“I-nelik … I-nelik …”

One thought was overtaken by another, causing the first to stall then stop. She was standing with her legs slightly open, and the sun was shining through her dress. And it seemed as if—he wasn’t sure, for it was just a shadow, wasn’t it?—that she wasn’t wearing underwear. Because that shadow there, that murkiness below the fabric, was not a wedge of well-cut silk. It was triangular though … with wavy edges … like a delta seen from a mountaintop.

“You know bout I-nelik?” he said, wondering if she’d seen him looking. “I-nelik is my ole man’s youngest brother. I used to find every excuse to spend time with him when I was young. I used to think he was so cool.”

“What was so cool about him?”

“He’s only fifteen years older than me. So he was in his late twenties, early thirties when I was growing up. So I felt like I could talk to him about anything, especially guy-things I couldn’t really talk to my ole man about. Plus he was a romantic kinda guy. I-nelik was a dentist, y’know—did his D.D.S. at Tufts. He’d always wanted to do music, but the whole family was against it. Not because it was the arts or anything like that—they never fought against my ole man wanting to paint—but because he wanted to play reggae. And in those days—we’re talking like the late sixties, early seventies—reggae was street music. You couldn’t play it uptown. It was just a ghetto thing.

“The same people who are praising Bob Marley now used to fight it. So about four years after coming back and setting up a practice, and playing one or two sessions at places like Randy’s and Dynamic, rasta just buss in him head, and he just knew that he had to play music. That that was his calling. And he sold the practice and became a full-time musician. Of course there were some really hard times. He started growing locks and because o’ that people wouldn’t rent him a flat in a good neighborhood, so he just went and lived in the ghetto and did volunteer work two times a week at an area clinic. There wasn’t much money … but he was happier than when he was a fat cat named Jonathan Heath. But the thing is that he’s all right, now. After linking with Bob and all that, everything worked out. So anyway, I met Ian because he and I-nelik were neighbors. Then when it got back to my father that Ian was a prodigy, it became almost like trading places. Ian would spend most of the summer by me and I would spend mine by him.”

“I gather that you didn’t spend all your time in Jamaica,” she said, intrigued now, seeing in his personality the convergence of two others.

“I came here to go to college.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“Yale.”

“Impressive.”

“It’s a school.”

“Well, be modest. What did you study?”