Still tired from the night before, he nodded off to sleep, waking up a little after noon. She was still not awake, so he occupied his time by wandering through the apartment. She had a decent collection of art, including Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden originals. But it was clear that she hadn’t bought the work just for its investment value. A lot of it, he concluded, she simply liked. Crossing his legs on the floor, he rifled through her music, a collection that was deep and wide, ranging from jazz and classic soul to soukous and qawwali. She particularly liked Al Green and Marvin Gaye, and Cassandra Wilson and Sweet Honey in the Rock. Her library, though, was deep but narrow. Her tastes were decidedly American, and didn’t seem to stray beyond the French and Russian must-reads like Camus and Dostoyevsky. It’s fascinating, he thought, how difficult it is to predict people’s tastes. For judging from the art on her walls and the music in her racks he’d expected to see well represented the work of writers like Naguib Mafouz and Nadine Gordimer and Maryse Condé. But greatness was the dilemma of America, wasn’t it? It was a large, rich country with only two neighbors, so one could easily live here in comfort without considering the rest of the world—as the rest of the world has to consider itself in addition to considering America. His novels, for instance, had sold a million and a half copies in the Commonwealth, mainly in Britain, Canada, and Australia, but had done about twenty-five thousand in the States. Which didn’t bother him. Success in the States would come—if it did—like most things … in the fullness of time.

There were some photo albums on the bottom shelf. He took his time going through them, struck by the absence of childhood pictures or any group shots with family. Why is that? he wondered, adding this to the list of things he wanted to ask her later.

Gaps notwithstanding, the albums gave him a bit of context. And after going through them he felt as if he knew her a little better. He knew where she went to school. And had an idea of her career track. He knew now, as he’d suspected, that she’d traveled fairly widely, and also, as a photo in a carnival costume showed, that her bottom was fuller than it appeared in her clothes.

The scene looked like Trinidad or Barbados. His lashes licked her image from the page. Her body was in profile and her face was turned toward him, smiling, as if she knew, as the shutter sliced away this moment of her life, that one day a man would recognize this as the essential her—a lover of life and its possibilities.

He was pulled out of his thoughts by a rustling, and what he thought was her voice. But he wasn’t sure. For he’d heard it across time and space—from within the paper on which the picture was printed, on that layer just below the ink, where the life behind the image really exists, where he’d held her hand and danced with her behind a float, imbibing rum drinks and diesel fumes and salt-laced sweat, dancing on the street in a crowd with the same vitality with which he would shuffle inside her sweaty shabeen as soon as they were alone.