Thandi follows Alphonso. He takes the brandy bottle with him and leads her through the backyard like they are going on a picnic. The lights along the cobblestone walkway shine brightly, bringing into view a gazebo, a swimming pool, and a Jacuzzi. The space could hold a wedding with a hundred people. On the other side of the yard is a small cottage. It looks like it might be the maid’s quarters. Outside the cottage are palm trees with lights strung up and down their trunks like ivy. The dark sea roars nearby. Thandi can hear the waves nudging their way onto the pristine white sand.
Alphonso opens the door to the cottage and leads her to a couch. A gentle breeze floats inside from the open window as he busies himself in the small kitchenette area, searching for two more glasses. Thandi tries to distract herself with the canvases that are leaned against the green walls.
“I store stuff here when I don’t know where to hang them,” Alphonso says, handing her another glass of the brown liquor. “I don’t allow many people in here. So consider yourself special.”
He hauls plastic cover after plastic cover from large frames. Each time he uncovers a painting, Thandi is taken aback, unable to believe one man could own so much beauty. She’s aware of him watching her as she marvels at his collection.
“Go ahead,” he says gently. “You can touch.”
Thandi touches the frames. There’s one painting in particular that she’s drawn to. She likes how the artist captures the essence of the naked woman with chiney-bump knots in her hair — the way mothers style their daughters’ hair after washing it in the river, taking their time to part, oil, then wind the kinks into corkscrews with their fingers all over the girls’ heads. But this woman is grown, though she poses demurely on a red couch — similar to the one in this room under the window. She smiles with her eyes, not her mouth, one arm slung over the back of the couch, while the other hand rests comfortably across her small potbelly. Her soft brown flesh seems palpable even in the painting, and her breasts are perfectly round. One leg is propped seductively on the couch, while one foot rests flatly on the floor, the separation revealing the dark triangular patch between them. But it’s the chipped red nail polish on the woman’s big toe that gives the painting a personal touch — a vulnerability that makes Thandi feel like she’s both violating the woman’s privacy and getting to know her. “She’s beautiful,” Thandi says.
“So are you. And I know you have a lot more to show me.” Alphonso sets down his glass on the counter. She senses that he knows why she’s here. He’s in front of her, holding her hand in his, his grip firm. He gets down on one knee as though he’s proposing. He nearly loses his balance but quickly steadies himself. He reaches out and touches her face. She flinches. He doesn’t seem to notice. She does what Jullette told her to do and remains calm. His hand is trailing her left cheek. “Why are you here, Thandi?” he asks. “Clearly you know I can do something for you. Something special.” His hand is coarse against her skin. Her mouth opens and closes. She has no ownership of anything. Not the scholarship. Not herself. And certainly not Charles. She exists merely as a debt to be paid.
Thandi closes her eyes as Alphonso undresses her. When she opens them, she focuses on the covered paintings in the room, their worth already established. It’s Charles who comes to mind at this very moment as Alphonso tilts his head to study something on her face. It’s the possibility of strolling with him along the river that releases Thandi’s mind from the slow pull of the zipper, the cool, damp air that washes her back from the open window, which clutches her shoulders and grazes her nipples like a baby’s teeth. “Beautiful,” Alphonso says. His hands are cold on her thighs. She remains focused on the paintings. Frames and frames of them he has collected. He’s easing off her underwear. He’s pulling her onto the floor. Charles’s face begins to transform into a watercolor painting. Soon he begins to fade, his eyes becoming the same bluish glazed color of a dead fish. Thandi gasps. She realizes that she has been crying. And when she blinks through her tears, she’s surprised at the sight of her brown flesh. Alphonso is on top of her. “Don’t be nervous, it won’t hurt.” He’s unbuckling his belt.
Just then there’s a rattle at the door. Alphonso stops what he’s doing. “You stay right here,” he commands in a whisper. He goes to the door, adjusting his pants. Meanwhile, Thandi looks around for a hiding place. But before she can find one, Alphonso opens the door and a woman’s voice enters like a breeze. “Sweetness sent me in here. Told me you have a surprise for me. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. I thought you wanted me to bring the package. Yuh have me waiting in the villa with dat prick of a sergeant. Who or what on earth could you be doing that is more important than—” Margot stops short when she sees Thandi trying to pull up her dress. She looks from Thandi to Alphonso, then back at Thandi again.
“What’s going on?” She turns to Alphonso. Thandi fumbles with the zipper in the back of her dress. “What is my sister doing here?” Margot says; her voice is a high-pitched screech. “You bastard!” Margot shouts. “How could you?” She hits Alphonso on the arm and he grabs her and turns her around, her back pressed into him.
“Calm down. You know exactly why she’s here. I thought you sent her here with Sweetness, since you owe me,” he says.
“We’ve talked about this! I helped you with the police!”
“She came of her own free will.”
“Am I supposed to believe you?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
Margot narrows her eyes at Thandi. “Why are you here? Delores and I were looking everywhere for you! And here you are, taking off yuh clothes for ah man? What di hell is wrong wid you?”
Thandi has lost her ability to speak under her sister’s smothering rage. She wonders if the alcohol has gotten to her brain too, for she has forgotten the reason why she’s here.
“Thandi, answer me.”
“Margot, you’re interrupting us,” Alphonso says. He holds on to Margot’s hand, but she pushes him away.
“Fuck you! This was not the plan!” she says, whipping around to face him again and pointing her finger at him as if he were a child. “My role in this was to help you so that you can help me. Why her? Why my sister?” she screams at him.
But his answer is a grin. A chuckle that becomes a boisterous laugh. “You people,” he says with a laugh, shaking his head. “You people with your drama just continue to amaze me. Margot, you have a business, a responsibility. You work for me. So you’re the last person I expect to be telling me who I should and shouldn’t have. I hired you to do what you do because you’re the only person without a conscience. Then you have the nerve to blackmail me with it.” His eyes turn from jovial musing to stone. “Your sister, as far as I am concerned, is fair game.”
For a second Thandi thinks she sees Margot lose her ground, but when she turns to Thandi, her eyes are steady. “Everything I do is for you. You are the reason why I work hard, you ungrateful—”
“So that I can pay you back tenfold, right?” Thandi asks, cutting her off. “Isn’t that what you always say? That one day I will pay you back tenfold? Now I know it’s because you owe him! My scholarship? That was his money!” She gestures to Alphonso with her hand. “You use me to justify your dirty work. That’s all I’ve ever been to you and Delores, a way out. Your own conscience won’t do it for you, so you pull me into it.”