Ricky Jenks gave up life in the U.S. years ago and is content, if not happy, with his life as a piano player in a small Paris café. He has many friends among the other African-Americans living in Paris and is involved with a French Muslim woman. But then everything changes. His American life comes crashing down on him when his estranged cousin wants help finding his runaway wife, even though he's vague about why. That same night Ricky finds a prostitute dead in his apartment building in Paris's 18th arrondissement, the center of multicultural life in Paris. That these two events could be connected is something he never imagines.

Reviews:
"Always a witty and astute social observer, Jake Lamar illuminates the interaction of French locals with Americans abroad, some of them on the lam, in a suspenseful and funny thriller set in the seamy, particularly fascinating Eighteenth Arrondissement of Paris."
-- Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce, Le Mariage and L'Affaire

"...in this atmospheric novel... Lamar relishes Montmartre geography and incorporates it seamlessly into the story. Best of all, Ricky is a thoroughly engaging hero, self-deprecating, something of a bumbler, yet sensitive and romantic in utterly believable ways. This one's a keeper; pair it with Charlotte Carter's Coq au Vin (1999), also starring a jazz-playing African American in Paris."
-- Bill Ott, Booklist

"...a first-class story...Jake Lamar delivers a compelling and unique look at the stranger-in-a-strange-land theme. The solidly plotted Rendezvous Eighteenth offers an intriguing tale of alienation and the search for identity."
-- Oline H. Cogdill, Sun-Sentinel

"Lamar makes a new start in the crime field with this well-constructed novel...The author casts a tough, critical eye on his cast of mostly black middle-class expatriate Americans, whose interactions he so deftly depicts....mainstream readers fond of Paris should feel fully satisfied."
-- Publisher's Weekly

"This one is a gem not just for its plotting but for the extremely likable character of Jenks, who lives in a world of perpetual perplexity where music is the only thing he understands well. Mr. Lamar´s love of Paris and his understanding of its ways add to the delight."
-- Judith Kreiner, Washington Times

"...skillfully plotted and paced, it also succeeds as a portrait of a Paris that most visitors never get to see. Jake Lamar, formerly a writer with Time magazine, is a Bronx native who beautifully describes the joys of his adopted city. A fast-paced read for mystery fans—or lovers of Paris."
-- Bruce Shenitz, Out magazine

"This deeply engaging novel, full of richly drawn characters, explores the fascinating lives of black expatriates. Best of all is the setting most literary tourists don't know: the intersection of arty Montmartre, sex-trade Pigalle and multicultural Barbès."
--Lev Raphael, The Miami Herald

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Rendezvous Eighteenth
by Jake Lamar

Part One: Cousin Cash Comes To Paris

Chapter One

What can I tell you? Ricky Jenks was the family embarrassment. The fat kid. The bed-wetter. The C student who broke your heart because you just knew he could do better. If only he would “apply” himself. Laughable athlete. Luckless with girls. Not that he lacked talent. He was a naturally gifted pianist. That, in any event, was what Ricky’s parents always said, as if to excuse all his obvious shortcomings. Whatever modicum of artistry Ricky Jenks possessed, he was by no means a musical prodigy. In most families, Ricky’s ordinary imperfections might not have been a badge of shame. But he was the progeny of one of the fabulous Pendleton sisters of Norris, New Jersey: three famously smart and ambitious black beauties who all married “well” and prided themselves on breeding “well” the next generation, the blessed black children of the 1960s, who would be trained to stake their claim in mainstream American society. Ricky’s kid sister grew up to be a judge in Miami. His cousins were all prominent in their fields as well. Ricky, on the brink of 39, knew he was considered a bit of a fuckup. Back in America, anyway. But Ricky, despite all his ostensible privileges, felt he’d been dealt a pretty weak hand in life. He figured he had made the best of the raw human material he had to work with. Ricky Jenks was not a proud man. Nor did he suffer from self-pity. Yet he always found it somehow fitting that the place where he felt most at home in this world was called the Street of the Martyrs.

April in Paris, 1999, had been typically dreary: leaden gray skies, a chill wind blowing spitty drizzle in your face. May tends to be the truly beautiful month in this town, the time when the sun reappears and the cafés fling open their doors, round-top tables and rattan chairs taking over the sidewalks. “This song should have been called ‘May in Paris,’” Ricky Jenks often said before launching into his rendition of the famous standard at the crêperie where he played piano. “But ‘April’ scans better.” The sun was shining boldly, though, on this last Thursday morning in April, filling Ricky’s studio apartment with brassy yellow light. The tall narrow windows were open wide. Ricky sat in a chair, wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts, tiny cup of fierce espresso in hand, his bare, chubby knees pressed against the intricately wrought little iron railing over the window ledge, looking out on the rue des Martyrs, a steep, mile-long street that climbed through Paris’s northern precincts. Ricky’s building, number 176, was smack in the middle of a precipitously inclined stretch of Martyrs. At the bottom of his block was an intersection where the neighborhood of Pigalle, the neon-bathed commercial sleaze district, boasting round-the-clock peep shows, leather underwear shops and the International Erotic Museum, bordered the neighborhood of Barbès, a buzzing network of African and Arab communities. At the top of Ricky’s block was Montmartre, the hilly, cobblestoned neighborhood that combined a bohemian grit with a village-like quaintness tourists found irresistible. The main boulevard of Pigalle and the whole of Barbès and Montmartre were the three key regions of Paris’s sprawling Eighteenth Arrondissement, a city within a city: eccentric, hard-bitten, robustly alive.

The telephone rang but Ricky had no intention of answering it. Fatima groaned. Ricky turned and saw only a tumult of jet black hair poking out amid the white sheets and pillows on the sofa bed. The phone rang a second time and now the sheets undulated in the bold late morning sunshine. There would be one more ring before the answering machine clicked on. Ricky hated disturbing Fatima’s sleep but he couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone. The caller had either dialed the wrong number or was someone Ricky wouldn’t feel like talking to. No true friend of Ricky Jenks would phone him before eleven in the morning. The third ring. Fatima grumbled loudly. Ricky saw two burnished bronze arms emerge from the tangle of white sheets, slender hands groping. Fatima’s black hair disappeared beneath a plump white pillow. Her bronze arms were splayed atop the pillow, behind Fatima’s covered head, crossed awkwardly at the wrists. Oh, well, Ricky thought, it was time for Fatima to get up anyway. She had another day of relentless studying ahead of her.

“Bonjour,” Ricky heard his voice say jauntily on the answering machine. As his greeting played on the tape, Ricky returned his attention to the rue des Martyrs. He sipped his potent coffee, the caffeine tingling in his brain. He felt the sunlight on his face, prickling the skin on his cheeks. His eye wandered across the motley array of establishments across the street: the seedy cafés and popular night clubs, the bread and pastry shop, the Chinese, Senegalese and Lebanese restaurants, the fruit and vegetable store, the transsexual/transvestite whorehouse, the nursing home. Ricky Jenks loved his block and in that brief interval of time between hearing the electronic beep on his answering machine and the voice of the caller---a one-second pause during which he gave no thought at all as to who might be phoning---it dawned on him, like a pleasant whisper in his ear: “Hey, maybe I’m a pretty lucky guy after all.”

Then he heard the voice of the caller, rising above the static, the aural clutter of a public place. “Yo, R.J.!”

A sudden twinge of panic, a tightening in Ricky’s throat. Nobody called him that---”R.J.”---anymore. Before he recognized the voice, he knew this was someone from his distant American past. But he could not bring himself to believe that the voice belonged to...no, couldn’t be....not him....Not here!

“It’s your favorite cousin! Heh heh heh.”

Ricky felt as if he had been pushed backward into a swimming pool. Though he remained seated in his chair in his cramped and tiny Paris apartment, he imagined he was flailing, tumbling blindly, falling through the air, then splashing down, helpless, shocked, unable to breathe, submerged in the cruel, cold past.

“Are you there?” the voice on the machine asked. “It’s Cash.”

Ricky, submerged, could hear the old confidence in his cousin’s honeyed baritone---and the expectation, the undoubting assumption that Ricky, when he learned who was calling, would hurry to pick up the phone.

“Maybe you’re not there. I hope this is the right number. I only heard someone speaking French on the machine. I’m calling for R.J. Ricky Jenks. This is his cousin, Cassius Washington. I just arrived in Paris. I’m at Charles de Gaulle Airport and I need to talk to him. It’s an urgent matter. I will only be in Paris for a few hours and I need to speak with Ricky, so if you’re there, man, please pick up....Ricky?...Are you there?”

A violent kicking and tussling in the sunny sheets. Fatima bolted upright on the sofa bed and, at that moment, Ricky broke to the surface, emerged from his icy blue trance. He could breathe again. Fatima was rubbing her eyes, scratching her lush and unruly black mane. “Rahr rahr rahr,” she said in a needling whine. That was Fatima’s imitation of American speech, a grating nasal drone. No real words. Just noise. That was how all Americans sounded to Fatima. But Cassius Washington sounded nothing like that. Cash had a mellifluous, Michael Jordanesque voice to go along with his smooth and sculpted good looks. That beautiful voice now had a desperate edge to it on Ricky’s answering machine.

“Okay, well, maybe you’re really not there. I got your phone number from your Mom. She said this would be a good time of the day to reach you but...whatever. Maybe you don’t want to talk to me. After all the shit that’s gone down between us, I guess I could understand that. But, you know, I thought we’d got past all that shit.”

Now Ricky was aquiver with rage. He saw the little cup of espresso trembling in his hand. How dare you! How fucking dare you come to my town, to my side of the ocean, and talk about all the shit we’ve supposedly got past! Fatima was out of bed now, standing, stretching and yawning with a feline languor, one of the white sheets wrapped around her lithe, cinammon-skinned body, like a sari.

“All right,” Cash said on the answering machine. “I’ll be staying at the home of a business associate. On the Left Bank. Like I said, I’m just here for the day. But I’ll try you again later. I could give you the number on my cell phone but I....No, I better not. I’ll just call again in a little while.” Ricky heard a horn honk obnoxiously in the background. “I need your help, R.J. You’re the only person in the world who can help me right now. I need you, man. Okay. Anyway, I---”

The answering machine beeped three times in rapid succession, cutting off Cash’s voice.

“Rahr rahr rahr,” Fatima said irascibly, turning and walking into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Even sleepy-eyed and grouchy, Fatima was the most beautiful woman Ricky had ever known. He hated to admit it, but he was deeply, achingly in love with her. He hated to admit it because she was not in love with him.

Slowly, Ricky’s rage subsided. He felt strangely soothed by the sound of streaming water, behind the closed bathroom door. He drank the last of his bitter coffee, rose from the chair, slipped into a pair of baggy black pants and sneakers, put a New Jersey Nets cap on his prematurely graying head. While Fatima showered, he would go out to buy their daily bread. But first he pushed a button on the answering machine, erasing Cassius Washington’s message.

* * *

“I’m anti-success, anti-technology, anti-exercise, anti-self-improvement, anti-stock market and anti-sobriety. But I am not anti-American. I actually like most Americans. I just can’t stand living in America.”

That was how Ricky Jenks liked to answer the questions of why he had come to Paris, France and why, after nine years, he was determined to stay here. Like a lot of what Ricky said it sounded only half-serious. Ricky laughed when folks wondered if he had been inspired by the great black American jazz men who had lived in Paris before him: the Bud Powells, Sidney Bechets and Kenny Clarkes. Ricky would cheerfully explain that he was a pretty mediocre piano player and that he harbored no aspirations of greatness. He could see the surprise---the near horror---in the faces of his fellow Americans when he spoke of his mediocrity and lack of ambition. In America, Ricky Jenks would be considered a loser. In France, he was simply himself.

“You are too lazy for America,” Fatima would chide him. “You are like a Frenchman. Or an African. You live for pleasure. Americans live for work.” Fatima would nod vigorously, endorsing the American way. She wanted nothing more than to emigrate to the United States. She was in her last year of studies at Paris’ elite Institute of Political Science. Once she got her degree, she was determined to find a job in New York, the city Ricky had once called home. The daughter of a Moroccan man and an Cameroonian woman who had grown up in the southwestern French city of Toulouse, Fatima thought Ricky was foolish to have left the United States. “You black Americans,” she scolded, “you don’t know how good you have it.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Ricky would say with a shrug. “Maybe you’re right.”

He never told her how France had saved him. How he had come to Paris a broken, humiliated young man. How he had needed to be a stranger in a foreign land, his old identity obliterated, his American past extinguished. He didn’t speak of the catastrophe that had, at once, shattered and redefined him. Ricky never told Fatima about his cousin Cash and how he had, more or less, destroyed Ricky’s life.

* * *

“What the fuck does he want from me?” Ricky muttered under his breath as he climbed the steep slope of the rue des Martyrs. “Why the fuck doesn’t he leave me the fuck alone?” For Ricky Jenks, one of the bonuses of living outside the United States was not having to see, talk to or hear about his cousin Cassius Washington, who, in Ricky’s eyes, was an immoral scumbag but who was, in the eyes of America, a glorious black role model: not simply a success, but a doctor. And not just a doctor, but a surgeon! Absence of Cash had been a wonderful aspect of Ricky’s life in Paris. Now here was Dr. Washington, barging in with no advance warning, leaving a mysterious, melodramatic message about needing Ricky. About Ricky being “the only person” who could help him. What kind of shit was Cash trying to pull now? Cash had never seemed to need anybody in his life, least of all Ricky. And even if he did need Ricky, why in the hell would Ricky lift a finger to help him? Fuck Cash!

Ricky’s mood improved as soon as he turned the corner and began walking across the Place des Abbesses, a courtyard-like open space full of trees and pigeons; benches occupied by gossiping little old ladies leaning on their canes, a leather-clad couple, bodies entwined, kissing hungrily, and a few ragged street people swigging from green-glassed wine bottles; young toughs standing in clusters---white French, black French, brown French---ostentatiously loitering, smoking cigarettes, tryin’ to look bad, talkin’ shit; a girl with dirty blond dreadlocks rollerblading in circles, Walkman headphones plugged in her ears; a noble-looking, ebony-skinned man handing out leaflets, rotely, wearily demanding an end to the war in Sierra Leone; befuddled white American, German and Japanese tourists, maps in hand, cameras strapped around their necks, struggling to get their bearings in Montmartre, this curious puzzle of a neighborhood, full of hills and outdoor staircases with iron bannisters, hidden alcoves, ivy-lined nooks and crannies, narrow, labyrinthine, cobblestone streets. An ornately crafted iron and glass canopy presided over the center of the little plaza, the Art Nouveau entrance to the Abbesses metro station. The bells of St. Jean, the imposing, orange-bricked, Byzantine-looking Catholic church that towered over the shady public space, sounded eleven o’clock.

Ricky smiled. There was just this thing he had with Paris, with the Eighteenth Arrondissement in particular: No matter what else was going on in Ricky Jenks’s life, whether he had money or not, whether he had a woman or not, whether---back in his first days in the town---he was abysmally depressed or not, once he stepped into the swirling nebula of this quartier, he felt better. Ricky saw, in the near distance, the sun shining brassily on the white apartment buildings that stretched down the rue des Abbesses, the long street that originated at the busy square. His heart felt full. He knew that he was in exactly the place where he needed to be. His beloved Eighteenth.

“Bonjour, monsieur,” trilled the pert young woman behind the counter at Ricky’s favorite bakery. “Comme d’habitude?” she asked. “The usual?” Ricky greeted her and nodded yes. They talked about the improvement in the weather as she pulled a baguette, one of those long batons of hard crusty bread, from the row of them along the back wall. Ricky had never known the name of the girl behind the counter and she did not know his, though they had developed a jokey, ever-so-slightly flirtatious rapport since she had begun working in the place a year earlier. She was twentyish, with quick, bird-like gestures; olive-complexioned but of indeterminate ethnic origin. To Ricky’s eye, she could have been Algerian, Turkish, half-European and half-African or some sociogenetic mix beyond his powers of perception. A lot of people in the Eighteenth looked like that. Ricky watched her scoop up a buttery croissant and a golden brown pain au chocolat (Ricky’s mother had been horrified when he told her he ate “chocolate bread” for breakfast most mornings.) from under the glass display case. As Ricky paid, he noticed the girl was staring quizzically up in the air. “What does it say?” she asked in English. She stood on the tips of her toes, leaning across the counter, reaching up and tugging gently at the bill of his cap.

“New Jersey Nets,” Ricky said in his native tongue. “It’s a basketball team.”

“Ah,” the bakery girl said, with a familiar, coquettish little gleam in her eye. “Shouldn’t you wear it backwards?”

Ricky laughed and responded in Franglais: “Je suis old school.”

As he walked out of the bakery, Ricky felt a buzz from his little encounter with the girl behind the counter. You have to realize that Ricky Jenks was a guy who didn’t know he was good-looking until he was thirty. Though he had lost his roly-poly figure by late adolescence, Ricky carried a fat kid complex with him right up until the year he moved to Paris. He would always be a husky man, a wide body at six feet tall and two hundred twenty pounds. But, despite his high-calorie diet and lack of exercise, there was little flab on Ricky. He had the sturdy, solid, strong-shouldered build of a shorter Charles Barkley, the pro basketball player once dubbed The Round Mound of Rebound. Though plenty of women back in the States had found him attractive, Ricky could never quite believe it. But in the nine years he had lived in Paris, Ricky had lost most of his insecurity around women. Popularity will do that. And, for some reason, Ricky Jenks found that his popularity with the ladies had soared in Paris. The only woman who could make him feel the timidity and awkwardness of his younger days was the one back in his apartment, awaiting breakfast, Fatima Boukhari.

Stopping at a newsstand just off the Place des Abbesses, buying the English language International Herald Tribune for himself and the French left-wing daily, Libération, for Fatima, Ricky wondered if his cousin Cash had phoned again. Cash said he would be in Paris for only a few hours. So all Ricky had to do was screen his calls for the rest of the day, just not pick up the phone if he heard Cash’s voice on the answering machine. But what if Cash had called since Ricky went out? And what if Fatima, having emerged from her shower, had picked up the phone? The idea of Cash talking to Fatima made Ricky suddenly very afraid.

Ricky walked a little more quickly as he turned onto the rue des Martyrs and headed downhill. Grace Kelly, he instantly noticed, was trudging uphill, on the same side of the street. What a surprise to see her at this hour. Grace Kelly was part of the night shift of transvestite and transsexual hookers who stood in doorways, here and there, up and down Ricky’s long block. The day shift was just beginning to gather at eleven a.m. Familiar neighborhood faces, particularly the two hookers who seemed to be the veterans of the afternoon corps, looking always a bit matronly, a certain Dustin Hoffman-in-Tootsie aspect in their chunky bodies and curly wigs. These were men, or former men, dressed as suburban Moms who had put on their best outfits and got all made up for a big trip to the city. The night shift, on the other hand, consisted of hookers done up in more of the tawdry showgirl mode with mini-skirts and fishnet stockings, short leather or fake fur jackets.

Grace Kelly was the regal blond princess of the night shift. One look at any of the crew and you could see they were not organic women. According to Valitsa the Serb, most of the hookers on Martyrs had gone under the knife, switching genders by surgical means. Valitsa herself was a woman by birth and had never been a hooker but she had, years ago, lived in the same building on the rue des Martyrs where the whores took their johns and she had gotten to know a few of them. It was Valitsa, Ricky’s sometime French tutor and one-time-only lover, who had named the tall, leggy prostitute with the golden, shoulder-length hair and movie star haughtiness “Grace Kelly.”

“She’s really a very nice woman,” Valitsa the Serb had told Ricky. “You should get to know her.”

But where Ricky came from you didn’t talk to a hooker on the street unless you were interested in a business transaction. Sometimes, when Ricky was still new to the area, the hookers would whisper to him from their shadowy doorways as he walked past. Ricky assumed they were offering their services and did not reply. After a while the hookers stopped saying anything to Ricky. He figured they’d seen him around a lot, seen him in the company of different women and realized he wasn’t a potential customer. But the longer he lived on the rue des Martyrs, the more Ricky saw that the shopkeepers, housewives, young professionals and policemen who lived or worked on or regularly traversed the block often said bonjour or bonsoir to the prostitutes.

One winter evening, walking up Martyrs on his way to work, Ricky spotted Grace Kelly standing and smoking majestically in a doorway. He realized then that what made her distinctive among the hookers on his block was the way she so fully inhabited her femininity. Grace Kelly seemed to own her adopted gender in a way that the other transsexuals did not. Ricky impulsively decided to be friendly. As they made eye contact, he smiled and said, “Bonsoir.” Grace Kelly’s reaction was immediate and theatrical. She rolled her eyes and let out a loud, exasperated groan. She then shot Ricky of look of utter scorn, as if he were an ugly bug she had just squished beneath one of her stiletto heels. She shook her big, yellow head and sneered extravagantly. Ricky had never received such a contemptuous, wordless putdown before. Rather than being offended, though, he thought it was hilarious. And probably well-deserved. Where did Ricky get off suddenly trying to be neighborly after living on the block for years? Ricky never said anything to Grace Kelly after that. But sometimes when he would pass her on the street, she would suck her teeth in annoyance or mutter something inaudible but clearly insulting. Ricky, though, remained more tickled than affronted.

Now, on this Thursday morning in April 1999, Ricky couldn’t help but wonder what Grace Kelly was doing out and about so early. Was she currently working the day shift? No, from the heaviness of her steps as she climbed the street, her disheveled hair and the hungover slackness in her face, Grace Kelly looked like she was returning home after a particularly rough night. She was trudging past the long, pale facade of the nursing home that sat amid the nightclubs and restaurants of Martyrs when a prim, little nun in gray veil and habit stepped out of the building. Nuns and ambulances were always coming and going through the wide green doors that swung open onto the courtyard of the nursing home. As the prostitute and the nun passed each other they both nodded and said, “Bonjour.”

Ricky decided that he, too, would greet Grace Kelly this morning. As they approached each other, Ricky was startled by how deeply lined, rugged and masculine Grace Kelly’s face was in daylight and without makeup. He suddenly sensed something bottomlessly sad about Grace Kelly. A sympathy welled up inside him. He was opening his mouth to say “good day” when the hooker, not even glancing at Ricky as she trudged uphill and he plodded down, blandly uttered one of the more severe slurs in the French language: “Pauvre con.” There is no precise translation for this in English, at least not one that captures the withering disdain of the expression. It’s sort of like saying, “You pathetic asshole.”

But Ricky didn’t mind.

* * *

“So---why do you not wish to speak to this cousin of your?” Fatima Boukhari said in her lilting, scolding voice. She sat across from Ricky at the small round-topped table wedged into the corner of his studio that constituted the “kitchenette.” Fatima was dressed in her blue workshirt and black jeans, her turbulent black hair still wet from the shower. She spoke while staring at the newspaper spread out on the former café table in front of her. She took a sip from a small ceramic bowl of tea, waiting for a response. Ricky held his tiny cup of espresso in one hand, his carefully folded Herald Tribune in the other, pretending not to have heard the question, absorbed in his morning newspaper. “Ree-KEE!” Fatima squealed impatiently.

“Yes, dear?”

“Why do you disrespect a relation so?”

Cash had indeed called while Ricky was out buying the bread and newspapers. But Fatima, fortunately, was still in the shower at the time. Ricky had listened to the second message on the answering machine as soon as he walked in the door. “Hello, this is Dr. Cassius Washington calling for Richard Jenks.” Traffic noise in the background. “Yo, Ricky, pick up the damn phone, man.” Cash’s voice had changed instantly from authoritative to combative and now, in a split second, switched to high-pitched whiny: “C’mon, man, don’t do me like that! Please, Ricky, pick up the phone.” A pause; the motorized cacophony of the highway. “Okay,” Cash said dejectedly. “Be like that.” Honking horns. “But I will call you back.” Click. Dial tone. Ricky erased the message.

“It sounded like your cousin is in need,” Fatima said.

“Then I guess he’ll call back,” Ricky replied in a disinterested tone, trying to concentrate on his newspaper, sipping his espresso.

“Will you answer when he does?”

“I dunno.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a jerk.”

“That is no excuse!” Fatima cried. “He is your relation---in blood!”
Ricky finally looked up from the paper. Fatima was staring fixedly at him, her dark brown eyes sparkling the way they did whenever she felt argumentative, which seemed to be more and more often. “He probably won’t call again.”

“But you just said he would!” Fatima fired back.

“What’s it to you, anyway?” Ricky said, trying not to sound too annoyed, but just annoyed enough to end the discussion.

Fatima paused, seeming to stop and wonder why she should, in fact, care. Then she smiled. “I don’t know,” she said, “I think maybe I just like to---how do you say?---bust the balls.”

Ricky let out a huge laugh. “Well, you certainly do a good job of busting mine!”

Fatima’s smile was a radiant sunburst, all the more precious because she displayed it so infrequently these days. She thrust a fist into the air. “I am Queen of the Busters of the Balls!” Fatima, who had been so stern and hyper-critical the past few weeks, was giggling uncontrollably.

Ricky, at first, was thrilled to see Fatima enjoying herself so freely, so fully. But he began to wonder if her mirth was due to the fact that she had just discovered some essential truth about herself. “So that’s why you keep me around,” Ricky said in his half-serious tone, “just to bust my balls.”

Fatima was beside herself with laughter now, slapping a palm down on the copy of Libération spread out on the table, her eyes closed, crinkling at the corners, tossing her magnificent head of black hair that managed to be, in different places, straight, curly and kinky. “I like to bust the balls,” she wheezed. Slowly, Fatima calmed down. She sipped her tea, took a bite out of her buttered slice of baguette, returned her attention to her newspaper. Back to business. “I have to go soon. I have a class.”

Ricky had to always remind himself that---no matter how much he was in love with her---Fatima was not in love with him. She was in love with the Frenchman who had dumped her a year ago. Ricky was Fatima’s diversion while she got over Bernard-Henri. This was something that Ricky had to force himself to keep in mind: She is not in love with you. Memorize that fact. She is in love with the rich French yuppie, the former management consultant she met during a summer internship, the Gauloise-smoking motherfucker who traded in his business suits and ties for an all-black wardrobe, shaved his head, grew a goatee and, with an immense subsidy from Papa and Maman, started up an Internet company. He dumped Fatima for some skinny blond chick from the posh Seventh Arrondisement and Fatima still can’t believe it. But she uses you to cover up the hurt. You’re not her boyfriend. You’re a Band-Aid. And she will never love you.

Yet, even if Bernard-Henri dropped his posh girlfriend and came crawling back to Fatima, even if he demonstrated his undying love for her and no matter how deliriously in love with him Fatima might be, she would never marry Bernard-Henri. Just as she would never marry Ricky Jenks. Fatima Boukhari had sworn she would only, ever, marry a fellow Muslim. Fatima’s inflexibility on the issue surprised Ricky. Because he had always seen her as a fairly “secular” Muslim. She was certainly no fundamentalist. Yes, she had been to Mecca and she fasted during Ramadan. But she also drank wine and engaged in pre-marital sex. Ricky would never have thought that someone as intelligent and broad-minded as Fatima would be adamantly opposed to religious inter-marriage. He was wrong. Fatima had her convictions. They had been ingrained in her, she said proudly, by her family.

Ricky and Fatima ate their breakfast and read their newspapers in silence. Ricky hoped the telephone would not ring. He did not want to feel pressured by Fatima to answer it. Ricky wanted to ignore Cash, to pretend his cousin had not even called, or that he had just happened to be away from the studio during those few hours when cousin Cassius had just happened to be in Paris, missing those urgent messages. He knew Cash would call back. He just wanted Fatima to be gone before the phone rang again. It was the first time in the ten months of their now-we-see-each-other-now-we-don’t quasi-relationship that Ricky was eager for her to leave his apartment.

Killings were splattered all over the pages of Ricky’s newspaper. For more than a month already, an international war had been raging on European soil---the worst in fifty-four years---just a few hours away from where Ricky and Fatima sat. Bombers, refugees, the slaughter of civilians. And just a week or so earlier, a couple of rich white boys in Colorado walked into their high school, armed to the teeth, gunning down their fellow students. They had specifically targeted jocks and black kids. Kosovo and Columbine. So this was the fin du siècle.

The telephone rang. Ricky almost jumped up to answer it, but forced himself to remain in his chair. Fatima locked eyes with him. The phone rang a second time. Ricky pretended to read his newspaper. Fatima rose from the table. The third ring. Fatima slid her newspaper into her knapsack, strapped the knapsack over her shoulders. “Bonjour,” Ricky’s voice said on the answering machine.

“I have to go,” Fatima said as Ricky’s recorded greeting played on the tape. She stood above him. “Just remember: your family is all that you got.”

She leaned forward and kissed Ricky roughly on the forehead. The electronic beep on the answering machine sounded. There was a long silence on the tape. Fatima opened the door to Ricky’s apartment. He wanted to believe that what she had just told him was true. But he couldn’t. Fatima softly closed the door behind her.

“Yo, cuz.” Cash’s choked voice on the answering machine. “I’ve arrived. I’m here. On your turf. And I gotta see ya, man.”

Ricky Jenks sat rigid in his chair, thinking of what Fatima had said to him---and trying not to reach for the phone.

“You gotta help me, Ricky.” Cash seemed on the verge of crying. And Ricky felt tears sting his own eyes. “I’m dyin’, man. For real.”

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