“Wow … I’ll put that on my list of things to read. Through the Ivory Gate. That’s what it’s called, right?” He was circling her with words, suspecting that she saw some of herself in that narrative. He was thinking now of her album … the missing pictures of childhood … the absence of her parents. And her voice—something he’d noticed the first time they met—it was suspiciously neutral.

“Where’s Rita Dove from?” he asked, approaching the subject obliquely.

“I’m not sure.”

“Somewhere midwestern, nuh?”

“That sounds right.”

“Have you ever been there? To the Midwest?”

“Yeah … on business.”

“Do you think you could live there?”

“No,” she replied. “I don’t think so. It’s too cold.”

If she were midwestern, he thought, she would’ve added something like “although I spent the first x years of my life there.” He had to maneuver some more now. Asking people where they’re from, he knew, was sometimes uncomfortable. People carry so much baggage from home.

“What about the West Coast or the South?”

“I like the West Coast a lot. California especially, for the ocean and the sunshine. The south … I’m not so sure about. I like a lot of it … like New Orleans and Atlanta … and the Gulf Coast beaches. But I don’t know about living there so much. In many ways I’m a spoilt New Yorker.”

“And in other ways?”

“In other ways … I don’t feel like I belong here.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Most of my life.”

“From where?”

“Guess.”

“I have no idea.”

In his mind he was walking through her house, looking for clues. On looks alone she could be many things. Latina. North African. Native American. But none of these were right. He knew that. He could feel it.

But as he pictured her at the phone booth rocking back on one leg and considered her name and her familiarity with the selections at the concert, he began to suspect she was Caribbean, and further, from one of the English-speaking territories.

But from where? It was hard to say on looks alone. The Caribbean islands are flakes of three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—ground up and dropped in the ocean like codfish cakes in hot oil, becoming in the process something new and exciting that is often hard to define.

“Trinidad?” he asked. She might be part East Indian.

“No,” she said. “Let’s put it this way, I could’ve been your next-door neighbor.”

“You’re Jamaican?”

“Yeah, man.”

Her shoulders relaxed, and she smiled.

“From where?” he asked, drawn even closer now.

“Kingston, I think. But I was only eight when I left and haven’t been back.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t even talk to you then.”

“Oh, stop,” she said, laughing with him.

“Y’is not me frien again,” he said, speaking patois now. “You lef de rock at eight and y’is hummuch now?”—thirty-four, she said—“An you doan touch back de rock? Shame o’ you.”

“Oh, stop, it’s a long story.”

“Okay, tell me, lemme seef ah fogive yuh.”