The music stopped, he came to her table, sat down and gave her a smile mixed with a contraction of pain.

"I know," he said. "I know..."

"You know?"

"I know, but it cannot be," he said very gently. And then suddenly the anger overflowed: "For me, it's everything or nothing. I've known this before...a woman like you. Desire. It's desire, but not for me. You don't know me. It's for my race, it's for a sensual power we have."

He reached for her wrists and spoke close to her face: "It destroys me. Everywhere desire, and in the ultimate giving, withdrawal. Because I am African. What do you know of me? I sing and drum and you desire me. But I'm not an entertainer. I'm a mathematician, a composer, a writer." He looked at her severely, the fullness of his mouth difficult to compress in anger but his eyes lashing: "You wouldn't come to Ile Joyeuse and be my wife and bear me black children and wait patiently upon my Negro grandmother!"

Sabina answered him with equal vehemence, throwing her hair away from her face, and lowering the pitch of her voice until it sounded like an insult: "I'll tell you one thing: if it were only what you say, I've had that, and it didn't hold me, it was not enough. It was magnificent, but it didn't hold me. You're destroying everything, with your bitterness. You're angry, you've been hurt..."

"Yes, it's true, I've been hurt, and by a woman who resembled you. When you first came in, I thought it was she..."

"My name is Sabina."

"I don't trust you, I don't trust you at all."

But when she rose to dance with him, he opened his arms and as she rested her head on his shoulder he looked down at her face drained of all anger and bitterness.

Mambo's studio was situated in Patchen Place, a street without issue. An iron railing half blocked its entrance, like an entrance to a prison. The houses all being identical added to this impression of an institution where all variations in the human personality would be treated like eccentricities and symptoms of disintegration.

Sabina hated this street. She always considered it a trap. She was certain that the lie detector had seen her enter and would wait at the gate to see her come out. How simple it would be for him to find out who lived there, whom she visited, which house she came out of in the morning.

She imagined him searching every house, reading all the names on the letter boxes: E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Mambo of Mambo's Nightclub, known to everyone.

At dawn, the lie detector himself would see her come out of the house, holding her cape tightly around her against the morning sharpness, her hair not smoothly combed, and her eyes not fully opened.

Any other street but this one.