Ian crossed his arms and turned one of Fire’s favorite questions back at him: “So what are you going to do about all this?”

“Nothing,” Fire replied, slightly chafed by the irony.

“Just nothing?”

“That’s right. Sylvia doesn’t want to be hot or cold, man. She wants to be lukewarm. And I can’t deal with that. Trust me, I won’t be waiting in vain. But if she becomes single again and she makes the move … well … you never know.”

“And what if she should just turn up right now.”

Fire’s eyes came alive and he began to laugh, booming fists with Ian over the top of the flame. “She would go back to America with a pregnant belly—then she woulda really haffe leave de bwai.”

They began to debate now. What should Fire do? Ian, who had seemed enlightened earlier, was insisting that Fire get his closure by taking some revenge. Send the letter, he implored, and win her heart again, then fuck her good at least once before letting her go. It wasn’t good for a man to go around with a big what-if, he argued. Things like that can make you crazy. Laughing with Ian, who presented his ideas with a comedian’s sense of timing, Fire disagreed, hiding his true feelings, while countering that sleeping with her would be giving her the victory, because she would believe that she could have him and eat him too, like cake. The real reason, however, was that he was afraid that his infatuation might take control of him and make him believe that he could conquer fate—which he believed was the true force that directed the universe.

When the corn was done, they peeled away the blackened husks and entered into the ritual of eating, a bonding marked by burnt tongues and scorched fingers, into which little boys were initiated by older men. You have to know how to blow the corn or else you’ll singe your lip.

“So what you have there?” Fire asked, referring to the CDs that Ian had brought outside along with the kitchen stereo, a Bose Acoustic Wave Music System.

“Foreign Exchange, Cassandra Wilson, Salif Keita, Oumou Sangare, Al Green, ZZ Top, Nusrat Ali Khan, Johnny Winters, Shabba Ranks …”

“Gimme some Shabba. I feeling like a bad bwai tonight. The thought of getting her pregnant just gimme a vibes.”

They began to talk about Sylvia again, as Shabba horse-galloped on a rugged ragga beat: “Love punanny bad / Love punanny bad …”

“You think you guys would make a good couple?” Ian asked. “Let’s say Lewis wasn’t in the picture.”

“Yeah,” Fire replied, as he cooled down the corn with a few bursts of his breath.

“Why?”

“Because we seem so compatible. It’s been a while, Ian, since I met a woman that I can talk with about so many things … and I’m not talking about open-mindedness—which is important—but a shared set of references, man. One afternoon we strolled the Brooklyn Promenade and talked and talked and we covered so many things, just moving together, man, like athletes out on a Sunday run. There was this immediate understanding that nobody was trying to outrun anybody and the pace picked up and slowed down with the clear sense that nobody’s brain would be tired or that no one was being held back. That’s it, man, she’s got a great brain. And that’s really hard to find. And I personally need that. Everybody doesn’t—but I do. I need someone that I can talk with about Nabokov and Leon Forrest but also Stephen King. Someone who can leave a museum and go see a karate film. I want partnership, man—someone that’s wired for me outta the box, someone with the same intellectual and spiritual vocabulary. I check for Sylvia, man. She’s not big-headed about being smart … and with all that she is, at her core she’s really a cool West Indian girl.”