There was no way she was right for the position. Harry needed someone to cover his weakness with paperwork, to write up what he dreamt up. Beige write it up, the way the world of business seemed to need. On time too – deadlines weren’t his strong point either. This girl looked about as beige and orderly as a dripping popsicle. But as she eyed him through the lousy streetlight, looking righteously pissed, Harry found he couldn’t bring himself to say, this is pointless.

So he took her to That Boy’s diner, where Aretha Franklin had signed the wallpaper and the waitress wore a tag that said Jesus Saves above her name. Harry bought them both honey cream sodas, and went through the motions of an interview. As Artesia sat weaving her pumpernickel hair around her fingers, Harry gave his speech.

African American music, Harry said, had come to mean one thing in the popular imagination: hip-hop and jazz. Harry’s record label would change that. In the cash-only basement bars, the projects stairwells and the busking aisles of the L train, there were pioneers out there. Lonely as Christmas trees in July, honing other forms of black music. Harry’s vision was to find and champion those overlooked artists, first here in Chicago, then expanding to the nation. Given Artesia’s apparent admiration of other, long-embraced forms of music – here, Harry looked meaningfully at the Fleetwood Mac T-shirt – he would understand if she felt now the position was not –

Artesia raised a finger – one moment – and finished sucking up soda.

She said, ‘Market.’

Harry realised this was a question.

‘Imma make the market,’ he said. ‘People don’t know they want this yet. Like sliced bread. How that wasn’t a thing, until it was.’

Artesia frowned elaborately. ‘So you know they want it, but they don’t?’

He paused. ‘Imma make them want it. Won’t stop till they do.’

‘Kind of rapey?’

‘Say what?’

‘Look.’ Artesia shook her head with amused impatience. ‘Sex and sugar.’

Guess he looked kind of dopey, because she explained. Dear imperialistic asshole (that part she said sweetly), people knew exactly what they wanted. And that was: sex and sugar. One of those two things motivated the sale of everything. Which one was going to sell Harry’s records?

‘Sliced bread’s a savoury,’ Harry said feebly.

‘You dreaming. The bread people, the car people, the news people, they put sex in, or they put sugar in. And that’s business.’

They were silent, except for the clacking of Artesia’s jewelled nails on her glass.

She had annoyed Harry deep in his gut, as she would many times again, generally for being right.

Harry said, ‘You’re saying my business isn’t viable?’

‘No. I’m saying you’re telling it wrong. You’re leading with the politics. You know why we got to put our pain on placards and yell it through the gate? Cause no one with money or influence wants to hear it. And, not to pre-judge you or nothing, but I’m guessing money and influence is something with which you’ll be needing an assist.’

‘That is ... so.’ (The weird diction was owing to Harry’s reluctance to concede correct.)

‘Of course black folks make all kinds of music. We’re all kinds of souls. But that truth is not a plan. Excuse me.’ Artesia swiped thin air to signal she had a better word. ‘It’s not a profit map. So.’

Harry sat bewildered by the sudden halt. ‘So?’

She blinked like it was obvious. ‘So tell me you’re going to find music that makes people feel horny, or fuckable, or like candy makes them feel. Keep it low that it’s music by black folks. That’s your bathroom-mirror goal, you don’t have to tell it loud and wide.’

‘That’s cowardly,’ Harry said.

‘Nope. The pattern in your client list will make it plenty clear. Our community gets new representation in the end, whether you bullhorn it upfront or no. But money and influence is only going to be lifting your business into actually happening if there’s a ...’

She seemed to have forgotten her own perfect word. Harry prompted, ‘Map.’

‘Right. To more money and influence.’

As Harry absorbed that, Artesia considered her T-shirt. ‘And this ... this I picked up off of the floor after we got topless to protest the senator. No one was too fussed about whose top was whose, cause the police had arrived.’

Harry sat with that for a minute. Where to start?

He finally decided on: ‘Which senator?’

Artesia shrugged. ‘I guess the one that’s a boob.’

‘You do that a lot?’ Harry said nervously. ‘Protesting?’

‘That’s where all my arrests came from, yeah.’

Wincing, ‘Arrests?’

‘Other jobs I’ve tried for, they haven’t liked that so much. But you ... I think you’re different.’

‘How’s that?’

Artesia looked at him from the most knowing depths of her eyes. ‘Cause ten dollars an hour is a joke, but I’m guessing it’s nine more an hour than you got. In no time at all, this could belly-up and I’m back to circling tooth donor ads. So I’m taking a chance on you too.’ As an afterthought, ‘And, hey, I could’ve shown up worse. I could’ve shown up white.’

Harry raised his palms. ‘Nah, you got that wrong, I’m an equal opportunities ...’

He fell silent as she made blabbing motions with her hand. Their eyes met for a moment. He thought of that perfect spelling in her text message. His smile already hinted in the air between them.

No, Artesia was not beige.

The mistakes she made, in the early days, were spectacular. So much so that they felt like cosmic events – super blood moons, conjunctions of Venus and Saturn – that only the two of them had witnessed. The time she’d mailed their tax return to the Illinois Department of Transport because she’d searched ‘file something the express way’, then hadn’t noticed that Google had given her Did you mean results for expressway. The edgy but illegible business cards. The legible but Gothic letterhead. The bargain office chairs that turned out to be garden furniture. The typos that resulted from her listening to his dictation tapes and NPR both at once. (‘N, P, R?’ Harry had exclaimed, tight up in his throat, when she’d unhurriedly diagnosed the problem. The joke among Harry and his friends was that NPR stood for Nana’s Playable Ritalin, because all it did was keep old ladies from napping. Artesia had shrugged and said obviously she was only listening to it in eternal hope they’d play Fleetwood Mac. A smile flickering at the corner of her mouth, where her tangerine lipstick was smudgiest.)

All the same, Artesia learned fast and, in no time at all, became essential to Harry. (Yes, somehow even when spectacularly fucking up, essential.) She had an instinctive sense of priority and proportion, a fierce loyalty to their bottom-line, and a wide circle of scrappily creative friends from the fashion program she’d ‘half-graduated’, all of them ready to lend a hand.

Above all, she was as grounded as a fire hydrant. For months, Harry had pained over potential names for his record label: ‘Night Peach Records’, ‘Gravy Train Records’, ‘CoffeeDup Records’. Artesia dismissed all of these as having the stickily homespun feel of a lemonade stand. Just spit it out, Artesia said, hard and clean, like something you’d yell if someone dangled you upside down from a rooftop.

And so, Black Wax Records was born.

It had a founder, a handful of volunteer talent scouts, and now a secretary. To Harry, that was a business with the ‘dimensions’ investors needed to see to take his vision seriously.

Artesia had dimensions, all right. The bank manager could barely keep his eyes off them. The cream silk blouse, the chocolate pantsuit, the spectacles that vibed trigonometry consultant. She’d bought all this solely for their appointment and returned it to the store afterwards. But the way Artesia wore it, that didn’t come off no hanger. Harry recognised very quickly that, in the particular niche Artesia called her own, she was the real deal.

It didn’t get them a bank loan that day, nor in the four more attempts that followed over the next two years, but every time Artesia made an effort for his business, Harry felt that business was real. Maybe it was the low expectations you learned early as a black man too restless and broke for college. Maybe it was his upbringing in a family of factory workers, where excellence was dependable repetition, and improvisation was frowned on and even dangerous. Or maybe it was still living at his aunt and uncle’s place, where he’d moved after cancer took his mother, the address for which always got lingering looks from administrators. (‘Is that a storage unit?’ one lady at the SBA District Office had said, openly straining to imagine what else that street was fit for. Harry pointed out that businesses could not legally be registered to storage units, and left it at that.)

For whatever reason, Harry couldn’t shake the feeling of being an impostor in this world of creating your own pay-check.

Harry felt that a little less when Artesia said, ‘That’s a killer idea for another business. But Black Wax Records is a different animal.’ This was in response to a self-proclaimed ‘misfit moneyman’ who had a tiny, deniable office full of time-zone clocks and money-laundering vibes. He’d fund them, he said, if they changed their business plan to ‘finding the black Eminem’. (‘The black Eminem,’ Artesia eye-rolled afterwards, ‘is hip-hop.’)

Black Wax, Artesia would say, was an independent record label that identified under-exposed talent sooner than anyone else thanks to its authenticity-first outreach energies. (They’d settled on ‘outreach energies’ after rejecting ‘outreach program’ – too white – and ‘outreach efforts’, which tended to get them asked what efforts exactly and that was embarrassing: it was Harry and the three volunteer scouts mooking around town, as light-pocketed as birds.) The musicians Black Wax discovered were too sensitive or shaggy for YouTube and SoundCloud, and often too rent-crushed or life-tired for any kind of self-marketing at all. They cared only about performing: that pre-fame true-star integrity. Artesia never exactly said their focus was black voices. She would reject without comment anything not compatible with that focus.

Those moments of sensing Artesia in his corner made Harry work harder. He befriended assholes, high-fived dumbfucks, nodded along with emotional wrecks. All so he could say, ‘Tell me who you’ve heard lately.’ He paid particular attention to the drunks, the tweakers, and the kids who’d barely hit puberty but already had gang tags burned into their skin. Whatever music had registered with them through the apparatus of their self-destruction was a name Harry wanted to know.

In this way, Harry was the first to hear about Marc ‘Stussy’ Roberson, a singer-songwriter whose bruised folk songs were later compared by the Free Press to ‘dusty candyfloss’. There was also protest pianist Ion and electronic blues group Broken Kite.

Only Broken Kite had a manager. This was an ex-touring saxophonist with a drooping face who only seemed to represent folks he hoped someday would invite him to play with them. Such hoping was all he really did for them. He didn’t appear to notice or care that the Black Wax Records contract was a template Artesia had downloaded during a free trial of Law4U, with one ‘[COMPANY NAME HERE]’ left in there by accident.

The pianist, Ion, was tougher. As he flipped through the cheap printout, Ion noted that the contract’s language on record production and distribution read like hopes not promises. Then he got to the clause that tied all of the foregoing to as-yet unsecured third-party investment. Ion smiled grimly, shook his head, and handed it back without a word.

Stussy Roberson was the game-changer. He owned nothing but his guitar and the case he carried it in, which he lined with spare socks, the raw materials for rolled cigarettes, and an increasingly unstitched copy of The Three Musketeers. (‘I can’t decide,’ Artesia said, ‘if it’s better or worse that his one book is not by James Baldwin.’) He was also seventeen years old, with a fire-scarred face that couldn’t, owing to permanent muscle loss, ever smile. My voice, he said, referring to his limited facial mobility, is a miracle. I gave up everything to follow that miracle. It would be nit-picking to observe that he never had very much to give up in the first place.

Stussy couch-surfed from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, around gigs. He had a cellphone but frequently lost it. He played full-immersion video games for hours, refusing to exit them until he felt inspired again. For this reason, getting the Black Wax contract to him took weeks. When they finally did, Stussy held the contract real close to his face as he read, chuckled fondly a few times, then said, ‘So you cats got no chute either.’

Artesia confirmed: no parachute.

Stussy cast the other miracle of his face – the crisply green eyes – over the two of them, lingering on Harry’s pants, wet by the snow almost up to the knees, a sure sign there was no cab money in these folks. Stussy nodded as though to a long, calming monologue. Stussy signed.

Which bothered Ion. He kept saying, ‘As is?’ then paced around haphazardly while his baby tried to stash his car keys in its diaper. After two weeks of this, Ion went from rejecting their contract to insisting on a six-month renewable version. He also wanted a clause for immediate, no-penalties release if some other deal with guarantees came his way.

With these signings, Black Wax was looking decidedly less adolescent. This time, the bank manager had coffee laid out for them.

‘Decaf after eleven,’ Artesia insisted. Decaffeinated was the one thing not on the tray. Naturally, Artesia had never drunk it before in her life. She was being prickly in the way she felt they’d earned by now.

Harry smiled and requested decaf too.

Sex and sugar. Seven years later, Harry reminded Artesia of those two words in the icy lot of a car rental place at Minneapolis Saint Paul airport. They were heading to Bloomington, the city of Artesia’s birth, for what she anticipated would be a ‘meh tour’ of all the places she’d long outgrown. Standing by their rental car and pretending to read from the rental agreement, Harry told Artesia they’d find the keys on top of the back wheel.

Artesia snorted. ‘They just leave it right there on the wheel?’

‘That’s what it says.’

Artesia shook her head. ‘Thas something else I don’t miss about this place. Always so damn trusting.’

She reached to the back wheel for the keys, and found something else perched on top of it instead. Something else entirely.

She stood with it in her hand, and looked at him.

As Black Wax had grown, it had demanded more and more strategy and stapling. Harry and Artesia had done both together, neither task feeling like it belonged more to one than the other. Fuelled by Nat King Cole, rum cocoa, and cheap, crumbling cigarettes, they worked into the wee hours, when pink neon sprinkles from the 24/7 Bail Bonds sign next door fell between their desks. Meanwhile, they talked small things, then things so great their voices would break with the weight of them, then great and small things interchangeably because over time, with each other, they forgot the difference.

The bank manager had indeed fetched them decaf that day. Then he’d given them a $50k loan.

‘Big money for baby’s first business,’ Artesia had fumed later. It’s true their hopes had been ten times larger. $50k wouldn’t fund much more than continuation for now. To justify the amount, the bank manager had used NASA words (‘vector’, ‘propulsion’, ‘resistance ratios’) and moved a finger down a long column of ‘scenario outcome yields’. This was pre-printed, however, so can’t have been their specific scenario.

But Harry considered any money at all to be victory enough. Particularly in this, the electronic age. It was perfectly legitimate now for a record label to trade only in digital media. That put their premises, storage, and distribution costs near zero, and meant most of their dollars could go into marketing. The bank’s NASA-veiled fear of black innovation would not hold them back. In fact, they quickly came to appreciate that the kind of money they’d wanted likely would have taken them away from the reasons Stussy signed with them in the first place. That crazy-beautiful decision they would need repeated by others if Black Wax was going to make it.

Somehow, it happened: talent did make the same leap onto their list. About two or three times a year at first, before six or seven signings became their norm. More often than not the choice was because of Stussy and the mad respect for him around the city. Them flames left him ugly as sin. Voice like that, though, he all you want to look at. Black Wax heard that a lot as the ink crossed the signature line.

RRbT, a lesbian slam poet whose début album, Trojan War, was about growing up in foster care, sought them out after Stussy name-dropped Harry as his ‘demonwhisperer’ during a Sofar gig. You hush that boy’s demons, RRbT said, maybe there’s hope for me too. Day-Day (aka Danielle Marks) defined herself as a ‘gospel rapper’. That last word hit up against Harry’s reluctance to continue the yoking of black to rap in their client list. But Artesia asked him to reconsider – this, she said, was rap the likes of which had never been heard before. She again asked him to reconsider when singer-and-kettle-drummer Ty Roy created a crowd so big outside the Garfield Park Green Line Station that the police stopped by and not to circulate finger snacks. Harry’s hesitation: Ty was Cambodian. Artesia saw no conflict between representing Ty and their founding vision, as marginalised-because-black was simple paraphrasis of marginalised-by-skin-colour. After that, black voices became voices of colour in their unwritten ethos.

And seven years went by.

The business grew, albeit at a pace so slow that ‘you could almost chalk that up to population growth’, as one grinning Venture Capital man in a Kentucky Derby straw hat put it. (His female fund partner looked nervous and did not laugh.) They paid back the bank loan, then were offered another three times the size and now called a ‘credit facility’. Harry got his own place, where he watched Viking movies in a kimono and missed the continual compromise of a roommate. The Black Wax client list grew to more than twenty and its staff to six, scaffolded by a competitive internship program.

Their biggest shock came four years in, when they lost Stussy Roberson.

‘LA took him,’ Artesia would say and this expression caught on around the Black Wax office. It was a kind way of telling it. A West Hollywood condo, Lamborghini keys, and a piano signed by Beck was what it took for Stussy to break contract and sign with Universal (who sent an attorney to their office to take a seat, very carefully position his attaché case on his knees, and ask in a silky tone if there was a problem here). More folks might have been straight-up happy for Stussy if it hadn’t been for one particular clause in the Universal contract. It mandated him to wear a balaclava for every performance and public appearance. ‘Urban energy personified,’ his publicist raved, ‘Anonymous and yet entirely himself.’ A black face in criminal get-up was an easier sell, it seemed, than a disfigured black one in the open.

They didn’t expect it to, but Black Wax Records withstood the loss of Stussy. Of the clients that Stussy had passively led in, only one of them left with him – and it wasn’t Ion the pianist. Ion was particularly appalled by the balaclava clause, and composed a jagged response piece called Invisage that got picked up for a TV show teaser.

Throughout it all, Harry and Artesia were partners. Business partners, with equal share ownership. Artesia requested this in year three, and Harry revealed he’d already drafted an agreement.

Artesia always had some sugar daddy. Different name, same dramatically unimaginative gifts (‘Armani,’ she’d announce flatly, the way others might say the day of the week.) Harry, meanwhile, was so caught up in the business that he dated the same way he ate – simply so as not to go hungry, the food itself barely mattered.

Then, one afternoon, while Harry was waiting for the L train, he noticed a man pacing by the safety line. Rumpled suit and clearly under-slept, but that was just another way of saying Chicago. What got Harry’s attention was the man’s palpitating intensity, and the way he seemed to breathe less and less as the ETA of the train ticked down. Their eyes met, and Harry understood, the way you only could face to face, that the man intended to jump in front of the train.

Harry wanted to say something. Some simple words to revive this man’s attachment to life. Music, Harry might say. Listen to some music and then decide. At the same time, he was terrified the intervention of a stranger would backfire and seal the man’s resolve to jump. Before Harry could make up his mind, a group of school kids arrived, and the pacing man came to a standstill. As the kids yelled and laughed and kicked a Halloween pumpkin around the platform, the man stood paralysed, his eyes filming with tears. Again, Harry silently understood. He couldn’t do it with children watching.

After the man had reeled away and taken the stairs up to the street, Harry thought about despair. He tried to remember the last time he’d felt despair – truly felt it. Rather than just feeling weary with the moment and mistaking that for weariness with life. Harry realised it hadn’t been for seven years. Not since he’d met Artesia.

When his train arrived, Harry travelled four stops more than he’d originally intended, to the construction site that had once been his home street. The developer had run out of money, and so here stood the bare bones of urban regeneration, on indefinite hiatus. Harry walked the razor wire perimeter, missing his mother. She’d always silently nudged him forward at baseball try-outs or barbecue plate lines or the doorbells of sick paper boys whose routes he coveted.

‘The worst rejection of all,’ his mother would say, ‘is not trying. Cause you do that to yourself.’

Coming to where his childhood home once was, Harry stood very still, hanging memories on the scaffolding there now. Knowing the biggest risk of all was still ahead of him.

That night, Harry wrote down his feelings. For two weeks, he worked on what he wrote. Then, on a lunchtime walk, not entirely recognising his own voice, he’d read it to Artesia. A homecoming parade at the high school across the street now and then added whistles and parps from the marching band.

There was silence, then Artesia said, ‘You’re saying you love me.’

‘That you have defined love for me, yes.’

They were waiting on a walk sign. Both turned to look at it, their lungs clenched.

When the sign said Go, neither moved.

Artesia said, ‘It used to hurt so much that you wouldn’t just hurry up and say it. But now I’m glad you took your time. Cause it’s perfect.’

It felt like the world itself grinned then, but probably it was only the two of them. A year and a half later, arranging for the wedding ring to be placed on the wheel of their airport rental car had taken all of Harry’s ingenuity. As Artesia smiled at the small velvet box in her hand, too full of the moment to open it, Harry got down on one knee.

‘Sex and sugar,’ Harry said, summarising what he would give Artesia for the rest of her life.

Artesia looked at him. His knee in the ice.

She said, ‘You know ... I don’t clean, cook or shut up.’

Harry thought about that. Grinned. ‘You always did know how to sell something.’

The next minute, Harry would raise his hand in a signal, and Artesia would learn that he had rented not only this car but the entire parking lot. Hunkered down in its parked vehicles were Artesia’s family, Harry’s aunt and uncle, Ion, and four or five other Black Wax musicians, ready to bust out and celebrate their engagement. (‘Is there a plan for “No”, bro?’ Ion had gently asked. Harry was forced to admit there was no plan for ‘No’, never had been, in fact, in most everything he’d done since Artesia came along. She made ‘No’ feel like a distant problem, nothing to do with him, a streetlamp flickering out on the other side of the city.) The ‘Yes’ plan was Fleetwood Mac covers that Day-Day had reworked as gospel songs.

A child of theirs in the future might ask how exactly they’d known they’d be good together. Harry already knew the answer. If she’s got you in a garden chair in your own office, leaves you with an infinitely tellable tax joke, and puts despair far out of sight, that’s probably your wife. Secretary ... well, he still wasn’t sure.