Come On

“Come On” is a recurring Rolling Stones song cue that links two points in the book’s musical framing. Its appearances bracket a movement from the narrator’s account of a failed summer search for intimacy to her return to Berlin and Mark’s re-entry into her life, where the prospect of infidelity becomes a new possibility.

Appearances and Placement

The song is listed twice in the musical material surrounding the September 2014 passage: first after an encounter that ends with a departing client shaking the narrator’s hand, and again in the book’s June 2014 song list. The earlier listing sits beside an exchange in which the narrator thinks the client mistook a professional encounter for something warmer; the gesture of a handshake closes the meeting without resolving that mismatch.

The later listing appears among four musical selections associated with June 2014, alongside “The Hell of It,” “Is She Weird,” and “Au cœur de la nuit.” The recurrence makes the song part of a soundtrack-like structure rather than a one-off label, though the available passages do not identify a specific lyric or explain the song’s selection.

September 2014 and Mark

In September 2014, the narrator says she has been at La Maison for two months, working with such professional concentration that she has lost a social and romantic life. After spending a month in the south, she returns to Berlin pleased with her tan and blondness and eager to show them to someone. Her hoped-for holiday romance has not materialized; she has reduced the fantasy to wanting sex that she genuinely desires and can focus on one man, a desire she finds more complicated than expected.

The song cue accompanies a sharp turn in that return. A text message from Mark supplies the opening she had been looking for, and she imagines him as a bored young father who may have spent the summer lamenting life’s emptiness. She reads infidelity as the promise of renewal for him and recognizes that she is willing to become its symbol. Against the preceding account of professional labor and unsatisfied longing, the message shifts the passage toward a possible affair; the evidence does not establish what follows between them.

Recurrence and Contrast

The song’s two placements connect different kinds of encounter: the earlier scene ends in a formal handshake and a private judgment of the client, while the September passage turns on the arrival of Mark’s message and the narrator’s readiness to be desired. In both, the musical cue sits near a threshold between paid intimacy and the narrator’s own search for feeling. Its recurrence offers a structural echo, not proof that the encounters share an outcome or that the song directly comments on either one.