Open Water

That same Saturday night, the woman makes the narrator sleep on the couch, which he decides is good because he’s drunk.

The following evening, the two are at the woman’s house watching TV. The narrator thinks about how, despite his belief in summer crushes, the heat can drain people’s energy. They do nothing in particular, which the protagonist understands as a marker of trust and therefore love. They talk about the music of Kendrick Lamar.

He stays past the last bus’s departure time. In the woman’s room where she is getting ready for bed, he says that he’ll get an Uber. She invites him to lie on the bed with her while he waits. They hold each other as usual, but he caresses her breast. He misses his Uber. They kiss, and he continues to touch under her t-shirt and underwear. There is no need for speech due to their body language, and it is implied that they have sex. The narrator feels that they are swimming together, though he says that he didn’t intend for this to happen.

The woman, now the narrator’s lover, goes back to Dublin for a week to look for a place to live. They do not discuss the night that they had sex but continue by accepting this new facet of their relationship. The narrator revises his thought on spending empty time together equating to trust; instead, he feels that trust means that two people “fill that time with each other” (96). He finds it hard to be separated from his lover.

He likens the woman and himself to jazz musicians, thinking of the spontaneous but harmonic rhythm of their relationship. He shifts that idea, specifying that they are in fact the music itself.

This chapter opens with a line drawing the difference between simply looking at someone versus genuinely seeing them. The narrator describes his position as a photographer as being an “objective observer, perched in the near distance” (98), which allows him to capture people naturally. He takes a photo of his lover that preserves a beat of the freedom that they create together.

The narrator talks to a friend about the paintings of a British Ghanian painter named Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who paints portraits of Black people whom she has imagined. He reflects that he wants to make his own art in relationship to Black music, which he calls “the greatest expression of Blackness” due to its rhythm (99).

The protagonist then thinks of another painting exhibit that he attended. This one was on Sola Olulode’s work, to which he responded for its focus on Black women, romance, and joy. He spoke to Olulode to tell her how much he appreciated her paintings and she smiled, though he thought that she was experiencing imposter syndrome.

He takes another portrait of his lover, seeing her trust through the lens. They go grocery shopping before parting to meet separate friends, which is a hard separation. Once they are both off public transit, they talk on the phone and she tells him that while on the train, she wrote about him. After they hang up he waits for her to text what she’s written, unsure if she will send it. He gets the message and it touches him so deeply that he hides in the bathroom at the party at which he has arrived.

Once he emerges, his friend asks if he and the woman are dating. He responds yes, but noncommittally, and his friend tells him not to be scared. Internally, the narrator admits that he is—specifically of the woman seeing him so clearly that she sees the bad things about him. The friend tells the protagonist to invite his lover to their party. He does, using the same words that she used to invite him over to her place on her first return from Dublin, and she comes. He takes another picture of her and they dance. The narrator is still frightened by their relationship, but the music helps him release the feeling.

It is Carnival Sunday, the day of an annual festival celebrating Caribbean culture and people held in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London. However, it is raining, so the couple sits at home. The previous night, the narrator helped his lover bleach her hair blonde. Eventually, they go out to find a barbershop to trim her new hair. The barber asks if the narrator is the woman’s boyfriend and they don’t have an easy answer, but the barber promises that he won’t hurt her to the narrator anyway. This is the scene from the prologue.

Back home, they eat. They both have to go somewhere else soon, but they take a nap that becomes sex. Hours later, the narrator returns to find the woman in bed still and tells her about the party he went to. Despite her new hair, she feels familiar, and he reflects that she smells “like a place [he] call[s] home” (106).