These Dreams of You

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She has an affair with a black session keyboardist who has a wife in Atlantic City. She breaks it off after eight months; to her surprise, since she never suspected such inclinations in herself, she has a longer relationship with a young white woman out of college named Kelly who designs album covers for artists that the public hasn’t heard of. The covers fill the walls of the little house on the edge of Hancock Park that the women move into together.

Though the break-up takes a couple months, the relationship ends after three and a half years when Jasmine wakes in the middle of the night realizing she wants a child. “We can adopt!” Kelly wails desperately; but Jasmine already feels her womb invaded by the future. Hating herself, pulling away from the house with Kelly sobbing in the rearview mirror, she drives and keeps driving all night, trying to escape the melody of “Tezeta” in her ears until she realizes that the song comes from the vapor within her. “Are you a ghost?” the future mother cries out loud to the daughter who haunts her before she’s conceived.