long left their seats, like the rest of the crowd. But on his way out to leave, Mansour finds Bonnie slumped, sleeping in the corner, waiting for him near the coat rack at the front door.

At the club’s back alley, in the twilight, they dash through the misty rain. And soon there is no one but them, walking up into their shadows, as the streetlights paint each raindrop golden for a moment on its way to the ground.

64. BONNIE DROPS THE stylus onto Sarah Vaughan’s record, her hands still damp from the rain.

In the dark, beside their records, Mansour undresses her by the flashes of the storm’s lightning: dropping her silk blouse onto A Love Supreme, her black slip onto The Modern Sound of Betty Carter. Then she’s shivering in the hot room, a nervousness in her body that her mind doesn’t share.

“What do you think I’m gonna do to you?” he whispers with a smile, teasing her.

“Whatever I’ve done to you, hopefully,” she says, teasing back as she observes him, his hunger.

She pushes his shirt farther down his arms. Mansour lifts her by the thighs, walking her to the bedroom’s open doorway, shocking her with the ease of his handling. When he slides inside her, his rhythm splits Sarah Vaughan’s notes into fourths, then sixths, then eighths in her ears: the guts of some future J Dilla beat. Her body chases his rhythm, drifting from her mind’s control. The panic, the excitement of this enlivens her; heat rises in her as she changes their pace, starting to use her hips.

Then they focus, forehead to forehead. Patiently aligning, until there is nothing between them but skin. Bonnie catches a glimpse of inside Mansour: a flash of bright emerald that briefly obscures her vision. And what she cannot see any more of this first time, Bonnie feels. Mansour is endless. Open, maybe broken.

His arms weaken under her thighs as Bonnie rests her chin on his head and holds Mansour to her body. Coolness covers them and they breathe and stop.

65. LIFE IS A COMPULSIVE GOSSIP, always whispering what’s to come. Some months before they landed in Paris, the Sahara sneezed west. Then sand crossed time zones like streets, fertilizing the tangled abundance of the Amazon, sending a light sprinkle of dust over Western Europe. This Afro-Brazilian dust arrives in Goutte d’Or in September and presents itself modestly: a subtle amber muting to the sky that keeps a dawn feeling through the hours. But this strange sight, this strange color, burrows so far into the subconscious minds of the people that for a few nights, they dream in gold. Daily life in the streets loses some of its gravity, as they reckon with this rare evidence that the world is one.

Peeling her eyes from the strange sky, Bonnie pulls the last of their things—a fitted sheet—from the communal clothesline and it cracks in the cool air, throwing microscopic traces of the Sahara between her toes. She keeps looking for her childhood in this terrain, in this place. There is maybe some hint of Claudine at the counters of convenience shops, when brown little girls in buckled shoes get on tiptoes to be eye level with their mother’s hands, or in the racing silhouettes of those same young mothers, chasing buses at sundown with their daughters on their hips—but that is all. Bonnie’s early life didn’t have a single witness, and it seems these days to be a thing imagined.

Now that she quit the textile factory (out of boredom), she is home most days, where she and Mansour play incessantly, like children. Their carrying on has incurred some pounding on the ceiling from the family above them, chastisements in Arabic from the floor below. But when he goes off to work at the bakery or the club, the neighborhood feels sordid again. Some of the houses seem to be made in jest—sheets and shawls for windows, a slab of wood for a door.

This morning, Bonnie returns from the clothesline surprised to see that Mansour hasn’t left for work. He is on his hands and knees in the living room, drawing a map of Europe across their warm wooden floor with white chalk. He’s made mountains where there are mountains, rivers where there are rivers. Numbers and names are scribbled on countries. His body scurries after his left hand as he tallies prospective money and mileage. Without turning around, he speaks, startling her with the richness of his morning voice.

“It’s looking pretty apocalyptic out there,” he says.

“Lil bit. Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“Yusef sent everybody home. He thinks the sky’s a bad omen.”

“Black people think everything’s an omen,” she says, and he laughs a little. She drops their laundry on the couch and climbs between his legs, leaning back into him. She observes his expression carefully.

“Too much?” she says, quietly.

“Is what too much?” he says, his eyes still on his map.

“Am I crowding you lately?”

“Yes, woman! Get away from me!” he says, a perfect mimic of an American superhero. He squeezes his arms tight around her, kissing her face until she’s squirming away, squinting and squealing.

“OK, OK! I got it.” She laughs.

Her eyes drift across the floor, observing his map wordlessly as she leans back, snuggling into him comfortably.

“There’s nothing for the UK,” she says.

He rests his chin on her shoulder from behind. “I’m aware of that.”

“You worried about those English, aren’t you?” she teases. He cuts his eyes as she giggles.

“I can help, you know,” she says. He leans back, peering at her suspiciously.

“I’m serious.”

“How good’s your English?”

She scoffs.

“What?” he says. “I need English. Not American.”

His plan is simple, if ambitious: Six countries in eight weeks. Enough money and press to start over. She will make the calls to English-speaking promoters. He will teach her what Gil taught him (“You can’t just be an artist, you got to know the business side of things too—unless you out to be a slave all your goddamn life”): to say she’s from a company, to lead with his credits, to get past the secretary by asking for the decision-maker by name. She can find the names in the paper—which he’s hoarded for months, same way her grandmother hoarded the Afro-American newspaper. She’ll say her client opened for Bob Dylan; The Guardian called him the African James Brown. The first part is a lie, the second is true. All deals are closed that way, he tells her, just as Gil told him.

He coaches her like a film director. She plays the part of a temperamental American manager. He watches her performance while he sits at her feet, his arms tight around her shins, a pencil between his teeth, listening to her interrogate British promoters.

Her client needs a room with a good view, thirteen pieces of baklava, a pianist familiar with the work of Nana Caymmi.

“Who?” Mansour hears a man shout back over the phone.

“Nana Caymmi!” she screams, playing her part.

“Who is Nana Caymmi again?” she asks Mansour quietly, a hand over the receiver.

Artist-minded, he is modest in his financial asks. Lowballing. A number that, she points out, hardly leaves a profit after transportation and the band.

“It’s more than what we played for in the States,” he yells with a mouth full of toothpaste from behind the bathroom door.

“Well, as Malcolm would say, you’ve been had!” she yells back.

After the first two days of carefully studying his tactics, she starts to riff with her own variations. Bonnie discovers she has a way of syncing up with people, of matching their tone, mirroring them until she seems like a part of them, thus inspiring their full surrender. She tries a few different accents, discerning in the first few seconds of a call whether it’s better to seem American or European, Black or white. When negotiating, she oscillates between being girlish and someone ruthless who will end phone calls mid-sentence.

“You can’t hang up on people,” he says.

“Why not? They didn’t have the money.”

She sees him stop mid-stroke while painting the living room wall when he hears her throw out a figure far higher than what they’d discussed, the look on his face caught between horror and admiration. She has the timing, the sensibility, of the kind of drummer he still can’t find. It’s all in the way she uses silence. Tiny pauses—just enough time for adjusting her glasses, for scratching behind her ear—to create pressure. The start of an invisible clock. Did they want her wares or not? He asks her what planet she comes from and she laughs. But her penchant for negotiation has been inherited from a long line of Black attorneys who had saved Black people, kept them safe and free, with their tongues.

Later, he leans in the bathroom doorway, staring for a long time as she pin-curls her hair.

“What?” she asks, matching his leer in the mirror.

“You’re mean,” he says. An epiphany.

She grins her cocky grin. A perplexing combination of innocence and wisdom. A rigorous mind that works a problem until it cracks.

66. THAT EVENING, as they’re discussing the terrible exchange rate, the weakness of their dollars abroad, he smells tar. It congests him, cutting through the candied yams Bonnie’s left simmering on the stove while they lick stamps, packaging demos for southern Europe. And then he feels it coming on. That delicate aura that tunes the room to a disturbing precision: her hair strands are suddenly so important to his mind that he can see where they sprout from swollen follicles. Then the silence of the room drops an octave in tone, as if they’ve been sucked underground. And then he’s certain.

He goes and hides out in the bathroom. There, he locks the door and turns on the tub faucet for an alibi. Defeated, he slides to the floor and waits.

By the time Bonnie knocks, announcing a burnt dinner with a giggle (“oh Lord, this is a mess”) and humming Laura Nyro, he’s come to, tasting pennies as always. He cannot tell how much time has passed until he feels the wetness along his back where he’s splayed on the floor; the bathtub is running over. She’s pounding on the locked door, trying to break in, calling his name.

When he can get to his feet and unlock the door, it takes all his power not to collapse into her arms.

“What happened?”

“I’m OK. I swear.”

“What happened?”

“Just got a little dizzy.”

Holding himself up with his hands on her shoulders, they waddle, as if drunk dancing, to the edge of the tub, where, under his weight and despite the water, they plop down—until he, unable to sit up for long, slides to the ground again. She turns off the tub faucet, the silence now so piercing that it creates a pain in his head. A silence like that crowd he couldn’t charm the night before at Goutte d’Or.

“What do you mean ‘just dizzy’? Dizzy from what?”

He is silent for a moment, as he always is when she asks her many questions. The pause is always his chance to decide whether or not to tell her the truth. He kisses her thigh, sweaty and salty beside his face, says nothing more. His heart is still convulsing out of rhythm, like a little sticky-fingered demon had reached into his chest while he was seizing and tangled the veins. Bonnie puts her hand there, pushing down a little, like she could press it back into its standard time signature. This kind of touch, the tenderness of it, is new from her. He’s staring at her hand, surprised.

67. HIS GIGS AT the local club start to attract a larger and larger crowd. He continues with his job biking deliveries, and Bonnie continues to take the lead on his bookings. Now when he returns from the club in the evenings, the kitchen table and walls, the living room floors and couch, are all covered with poster paper filled with venue names with checks and x’s beside them. More than once, he carries her from the living room floor to the bed, prying the phone out of her sleeping hand. Then he takes over, calling overseas until his eyes won’t stay open. Then he wakes before her to make his calls before work. Their lives begin to take on a rhythm.

While he’s at work one day, the landlord calls for the rent. Twice. Bonnie doesn’t know the state of things until she takes the call.

She dips into her grandmother’s account for the first time, has the money wired to a bank in Paris. But when she hands it to Mansour, he asks her what it’s for, then tells her to keep the money, that he’ll find a way.

“How? With what?”

They argue for the first time. Their voices loud and raw, testing one another, as she follows him from the bedroom to the kitchen. She needs to learn how to live with a man, he yells as he violently scrambles eggs. She slams the bedroom door.

As the bookings from further afield continue to come in slowly, Bonnie feels like a failure. Mansour assures her that this happens all the time. But instead of feeling comforted, it amplifies her fear of losing him. If she can’t help, she thinks, what does he need her for? The possibility of separation—or, more so, the perceived impossibility of ever simply belonging anywhere, with anyone—resurfaces. She makes more calls.

At night, they turn into chain-smoking postal workers, addressing and packaging copies of the first album with press kits to be shipped off to hundreds of promoters. That’s when she discovers that he cannot write in French. His call notes, even the phone numbers, are in ornate Arabic. When she expresses fascination with his handwriting, he jokes that the only European language he learned to read and write in with any dexterity is musical notation. He tries to teach her the Arabic alphabet: alif, ba, ta … but she doesn’t get very far before he lies flat on the floor, holding his head at the American accent she cannot shake.

“Don’t use your nose like that. It’s not ah-leef; it’s ah-leef.”

“Mansour,” she says, eyes closed, exasperated. “That’s the same exact thing.”

“It’s not the same at all! You speak two languages. How can you not hear that?” he says, sitting up on his elbows, assessing her with genuine curiosity, his eyes squinted. Throughout their lesson, all of the windows are open, the broken ones propped high with dictionaries and serving spoons, but they are still drenched in sweat. By the end of the night, she’s begging him to forget it.

Beyond the music—the records, the work—as a man he is still, mostly, a mystery to her. Attempts to venture any deeper into his story still produce a wall, a thing that she resents as they become more and more enmeshed. But Bonnie learns that the easiest way to get Mansour to talk about his past is to get him to talk about music. One day she put on Otis Redding, and when he is singing along—a fidelity to the singer that is uncanny—she asks about some memory he vaguely mentioned when they first met, and when the record dies down, and they’ve done their packaging for the day, without prompting, he’ll usually tell her more: Otis makes him see the Casamance peanut fields.

Otis’s grit brings to mind the terrain: a sharp deep-brown gravel that spikes your heels, a dust so fine and hot that it billows through the air like steam. When Otis goes high, Mansour feels the relief he felt at the day’s end: when his rounded arms, still soft with childhood, released the last harvest of peanuts into an enormous truck bed. And along the road home, he will smell nothing but peanuts, the scent all through the air; the other talibé children beside him on the road. He’ll stop there, saying no more, and both of them will lie in the living room’s peaceful silence, each seeing their own version of his past.

As they make headway, shipping off fifty packages, closing in on a hundred phone calls, he suddenly seems conflicted. He is moody, picking fights with her after one too many nights of seeing Keifer’s name across the top of each record they ship out. After fifty more have been packaged and are waiting at the door, he tells her to stop.

“We’re not gonna sound like this anymore,” he says. “We can’t send these.”

“I’m sorry, what?” And from the way she’s leaning forward, it is clear another argument has begun. Soon, he is gone every morning and most nights, scrambling to find studio time in the city. He has a demo for her some weeks later.

“How much did this cost?” she says. He won’t give a straight answer, but she figures it out when the lights go out around nine at night, and she finds him sitting on the floor in the living room, in a dark corner, dressed only in jeans, and with his back against the wall. His elbows are on his knees; he’s humming something somber. For the first time he seems unsure of himself. And when unsure of himself, he has a way, she learns, of disappearing. His senses drift elsewhere.

She lights a twelve pack of candles, illuminating every corner until the whole place glows like a church. The wobbly refractions of the amber flames are enough to draw by, so she does. She is in just the right mood—mirroring his: pensiveness, melancholy, not quite sadness.

She likes being in the room with him, though they are not speaking and at opposite ends. But after a while he comes closer, and she lets him see. She’s drawing a woman. “Who is that?” he asks. “I have no idea,” she says, shaping the soft jawline, the gap in the teeth. He won’t go away, so she gives her pencils to him to sharpen.

68. AS THE WINTER APPROACHES, they lose a third of their prospective bookings to budget cuts and ghosters. She blames the new demo but doesn’t tell him so. She thinks back. When they were still in America, in the spring before they left for Paris, lying in Washington Square Park, he’d explained his musical taste to her, his vision for the next project. Thinking back on that fusion—Pavarotti, Malian and Cuban music—she wonders, who would understand this combination of sounds? Will anyone? She worries now.

For several days, she disappears from morning till evening, leaving well before he’s awake. Taking the train into the city on her own dime, she bogarts the promoters who won’t answer her calls. Then she goes further. In cities across Europe, using her hardly tapped inheritance, she ambushes club owners after performances. If she finds them at the kitchen door, she’ll jump in to take the tray in their hand to the crowd. If she finds them moving chairs, she’ll grab one too, following them to the back in her heels. This gives her time for her thirty-second pitch. And she learns when to push and when to recede. She moves quickly: fifteen, sometimes twenty venues in a day. She knows when she has a buyer, and now, she never leaves without something written down, selling gigs on the spot. “Could we put this on paper?” she’ll say with a smile. Mansour had brought that smile out of her. He’s a smiler, regardless of his mood, and it’s sometimes a way, she discovers, of keeping people at a distance, a way of diverting attention from your true feelings.

She gets signatures on bar napkins, on the backs of sticky drink menus, throwing back strains of vodka she can’t pronounce to prove that she can hang. She learns to hold in her cough until she is out in the snow, racing to a phone booth to report the victory to Mansour. But she doesn’t tell him everything.

She doesn’t tell him that some men leave their personal numbers with their signatures. That while they peruse her contract, discussing the deal points, they slip in matters about their personal lives too. Their problems are always the same: that they are aging, that their wives are inattentive, that they have too much money in the bank.

They are comfortable touching her even if she squirms. Even if she laughs nervously and shifts in her seat, they slap their hands on her thigh with greasy, defiant grips. They want to tell her what they think of her body, in more and more explicit terms as the conversation progresses and the alcohol flows.

She replays these events in her mind afterward and is ashamed of how often she resorts to laughter, to stepping back and back until there is nowhere else to go. Ignoring their hands, while she repeats the deal points, pretending somehow that the hand that is caressing her shoulder, that the foot bringing her chair closer, does not belong to the man she is speaking to.

_______

He never confesses that these long trips disturb him. That while she’s gone, he imagines that there are other men. He has never recovered from the shock of seeing her walk into Goutte d’Or with that Moroccan, one of many things they moved passed by not discussing. When he watches her with the phone to her ear, looking over her shoulder to gives a thumbs-up for another deal that has been closed for him, he can’t say more. It feels foolish to belabor old pains, when she seems to be devoted to him in so many ways.

_______

When she gets back to the apartment in the early mornings, Mansour is seldom home. He has taken a new, additional job on the metro tracks, joining a campaign to extend the city lines. He knows that he shouldn’t work on the road, that the fumes could trigger his condition. But he lies to the manager and starts work as soon as he’s hired, determined to provide for her. Observing the group, he gathers that the other two Senegalese men do not speak French. As the boss runs through security measures, Mansour watches the men stare blankly; he finds them later in the lunch line, trying to repeat the instructions to them in Wolof. He is surprised when the words do not flow easily, that his native language is almost something forgotten. It makes him think that maybe his past could be shed in its entirety, that maybe there was a way of stepping into a new life, a different path, with her.

69. BONNIE WAITS FOR Mansour on the street. They have spent the evening at a Paris nightclub owned by Mansour’s gypsy friend. The club owner is twenty-one, energetic, and slender. He banged the table defiantly when Mansour explained that America is nothing more than smelly convenience stores and bad traffic.

Mansour is a delight for the gypsies. His friend’s great-grandmother, the club’s original owner, comes down the steps from her apartment sideways, one by one, to see him. The bartender tells Bonnie that the woman hasn’t been to the club in months, that her arrival now is an event. The patrons applaud her entrance, standing until she’s seated. Mansour breaks his song to applaud too. When she is comfortable in her seat, which has been brought onto the stage not far from Mansour at her request, he and the pianist resume.

The woman is frozen, her face gazing upward at him like a light. Between songs, she reaches for him, and when he comes close, he brings his head down to meet her. She kisses him. She says to him, in a language that he cannot understand, You are my soul. You are my soul. She says it again and again. And for the first and the last time, Bonnie sees him cry.

It is the same when they go to Livorno. A weekend trip they take (unbeknownst to her) to evade their fuming landlord in Goutte d’Or. Mansour introduces her to more of his friends, men and women who are just as in love with him as she is, several of them more so. The place is crawling with his ex-girlfriends, or lovers at least. Bonnie would call them white girls; they’d call themselves Syrian, Egyptian, Toulousian, Italian.

The club’s owner in Livorno is a five-foot-tall, fast-talking, drink-making, table-wiping, mic-setting woman with full hips named Amal. She hugs Bonnie first, then Mansour. Mansour and Amal hold on to each other too long, nose to nose, so close that Bonnie is certain that they will kiss, right in front of her.

“You don’t look well,” Amal says in Italian, a hand to his cheek. She pats it playfully until he smiles. He remembers enough of the Italian the thick-legged woman taught him to say that he’s fine.

Bonnie is focused on Amal’s body. There is so much of her, a frame that fills Mansour’s hands in a way that hers never will. When the club lights dim and he takes the stage, Amal slips in beside Bonnie, asking with warm breath and a hand on her hand to see to it that he stays well.

“It’s very difficult, isn’t it?” Amal says to Bonnie while staring straight ahead at Mansour. When Bonnie doesn’t respond, Amal looks right at her. There’s wisdom on her face, a knowing of something, maybe herself, maybe Mansour, that Bonnie envies. “He’s very difficult.”

“He isn’t with me,” Bonnie says.

Amal smiles at the competition in Bonnie’s voice.

“Have the dreams started?” she says.

Bonnie says nothing, fighting the urge to know more. Amal sighs, taps Bonnie’s hand lightly, and heads back to the bar.

Mansour sings that night for free. Had insisted on it. When his set is over, his rejuvenation, his renewed freedom, is palpable. He kisses Bonnie so hard he almost knocks her back. Out on the street, Amal’s brother chases him up the block with the cash in hand. Bonnie is relieved to see the money, but then Mansour tucks it back in the man’s pocket before hugging him goodbye.

70. IT IS DECEMBER, and he still cannot tell her with words. So instead, as they walk through the neighborhood, he points at the motifs in the Turkish rugs, some beaten good as new, hanging from the walls of half-finished buildings, others dividing the stations of spices in the tiny mazes of the city’s miniature souks. The patterns of the rugs hanging in front symbolize marriage, he says, hoping she’ll take a hint. But she just smiles. They have watched the snow silence Paris, the unpaved roads turn soupy and slick with dirty ice, the scarce trees still harboring leaves that are too weightless to shed. And though he knows that it is not quite the time, he’s worried that there is no sign at all that she wants more too.

_______

In the middle of December, the underground club in Goutte d’Or shuts down, making money even tighter. Bonnie tallies their final earnings on a calculator and is devastated by the outcome, holding in the news all day until the lights are off and Mansour cannot see her. She sees him illuminated by the low light of the window. Just home from the metro tracks, he faces away from her as he undoes his boots, sitting on the edge of the bed, his arms on his knees, leaning forward, exhausted. When she tells him the figures, he says nothing. Crosses to the bathroom. She hears the water start. She slips into bed. The tears gather under her chin.

She goes south on the weekend, trying to see how it feels to be alone again. She agrees to meet a promoter for dinner in Toulouse. Over the course of their three phone conversations, it has become clear that the meeting is personal. And on the phone, for some reason, it is easy to agree, but when she gets off at the train station and sees the handsome gray-haired man waiting for her on the empty platform, she cannot approach him.

She goes instead to the train café and waits for a night train to Mende. In the early morning light, she walks the town’s quiet quarters, its dirt roads and moss comforting her. She stops at the corner where the house she was born and raised in is, almost walking past it. The property, like the others on the block, is now marked as an administrative building for the local water-filtration system. Surprisingly, staring at the brown-bricked, red-shuttered house where she lived on the top floor with her mother is like staring at any house on the block. There are no answers here. No feelings. There is no lost part of her to find.

When her cab from the metro station drops her home, she walks five blocks past their residence, avoiding entering for as long as she can. She doesn’t want to face him. She doesn’t want to hear him say it. She doesn’t want to have to say it first. When she eventually does go in, she’s relieved that he isn’t home. She starts packing, puts her things by the door. It would be easier to just go. She could call him later from wherever she ends up. In the end, she decides that she cares too much to leave him suddenly. She decides to wait.

He comes through the door minutes later, a baguette in his hand, soccer ball under his arm. Before his keys are out of the lock, he notes her bags. She stands awkwardly in the middle of the room in her good coat, her hands in her pockets.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Tu vas où? Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” Where are you going? What’s going on? he says, dropping everything on the table.

“I don’t think … You don’t need me here.” She gazes around as if she’s just arrived.

“What’s going on?”

“I really tried.”

“Tried what?” he says, approaching.

“I tried to get the gigs. I …” She can’t speak. He takes her face into his hands. His grip is firm, assuring. She begins to cry. She tries to pull his hands away but he resists, and she ends up holding on to them. But she will not look at him.

“I really did try. I’m sorry,” she says through the tears.

“Is that why you’re … you’re leaving? Bonnie look at me.”

She finally does.

“Forget the gigs,” he says quietly, but stern, grounding her. Her face is still in his hands. He tips it up to meet his. “It’s supposed to be hard. We’ll just keep trying, or maybe take a break from all that for a while. Cool?”

“Yeah, OK,” she says, her voice almost making it a question. She is baffled as she considers being wanted for her own sake.

He is watching her in turn, waiting for her to fully rejoin the world before he lets his hands fall from her face to her shoulders.

“You weren’t gonna get away from me that easily,” he jokes quietly, and kisses her. She smiles for him as much as she can.

She takes a few steps backward, sits on the coffee table, and watches him go to the front door and take her bags back into the bedroom. By the time he returns to the living room, her body has calmed. She breathes deeper than she has in years. Love in abundance? At least well within her reach? Mansour is watching her; she looks away from the shock on his face.

The phone rings. She goes to it, picks it up.

“Allo? Oui … oui.”

Mansour lies back flat on the floor, trembling a little, in shock. Across the room, Bonnie scribbles something on the notepad near the phone. She hangs up and begins to laugh—a deep belly laugh that makes him sit up, worrying again, just as she comes over and lies beside him. She laughs and laughs, the tears streaming down.

“That was …” She tries to gather herself, speaking slowly, savoring the words. “That was Brazil. Apologizing for the short notice. Milton Nascimento dropped out. And they wanted to know if this”—she holds up the figure she’s scribbled down on a piece of paper—“is a suitable fee for you to replace the headliner’s opening act for the World Music Festival.”

She laughs harder as he screams, pulling her up to her feet. She smiles down from the window as he runs out the front door, his footsteps echoing on their stairs until she sees him bolt onto the streets of Goutte d’Or, leaping up at the sky. They are days from the New Year, only a year away from a new decade, and, for the first time, this has meaning. Bonnie is convinced, finally, that life does change.