Nicole Dennis-Benn - Here Comes the Sun

Margot needs a distraction. She wheels into the street, blind to moving cars and deaf to their horns. She walks in a zigzag pattern, turning the heads of passersby. If they look any closer they might see the knife rammed in her back, its blade deep inside her chest. She stops under a tree to catch her breath and hide from the sun. As air slowly fills her lungs, so does the sharp pain of the moment Alphonso snatched it. “ I love you, Margot. ” She had heard him right. So what happened? Who is this bitch he has given Margot’s job to?

Eight years ago Alphonso put himself in charge of his father’s hotel empire. When word got around that the son of Reginald Senior and heir to his hotel empire would be on the property, everyone scattered, fixing what didn’t need fixing, straightening uniforms and hair and papers on desks. The front desk clerks assumed postures. The concierges stood erect like police officers during a Jamaica House event, the housekeepers dusted places that were already glistening with shine. And the gardeners watered flowers and the manicured hedges that were already watered. Alphonso exited from a chauffeured vehicle and Paul, the concierge, gave a slight bow when Alphonso approached the door. “ Good day, sah, ” he said. But Alphonso didn’t respond.

Alphonso didn’t take off his dark shades inside the building. He stepped silently past the workers on the compound, who stood around holding on to things in their hands more for comfort than necessity — handkerchiefs, smooth stones for luck, papers soiled by sweaty palms. To them, he was God himself. Like his father — the one who granted them jobs that put food on their dinner tables. But to Alphonso, these people were mud crusted under his heels. At any point he could get rid of them, wipe them clean from the property.

He fascinated Margot. The hotel staff came to know him as the exact opposite of their beloved boss. He took over the hotel while Reginald Senior was still on his deathbed, fighting prostate cancer. This angered the employees. ( “ Him couldn’t even wait till him daddy get put dung inna di grave. ”) It was feared that he would be the one to destroy everything his father and grandfather ever built. They were right. Alphonso immediately fired old staff without an ounce of remorse. He even fired the Jamaican chefs and hired foreign ones. (“ Tourists want to eat their own food on the island. They don’t come to eat Jamaican food wid all dat spice. ”) New boys were hired from other parts of the island, as far as Portland, to work in the kitchen under chefs that came from Europe.

When he saw her that first day, he lifted his shades, appraising her.

“And who are you?”

“Margot.”

“ Margot, ” Alphonso repeated. He put his hands inside his pockets as he played with her name on his tongue, rolling the r . She spotted a flash of the pink flesh, and a perfect set of white teeth closing together as he swallowed the t . “ Marrrrgot. ” He took her hand and squeezed it. “ My pleasure. ” His eyes held a reflection of her face. “ You’re very pretty, Margot. ” Margot looked away, hoping that he would drop his gaze. By twenty-two, Margot knew what that look meant. She knew how to smell lust rising from men’s pores, enveloping her like the thick musk of sweat from the heat. She smelled it the way women at the market knew how to smell the ripeness of fruits even if they were green on the outside. But a man like Alphonso was a different breed. A different smell. Unlike the men she had been with, including his father, Alphonso was young, green, only a couple years older than her. He reeked of youthful privilege — a privilege that made him unaccustomed to ambition, sacrifice, hunger, hustle. His palms were too soft, teeth too white, nails too polished. She could smell his mother’s milk on his breath. He wasn’t ripened in a way older men were ripened — creased and blemished with old habits that thicken their skin like leather, blunt their edge. This man’s skin was smooth. The girls in River Bank would have loved to catch the attention of a young man like that. Visions of light-skinned, pretty-haired babies would certainly dance in their imaginations. Add cubits to their height among other downtrodden women who could only choose from “ole neggars” who gave them nothing, except picky-head “pickneys” and swollen black eyes. Alphonso was a catch. The type Margot saw in movies with bow ties and tuxedos, plotting murders while seducing unaware damsels caught up by their charm. “ Yuh should be grateful fah a man like dat to show interest in yuh ,” Delores had said to her years ago when the stranger at the market brought her back to Delores’s stall. A man like that. That was what Alphonso was— a man like that.

Margot was thinking all this when Alphonso said to her, “ Why don’t you come by later, and show me what you’re good at? ”

And so, when the sun went down and the staff went home, he led her to the conference room — the only time she had ever seen the inside of it. She opened the folder in which she kept all her ideas for the hotel. Her hands shook a little as she showed him how she had designed the small surveys so that management could know what guests were responding to. But Alphonso wasn’t interested in that. Instead, he watched her. She felt his eyes on her the whole time. When she finally gathered the courage to look at him, he leaned in and whispered, “ I didn’t mean for you to show me all that about the hotel. I wanted you to show me what you’re good at. ” Her first instinct was to slap him across the face and walk out the office; but Margot thought of Delores. The thought held her in place as Alphonso’s hands traveled the width of her hips, pressing her into him. There, his lust grew forceful. He bent her over and she let him. It’s fah di bettah. As he entered her, Alphonso breathed into the back of her neck. “ Now I know why he kept you around. ”

Margot responded by moving his hands to her breasts. The folder full of her ideas slipped from the desk and fell, papers sailing every which way. After a few minutes Alphonso came. He stood up and wiped himself clean with the handkerchief he carried in his left breast pocket. He tossed it in the bin with the condom. “ Jus’ keep this between me and you, ” he said.

But Garfield — the security guard who probably heard movement in the conference room after hours, and who worked for forty years to prove himself in his old age as a noble guardsman who didn’t deserve to be laid off without a pension — busted through the door holding a flashlight and a baton, only to behold the sight of Alphonso zipping up his pants and Margot leaning over the desk, her ass exposed. In exchange for silence, Garfield was given job security. A month later he died of a stroke. The secret didn’t die with him.

In time she has pushed aside the things about Alphonso that make her cautious. His volcanic explosions when people dare question his authenticity as a Wellington, given his tendency to squander money, unlike his scrupulous predecessors. Already he has squandered the revenue from the coffee farms and rum estates, and has had to sell them. And since his family is currently threatening to take the hotels out his hands, he seeks to pull from every vault his father painstakingly hid from him before he died. When Alphonso came up empty-handed after being denied privilege to any more of his father’s estate, he combusted: “ The bastard cared for his three w ’s. His wealth, his whores, and his whiskey. ” He was drunk. He smashed a rum bottle on the wall and splattered the expensive Persian rug in his villa with the brown liquid. He kept on looking at the wall as though he saw his father’s shadow there, though it was his own.