The Last Good Paradise (11 page)

Ann got up and dusted the sand off, pleased despite herself. Although she didn’t believe a word, it was falsely reassuring, like a good fortune cookie.

She headed back to the
fare
, looking forward to seeing Richard, maybe apologizing for being a little too hormonal, too type-A lately, but when she got there, the room was dark and he was asleep.

*   *   *

She woke early to the sound of a boat engine. Outside, John Stubb Byron and his silent knitting wife hurried onto the boat as if they were making a getaway. Cooked waved at Ann, and she waved back vigorously, as if to say,
I see you, I see you
. The boat motored out of the lagoon.

Later at breakfast, Ann asked about the couple.

“They say it’s too crowded here.” Loren lifted his thin shoulders and dropped them in a noncommittal way.

Only Ann and Richard showed up for breakfast. Mango was served, a splendid thing—voluptuously split open, orange flesh shiny under Ann’s spoon. She never ate mangoes at home; she didn’t know why. She avoided them at the grocery store. They seemed exotic, difficult with their thick greenish-yellowish-red skin bruised like a sunset, and the large pit pinioned down within its fibery strings. A mystery how to prepare one, but here the fruit was opened, diced, ready and willing. Here mangoes were lovely. She promised herself that, from now on, she would eat them at home to remember being on the island. While they lingered over a third cup of coffee, Loren brought Ann a fax from the main resort. It was yet another note from Javi:

Spent the night in jail. Lorna bailed me out. Don’t worry—everything will be fixed. BTW, Lorna’s not as stuck up as she used to be. Hope you don’t mind me asking her out.

She balled up the paper, but there was nowhere to throw it, so she stuck it in the pocket of her cover-up. Titi glared impatiently at their empty plates, willing them to get up. As Ann and Richard poked along the beach, they saw her and Cooked disappear into the trees.

It was strange to go from full-throttle panic to having nothing to do but worry about one’s tan lines. Should they have stayed back home and stuck it out? Should Ann even now be sitting in the prison of her job? Richard couldn’t bear the thought of his stillborn kitchen. Leisure time yawned in front of them, and without email or Internet, much less TV, Ann thought this might not have been the best idea to get their minds off things after all. Richard had not asked to see the fax, but now, alone, he hinted.

“That from Javi?”

“Yes.”

“Anything I should know?”

“He says, ‘Don’t worry.’”

Richard gave his irritating tight nod.

*   *   *

When Cooked came back from his morning “nap,” he offered to take the two couples over to a nearby deserted
motu
for snorkeling.

Ann declined.

“Are you sure?” Richard asked. His voice wheedled like a young boy’s asking permission to go play, not wanting to give away his excitement.

“Go enjoy yourself,” Ann said.

Richard hesitated, knowing solidarity was what was called for, but why couldn’t Ann go along with the program just this once? He craved the release of being back underwater.

She took his hand. “We can’t just sit and stare at each other, right? Nothing is going to get decided today.”

“Can you remind me again what we’re doing here?”

“Assessing our options.”

“It’s not criminal, though, what we did, right? It was our money.”

“It has more to do with intent. The truth is slippery sometimes.” Answered like a true lawyer.

Wende came out in a tiger-print bikini, wearing oversize dark glasses. She tiptoed, as if too much motion hurt. Cooked’s eyes grew big, grinning at the invitation that was Wende as she climbed into the boat. Titi stood in the kitchen doorway, sulking.

“Is there any way I could get some breakfast to go?” Wende asked.

Now Cooked climbed back out and waded through the water to the kitchen. Titi huffed inside. Sitting at the table, drinking coffee, Loren read his newspaper, ignoring the whole thing as if he were just another guest.

The previous night they had been kept up by the rapt, orgasmic sounds of lovemaking coming from Dex and Wende’s hut. It had woken Richard from his exhausted slumber, and Ann and he had lain side by side in bed, listening. They snickered at the obvious showmanship, although the truth was that it made each of them mourn the disappearance of lust in their own lives. Why couldn’t they have had the island to themselves so that they could concentrate on healing through nature, communing with the solitariness that was the essence of the desert island ideal, or at least be with civilized people who muffled their cries of pleasure in their pillows?

As they waited, Dex came out in long baggy swim trunks, whistling.

When Cooked carried out a paper bag of fruit and folded pancakes, Wende called across the water: “Thanks, Titi. You’re the best.”

Titi shrugged, not sorry in the least that she had spit on the pancakes. She watched the girl untie and shed her top as soon as the boat took off.

When it was gone, Loren looked up, surprised to find Ann still sitting on the sand, nursing a coffee she had cadged from the kitchen.

“You don’t go to swim with the fishies?”

“I don’t like water.”

Loren laughed. “Perfect.” He stared at her a moment. “I didn’t at first either. It scared me. But that’s why I eventually went in. I will make a picnic for us later.”

“I came for solitude. I can entertain myself quite well.”

“I’m a selfish man—I would like you to keep me company. If you change your mind, let me know.”

*   *   *

The boat motored out across the blue lagoon, and soon it was easy to forget that there was even such a thing as land—it seemed the entire earth was covered with this limpid, body-temperature bathwater. The sun overhead scalded, and Richard felt his skin starting to tingle from burn. He’d forgotten Ann’s sunblock. Although he tried to concentrate on the watery view ahead, Wende was slathering oil all over her lovely, bare brown self, smelling of coconut, and it was difficult not to be taken in by the display.

Dex had been pouting over the sudden departure of John Stubb Byron, especially without even a good-bye or the promised signed books. “But I get it,” he said. “Artist to artist. Mano-a-mano. We blew his cover, his anonymity. He couldn’t be the observer but became the observed. It’s an artist thing.”

“You always want people to recognize you,” Wende said.

That’s when Dex feigned sleep, wedged into the back of the boat, propped up on the life jackets that no one wore. The islands were very French in their disdain for safety regulations.

Richard knew how unworldly, how adolescent it was, but how did the French handle this topless thing? Their everydayness about it made it all the more erotic. Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe the puritanical streak in Americans made any sighting of off-limits flesh all the more seductive. His parents had been affectionate with each other, but he still marveled at the fact of his conception, as prudish as they were around the house: a peck on the cheek or an embarrassed hug passing for intimacy.

When Cooked, their instructor and safety monitor, dropped anchor at a picturesque cove, they put on flippers and masks, then jumped into the water while he waved them off and took a nap.

They paddled to a huge coral forest, watching clouds of parrot fish swim by. As beautiful as the sea life was, even more beautiful to Richard were the mermaid flutterings of Wende, her hair a halo around her. At one point, he grew so bold as to grab her ankle to point at a glorious burst of angelfish behind her bare back. She nodded in pleasure. He longed to place starfish over her perfect breasts, if not his own outspread, starfishlike hands. After half an hour, Dex signaled that he was ready to return to the boat. Wende went with him, but as much as Richard missed her company, he found he didn’t mind being alone. He was never alone in his regular, workaday life; working in a kitchen was a team activity.

He could not describe the sensation of being underwater, but if anything, this time was even more intense than the dive lesson. It put the car-crash reality of his life in perspective. The closest he had come to this kind of experience was when he was in the hospital five years before after lifting a too-heavy crate of steaks.

Richard never allowed himself to relax. Always he felt pressure. His life was a constant round of being late, hustling, making do, and catching up. Even on the rare occasions when he was ahead of schedule, he would prep in advance for future chores so that eventually he forgot what it meant to unwind. Even in his sleep he dreamed of chores he had done during his waking hours so that his entire twenty-four-hour day ended up being an endless treadmill of anxiety. In the hospital, nothing had been expected of him except sleeping and eating; the pain was a minor inconvenience. He had the unprecedented luxury of sitting on the toilet for a leisurely bowel movement instead of straining while someone pounded on the door with a delivery that waited for his approval. Technically, that had been his last time off till now.

If he could have only imagined that a place like this existed. Underwater, there was no blame. Underwater, there was no possibility of talking with Ann about their troubles. Underwater, the possibility of Ann leaving him became more remote. A relief. All one could do underwater was marvel at the perfection of the world that one normally let pass by. Like Wende’s breasts. Floating facedown in the ocean, his ears stoppered by water, he joined the fish in their fishy daydreams.

The truth was this leisure made him feel guilty because during those long ago summer days with Chloe, learning about the joys of French food, Richard had found his bliss, and he had pursued his love of cooking all these years, cocooned away from those who worked just for money. People, for example, like Ann. Just because he followed his bliss didn’t mean he should have allowed Ann to support his dream. It wasn’t as if that bliss kept Richard from having to hustle, kept him from getting tired and discouraged. Kept him from doubting if it was worth the price he was paying. Everyone encouraged one to “live the dream,” but no one talked about how to pay for it.

Floating above a particularly spectacular growth of coral, Richard would have exchanged it all to be a fish—just not one fated for his own frying pan.

He was learning the hard way that even divine cooking didn’t make one immune to being unloved. Sadly, food wasn’t always enough.

Toward the end of what he would call his Summer of Food, Richard had gone over at the preappointed time to Chloe’s to practice a
pâte brisée
. Claude was away at baseball practice. He found Richard’s interest in cooking with his mother a little freaky and now made himself scarce.

The kitchen was empty. Sun streamed in and filled the air with floury dust motes. Richard made himself at home, sitting at the kitchen table and thumbing through Larousse’s
The Best of French Cooking
. Time passed. He looked up from the recipe for a complicated
torte ganache
, and his head was hot from the sun beating through the window. How long had he been there? He got up and filled a glass with water from the sink when it occurred to him that he had heard no sounds from upstairs. Was the house empty? Had Chloe forgotten? Suddenly he felt strange, as if he were trespassing. What if her husband or Claude came in and found him?

“Chloe?” he called up the stairway.

Nothing.

He should have left, gone home. Even years later he could not say why, but he stayed. Instead, he climbed the stairs and entered the room he knew was the master bedroom. It was the one Chloe always came out of dressed in her Capri pants and sleeveless shirts, trailing musky perfume, ready to cook.

The bedroom was disappointingly ordinary, not the French boudoir of Richard’s nighttime imaginings. No flocked wallpaper or gilded mirrors. The realization that he had been picturing it startled him. He looked hard at the king-size bed, memorizing for later its chenille spread, creepily like the one on his own parents’ bed, trying to picture Chloe’s brown hair splayed on the pillow. Somehow he knew she slept on the right side, by the window. He walked to the dresser, ostensibly to look at the wedding picture of the professor and Chloe, but even as he bent to compare the younger Chloe with the one he now knew, his hand was yanking the handle of the top drawer. There, as he’d hoped, were her undergarments. He clutched at a lacy bra and brought it up to his nose—it smelled of Chloe’s signature perfume mixed with her skin, only more so. Then he saw underwear—in flesh tones and black—not skimpy and shiny and candy-colored, like glimpses he’d caught of girls’ at school, but not the big beige granny pants of his mother either. He felt a flush through his body—intense pleasure and discomfort combined—utterly unlike anything he had experienced alone in his room at night. He picked up the underwear and balled them under his nose, feeling the stiffness of the crenulated lace waistband, but they smelled only of detergent and line drying, a soft powdery baby smell that did nothing to encourage his fantasies. He held the panties up to the sunlight, imagined Chloe’s narrow, boyish hips in them, the Bermuda triangle of her dark pubic area. He spread the panties and examined the cotton insert at the crotch. Pristine. Inexplicably he brought the fabric to his tongue, tongue against dry cotton, and felt another fierce shudder. Just at the moment he was ready to sink to the ground to relieve his unbearable tension, he heard a watery slosh from the bathroom.

Impossible. His heart hammered up into his throat. “Pervert” would be the kindest of labels. Chloe would tell his mom and dad in the guise of concerned parenthood. He would be expelled, grounded, ridiculed. He was doomed. He threw the underwear back in the drawer and slammed it shut with a bang, and then tiptoed back to the bedroom door. Clearly, he had lost his mind.

“Chloe?” he said, his repentant voice weepy. He was dead meat.

Nothing. A minute later, another watery thump.

He walked to the bathroom door and knocked. “Everything okay in there?”