“That is a beautiful woman.” Rafik was looking at a table near the dance floor.

“You should try to know her,” Aziz said.

“I am in love with Heather. We will be married one day.”

“Then why are you here with me, while she thinks you are working in Providence to make more money?”

“No, seriously. Do you see her? Her friends are not like her. Over by the other bar.”

Aziz looked across the dance floor and scanned the tables. “Right by the dancing?”

“One sort of back, behind the table with the two couples. She is American. Blond. Small, very small. Her eyes, they are like Djara.”

Djara was a singer from home who had big eyes, very blue. Aziz believed they were fake. He knew about contact lenses that changed your eye color. No Algerian woman would have eyes that deeply blue. Maybe an American. He looked.

She was small like him. He would be able to carry her. She was wearing something that did not show her shape; maybe it was a dress, but it was hard to see from where he sat. Her friends were laughing, and they were leaning into each other, and she was too. She laughed in a way he had only imagined someone could laugh, but not actually seen. She did not think anyone anywhere would be watching her. She did not feel that her face had to be any one way in particular.

“I am not sure she is American.”

“Aziz. She is American.”

“No. Look at how she is looking.”

“Looking?”

“She does not have that thing the Americans have. Being soft but hard; nothing difficult, nothing easy; nothing good, nothing bad.”

“Matter-of-fact they call it.”

“Rafik, she is not American.”

“You make no sense, cousin.”

“I cannot explain it to you. I just know this.”

They sat in silence, watching the table of women. There were four of them. There was a tall woman; she made him remember giraffes. Her hair was extremely short and spiked up in the air, and she had tipped it with orange. She had a beautiful smile. But she had no chin, and this robbed her of being beautiful. But he liked her immediately. There was a woman smoking, but he could not see much of her from where he was sitting. Every so often he glimpsed her hands, because she was waving them, fluttering them like a fan, but no, that was not right. She was also rising up in her chair a little, then down, then up a little. Then there was another blond woman who was also small and had blue eyes—Aziz realized that she could be described as the Djara woman could be, and yet somehow Rafik had not noticed her, nor had Aziz. And she laughed a lot too. Why was she so hard to see?