Thandi feebly clinks her glass with his and watches him throw his head back. She drinks too, squinting at the burning sensation of the alcohol in her throat. He pulls out a cigar from his left breast pocket and lights it. “I would like us to play a game of show-and-tell. I couldn’t help but notice your fascination with the artwork. So how about you show me your favorite artwork and I show you mine?” He turns his head to blow smoke the other way. He’s studying her again.
“All right.” She glances at the walls, not knowing where to begin. She points to an abstract painting with geometric shapes and vibrant colors. This elevates a slow, uneven smirk on Alphonso’s face behind the veil of smoke. The orange ash glows like the inside of an oven. “You have good taste.” He takes her by the hand. “Let me borrow you for a minute. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
She glances over at Jullette, who is already tonguing the general, whose free hand is clamped firmly, possessively, on her bottom. “Yuh don’t have to do whateva dey ask of you,” Jullette told Thandi when they waited on a taxi in the square. “But yuh get as much as yuh give. ’Membah dat.”
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.