New York, 1968
21. BONNIE WAITS OUTSIDE Mrs. Alvi’s office for her interview, still contemplating the very last scene in Planet of the Apes.
Was that already a week ago? The last time she saw Emmanuel. At the Brooklyn theater doors, she’d pretended to feel shy as he pulled her close. She’d rested her head on his chest, watching the street from the side, a place still restless since Dr. King’s murder. During the long walk to her building, he’d suggested a detour to the hotel they’d passed on the street, but when she didn’t smile, he’d covered it quickly with a loud laugh, sputtering that he was only joking. He’d apologized profusely when they arrived at her door.
He’d keep waiting if she wanted to wait. He hadn’t meant to make her feel cheap. In the corner of the hallway, they’d shared a kiss, sour from his nerves. She’d stepped away first. Suddenly tired, she said, “I’m kind of drained,” and she squatted down. She was seeing his holes, feeling them too. That and guilt for holding back, for she knew what it took to live with open wounds. She was discovering, finally, her own holes.
Whatever you fed them, they swallowed down without chewing, never savoring, never showing mercy. But every time they’d get lost in rich arguments about the harms of radiology, or Ossie Davis versus Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger, the tactics of the student organizers in Lahore versus those in Montgomery, she’d see a glimpse of the real him, and wonder, for a moment, what it might be like to truly know Emmanuel. How they might be, if they were not in shackles, feeding each other to their own monsters to spare themselves.
Sylvia’s bedroom door is still closed almost a year later, and Bonnie hasn’t been inside. The things returned to her by the coroner—her grandmother’s tweed suit, stockings, wedding ring—remain in a laundry bag hanging on the brass knob of the door.
And today, sitting outside Mrs. Emmanuel Alvi’s office, Bonnie cannot piece a coherent thought together, even though she spent the night in preparation, fogging up the bathroom mirror, practicing soliloquies on the label’s history. The glass door is ajar but the interview is now nearly an hour behind schedule. Bonnie’s beginning to wonder if the woman is deliberately making her wait, perhaps in retribution.
The elevator operator is a Black man who will not make eye contact with her. Every time the doors open, the portable fan he keeps inside the elevator expands Bonnie’s hair, her first attempt at a press-n-curl. She wishes again that she knew how to braid.
When she finally gets inside the office, the job interview is a rapid fire of questions, mostly asked by a secretary. Emmanuel’s wife, Rabia, continues her other tasks as she listens. Taking notes, crunching numbers on a loud calculator. Bonnie watches a receipt recording losses on an album crawl down the side of the desk, until it is low enough for her to kick under the table.
After what seems like a half hour, Rabia looks up.
“Do you have any questions for us?” Rabia asks, removing her glasses. She looks like a sleepy Sophia Loren.
“I’m not sure what you mean?”
“About the company, the role? It’s important to take these opportunities to learn.”
“So this was just some learning opportunity? You’re not actually considering me?”
Rabia leans back in her chair and exchanges a glance with the secretary. The woman hands Rabia her page of notes and disappears.
“You’re direct.”
“I try to be,” Bonnie says, feeling defensive. But there is something warm in the older woman’s gaze, and Bonnie hates the way she responds to expressions like a child. The mood of perfect strangers, pulling her up and down. Even now, despite herself, she’s softening, a little guilt creeping in too.
“I take it that you’ve never been to a job interview before,” the woman says gently. Bonnie shakes her head, and Rabia studies her for a moment too long, with a look too close to pity.
She looks over Rabia’s head. Right above her is an album signed by Miles Davis. To the right is a black-and-white candid photograph of Rabia and Emmanuel on their wedding day. They’re young, teenagers or in their early twenties, both of their necks stacked in layers of garlands, their striking beauty tempered by huge, goofy smiles.
“Ask me a question. Anything,” the woman says, coaching her.
“What’s your favorite album?” Bonnie asks.
Rabia sits with this question, her reverence for music widening her eyes, and Bonnie knows, right then, that Emmanuel once truly loved her. They felt music in the same way.
“That’s an impossible question,” Rabia says, alive, “but I can tell you what I’ve been listening to all weekend. Sketches of Spain. He’s really at the pinnacle of his talent. His greatest work yet.”
“I like it too, but I almost feel like it should be played backward. ‘Solea’ is the best track. It should’ve gone first.”
The woman smiles. “You have good taste.”
She gathers the paper on her desk.
“Bonnie, don’t be late. You’re the first woman to have a job in the editing department.” She extends her hand.
Bonnie, genuinely grateful, shakes it as hard as she can. She stands to leave.
“And about your grandmother … I’m so sorry.”
Bonnie nods, trying to feel appreciative of her words. Trying hard to feel any way about them at all.
She can hardly remember the death. And though she’s lived alone these past ten months, in some ways, she still does not believe it happened. The funeral, a dignified ceremony in the stuffy assisted-living chapel, was filled to standing room. Two of the sixty people who hugged her claimed to be her cousins, well-dressed brothers from Poughkeepsie in their forties. Tall men shaped like teapots, smelling of mall perfume, without wives or children.
“She has the mole,” one said to the other. The family mole. The mole under the left eye that went back at least a hundred years. The mole that did in a runaway ancestor ten miles from the Mason-Dixon Line, forever dividing the family history. It was the ultimate signifier of twinhood with her mother, so Bonnie had tried to scrub it off with Ajax when she was nine. But even after bleach, Ajax, and a night in the ER, the mole remained. Instead, she scarred her iris (a permanent discoloration; her “cat eye,” Mansour later called it), which blurred the vision in her left eye and meant she would always need glasses to see farther than her hand.
Otherwise in attendance were a senator’s son—handsome, white, with gray hair—who hugged Bonnie like she was a long-lost grandchild, and a congressman who retreated from the mic with sobs, letting the organ take over after he failed to say more than “This woman …” The local news covered the event, as did Ebony magazine and the Amsterdam News. Of course, as she scanned the pews and the parking lot, the one person she had hoped to see, her mother, never arrived.
Emmanuel’s mother cried throughout the two-hour ceremony, her sobbing at times loud enough to drown out the sermon of the shy preacher. But Bonnie didn’t cry, her brow perpetually furrowed, like a driver in a snowstorm struggling to see the road.
Without a college degree in music (without a college degree in anything), Bonnie is an assistant to the assistant editor of liner notes at Onyx Records. Just one last pair of eyes on the one-, two-, sometimes three-page documents that are stapled crooked and stacked on her desk. Her real work is gathering the documents, organizing them by date, and carrying them upstairs to the art department, where they can be typeset. Every Friday, she takes the papers upstairs in a humiliating cart, the loud squeak of the wheels, the way they stick and move against the grain, make her struggle with the thing at an angle, a terrible feat in heels and a pencil skirt.
She works at a small round desk in the basement, sharing the space with two men. One is a tall father in his early thirties. On her first day of work, he entered the room with a hairpin in his mouth, sat at the bureau across from her, and secured his yarmulke. That one gesture gave her the courage to keep her front bang in a curler until she was at her seat. It was a choice that would’ve horrified her grandmother, but it is the only way she knows how to keep her hairstyle for at least the first few hours of work. The other is a stocky Korean man closer to her age who wears crisp Brooks Brothers suits and is always the first to arrive at the office.
Both men give her assignments, approaching her desk up to nine times a day with liner notes that need proofing. In the case of the Jewish man, this is done with great apology, as he continues to add more articles to the tipping pile on her desk. The Korean, however, has no remorse.
One day, she is deep into the copy for the first album of a duo named Mansour & Liam, sometimes Liam & Mansour in the document. She’s speeding through, looking for typos, but stops when the title of the first track catches her eye. Paris was one thing, but she’d never crossed paths with another living person who knew where Mende was: the creepy, quiet place in Southern France where she was born. She slips off her shoes and sits on her feet, eager to dive into the singer’s notes. Farther down, he explains that while he’d grown up in Paris, he had always preferred Mende, a province that, somehow, shared the name of an ethnic group in Sierra Leone.
Bonnie smiles at the transcript, charmed by the singer’s nerdiness as he rambles on: And the city goes back to 200 BC, and the world is very small, so, you know, maybe there’s a connection.
When she turns back to the liner notes, the writing is sloppy, difficult for Bonnie to edit because she can barely decipher what’s written in the first place. The last sentence reads: These ambitious and tender folk selections are a gift to fans of John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong.
“What?” she says out loud.
She takes the article back to the Korean, nervous as she nears him. He is bent over, plowing through documents at the speed of an assembly-line worker. His stacks are far higher than hers: enough papers to obscure most of her view of him. He stops, looks up at her before she speaks.
“What?”
“I can’t edit this. It just doesn’t make much sense. Coltrane and Armstrong in the same sentence? Coltrane and Armstrong as folk music?” She slides the paper across the desk, stopping herself before she says more. He picks it up with both hands, holding it close to his eyes. She feels a sudden solidarity with him—the darkness of the room and the incessant reading is taking her eyes from challenged to nearly blind.
He huffs and scoffs at this messy paper, his enemy in a race against time. He strikes out lines, circles others, and slides it back across the table to Bonnie.
“Here. Blue pile.”
She hesitates but ultimately follows his orders, placing it with the things she’ll take upstairs for printing on Friday afternoon.
“Do you read liner notes?” she asks Emmanuel at lunch, stirring her iced tea with a straw.
He shrugs, busy with a stubborn steak. “Sometimes.”
“Do they make you wanna buy the record more?”
“If I don’t know the artist, I’d say the cover matters more.”
He tears a slice of sourdough bread in half and submerges it in dark olive oil. Bonnie turns pensive.
“What?” he says, taking in the pout on her face. “Disillusioned already? Has it even been a month?”
“You should tell her,” Bonnie says. They never refer to his wife by name to each other. An unspoken agreement.
“Tell her what?” he replies carefully.
“That the writers don’t care. That they skirt their way through ninety percent of the liner notes—unless it’s for the famous artists—and could be costing these people their careers.”
“Most of them are going to fail for other reasons, Bonnie.”
“Like what?”
He shakes his head, swallowing the olive from his cocktail. “A million things.” He reaches across the table, flicks crumbs from the corner of her mouth with his fingertips. “I don’t think there’s much she can do.”
She can see his green scrubs under his open raincoat, and what he’s just said reminds her of the doctors at his hospital. The way they framed her grandmother’s unnecessary death as some acceptable expression of fate.
Emmanuel sees her sadness settling, a shadow wide enough to cast over him too.
“Let’s get you home,” he says in a tone striving for distance.
They are silent as they walk against the warm wind. When they reach the door of her grandmother’s building, she feels him hesitate. Though he visited Sylvia here over the years, he hasn’t been inside their apartment since Bonnie’s lived alone. But tonight, Bonnie cannot bear her empty house, she bangs the glass until he turns around.
Fully clothed, she mounts him on her grandmother’s Persian rug, doing finally what he wants, moving quickly before her mind intercedes. Strips him of his scarf and jacket and shirt and climaxes from the friction of their bodies before they have even undressed. Surprising convulsions that suspend her mourning, comforting her for seconds in a pleasure as taut and private as a womb. After some time, he whispers that this has to stop. That they have to be over. He says this before she feels strong enough to begin her life completely alone.
When Emmanuel is gone and she can finally feel the house (still, empty), feel that there is no one there (the breathing, all her own), can see that her grandmother, her only real kin, has died, Bonnie waits again to feel something more. She picks out her hair until she can’t see any curls. She folds clothes and watches The Flintstones and cuts bananas and throws them out and cuts some more and throws those out until the garbage is full. And waits, still, to feel something more.
On the street people are starting to gather, faints screams that she imagines have something to do with Dr. King’s murder. She listens. She sits out on the terrace and smokes and counts. She counts the times she hears the splash of a new fire hydrant being opened. She counts the cracks of bottles as young folks gather down the street. She pokes holes in the sofa with the steel end of her rat-tail comb.
When she still feels nothing, she goes out and riots.
22. SHE WALKS WITH a blank mind, obeying her body without question. She follows some noise, like a hailstorm, out to an empty street. Down the road are a dozen slender silhouettes, scattered, from a wide distance. Bodies colored and shaped like the trio of wooden sculptures from Benin joined in cobwebs on her grandmother’s windowsill: hardly a torso, mostly legs and arms. When she arrives, she encounters a dreamy, serene scene. They could all be sleepwalking. There is no fire. Just a parade of young people wandering, calling one another what they are called at home, filling the American air with their nicknames, asserting that America is their home too, before some begin to pass around liquor. And the ones who partake get louder, drowning in Colt 45s and laughter.
The second time, she walks until a single window breaks and the crowd scurries. A boy tries to walk Bonnie home. Asks her to his senior prom in a whisper.
This time—the third time—she wants to engage. It takes all of her courage, but she approaches a trio of Black girls her age and size who are standing in the middle of the sidewalk wearing bathrobes and rollers, watching the car they’d just set on fire roast in flames. One holds the hand of a younger boy, maybe her brother. He jumps from side to side and plays tag with his shadow.
“I like your braids,” Bonnie says to the girl, admiring the white beads clanking at her shoulders. The girl smiles, revealing a gap.
“Thanks. My mama did it.” She looks around, taking in the night. “She’s gonna kill me,” she adds, as they return to the fire.
Some of the girls make Molotov cocktails. Bonnie grabs a bottle from the ground, still half-filled with cheap liquor, and tosses it at the burning car. She’s enlivened by the fire’s immediate flare. Terrified as its edges approach the phone lines and trees.
She hears the siren, the patter of feet running.
“Girl, come on!” the braided girl screams at her.
She makes it inside her pitch-black apartment, humid and silent. The highest leaf of the wilting snake plant waves a tired hello. Her sweat stings her eyes; her feet bleed through her slippers, where miles of broken glass has punctured her soles.
Instead of sleeping, she counts down the minutes until the office opens. At 4:30 a.m., she rolls over on her stomach to get on her feet, and sees her grandmother’s robe hanging on the bathroom door. She vomits into the sink. Turns on the faucets and the bathtub, letting all the water run, her thoughts drowned out by the sound. She washes her hair. Giving up on wearing it straight, she puts it in a puffy bun.
She sees the braided girl at the bus stop on her way to work. The girl is in a school uniform, still holding the hand of the younger boy, her socks over her knees. They exchange a smile but do not speak. It’s like encountering a person from a dream.
23. THE CART IS STACKED high with this Friday’s delivery of liner notes for the art department. The liner notes for Mansour & Liam, pawed and read a few more times, are now stained black with the soot that’s still under her nails. She is curious about what this record sounds like, wonders if she might be able to adjust the liner notes and submit them later if she could only hear the music herself.
Every time she enters the art department, she is struck by the atmosphere. The enormous room of large windows and hardwood floors would be mistaken for a record store were it not for the handwritten stickers marking every album “Not For Sale.” Bonnie senses that the people up here are a little closer to the music, nourished by a feeling that doesn’t reach the lower floors.
There is a visual artist working in the corner. White, forty-something, knobby knees angled toward his canvas. His mouth a little tight with a problem that excites him. Bonnie takes in his work, an abstraction of a body with too many limbs, a gorgeous green monochromatic piece. She recognizes the same of the artist: Celia.
“Are you new?” Bonnie jumps at the sound of his voice. She hadn’t realized that she’d come so close, her nose almost at the canvas. He’s speaking but hasn’t stopped working, his pencil still making tiny strokes, so subtle and gentle. She stumbles back a few steps, adjusts her glasses.
“I started a few weeks ago.”
“Well, don’t let Cobb see you standing around.” He tips his head to indicate that the art director is on the other side of the room.
She pulls the wrinkled paper for Mansour & Liam from her pile, wipes it on her knee to smear off some of the tar. She shows it to the man, putting it between his face and his canvas. She asks her question quietly.
“Do you know what the cover is for this one?”
The artist examines it for a moment, then sort of gestures to the side of him.
“Right there.”
Bonnie looks: a stencil of a coffee mug emitting steam.
“This?”
“Yes,” the man replies, returning her sharp tone.
She goes back in the evening under the guise of dropping off a few more liner notes. At this late hour, she’s startled when she feels the rumble of footsteps beneath her, the elevator gate clanking loudly as she makes her way up to retrieve Mansour & Liam’s record. She moves fast, parsing through the demo albums stored in thin white sleeves. She finally finds it toward the back, fishes it from the crate, and scurries out of the room.
At home, she lifts the dust cover off the record player and takes off Ray Charles’s Yes Indeed!, the last album her grandmother played. Bonnie pulls Mansour & Liam from the sleeve and sets the needle in the first groove. She sits on her feet in grandmother’s chair, watching as the record spins on the record player. A man’s voice counts off the beat, “One, two, three,” and a pianist begins a trill. The singer believes in patience, in silence. He starts and stops a hum like he’s testing the air to make sure it can hold him. Then a low note that clashes and melds with the instruments until it all produces a perfect sonic marriage.
The low note he holds stirs up a feeling in Bonnie’s crown. A wet heat like the blood’s moving there, like it’s turning warm. It moves on, leaking down her spine, dripping, like a sap. Soon the feeling embraces the full breadth of her silhouette, and the long hairs on her arms lift, reaching for the dim room’s few sources of light. She slides from her chair to the ground, where she breaks and finally weeps.
She plays Mansour & Liam’s record into the night, but never the whole way through. She keeps drawing it back to the first track, “Mende.”
It was a town where people kept their heads down, any great hopes quickly hidden under brooms, in pots, and in soil. A meditative place of hymns and Gregorian chants that shimmered with a peace that did not penetrate their door. At home, sometimes, there was a feeling of being hunted. By what or who, Bonnie didn’t know. She gathered what she could, her mother’s memories of the war only slipping out after dark liquor or sleepiness:
When the bombs exploded, the girls, the dancers, their dresses, their bodies were flying. And, Bonnie, I remember, I remember, the explosion rocked me so hard that I couldn’t feel my body. I couldn’t feel anything, and I remember that I looked down just to see if I still had legs. And when I saw my legs, this joy came over me, so strong it was almost madness, so powerful that I screamed. She laughed.
The happiest I’d ever been was about my legs. Until I had you.
She finishes the cover art on the 6 train. A Yoruba priestess, all in white, watches it come together over her shoulder. She attaches the sketch to the album sleeve with paper clips and goes straight to the room of records, greeting the operator with a confident nod. She slips it into the crate. She goes down to the basement and sits at her desk. She wonders what the boy who loved Mende will think of his cover. She wonders if it will ever reach Claudine.