My mind was still spinning like a top with that evening's incredible events when my head hit the pillow, but I slept like the dead. I found Wilson in the kitchen in the morning. He shot me a hard look and said, "I hear you met up with Harriet last night?"
I nodded my head, "You are right, she is amazing."
"Any other comments...questions?"
I got the feeling that my response could make or break my entire career at the bank. Why should I care what he gets up to with his girls? Gina is twenty, I have learned, and Harriet is eighteen months older. They are both adults, able to make up their own minds whether to go or stay, and they have obviously chosen to stay. Thus far, I had seen no evidence to indicate that Wilson unduly influences their lives.
I shook my head, "None, Sir, none at all."
"Good!"
Wilson looked neither pleased nor relieved. In fact he showed no emotion whatsoever. He was a man completely in control of his life. A man who didn't really give a fuck what anyone else in the world might think about the relationship between his daughters and himself.
Gina and Harriet came into the room in a storm of feminine chatter and saved their father and I from further exchanges. They obviously had a day at the beach planned, wearing bikinis underneath brightly coloured, loose tank tops and almost see-through wrap-around sarongs. They looked simply breathtaking. And seeing them together for the first time, I couldn't help wondering how one sister came to look so different to the other one.
Wilson and I got a good morning kiss on the cheek from each of them, then mayhem broke loose as the four of us combined to prepare breakfast. No matter what happens later in my life, I shall never forget that morning. The sunlight poured through the windows painting those two lovely young women with rays of gold. There were laughter and gentle nudges to move to one side from smooth-skinned bare shoulders. Harriet's soft breast pressed briefly against my arm causing a sudden stirring in my loins. Gina wormed between the bench and me and then pushed me out of the way with her ass. I tickled her waist in retaliation and with a shriek, she nearly dropped the jug she was filling with milk. Breakfast smells of toast and coffee and eggs filled the room, as did the warm feeling of wellbeing and companionship. It was absolute magic, especially for me.
Harriet proved she was her father's daughter immediately after the meal by leaning back in her chair and letting out a huge burp. "Daddy, Gina and I aren't going to let you take Jon off to golf today," she announced, "we're going to show him that there's more to the Hamptons than that stuffy club."
Wilson feigned a protestation, but it was clear that he knew he would lose. More proof to me that Gina and Harriet were not totally in his thrall.
"But," said Gina, eyeing me up and down, "you're not coming with us dressed like that, Jon. Haven't you got something more casual?"
I thought I looked pretty good in my newly purchased Arnold Palmer golf shirt and pants, but they were evidently not 'cool' enough for these two.
"We know a good store in Bridgehampton. Hope you've got your credit card with you?"
An hour later I was 'more suitably' clad in a Nautica T-shirt and Rip Curl surfing shorts, with Arnold Palmer securely stowed in a box under the back seat of the beach buggy. The storeowner wasn't too rapt that Gina and Harriet joined me in the booth while I was trying things on, but that was too bad as far as they were concerned. And the booth was kind of small, which made changing into and out of shorts a very interesting exercise. Especially when certain people became inquisitive about the growing bulge inside my Calvin Klein briefs.
For a while the Gina and Harriet drove around and showed me the Suffolk County sights and then we decided to take a stroll along the wide, white, sand on one of the ocean beaches. As events transpired, it was a bad mistake, but we were not to know that at the time.
The summer season was still a long way off. Apart someone walking a dog about a mile away, we were the only people on the beach; one black guy hand in hand with two young white women in warm early spring sunshine under a boundless blue sky. If it was possible to ignore the pretentious rich-bitch houses that peeked from behind the dunes, you could imagine you were the first people ever to walk this beach. Both girls agreed that spring and the fall are the best times, and they hate the summer crowds. "Even though some of the parties are amazing," Gina observed.
"Jon, you're very different from all the black guys we have ever met before, especially the ones at Julliard." That was Harriet.
"But some of them are reeeally cute!" Gina grinned.
"You mean because I don't talk like a 'bruthuh' and act like I come from 'da hood'?" I answered. "I can do that stuff if I want to, but I guess in most ways I'm simply a white guy living inside a black skin."
"How come...just because you work at the bank?" Gina asked.
"Nah... Long, long story..."
"Do tell..."
"Well, first of all my full name is Jonathan Matthew Senzangakona Buxton...quite a mouthful isn't it...ethnically I am a full-blooded Zulu from South Africa..."