The Last Good Paradise (15 page)

*   *   *

A week into living on the island, something strange was happening to Ann. Nothing seemed able to disturb her calm. This felt beyond strange to a person accustomed to being buffeted by her emotions this last year. After Richard found her on Loren’s bed, he had stalked off to the boat and a long day with nubile Wende. Certainly Ann felt sad it had gotten to this point—her husband jealous of a homosexual hotelier and flirting with a beach bunny—but it was what it was.

Ann looked forward with guilty pleasure to another day spent alone. She went to the kitchen and loaded her beach bag with a half bottle of wine, a sandwich, and fruit. She dumped in sunblock, a paperback, and the sat-phone
just in case
, but much like her attitude toward Richard, her need to confer with Lorna became less and less compelling. Even the menacing scenarios that might conceivably be hers in the future—fired from the firm, bankrupt, foreclosed house—only made her philosophical. If she allowed these thoughts in, she would be gloomy, making it yet one more lousy day. She was a hopeless, doomed rat on a treadmill of misery because, face it, there was no fixing this particular existential dilemma. So why hurry? At two thousand dollars a day, not including VAT taxes, she couldn’t afford to waste another single, precious minute of paradise.

Ann walked along the shoreline, looking for a good spot to spend the glorious afternoon, absorbed in the sensual details around her. The beach was picture perfect—white sand with a rosy pink mixed in, coconut trees leaning out over the water. She considered taking a picture with her phone, but why? What she should do was go beg some paper and pens off Loren and sketch the scene. But having to compare her own inevitably amateur efforts with the perfection in front of her, not to mention Loren’s talent, would destroy the happiness she felt in the moment. Better to just laze.

The sun was so penetrating, her skin felt infused with light. She sat down and reapplied a slather of sunblock. Despite her best precautions, her skin was darkening to a pleasing gold that she had not had since her teenage years, when she basted herself poolside, oblivious to sun damage two decades down the line. The demarcation line between the exposed skin and the skin under her old brown bathing suit was startling. Pulling the straps of her suit down over her shoulders to apply lotion, she sat still, allowing the sun to touch the stark white. She glanced around—her stretch of beach would remain deserted all day. Why not? She pulled her bathing suit down so it bunched around her waist, close enough to pull back up if needed. It was the most freeing sensation imaginable—the sun and air on formerly cloistered skin. With no witnesses, even witnesses who were used to the sight of bare-breasted women and nonchalant about it, Ann felt a primal lack of restriction, as if she were truly a child of nature, freed of her awful self-consciousness. Even Richard’s familiar loving gaze upon her would have made her shy.

Usually she only looked at her naked self in the mirror in order to find fault and then quickly cover up. At home, Ann felt she was existing under siegelike conditions of a particularly impossible notion of beauty that made low self-esteem a constant. The billion-dollar beauty industry battered one to insecurity month after month from magazine covers, TVs, movies, clothing stores. Men unconsciously held the swimsuit edition of
Sports Illustrated
as an ideal—a D-cup, six-feet-tall, one-hundred-pound, anorexic eighteen-year-old. No real woman—much less an approaching-middle-age woman, much less a working woman with an eighty-hour workweek, no personal trainer, and no plastic surgery—had a snowball’s chance in Tahiti of competing. Ann knew this whether she chose to acknowledge it or not.

She flung herself back in the hot sand, liberated. Nonetheless, as she closed her eyes, she put a straw hat over her face because, liberation or not, sun on the body was one thing but on the face, no way; it led to premature wrinkling, wiping out the last five years of her retinol regimen.

It felt splendid, the heat on her body, the slight breeze, which caused her nipples to harden. The effects of the hormone shots were diminishing, and her small breasts felt like her own again. Was it possible that the very dream she had been pursuing was the thing that had been blocking her happiness? She fantasized about being kissed on her mouth, her neck, down to those nipples that were now definitely erect. She couldn’t make out exactly who was doing the kissing. Was it Richard, Loren, or Javi, or more likely some combination? Or none of the above?

Then the unimaginable happened—she fell asleep.

Asleep as in an hour of deeply passed out. Only the rising tide nibbling the soles of her feet (“Richard?” she mumbled) woke her up. She sat up and was briefly scandalized to find herself bare-chested—who did that?—until she remembered. The tender white virginal flesh was now flaming pink. When she tugged her suit straps back up, the friction made her cry out in pain. Damn.

She scuttled backward to the shade of an overhanging palm, pulled her suit back down because the press of spandex stung, and took out her lunch. Pulling the cork, she drank straight out of the bottle. The joys of solitude. She ate the whole sandwich in big, unladylike chunks, wolfed through the fruit, spitting pits and seeds into the sand, and then glugged down the rest of the wine. Her head buzzed pleasantly as she watched the white-foamed surf ride in on green waves, heard the percussive roar of breakers on the reef. She felt literally at the edge of the earth, alone, and reveled in it.

After twenty minutes, she got a little bored and decided to pull out her paperback.

One longed for the Robinson Crusoe experience only to a point. Spirits picked up considerably when the character Friday showed up. No fun at all to be shipwrecked with nothing: no food, no clothing, no communication, no companionship. What Ann had was perfect—a day alone, topless, and then a gourmet dinner, a luxurious bungalow, a companionable-enough husband. It was the precarious balancing act between solitude and community that made perfection. She got to her feet, leaving her string bag behind for later. No one would steal it. Another part of the Crusoe experience: the lack of crime. It was as if you were president of your own country. Forget that—the president had hardly any control over the country. Instead you were benevolent dictator, king, or, better, you were a god, little
g
, over your terrain, and could make it over to your own liking.

A swim would be perfect—the water would be deliciously calming on her burning skin. She did a strong breaststroke parallel to the shore, the straps of the pulled-down bathing suit dragging like an underwater parachute, bunching uncomfortably between her legs. Why not go for the full experience?

She did a sidestroke perpendicular to shore and bodysurfed till her stomach scuffed against sand, hesitated, then unpeeled herself from the suit as if it were an old dead skin. In many ways it was harder for Ann to take off her bathing suit than to give up being an attorney—she had never seen herself as a lawyer, but she thought she knew what kind of woman she was, and that didn’t include being a nude woman on a beach. Neither assumption ended up being the whole story.

Fearing the incoming tide, Ann wadded the suit into a ball and threw it back into the tree line so that it wouldn’t get swept out. She took a mental snapshot so that she could find the suit again—a clump of five palms, some boulders, more trees. The interior was so repetitive one could circle the island without ever realizing it. The key was to face out and memorize the shape of the cove—hers was heart-shaped.

Only a few days ago, she had been waylaid by the sight of a partially clad Wende, and now look at her. Filled with pure animal good spirits, she ran, kicking up the sand (she may have even let out a little victory howl), and jumped into the surf, splashing up drops of water that briefly sparked in the sunlight before gravity recaptured them. Then she dove deeply into the salty embrace of the lagoon.

The green fairy incident in Loren’s bungalow had set off an estrangement between Richard and her that she was at the moment not at great pains to fix. As much as she loved her husband and wished to protect him, Ann admitted to a dark streak of wanting to shake him up.

Although she was mildly jealous of his lust for Wende, she wasn’t jealous enough for the simple reason that she knew Richard wouldn’t act on it. The reason for nonaction had less to do with fidelity than with a basic tentativeness on his part, a timidity that extended from his personal life to his professional—Richard simply didn’t believe in himself enough to have an affair. Ann had always suspected that this was why he got swept up by Javi; they were so clearly opposites.

*   *   *

After Ann and Richard had been dating about a year, he went through a period Ann later called his depression. It coincided with a master class that included a trip to France to learn butchery. Ann had just started to work, and there was no way she could leave for a month. Javi had already moved to LA to work as
commis
at a famous restaurant; Richard would join him once the course was over.

Richard came back changed, and the only logical conclusion was that it was due to meeting a girl. Ann waited for the announcement that he was breaking up with her, but it didn’t come. Instead Richard worked at the restaurant longer and longer hours. When he came home, haggard, he went straight to bed. Their sex life sputtered out. Ann figured he was too nice to break up with her, or didn’t know how. When he began talking about apprenticing with a famous pastry chef in Paris, that was the last straw.

Ann called Javi up and asked him to have a drink with her after work. She needed to run something by him.

She waited for him at a trendy Westside bar he chose. Ann felt guilty and out of place to even be in such a place without Richard knowing. It was happy hour, and she had been elbowed off the bar, and crowded at her table, and one by one her empty chairs had been removed by adjoining parties. She feared that if she went to the bathroom, the table would be gone on her return.

When Javi walked in—jeans, black T-shirt, wetted-down hair—men and women turned to stare. Javi had charisma; he looked like someone whose name you should know. A chair miraculously reappeared along with a menu. The cocktail waitress whom Ann couldn’t flag down for a glass of water was now all attention while he ordered shots of a little-known brand of exclusive tequila. Then he turned to Ann.

This was Javi’s great gift—when he directed all that magnetism, charisma, and wattage on a poor single female entity, said entity felt so grateful. Now Ann fumbled over how she would inform him she was breaking up with his best friend and wanted his help.

His dark eyes pooled themselves into hers. He hunched over in his seat and held her hand in both of his, almost like a confessional.

“You want to dump Richard?”

“How did you know?”

“How could I
not
know? Question to you: How did you last this long? Richard’s messed up, man.”

Ann hung her head in guilt and, worse, started crying. Smeared black raccoon eyes. “I’m a terrible person.”

“He doesn’t see you,
mi amor
. He is too caught up in his own shit.”

The classic pot calling the kettle black, but she didn’t know it at the time. “He’s good-hearted.”

“And hardworking. Blah, blah, blah. Pour me another.”

The waitress hovering nearby made eye contact with Javi, nodded, and shot away like a hunting dog for more tequila.

“He’s a talented chef,” she said, digging in. “Better than you.”

To his credit, Javi nodded his head at this blow. “I’ll give you that. Maybe. But it’s about more than dry technique, isn’t it? Where’s the passion? He doesn’t like to sweat. Answer me: Does he take care of you?”

Ann was startled out of her tears by the question.

“You know.” He ran his index finger along her wrist.

“I don’t care—”

“You don’t care?!” he said with such force that people at other tables turned to look at him. “It’s a crime! Beautiful woman such as yourself. Leaving you at home every night while he goes out for a beer with Alicia. Nice girl, but not a thought in her head. Just ‘You’re the bomb, Richard.’”

He had said the magic words to release her (although didn’t the very act of choosing lacy, special-occasion La Perla lingerie that morning indicate premeditation on her part?). Half an hour later, she was at Javi’s place with said lacy underwear around her ankles. He was on his knees, making her feel as if she had never known what sex was before. Multiorgasmic, no-strings-attached sex. Afterward he gave her an affectionate peck on the forehead. No talk of love or a relationship in the future. Only years later did he also admit there had been no Alicia.

Javi’s cool professionalism as a lover balanced nicely against Richard’s maudlin tenderness, his recent postcoital crying in bed, his lack of initiative pretty much all the time. But somehow Ann put off breaking up with Richard even as she continued to sleep with Javi. She rationalized that this technically was the definition of a transitional stage.

One day Richard came to Ann’s office unannounced at lunchtime. “Grab a bite?”

“Sure.”

On the drive to Richard’s favorite gourmet hot dog stand, she said nothing, fearing that he had found out about the affair.

“I’ve been fired,” he said as he took the first bite of his grilled cipollini onion, horseradish-mustard-slathered veggie dog.

“Why?”

“I told them I wouldn’t work with
foie gras
or veal any longer. I told them my preference was that they be taken off the menu. These meats in particular are harvested using inhumane methods.”

“Oh, honey.”

“I have to stand up for what I believe in. It’s been killing me. You are the reason I get up every morning, and I hurt you like this.”

“Oh.”

If only she could take back the last month, but that genie wasn’t going back in the bottle. Guilt for betraying Richard,
who loved her
. More guilt for enjoying her afternoons with Javi so much. Guilt for not breaking up with Richard,
or
with Javi, for that matter.