The Last Good Paradise (40 page)

Richard looked over his shoulder, making sure no one was within earshot.

“Ann cheated on me.”

“Yup.”

“You knew?”

Dex emptied his beer and opened another. “It isn’t a game changer, is it? She’s amazing. I’d forgive her anything.”

“I wouldn’t forgive Robby. I don’t like him.”

“I don’t like Javi, but these are the people in our lives. The rough edges that make us smooth. Were you the perfect husband?”

“Only in the kitchen.”

“And me onstage. Thank God they put up with us the rest of the time.”

*   *   *

“I want another drink,” Lilou said. Wende and Titi had left.

When Ann went to the chest, she saw it was the last bottle and hesitated. Loren wouldn’t have tolerated sentimentality; he would want the precious juice to be used up in style, especially by his daughter. After pouring, the women stared into the liquid as if it were a crystal ball.

“Loren told me this quote by Oscar Wilde,” Ann said. “‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not.’”

“What about the rest?” Lilou asked.

“Rest?”

Lilou finished it: “‘Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.’ He used that even when I was a little girl. He learned it from my uncle.”

And like that, she took back possession of her father.

“Titi tells me you two were close. Was he happy at least? Did he have happiness in his life at the end?”

“For some reason … we understood each other. There was sadness in him, that’s true, but I also sensed joy. I did.”

“My mother threatened that without her, we’d be made wards of the state. Even after she was gone, I didn’t try to contact him.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t accept him as he was. I wanted a different father, one like all my friends had. His lifestyle … I never knew what he gave up for us. That he was an artist. That would have changed everything.”

Ann remained silent.

“At least I have the video, thanks to you. Maybe I’ll try to find some of his installations. They must have taken pictures and done catalogs. Resurrect his name? To honor him.”

“I don’t think it mattered to him anymore.”

“But it does to me,” Lilou said. “It makes me proud to be his daughter.”

Dex and Robby walked in.

“Whoa! A harem,” Robby joked. He was the hustler of the band, the one who always had a one-liner ready. He winked at Lilou. “Do we have Skype?”

“Skype?” Ann repeated. Somehow, in the absinthe-soaked recesses of her brain, it made sense that Loren might be reachable via Skype.

“Why?” Wende asked. She had been following Robby to find out what he was up to. In the past, she had fought him mightily over Dex. She didn’t appreciate being demoted to her old role.

“I lined up an interview on BBC News. Is that all right by you?”

“Let me set up.”

Dex and Robby crowded in front of the monitor in the office and did their interview. Dex described how he had discovered himself on the island, how it had been a period of deep self-reflection (Wende jabbed Ann in the ribs at that one). He was done with rock ’n’ roll for its own sake. All their future work would be tied to activism.

“We don’t think we’re the center of the universe anymore,” Robby said deadpan into the camera.

They were leaving the islands to go back to LA and record a new album.

“But we will have an ongoing interest in the issue of reparations in Polynesia,” Robby added. “These people are family.”

Which they weren’t, especially not for Robby, who had been there for all of forty-eight hours and kept giving his laundry to Titi and Cooked whenever he saw either one.

“We are dedicating the album to our dear friend Loren, who lost his battle yesterday,” Dex said.

“Yes, to Loren,” Robby said, despite the fact he had barely known him.

Ann felt disloyal sitting with Wende and Lilou on Loren’s bed, listening to the broadcast. It felt smarmy, no getting around it, his death being broadcast around the world.

“He shouldn’t have mentioned Loren,” Ann mumbled.

“There are people who would dirty Loren’s memory. Dex gold-plated him. It was a generous move,” Wende, astute spin doctor, said.

Ann flinched. The sad truth was that in the modern world packaging mattered more than message, and her little Machiavellian protégée understood and accepted this in a way Ann could not.

None of those closest to Loren had known the entire man. It came down to Dex, an almost stranger, to give Loren a flash of immortality, all the while positioning himself as some kind of humanitarian. Savvy Wende was right—it would be impossible to stay within Dex’s orbit without one’s life becoming grist for his fame.

The guys wrapped up and came out of the office. Robby stuck out his hand to Lilou.

“Can I buy you a drink? I’d love to hear more about your father. He sounds like a visionary.”

Lilou laughed, her expression of bemusement reminding Ann of Loren.

“Has Dex told you about Jamie?”

“No,” Lilou said.

“My sister Jamie is Dex’s ex-wife. We’re all close here. I feel like we’re family already.”

Lilou laughed but accepted his invitation.

Life went on, as it should and must, yet it drove a stake into Ann’s heart. She was moping. She longed for the spectacular gesture—Loren chopping off part of his finger as in a Greek tragedy. She, who had the least vested interest in the island, who had known Loren the shortest time, wanted some type of closure that seemed unnecessary and redundant to everyone else. They spoke of moving forward, but that was not a solution for her any more than it had been for Loren.

The idea of returning to LA filled her with dread: long lines of traffic, each car filled with a tense soul; high-rises that left deep valleys of shadow in the streets below; her hermetically sealed office with its numbing drifts of paper accumulating in her absence; the gray Brooks Brothers suits of her fellow inmates. She felt in her bones that if she remained a lawyer in that office for enough years—motivated by ambition, or greed, or self-righteousness, or even simple duty or just plain old inertia—some part of her would never
stop
being a lawyer in that office.

Wende got up to leave. “Typical Robby to offer drinks that are free.”

“When Dex and you fought, I was the one who comforted you in the kitchen. Not Loren,” Ann said.

Wende rubbed Ann’s arm hard. “It made Lilou feel better. Where’s the harm?”

Wende walked out, but Ann sat, not ready to leave.

“Because it’s not what happened,” she said to the empty room.

*   *   *

After dinner, there was for once no music. Everyone was busy packing.

Ann felt her time on the island was slipping away. She jumped at the chance to accompany Titi on a mystery journey concerning Loren. They walked in the dark to the dead center of the island, hidden from the beach by thick palms. Titi and Cooked’s old
fare
was even more battered and threadbare than Loren’s. Why had he not taken better care of them? But in truth he had not even taken proper care of himself.

Titi stopped for a moment on the bottom step of the lanai.

“What’s wrong?”

She motioned for silence. After a minute, she smiled.

“Did you hear something?” Ann asked.

“They say it’s too early, but I know he is there.” She tapped her stomach.

“You’re pregnant? How do you know?” Ann pictured some primitive method, a divining through stars or fish bones or something equally mysterious.

“Pregnancy kit.”

Ann hugged her.

“When Loren painted, Cooked loved to watch so much that Loren gave him lessons.”

Ann wasn’t expecting much. Probably amateur pieces of the sort she was so afraid to make. As Titi opened the door and lit a lamp, she put on a prepared face that quickly failed her.

The walls were covered with canvases. Along the baseboard, stretcher-barred canvases were stacked a dozen deep. If one pictured the color-saturated pictures of Gauguin, these were their opposite. Whereas Gauguin had given an exoticized view of his subjects, these paintings were from behind those subjects’ eyes—depictions of ordinary village people going about their lives. The originality was in turning the exotic into the mundane. The color was spare, bleached out, as if one was squinting at the scene in noontime sun. The line work was blunt, forceful, almost Japanese in its suggestiveness.

Ann felt a drag in her limbs. These were the real thing, and her recognition of raw genius in another confirmed that she would rather appreciate art than make it. That had been the nagging doubt back in Los Angeles, the antipathy for Flask’s dilettantish efforts, the apathy since she had been there. Surprisingly, the realization came as a relief. So
this
was the source of rancor between Loren and Cooked. They were master and pupil, and Loren’s artistic legacy would extinguish with his only student squandering his talent. What did revolution matter compared with art?

“Why doesn’t he sell these?”

Titi shook her head. “He says it would be no different from selling trinkets to tourists.”

“How else will people know about him?”

How could fame not matter? The whole idea of throwing away such talent outraged Ann. It also made her realize that she was as guilty of commodifying as Wende and Dex. She, after all, had been the one with the idea of renaming the website.

“We want to give you this.”

It was a small oil painting: mostly white sky, tan beach, a yellowish-green palm tree with a bronzed man resting beneath it. Loren. It was stunning.

“I don’t know what to say.”

Titi blew out the lamp. “Thank you, I guess.”

“Did you ever want to be anything, Titi?”

Titi closed the door, shrugged. “Happy.”

*   *   *

Ann went down to the beach to be alone for a few minutes. The alone part was necessary, but so was the idea of someone eventually coming to look for her, and not a search-and-rescue team; it had to be a person who understood her enough to know why she had gone off in the first place. There was a hollowness in her stomach at the thought that the person she most needed to talk to at that moment was Loren. Like a punch to the gut, the obvious: no matter how long she sat there, he was not coming back.

In her old life, she had loved attending art retrospectives. There was a richness in being able to view an artist’s oeuvre in a single show, from the newborn mewling of debut works to the death rattle of late ones. One could grasp what was usually ungraspable during the artist’s evolution. Perhaps Lilou was right to try to resurrect Loren’s name and save him from the oblivion that otherwise would consume his work. Even as Ann thought it, though, she knew Loren would find the whole thing hopelessly bourgeois. Perhaps he wouldn’t care that Cooked chose not to paint. Maybe the island, maybe
they
were his retrospective.

*   *   *

Javi was allowed to cook their last meal.

He was totally stoked to try his hand at a Polynesian-Mexican luau featuring the sacrifice of a piglet he’d bought from the Aloha Pearl Resort kids’ petting zoo (the Aloha Pearl hotel guests complained that they didn’t want their kids stroking their dinners and creating future neuroses).

He had made special arrangements to have the piglet delivered on the supply boat, and had created a temporary pen for it in the center of the island that hopefully would lull it into thinking it had been moved to a new petting zoo rather than a stockyard. Earlier that morning, Cooked and he had taken off for the piglet’s pen with a hatchet. The resort had been awakened to bloodcurdling, desperate swine cries. The ensuing silence was even more sinister, but that evening, strangely, instead of pork, a chipotle-basted fish lay on each plate.

“Hey, where’s the roasted pig?” Dex asked.

Javi frowned.

Richard sat back in his chair with a twisted smile on his face and downed a copious number of mai tais, along with beer, wine, and champagne. Having Javi around again was like having a slick little brother who was destined to become a used-car salesman. While Javi treated his arrival on the island as the most-favored sibling’s return to his rightful place at the center of attention, Richard emphatically did not. He had developed a liking for being the boss and refused to vacate the position. Maybe one kitchen wasn’t big enough for the two of them.

Everyone was giddy at the luau, a bittersweet combination of the end of their time together on the island (with all the bathos of end of summer camp) and sadness from the events of the last few days. Of course, Robby, Javi, and even Lilou could not feel the somber absence of Loren at the head of the table as the others did. Cooked was drinking heavily, and Titi teared up and left the table at regular intervals, presumably from grief, although it could also have been from the too-spicy food.

“I put a little Yucatan, habanero spin on the dishes. I found a bag of dried chilies in the kitchen—”

“That I avoided,” Richard said.

They had finished a salad of lettuce, garlic, raw onions, and dried chilies in a balsamic vinaigrette and moved on to the basted fish with sides of spinach seasoned with Calabrian red-chili oil and sweet-and-spicy baked yams.

Richard avoided the fish, but ate the rest.

*   *   *

Even as one ghost came to rest, another replaced it. Ever since Loren’s death, Richard had started having seafood dreams that were so shameful he could share them with no one, especially not Ann, who would rightly view this as the final straw. Seafood—the last bastion of his cooking repertoire—and he’d gotten pretty inventive on the island. Thirty-six ways with grouper. Opah galore. Mahimahi forever. Tuna any way you want it. But Loren’s death and the boat trip with Cooked out to that lonely stretch of water had messed with him.

Loren had told them that the early European explorers refused to eat shark because of its man-eating reputation—it would be akin to cannibalism once removed.

Richard
knew
; he’d been down there, had witnessed the sublime, mechanized violence of the ocean as eating machine. He could totally imagine it because every diver came up against the temptation eventually … It just seemed so natural, like a child believing he could fly after seeing birds in flight. Down below, surrounded, outnumbered by fish, one felt shackled by the mask, with its blinkered tunnel vision; the hissing, heavy tanks; the clumsy rubber flippers—all of it a barrier to being at one with the ocean. No wonder mermaids were invented; that’s what you fantasized being—breathing water in and out, having a fish tail, seemed marvelous possibilities that were in reach. Poor Loren had wanted to trade in his failing, aching body for that, and it made some kind of crazy logic, although Richard would never admit that. Officially, it was a Tragedy. Officially, Loren had drowned (and the fanciful wish that he’d metamorphosed into a merman was not even capable of being uttered, no). But if Loren had drowned, and if his body floated down and down into that all-encompassing darkness, well, the ocean was an efficient undertaker, and the fish would have done their biological duty toward him. By now Loren would have literally become part of the ocean he loved so much, and there was
no way in hell
that Richard was eating any freshly caught fish.