New York, 1968
24. IT SEEMS TO COME FROM the chords Keifer chooses—this thing that flows between him and Mansour. Liam has been watching them from the upholstered nook of the large brownstone window, waiting for the other musicians to arrive for their rehearsal. He rolls up his shirt so that his sweaty arms might catch the breeze. At its size and depth, Keifer’s house was usually cool, but the sun is relentless this morning. Liam’s studying them, trying to understand what it is about their new dynamic that makes him feel shut out. The only way he can describe it is that it’s like the two men are remembering a secret. With each chord Keifer strikes, each run Mansour improvises, more and more of this tale is recalled, their recollection insulates them, and they move farther away from Liam, into a place where only they reside.
When Keifer plays a chord, Mansour closes his eyes and laughs. Leans into the deep sway of the baby grand in the center of the living room, letting his head drop back and belting out an array of notes that make Keifer shoot up from where he sits at the keys.
Today, as they rehearse, Keifer’s wife, Vanessa, calls to them from the kitchen.
“Is that Mansour singing like that?”
“You better believe it, baby!” Keifer replies.
It is strange to Liam how close, how in sync, Keifer and Mansour are when it comes to the music. Keifer has even gotten Mansour to speak English, something that has given them another means to carry on without him.
When the backup musicians arrive, Mansour is revising the drum parts with a pencil. Today, the drummer Keifer’s been promising will finally arrive.
Mansour had spent yesterday morning notating the parts under the kitchen table. He’d been dragged into a game of hide-and-seek by Keifer’s youngest stepdaughter, Poinciana, and while he waited for her to find him, the rhythms had come to him. He’d sat under the table in one of those effortless, rushed, artistic fits that was difficult to keep pace with. He’d sung aloud to capture it all as he charted the drum sequence for the first track in the margins of the Amsterdam News.
The girl found him twenty minutes later, passed out. When he came to, he could tell from the sour taste of metal that it had finally happened. Manhattan and its medications, its tonics, its chaos, had not made a difference. He’d seized. He was cursing under his breath, but the little girl’s fear made him force a smile to comfort her.
“Did you die?” she’d asked, offering him her jelly-stained blue-eyed doll for comfort.
Today, in this chaotic rehearsal, Mansour cannot focus, the never-ending battle with his body still on his mind. A sourness escapes from the kitchen (Vanessa and her obsession with vinegar), and Keifer’s daughters and their little friends are involved in some game of leaping over the living room furniture. Their obstacle course includes the men’s music stands and instrument cases. It tickles Mansour that Keifer, for all his strictness with the musicians, is so soft and easy with the girls. He cannot tell them to stop running without breaking into laughter. It is his wife’s firm yell from the kitchen that finally gets the children to plop down into the dining room chairs and stare at the television in silence. Watching it all, Mansour wonders what his home might feel like. And if kids would one day soften him too.
The drummer, Davis, finally arrives. He comes and sits beside Mansour. The scent of his hair gel convinces Mansour that it must be the same one Sokhna uses. The man’s silky black hair is slick, his nose too flat to hold up his glasses. His skin is darker than Mansour’s, but a different kind of darkness, more maroon, that Mansour will only see again some years later in Mexico, when he finally succeeds at teaching Bonnie how to float. It is the skin tone of the man who will wander the beach and sell him an overpriced shawl that Bonnie will keep at the foot of her bed in the attic every day that he’s gone.
Mansour is still writing, adjusting the drum notations, when the man snatches the page from him.
“I don’t need you to spell it out for me, man. You from the goddamn Philharmonic?”
The man runs his hands over his hair in frustration, wriggling and shifting the carton of orange juice between his knees. “I know what to do here.”
Mansour only makes out half of what the man has said. He doesn’t have the language to respond, probably wouldn’t even if he did know what to say. His quest to understand Black Americans is ongoing.
Mansour tried to explain these feelings to Liam once but couldn’t.
“It’s the culture. It’s different here,” he’d said, and shrugged, with indifference. “What do you expect from Blacks anyway?” he’d asked, and Mansour had stayed silent.
Liam had been short with Mansour ever since he’d moved into Keifer’s house. Keifer had told Mansour that he could stay with him, that he didn’t have to endure the hostility of Liam’s Irish neighborhood in the wake of the city’s unrest.
But now, in Harlem, it is strange to Mansour to live in a place with so many Black folks again and to dismiss any likeness or affinity as a matter of circumstance and nothing more.
When the rehearsal’s over, Keifer leaps across the room and grips Mansour by his shoulders. He shakes him until he smiles.
“We gotta name you Gutter, you bring the gutter, man. Goddamn. You got people in your voice, man. A hundred of ’em.”
The trumpeter reaches out, shaking Mansour’s hand. “Well done.” He’s a large, quiet man from Chicago whom they’d met briefly on that film set months ago. He shares Liam’s addiction to beef jerky. This afternoon, the bag slipped between them during moments of panic. When the riots came on television, and others moved to share cigarettes, the men’s eyes met, and the trumpeter whispered to Liam, “Say, man, you got that jerky?”
The sax player also shakes Mansour’s hand, but the drummer only sips on his orange juice, combs his hair again.
“What are we gonna do about the lyrics?” Davis asks Keifer as the other men gather their things. “He can’t be singing in whatever that is.”
“It’s Wolof,” Mansour says from across the room, his eyes narrowed on Davis.
“Nobody even knows what that is. People are gonna think we’re losing it, man.” Davis looks to Keifer, who remains silent, his head in a scroll of Charles Mingus sheet music. A score he’s been studying since their work on the album began.
“Keifer? Keifer, you got me on this, right?”
“Huh?” Keifer is pretending not to hear him.
“The words are gonna put people off. It’s hard enough to get folks to come out as it is.”
“It ain’t hard to get folks to see me,” Keifer says, serious and shifting the jubilant mood of the room. “It’s different. The people need something different.”
“You sure about that?” Davis mutters.
“Say what?”
“Nothin’, man.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said, are you sure you can pack a house without Gil Rodney? Man, if Gil was my dad, you couldn’t catch me dead backing up some singer.”
Keifer says nothing to this, but Mansour sees a darkness settle around him. It makes Keifer seem as wounded as he is dangerous, like a dethroned king. And now Mansour realizes what Keifer’s trouble is: He is not the king. Gil is. But why did Keifer insist on waging war with Gil’s magnificence? Drowning in his father’s shadow instead of just floating in it peacefully? Mansour wonders, but he doesn’t say more.
Across the room, the men gossip in subtle murmurs, nervously packing up their instruments.
“I gotta get up out of here, man,” the trumpeter says, and the others agree, grabbing binders and zipping up jackets, exaggerating impending encounters with horny wives and girlfriends. Davis and the others stagger out of the room.
When the room clears, Mansour picks up his dinner plate from the table, famished. Leftovers from earlier: corn dogs and coleslaw. A shot of cheap vodka. When he empties the glass, his eyes are red.
“Your drinks here? They’re shit,” he says in English to Keifer.
“Well, we didn’t come here for the drinks,” Keifer says, speaking of America. He crosses into the kitchen and disappears for the rest of the night.
Mansour is lying in bed, face down, when it occurs to him that Liam was absent for the latter half of today’s rehearsal. No one else seemed to notice either. The song they’d been working on had gone on just fine without bass.
They are scheduled to finally begin recording the next morning, so Mansour spends the night awake, worrying. As the album progresses, as their date to debut at the downtown club approaches, even since it happened again, the fear of seizing onstage engulfs him.
He’s been in America for almost two years now, but when he’s this nervous, he sleeps and wakes on Swiss time. The other dwellers in the home are used to his peculiar hours and hardly stir when they hear him untangling the chain on the front door to venture out into the dark. They gossip over breakfast about it being an African ritual.
“That nigga be out there, howlin’ at the moon and shit,” Keifer mutters as he dumps cornflakes into a bowl, Vanessa muffling husky laughter with the thick sleeve of her robe.
Mansour walks through the hours it takes for night to become day. There is another Black man on 137th, moving exactly as he does. Gangly, a long stride that flaunts oversized shoulders another would work hard to hide. When they are face-to-face, or close enough to be, Mansour is afraid to look, certain that he will see himself.
He finds his spot. Some stack of bricks, where he crouches and smokes in the alley. A space between a new movie theater and a Chinese-takeout spot. The streetlights, curving down with the shameless flare of the Harlem Renaissance, lord over him. They pulsate a perfectly amber light. His sweaty stomach cooling off in the twilight breeze, his head propped back against the wall, a cigarette sweet in his mouth, and then he knows why he keeps returning here.
These few square feet of Harlem conjure the mood of the place where he first heard his own sound. He was maybe five, maybe six, in Saint-Louis, Senegal, sitting under streetlights like these, with only the talibé boy-beggars like him on the street.
He’d been sent into the talibé order by his grandfather, a man looking to protect his noble lineage from an illegitimate child. Mansour had had Kiné until she drowned, Mama until she left him for Paris, and then aunts, nameless now. He remembers them most for the way they fed him constantly: he wasn’t used to not having a warm bed and women’s arms to curl up in. Once with the talibés, he’d been in search of a way to soothe himself and had found it in the streets.
All the children, incanting prayers, each one praying alone. Boys barefoot, dressed in white smocks or blue jeans, five or fifteen raucous in worship, facing the wall, the sky, the ground, the river. The street emptied of anyone but them. A night wind full of harmony. The people kept their windows and doors open to let in the sound. Mansour can still hear them, can feel it all again tonight.
Some of the boys would be in ecstasy, rocking back and forth. Others dogmatically monotone, ready, already, for another long night of their lives to be over with. This is the place where he discovered himself. That his upper register could lift his spirit, his forehead soon tingling, his mind livelier, as if he’d had a taste of citrus. Low notes and rounding the mouth cooled the body down and filled his gut almost as well as rice. And his vibrato was like fingertips. So close to Kiné’s tickle, the only facet of her touch that he remembers.
Tonight in Harlem, he watches the Chinese women across the street begin their day, descending from a gray van and click-clacking through the alleyway in stilettos and men’s coats. The back door to the restaurant is always cracked open. He eavesdrops, hearing his aunts in the rhythm of their water and knives. They carry vats by the twos, pouring black grease into the weeds. The spring foliage seems to feast on it, the weeds turning greener every morning he returns.
25. MANSOUR IS SURPRISED to see Liam already inside the studio, biting his nails in the doorway of the booth, losing a debate on sound levels with the engineer. Liam gestures for Mansour and then walks ahead quickly, leading them to the privacy of a narrow carpeted hallway with a lamp so dim it hardly lights the table it sits on. The cacophony of the band’s warm-up glides beneath Liam’s guttural voice.
“I can’t believe you let those motherfuckers kill three—three—of my songs! After I’ve been your mouth and your eyes and your ears all this time. You’re finally in with them, huh? So you let them take what’s ours?”
Mansour feels Liam testing his loyalty. The feeling is merciless and burdensome, their bond at stake. It is too much to face. He sighs and plays it off. But Liam goes on, getting louder.
“Have you considered that he’s using us? That he’s using this album to break away from Gil and start his own career?”
Mansour doubles down, refusing to hear this. He turns away.
“You’re so paranoid.”
“You can’t hear that?” He’s gesturing to the men in the booth. “Listen to that! He’s made this into a jazz album. Do you want to make a jazz album?”
Mansour gets louder: “It’s not about the genre, it’s about making the best album that we can and—”
“Jesus man, could you please, please, fill me in on your criteria for the best record we can make? Or should I just ask Keifer?”
The African and the Irishman are silent, but it is not a standoff. They would rather speak, but neither of them have the words. They do not know the language for the place they’ve entered. After a decade of an indestructible bond, this rupture is foreign to them. They cannot even name or understand its true cause. Liam steps back.
“I’ll play my parts … I’ll play my parts and then I’m going home,” he says.
Liam’s eyes move back toward the studio, where the trumpeter and saxophonist have begun their embouchure, where Davis is tightening his cymbals and Keifer stands behind the piano in the center of the room, preparing to conduct. The sheet music stretches across two music stands before him. Mansour’s eyes follow.
“That is supposed to be you,” Liam says, pointing to Keifer.
He storms back into the studio. Mansour watches Liam strap up his bass. He keeps his head down, disappearing into his own groove.
As the session progresses, Keifer tightens control over the musicians, driving them harder. They are twelve takes in on the third track before Liam cracks, yanking off his headset.
“Hey, Keifer … Keifer! We gotta play. We’re running out of money!”
When Keifer speaks, his voice is muffled by the glass of the booth. “Liam. Don’t do that. You’re throwing me off. Let’s go back to bar sixteen.”
“Non, non! Ça suffit!” That’s enough, Liam shouts. “Ça suffit!” He rushes out of the booth. The studio door slams behind him.
They play on with Liam gone. Keifer lays down the bass himself. Mansour’s voice turns frail in Liam’s absence, his high notes cracking. He spits over and over into the garbage can at his feet, his mouth dry. Keifer tells him to take five.
Then a merciless three hours more. A foul vibe. The horn players finish sweetening and then rush out, relieved. They leave Mansour, Davis, and Keifer alone in the booth to start track four, a vocalese blues. With the others gone, Keifer zeroes in on Mansour, cuing the engineer to pause the recording after every phrase the African sings. Pushing him for more grit:
“More like field hollers.”
“This is that revival shit.”
“Muddy. Muddy!”
“Mississippi, nigger.”
“Like you on a dirt road, nigger.”
“Black.”
“Black.”
“Come on, man.”
Keifer stands up from the piano.
“You want a playback of that?” the engineer asks.
“Naw, scrap it,” Keifer says, cutting his eyes at Mansour.
Mansour smokes in the bathroom, waiting for the others to leave, cursing out Manhattan in his mind. The New World was supposed to make him feel invincible, enormous. Not small.
He makes it two blocks before he’s lost. The city looks different at night.
He finds a different subway entrance, jumps the turnstile as he’s seen others do, and waits for the train with the small group of twilight passengers. A homeless man walks up and down the platform on the other side, bellowing “Ave Maria.” A perfect alto. Mansour envies his control. He yells out and harmonizes with him, indifferent to the shocked crowd. When he finally makes it to Strivers’ Row, he walks past Keifer’s and heads down the quiet block of towering brownstones and their twinkling lights. He sleeps on his jacket on a bench in Central Park North, stretched wide under huddled stars.
A few months ago, before he moved into Keifer’s house, Mansour had already begun and ended his first love affair on American soil: a fiery eighty-seven days with a slender Haitian janitor with his complexion. An aspiring professor who was too busy learning Twi, raising a parrot, and acing physics at SUNY Purchase to convince him that she cared. He wanted her, she wanted Africa, so when she asked him what he knew about the orishas (“The what?” “Oh, come on, Mansour. Yemayah! Oshun!”), and he told her to stop playing Nigerian, she threw him out—with a sheet, for she was averse to public nudity—onto the twenty-sixth-floor fire escape and shut the window.
He didn’t realize he had loved her until he saw her again, waiting far ahead of him in line at a Jamaican restaurant they’d frequented as a couple. It was the closest thing to his aunts’ cooking that he’d found in the New World—closer than the few Senegalese restaurants he judged too harshly: no yéet, weak roff. He’d followed her for half a block from a distance. Ultimately deciding against approaching her, trying again, he crossed the avenue and went his own way. The memory of her strut forever tangled with the scent of Scotch bonnets and allspice, a memory like camera footage he plays over and over to get through the sexless Harlem days and nights. It takes another tryst and some time alone before he can finally release her.
Now, in the spring, he cuts his hair, learns the subway lines, and retreats from Keifer’s family into the wilderness of his own manhood. He gets a job stocking shelves, learns Spanish (far easier than English) in the early mornings at a thriving bodega. He doesn’t think of himself as homeless, though he sleeps almost every night in the park, still stopping by Keifer’s after recording to shower, rehearse, or catch the latest news on the riots.
He and Liam still do not speak. Mansour continues to stay with Keifer. And there, at Keifer’s house, there are some days when they are family.
After rehearsal one such night, the two men sit in lawn chairs in the brownstone’s backyard, seeking refuge from the heat of the house. Keifer is still shaking his right hand, fighting carpal tunnel from the fast playing—chasing Mansour’s adlibs. A song they named “The Chase.”
“So, your people. They’re all singers too?” Keifer asks.
Mansour shakes his head. They sit under a drooping clothesline and an evening sky the color of lava. Damp socks swing above their heads. “No, my family’s very religious.”
“Now I get it.” Keifer sits up, smiling. “That’s why you’re so free—you don’t have any shoes to fill.”
Mansour leers, unfamiliar with the expression.
“I mean, you’re not carrying somebody’s else’s legacy on your back. You get to start fresh. You’re free to be you.” Keifer’s eyes open in a new way, a softening, so Mansour finally asks:
“What’s with you and Gil?”
“Don’t go there, man,” Keifer mutters, quietly.
“I don’t know my father’s name. I’ve never even seen his face. You’re not gonna tell me anything worse than that.” Mansour drops his cigarette, stomps it out. He looks down for a long time to make sure it’s dead.
Keifer sighs, sitting back in his chair.
“All right. I’ll tell you a story,” he says.
The great Gil Rodney was a protégé of Louis Armstrong. Keifer speaks of an old Hollywood movie he won’t name. A film where his father played an eye-bucking trumpeter who sat on the back of a bus and made music for the film’s climactic scene. He’d returned to Harlem from Los Angeles strange and quiet. Leaving the room when the film was mentioned, telling his wife that they would not be attending the premiere.
But whatever words he had for the film’s director would, in drunken moments, be directed toward his son. Once, while drunk, he’d told Keifer the story. The director, dissatisfied with his refusal to portray the character as instructed (bulging eyes, licked lips, singsong voice), made him shoot seventy-two takes of the same scene. The producer, annoyed at the wasted money, came down from his office. Then they both were shouting at Gil, demanding he do as told, until, on take eighty-one, Gil broke. The crew watched. The director nodded, finally satisfied.
The night after he told Keifer this story, Gil, drunk again, had aimed a .22 pistol at Keifer for stepping on his foot. A decades-old memory that still brings Keifer to tears, a memory his father vehemently denies, his mother too.
As they spend more time together, Mansour learns more and more about what it takes to sound Black, the kind of Black that Keifer means: leaning into his guttural voice, always staying ahead of the listener with creative choices. An approach to singing that challenges Mansour’s mind even more than his voice.
Other days he is a foreigner, a stranger only passing as Black who cannot be trusted. The music had once given their brotherhood the weight of a decade without the roots. There is nothing else truly holding them together, and as the recording process draws to a close, their bond is fractured often and easily.
Though he likes the sound he produces, singing in the way that Keifer demands requires self-exploitation for Mansour, a constant unearthing of pain. Some of it was his own, buried longings for home this style of singing drew out of him, but the other pain he felt belonged to the sound itself. Chattel slavery, Keifer warned him, had made jazz. Mansour drinks sometimes after the session is done. But sober, the feeling returns and is sometimes too much to bear. When he does not emote, is not willing to tear himself completely open, he has to stomach Keifer’s disapproval. Soon Mansour begins to ignore Keifer, finding his own way into the sound, a way without suffering. Keifer backs off some, but their minds never quite meet, and the two men war and dance, war and dance, tugging at the spirit of the music until the end.
Months late and well over budget, the record—Carl Keifer Presents … Mansour & Liam—is submitted to the label in late April. The men go to their corners of the city and wait.
26. MID-SPRING AND THE rehearsals are long over, the album submitted long ago, and they’ve heard nothing from the label. Liam returns to Harlem to retrieve from Mansour the spare key to his uncle’s apartment, his amp, and a pocket watch he plans to pawn for rent at his own place. Vanessa answers the door, Poinciana asleep in her arms.
“Hey, Liam,” she whispers.
Another girl, the older daughter, begins crying on the stairs. She asks why he has come without Mansour, why Mansour has to sleep in the park.
“I guess he just needs some space, honey,” Vanessa consoles, but the girl whines on.
“But why does he have to be homeless, Mama?”
Liam decides that the girl has a point, that despite their fallout, it might be a good idea to catch up with him.
“He’s with the Cubans these days,” is all Vanessa knows.
Liam mounts the hills and crosses the bridge into Central Park North, passing the homeless, searching their faces to no avail. Walking faster, he calls his brother’s name. He can hear the Cuban drummers but can’t tell where the sound comes from. When he walks to the left, it seems to come from the right. When he walks to the right, the sound swells left and then divides, seeming to come from every direction. Finally, in a love song, some men are chanting to the Yoruba deities, Liam hears Mansour’s sound. Expansive, circular, a note stretched and held until it changes tone.
By the time Liam finds them, the drum circle is past the point of no return. The groove slows Liam down. Calms his nerves, calling him to hope. Mansour sits in the center of the circle, eyes shut, lost in song. Liam sits on the bench nearest to him. He does not understand, has never understood, where this music or the work with Keifer takes Mansour. But he can see Mansour’s joy, and that, at least in this moment, is enough.
Mansour breaks, sweat running down his face. He catches his brother’s eye, too used to his presence to be surprised by his being here, and tells him with a pearly smile: “I’ve seen the album—the cover—in a dream. It’s coming.”
27. IT ONLY TAKES three boxes before Onyx Records’ head of A&R, Rabia Alvi, stops again and sits on the edge of the U-Haul. Her red toes dangle over the hot asphalt as she worries that she has not sufficiently considered her husband’s side of things before initiating this separation. After all, she cannot bear children and had anticipated long ago that that would end in some kind of punishment. Emmanuel loves children. He mentors across the city in underfunded programs, teaches biochem for free at a public high school in Jamaica, Queens, not too far from their building. He’s particularly fond of Black children, telling her that as immigrants, they are indebted to the Black struggle for justice. He regularly derailed already-awkward dinner parties with the few Pakistani neighbors she could stand, drunkenly belaboring the role of the civil rights movement in their own success in America. It was a point Rabia respected but did not consider worth the disruption it always caused.
She’d wanted to believe that his general regard for young people was the cause of his closeness with Bonnie. That Emmanuel’s mother and Bonnie’s grandmother had been fast friends had made it easier too. They had met for the first time in the assisted-living dining hall in 1959. The only two people to rush to the chickpeas, each brown, high-cheekboned woman had mistaken the other for her ethnicity. After confirming Lahore and Boston’s South End as their respective places of origin, they laughed at their miscalculations and remained, until Sylvia’s death, the best of girlfriends. Knowing this story, Rabia tried to see the girl as family, no matter how unsettling her presence was. She could have persisted in this, at least for a while longer, if it were not for a comment Emmanuel made one evening after the girl had gone home. Rabia had remarked about Bonnie’s appearance, the rate at which she was growing up in the wake of her grandmother’s passing.
“She’s really into makeup now. I didn’t even recognize her today,” Rabia had said in Urdu, poking at her salad, the sound of her fork too loud on the plate. “The little mark she’s made under her eye.”
She noticed how Emmanuel started to twist his glass of dark wine by the stem, a slow turn while he studied the liquid inside. “It’s a mole,” he said, and took a long sip.
The look in his eye, the confidence of his voice, turned Rabia cold. Her appetite was gone. She took her plate to the kitchen and gripped the sink to stay standing. The following morning, he woke her before sunrise, mumbling about the torment of inertia, how they had to move in or out of one another’s lives. Whichever way she wanted. But they had to move. Then he broke down and confessed to the affair.
Though she only takes a week of summer vacation to move out of the apartment (while other executives take two, even four), Rabia knows she will be blamed for the slew of departmental mishaps that have overtaken the label in her absence. Several albums are running over budget, several more delayed; most of them are accounts of the new A&R executives. She knows what has to be done to reestablish order.
She calls the first young executive on her list into her office and fires him. He does not expect this, has just come from lunch, the grease of beef empanadas glossing his lips. He calls her a Guinea bitch (the wrong slur), slamming her door so hard that the Miles Davis record framed on the wall behind her crashes to the ground, shards of glass narrowly missing her head. The firings take all week, leaving several over-budget albums shelved, fledgling artists dropped. Her assistant works overtime to draft cancellation letters, make good with producers and recording studios with overdue bills. Rabia is so overwhelmed by the chaos of the week that she forgets that Bonnie works at the label. But one evening, she sees the large shadow of a tall woman filling the atrium as Bonnie makes her way out of the double doors. The girl’s shadow is so gangly, so youthful, so awkward, it seems impossible that it belongs to the person who has turned Rabia’s life upside down.
It feels like the work of a ghost when Rabia sees the debut album for Mansour & Liam on her desk. The striking image of a Black woman peeking between her fingers. Rabia immediately calls the art department to inquire how a shelved project received a cover, let alone a full printing. She’s told that the project was submitted for printing several weeks ago, that if she has any concerns she should call the publicity department before the album’s release the following weekend. Perplexed, she puts the album aside for a few days while she puts out other fires.
She takes the demo copy home to her new apartment and listens to the first track before she pulls up the stylus. She doesn’t need to hear any more. It is marvelous, the kind of record she’s been eager for the label to produce. She paces the room as she stares at the cover. She knows the work of the art director, has seen at least a hundred images come from his department, and has never known him to render a Black figure. It’s a financial risk, and he knows better. He’s always opted for images of coffee mugs, beach landscapes, or typographic abstractions. Never a Black face. Rabia reads the art credits again; it is exclusively attributed to him, as per usual.
She looks at the album again the next morning, the intensity of the portrait’s detail magnified in the daylight. It stalls her on her way out the door to work. She drops her keys when she notices the mole beneath the woman’s left eye.
A week later, Rabia files for divorce, the first step in a process that she discovers, much to her annoyance, will take time and require further interaction between them. But what, her mother-in-law insisted, had he even really done with the girl? Bonnie, a sweetheart, she claimed, had just needed someone to lean on as she grieved.
“What about the others?” Rabia had responded.
There were indeed others. Girls from his tennis club. Biochem students. A PhD student from NYU. He was on her dissertation committee. Rabia was beginning, at least, to see a pattern. Tall like Bonnie. Smart like Bonnie. He had a type.
And now, at Onyx, she finds herself callous, unable to feel the music, unable to offer valuable critiques of the records on her desk. At the next departmental meeting, a young executive shares the date for the release party for Mansour & Liam. She is already exhausted, just imagining the feedback of the instruments.
“Where is it?” she asks.
“The place you wanted, just past the bridge,” the executive says.
There are six copies of the album on the boardroom table. Rabia turns to Bonnie, her eyes fixated on the album cover. Glued to the image that resembles her. Rabia studies Bonnie’s gaze closely, knowing what she cannot prove.
“Add a ticket for Miss Bonnie King. She will attend in my place,” Rabia says, getting up from the table and adjourning the meeting.
28. ON THE NIGHT of the release party, Bonnie arrives at the venue. And then there, crossing the street, indifferent to the short stop he’s caused, is the singer. He wears white wide-legged pants that remind her of a zoot suit without the jacket, sandals, a loose blouse—mostly open. What looks to her to be a stack of necklaces bearing little leather books (talismans) swing at his chest. Bracelets stacked on his right wrist. He laughs at something a woman behind her in line has said at the sight of him (“You gon’ have a hard time leavin’ here without me”). Just passing by, he wields the same power over Bonnie that he had on wax.
Standing on the stage in the packed silent room, Mansour is supposed to lead the band in with a hard bellow, a B-flat held long and loud enough for the bass and piano to trinkle in under it, just like the record—but he is silent, staring out at the sizable audience in a daze. Suddenly, the fear of seizing stunts him.
Liam jumps in to fill the silence, beginning the bass line. Keifer follows Liam with another chord, and finally the B-flat pours out of Mansour, a sound so raw that the reviewers will write in the morning that it seemed like more an end than a beginning.
The drummer begins, and the audience locks in.
Once they’re in flight, Mansour backs off the mic, laughing out loud at the sudden joy that overtakes him. A portal opens within him, a new suggestion of how living can feel, and it makes him leap and move about the stage in a clumsy trance. The music gets ahead of him, flowing from his voice without intention. His mind is, at best, an observer in this experience; at worst, a foe that might dare interrupt this first taste of true love. As he ascends, he turns to look at the band, confirming that Keifer too is overcome: all hunched shoulders, closed eyes, and loose neck, for they have all been ravaged, made senseless and drunk by this feeling.
Mansour has never come this far out of himself before, and he fears what going further into joy will do. He considers returning to the safety of Keifer’s melancholy melody but cannot bear the fall. The band resists with him. Begging one another in every note and every grunt not to move from here. No one, not even Liam, will break the groove to wind things down, but Mansour is feeling more and more that he is losing control of his body, and the refrain is the only means to land. And so, Mansour cues it, releasing this new American freedom with regret.
It baffles Mansour that the others can socialize, can find their way back into the world so easily after the moments they had onstage. With the house lights back up, Mansour finds the room’s ecstatic brightness assaulting, the crowd’s English dizzying and frenetic, like a bad dream.
He retreats to the dark dressing room, alone with its smell of sweat and the weeks-old photographs of Sammy Davis Jr. on the stage he’s just left. His hand trembles as he grips the watery beer a short-necked waitress has slipped behind the curtain.
“Wow.” Her one sound at the sight of him. It means yes in Wolof; he wonders what it means here.
Like the vodka and the whiskey, the beer in America is terrible. He still hasn’t gotten used to it. But now he drinks as much of it as he can before a sudden spell of chills makes him put it down. Relief spreads through him. He did not seize. And he could feel that the people—the label and the audience—were satisfied.
And yet, he himself is not. Splayed flat and shirtless on the concrete floor of the dressing room, with the lights off, he groans, desperate for the last vestiges of this wild, uncontrollable thing to leave his body but terrified that he’ll never taste it again. How could he have let it go so soon? Something so otherworldly and precious, a flavor that a thousand prayers in two religions have never left on his tongue.
29. BONNIE DOES NOT see the singer in the crowd. But his band members are signing their names on her work. She trembles at the way they are passing a piece of her around the room in exchange for balled-up cash and postdated checks. Her mother’s face has become an object. Some hold the album in the air, waving it to grab the attention of friends or to harass a slow waiter. Others use it as they mack, jotting down phone numbers in the negative space. Some rest their shot glasses on it, her mother’s face divided by olive seeds and cocktail umbrellas.
Earlier that week, when Bonnie confirmed that her cover art had been credited to the art director, she was relieved. The image is out in the world, where her mother might find it—but her hands are clean. And because the art director is a man she can only recall from the back—the roundness of his shoulders, an excessive gravity to his frame that reminds her of a gnome—they don’t know one another, and so perhaps there will be no repercussions in the end.
If she socialized at all at the office, she would’ve learned that the biggest controversy about the cover art had been its likeness to Miles Davis’s Sorcerer.
“It’s a magnificent portrait.” Bonnie is standing behind a white woman, gray-haired with a Barnard sweater knotted at her neck, speaking to the only white musician from the band. When asked, he leans closer to tell the woman that his name is Liam and, yes, he’s from Ireland. Which part? Galway. Bonnie wants to tell them that she’s been there. At five or six years old. They stopped on the road to her mother’s audition (what hadn’t they seen on their way to make her mother’s auditions?), captivated by the sight of sheep being shorn by the hundreds. Bonnie had held the wool in her hands and felt the grease. Her mother beside her, her tongue put out with disgust, both of them giggling at the gross gamy smell that made such beautiful sweaters.
Bonnie is irked when Liam signs the record, his sloppy signature obscuring Claudine’s beautiful face. He pulls his cigarette from his lips to thank the woman very much for praising the cover.
“I hope the rest of the music stands up to it.”
Bonnie appreciates this distinction; it is her first compliment.
Nervous when it’s her turn, she begins to walk away, but Liam greets her first.
“Thank you for coming, miss.” She notes the fair brown of his eyes, his full lips, the lone long pinky nail for plucking the guitar. “Can I sign that for you?” He points to the record in her hands.
She takes his pen and signs her own name in the lower corner, before handing her record back to him.
“I’m actually the artist.”
He examines the record, looking between her and the art, seeing it anew.
“You are,” he says, with wonder. “You’re fantastic. It’s a stunning picture.”
“Thank you.”
A smile breaks across his face. “Would you wait—right here?”
Liam barely gives Bonnie time to answer before he dashes away. His excitement makes Bonnie wonder if she shouldn’t have told him; she can feel the comfort of her anonymity making way for something more uncertain.
He pops back over. She smells his sweat more powerfully now. He reeks of ginger beer.
“What shall I call you?”
“Bonnie.”
“Miss Bonnie—just one minute.” He disappears again behind the backstage door. She twists her mouth, trying hard not to smile at his strange charm.
It takes all his effort, but Liam drags Mansour from the floor to the bench, and from the bench through the door, telling him he has to meet the artist. Liam speaks in English, Mansour in sleepy French.
“You dreamed of the cover! And she made the cover! You have to talk to her.”
Mansour shakes his head, tired and disbelieving. “You really think she made it?”
“Who would claim something like that for the hell of it? You’re out of excuses, man, let’s go!”
Mansour is halfway out the door from Liam’s pushing and his shirt is hardly on.
“But what about my English?”
“What about it?”
“It’s gone out of my mind … it happens all the time.”
“Well, maybe she speaks French.”
Liam lugs him through the crowd where, every few paces, a new person stops Mansour for an autograph, to ask for a photo, to compliment his cheekbones.
They get to the center of the room, and by then he’s starting to get into it, scoping the women in the room.
“Which one is she?” Mansour asks Liam.
“She’s … she’s gone.”
30. RABIA CALLS BONNIE to her office the following Friday. On her way up, Bonnie takes the latest liner notes to the art department as usual and then takes the elevator even higher up to the executive floor. She leaves the cart for the liner notes outside the executive bathroom, where she gathers herself and tries to outwit time. Then Bonnie knocks softly on Rabia’s door, hoping she won’t hear.
“Yes,” she replies instantly.
Bonnie moves into the office, sits in the same chair from her first day, and waits.
“How was the launch party?” Rabia doesn’t look up from where she signs a stack of contracts, all turned to the same page for her signature.
“Thank you for sending me. I think they’re wonderful.”
“Yes. I know you do.”
Rabia removes her glasses. She puts the album on the table between them, staring down at Claudine’s face.
“Is this … a self-portrait?”
“No.”
“Is it a relative?”
Bonnie looks at the ground.
Her voice is missing, a sound with no tone. “It’s my mother.”
Rabia leans back in her chair.
“Well, she’s very beautiful. Was she … I don’t remember meeting her at Ms. Sylvia’s funeral?”
“She wasn’t there.”
“Why wasn’t she? Is she all right?”
Bonnie feels a pain rising in her gut, so she tunes into the street noise below, where a record store blasts one of Dr. King’s speeches in mourning. The wind distorts King’s timbre, mixing him with Cantonese from the bookstore below, and the whiny cranes, and an uptown breeze carrying steel drums, until he fully dissolves and becomes a part of everything. Was that what it meant to die?
“Here, here. Take this.” Rabia is speaking, and Bonnie brings her mind back to the room, where the woman has pushed over a pile of tissues. It’s only then she realizes she’s crying. Bonnie smears the mucus off her upper lip. When she looks up again, Rabia’s face is sullen.
“It seems an impossible thing to miss your mother’s funeral. I’m sure your mother had her reasons.”
“Like what?” Bonnie hears herself say, loud and clear. But Rabia stares and says nothing, seeming not to have heard.
When she speaks again, there is a sullen tone to her voice; she is conceding some kind of defeat. A release of something very old and worn. Rabia exhales.
“You’re very, very talented, Bonnie. It seems like you could do almost anything in life that you choose. But this wasn’t work you had the right to do. It wasn’t your place.”
Bonnie hears the quiet rage cutting through the formality of her tone.
“Today will be your last day. Do you understand?”
Bonnie’s tears flow while a stoic expression hardens on her face.
“Yes, Mrs. Alvi.”
“Then please … please go,” the woman says and turns her chair away. She’s crying too.
31. THERE IS NOTHING to take from her desk but her colored pencils and a handful of fried-trout receipts. She leaves the office and walks from Midtown Manhattan to the Village, eventually finding what she’d never admit to herself to be looking for: a poster of Mansour and Liam on a downtown club window. The album is in an adjoining record-store window, for sale next to Joni Mitchell’s.
Their set starts soon. She joins the sizable line, feeling a vague mix of pride and terror. The marquee advertises a signing after the show. She is the only person in line without the record bearing her mother’s face under their arm.
This early evening set is good, but the sound is imbalanced. When Mansour belts, Bonnie feels it in her teeth. He keeps cupping his ear, wincing at the feedback. For his part, the drummer solos for too long. So long that Mansour gets visibly pissed.
Looking for holes, for flaws, she finally finds his: transparency. Everything shows on his face. She can tell when Mansour misses a cue. When the drummer has gone off script.
The pianist yells something to the horns and the musicians all go with it, and as if lit by a fire, the singer dances across the stage. Head up, head down. It would be a Jackson 5 kind of thing if it weren’t for the exotic flavor of the movement. Mansour yells something in Spanish, and a conga player who’d been going easy, sort of backing up the drummer, takes control. The music switches again. Mansour sings in another language now, in a style and a rhythm foreign to her ears.
Bonnie’s mind searches for something to do with the sounds she hears, but her body is already in motion. Beside her, a woman’s head flops up and down and she screams, already inside the portal that is sucking Bonnie in. She lets it take her.
32. HE CAN’T GET a second more than the time it takes to introduce himself to her before he’s distracted. Then he steals another moment to lean down for her to repeat her name into his ear. Determined to speak with her about the cover, Mansour keeps Bonnie by the hand as he conquers the room: cheek-kissing concertgoers in that French way, signing albums, throwing back spiked Earl Grey, cornering Davis over the protracted solo, promising her he’ll just be a minute more. This goes on for almost an hour, but he never lets go and she never pulls away.
Between these interruptions, he leans close to ask her other questions, gathering her review of the concert piece by piece. Her first critique stings—a thing he already knows and struggles with. You shouldn’t close your eyes so much onstage. Then the sound. He agrees that it was horrible, and yes, the trombonist too. He promises her that he’ll fire the man (and he does, the first of Keifer’s friends he cuts). Within the hour they have inside jokes, have offended each other and apologized, have traded both home remedies for their migraines, tricks to avoid the perpetual construction on the 4 line. In this single summer night, they are intimately familiar, as if they’ve known each other for years.
They have many of the same records, have memorized the same time stamps on Hugh Masekela Is Alive and Well at the Whisky for drowning out loud neighbors, for making a day move at a faster pace. How, Mansour says, could Otis Redding know him on the inside like that? What did a man from Dawson, Georgia, know about the peanut fields in Senegal? How did he know just the right notes to take Mansour’s mind to such a personal time and place? Nine or ten again, kneeling in a heap of rotten peanuts with blistered hands. And when he looks up from telling Bonnie this, palms open, like he means to show her blisters that have long healed, he looks shy, as if he’s mistakenly made some confession, remembering that they are strangers.
She stands with crossed arms in the brick-walled backstage hallway, waiting for him to wash up. He told her that needs to wet his face and hair and arms between every set, releasing the electric charge of the body, so she stands there and meets the other men. Though Mansour introduces her as the cover artist, Keifer starts the rumor that she’s the fine-ass girlfriend he’s been hiding all along. (“And for good reason. Did you see that sister? Goddamn.”) Keifer tips his hat to her at the door.
Once the crowd is gone, they go back out to the stage from the greenroom. Mansour sits on the edge of the stage in the empty club. She sits on the table across from him, letting her legs swing.
He wipes his face with a towel, picks up a copy of the album from the edge of the stage beside him. Displaying it before her, he says with a furrowed brow:
“So how does this happen?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure if I believe you … but it’s a great line.”
He moves his cigarette in the air as he searches for the words in English and, coming up blank, watches the smoke dance.
“You mean, like, uh, to, uh—”
“A pickup line. Yeah.”
He smiles a gorgeous, full smile, scratches his facial hair.
“I don’t use lines,” he says, holding her gaze.
She drops her eyes first, shy.
“I saw it, I swear I saw your cover, in my dream … I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Sure you wouldn’t,” she says with a smirk.
“Liam,” Mansour shouts across the room, his eyes still on her.
“Yeah?”
“Tu as trouvé ma femme.” You’ve found my wife.
Liam laughs loudly from the back. Bonnie smiles at his antics, shakes her head.
“Oh, please. Je ne suis pas ta femme.” I’m not your wife. She says this firmly, parading her perfect French accent to startle him.
Mansour tilts his head in disbelief at her French.
He reaches out, to give her a pound.
“Ma soeur.” My sister.
She breaks into laughter as they bump fists.
He takes her to a rooftop party in the village, but they grow weary of a crowded dance floor, of loud music that makes it hard to have a conversation. She tells him that she’s just been fired, that all she really wants to do is get salty food and go to bed. So now they stand in line at the greasy counter of a Chinese takeout spot in the theater district, yelling in French over the clamor of industrial pots, the banter of the Chinese cooks, the Manhattan street noise from the open door. She fans herself with a takeout menu.
“How does this supposed dream start?” she asks.
“I see nothing but this woman, just the woman.”
“You see the picture?” she says drily.
“No, she’s moving. She comes to the chair, sits, moves into the pose you painted.”
Bonnie looks at him with narrowed eyes.
“Does she talk to you?”
He shakes his head, lights a new cigarette.
“Anything else?”
He’s silent for a moment.
“Her feet are bruised. Really badly,” he says. “Was she injured?”
Bonnie’s studying him. A look of shock.
“Next!” The man at the counter bangs it for the second time, breaking her spell. She keeps her eyes on Mansour as she orders.
Mansour mocks her enormous order: three different kinds of chicken, two kinds of beef rice, and lo mein.
“You got what? Six kids at home?” he says.
“Ten. All boys.”
They stroll toward the R train, delaying the steps that will take them their separate ways.
At the station entrance, Mansour stands square in front of her, his hands in his pockets. Several thoughts pass through his mind before he finally speaks.
“Where’d you learn all that pretty French?” he asks, moving the fuzzy curls from in front of her eyes.
She looks away into the deserted street, seemingly wrestling with something that has awakened within her.
“From the woman in your dream,” she says.