“What do you mean in town?” she asked, suddenly alert. “You don’t live in New York?”

“I live in Jamaica,” he said, smiling. “And I’m going to London at eight in the morning.”

“Well … call me … whenever … you’re in town,” she replied, trying to hide her disappointment.

“Claire has your number, right?”

He was sitting in the cab now with his feet outside.

“I don’t want Claire to know my business,” she said.

She was squatting on her heels in front of him. She rested her hands on his knees.

“Tell you what, then, let’s make things simpler. So that nobody will have to know anybody’s business, why don’t I give you my address then so you can write to me when you feel like.”

“Let’s make it simpler than that. Call me when you get in. I wanna talk to you.” She dug into her pocketbook and scribbled on a business card. “Here.”

She kissed her palm and patted his face. He watched to make sure she got in safely, then left.

He discovered when he got in that she had written her number—accidentally, he presumed—on one of Lewis’s business cards. And as he sat on the edge of the bed beside the phone, spritzed by the scent of Blanche’s flowers, he felt relieved that he and Sylvia were in separate rooms. For what would it all have been worth in the morning? She was involved. And in a manner of speaking, so was he.

He did not call her. Instead, he wrote her a letter. On his way to the airport, he stopped at her house, and in the orange light of dawn, slipped it beneath her door.

Hungover despite two cups of coffee, Sylvia found the envelope on her way to work and tossed it in her portfolio without reading it, for she thought it was a letter from her landlord, who lived on the street behind her. He often left her correspondence like that, in plain envelopes inscribed with just her name.

Why? she kept asking herself as she made her way to Clark Street, slouching in her skirt suit through the shaded streets. Her pace slowed with each succeeding step, as if the convoy of fellow professionals that trundled by were tapping her strength. Why? Why? Why? The rest of the question refused to be drawn into her mind until she entered the elevator at the subway station. There, compacted in the steel cage that lowered its passengers through the bedrock like old South African miners, she felt the weight of those around her forcing the thought through her intestines, into her belly, up into her throat, to coat the roof of her mouth. Why didn’t he call me? Even just to say goodbye.

She wanted to talk to him. Now. Desperately. About what, she didn’t know.

And as she imagined herself together with him, strolling a beach or sitting under a shade tree along a country road, she told herself that she wouldn’t care. Then she thought some more and decided that she would, knowing—in a way that she could neither describe nor explain, for she had never felt this way before—that he would want to discuss the same things as she, or would at least know how, which was something that she couldn’t say for Lewis, or most of the men she’d been involved with. They were bright men to be sure, but bright in a linear way, like laser beams. Intense. Focused. But Fire’s light had the expansive sprawl of a sunset … diffuse … layered … natural and organic. Lewis and the others had the brightness of the mind, which was accessible to anyone with the right life chances. Fire, though, had the brightness of the soul. Which was a grace. He understood her jokes, related to her references, and shadowed her subtlest shifts in mood. This is the way, she thought, that Billy Strayhorn must have felt when Ellington played his music—like, “Shit, this person can read my mind.”