The Last Good Paradise (21 page)

*   *   *

The next morning they lounged around the breakfast table hungover. Loren had deigned to make an appearance after avoiding the partying the night before. He wanted to see Ann, but she had not come out yet.

“I’m bored,” Wende said.

“Do you know about the island’s cannibalism?” Loren asked her.

Field trip. Everyone would go, with Titi and Cooked bringing lunch later. At the last minute, Ann canceled, deciding to stay in bed for the morning. Loren took them the clockwise route around the island, slyly dodging the camera by turning inland and walking a few hundred yards into a palm grove in which stood a rubble of stones and a large cut block. He was irritated that he wasn’t seeing the one person he planned the trip for.

“What’s this?” Richard asked, brushing away dead leaves. He snatched his hand back as an eight-inch-long banana-yellow centipede went scurrying for cover.

“Be careful,” Loren said. “Those are poisonous.”

The place was clearly not on the list of must-sees for the resort’s regular clientele. Loren used a fallen palm frond to clear off the overgrown debris. The stone dais was big—the size of a mattress. On top were carved figures, the largest a whalelike fish on which there were cup-sized depressions.

“This is where they did human sacrifices. Those were used to collect the blood.”

“Yuck.” Wende turned away, hot, pocked with mosquito bites, sorry she had come. Why hadn’t she stayed on the beach, drinking like Dex wanted? But then she felt ashamed. That was the old Wende. She turned back and forced herself to stare into the stone cups, imagining them full.

“Real live cannibals?” Dex said.

“On the Marquesas. The last owner of the island had this brought here.”

“Why?”

“He bought it cheap from a chieftain over there. But then things got confused. He wasn’t allowed to send it out of the country to the museum that paid for it.”

“So he left it?” Richard asked.

“Yes. He left it. There was a lawsuit when he lost the island to me. The government forgot about it. Then he died. End of story. Ready for lunch?”

*   *   *

To “make nice” with Richard after the tattoo, Ann agreed to go out on the boat for a day of diving even though she was loath to lose a day full of solitude. Wende joined the men in the water, and all three came back with tales of black-tipped sharks whipping by.

Cooked assured them that the sharks were harmless. “They just check you out. Bump, bump,” he said, grinning at Wende.

When they motored to a sheltered cove for snorkeling, Ann still would not join in.

“Don’t be scared,” Wende said. “I’ll protect you.”

Ann bit her lip, not wanting to mention the unresolved shark circling her thigh that very moment. Wende seemed a bit weak in the execution stage. They finally convinced Ann to float in the shallowest part, but every moment in the water she was on the lookout for an approaching dark shape and didn’t rest until she was back safely in the boat. She missed the mysterious largeness of a day spent alone on the beach—the description of what paradise should be. What was Loren doing? She smiled, thinking he was undoubtfully grateful for the reprieve of an afternoon without entertaining.

Back on shore, evening came in another blaze of violet.

*   *   *

It was understood that Cooked and Titi were betrothed to each other from childhood and would marry in the future. It was also understood that Cooked fell for the tourists once in a while. As per custom, both were allowed to have outside casual relationships before marriage, but Titi had already had her experience and wanted no more. She pretended Cooked’s excursions didn’t bother her, but this time, especially, Wende did.

The locals working the hotels were used to coddling tourists like spoiled children. Foreigners had the most outlandish ideas about life on the islands, as if it were some kind of paradise, another Eden. As if Tahitians didn’t have all the regular problems that existed back home and then some. On vacation, tourists loved it when you fussed over them, brought them their favorite fruit all cut up and served in a pineapple boat for breakfast as if they were small children. Not only did they smile, but then they tipped big. They wanted you to stroke and pamper them in luxury. They pretended to want to know the history of the islands, but they did not want to know the reality. The businessmen from Papeete came and built, destroyed the ecosystems of land and water, made money and left. They drove the gods away. Some of their own people betrayed them, profited by pretending development meant progress. Instead, their home had become a ghetto in paradise. So why was this girl so nosy?

This was the first time Cooked had taken a tourist home. Taboo. Even if it was just to get away from the crybaby Dex, he had crossed an unspoken line. He had told the girl everything and included her in his crazy schemes that even Titi refused to have anything to do with. Why would a big-breasted blond American girl get involved in their trouble? It made no sense unless—Titi swooned—she had fallen in love with him. Women did crazy things for their men.

As much as Cooked complained about how the French cheated, he was flattered when one of the foreign women found him attractive. Besides everything else, this was bad for business. Titi was the one who charged on the manna line of Dex Cooper’s credit card every week. The nice lady’s bag of money grew smaller each week. He was keeping them open. Other tourists would be more demanding.

*   *   *

Titi had first started at the resort as the maid after being a poli-sci major in college. Cooked was the boat driver and dive instructor; he had been studying for a phys-ed degree. Now they also had added the chores that Loren had dropped over the last year. She became concierge, bookkeeper, and cook. She was even thinking of taking an online course in web design to build a new website for the place. Cooked took on the work of handyman and now, apparently, gigolo. What couldn’t be replaced, what Loren did expertly, was entertain foreigners. When he discovered Cooked’s plan, he would be furious. Titi had to stop it without getting Cooked fired, or causing the foreigners and their money to leave.

Loren had been drunk almost every day for the last five years she worked there. Sometimes he disappeared for days, and they covered for him as best they could. This sickness was a new complication they couldn’t keep hidden for much longer. What to do? Titi recalled Bette and Lilou from when they were all children together, playing on the beach. Her grandmother told her that one of the girls, Bette, had died from a disease. She supposed it was true because the only letters that had ever come over the years were from Lilou. None had come for a very long time now. Was it time at last to make amends for the past?

Titi stared into the refrigerator, unable to come up with yet another meal. Usually she prepped and served for Loren but didn’t make the fancy foreign dishes from start to finish. Under Loren’s supervision, the cooking had been good, if basic, but with his absence, meals had degenerated into fruit, yogurt, and sandwiches served by a lovesick Titi.

She decided to chop fruit and make ambrosia salad for the fifth time in a row. She sliced the baguettes from Cooked’s love trip to town and jabbed salami and pickles into their fluffy insides. Their people were not jealous like the Westerners, but still … Titi chopped harder and harder, castrating mangoes, gutting pineapples, shaving the salami paper-thin, putting sharp little gouges into the cutting board that dulled the blade of the knife.

Cooked was making a fool of himself. She knew of his secret dream to be like the great and mighty Temaru, to stand up to the government, to foment revolution. Titi even suspected he wouldn’t mind being imprisoned for a short while to add to his street cred (he was still famous mostly for his soda ads). What infuriated Titi was that he complained so loudly about the foreigners and then let himself be the plaything of an American girl. How could any of them be strong with a leader like that?

She was tempted to throw up her hands and take the boat to Papeete. Her cousin was having a baby, and there would be celebrations. Maybe she would meet someone new, someone unlike Cooked, who cared more about politics and foreign women than he did about her. If it came to that, their vows could be undone.

After dinner she would go to Loren’s room and describe what was happening, what Cooked was planning, and avert disaster. Cooked would hate her. Things would change for better or worse. Maybe, just maybe, she would start her own revolution.

When the dishes were cleared, as usual Dex picked up his guitar, Wende and Richard set up their checkerboard, and Ann relaxed in a hammock. Once everyone settled, Titi made ready to go to Loren, just as Ann rose theatrically and stretched, arms overhead, then made the trip to his hut herself.

*   *   *

Ann lay on Loren’s bed while they drank their green fairy nightcap.

Loren chuckled. “Oh, how I would have liked to have had you.”

“Really?” Ann downed her shot. They were kindred souls; he saw the artist in her that no one else did, or else, at least he didn’t see the lawyer in her. She got up and swayed back and forth at the foot of his bed. The tattoo ached, and since she had already broken the prohibition against alcohol while healing, she saw no reason to now stop. At least the pain was numbed. The absinthe made her invincible, or was it Loren’s words? Or was the tattoo already wreaking its talismanic effect?

“We would have been good together,” he said.

The past tense of his desire, the implied hopelessness of his present, threatened to start tears that she would not allow in front of him. At one of their monthly WEFE cocktail parties, Eve had suggested volunteering at a hospice in order to feel she was contributing to the community and counter her disgust with the law. Even after completing basic training, the staff found Ann bawling away at the bedside of patients. “You are depressing the dying,” they said. One of the nurses had puffed her lips, disappointed. “You’re a crier.” She was fired from the volunteer position.

Now she worried over how to distract them both. She unbuttoned her shirt and swayed to the faraway strains of Dex’s guitar, channeling her thinner, early-twenties self (although she had never done anything remotely like this back then), pulling the fabric slowly down over her arms, her approximation of what a low-key striptease might look like. The shirt looped over her head in a slow circle, a lasso of lust. Wearing only Wende’s bikini, she drowsily danced around the bed, moving her hips, holding the bottle of absinthe.

“We can have this. I can give you this,” she said.

She pulled at the string around her neck, felt the pieces of fabric fall away from her breasts. Of course, toplessness didn’t really count for the French, but still. The shock of her nakedness made her hesitate. Unable to look down, she looked into Loren’s eyes; his delighted gaze gave her confidence to continue dancing, newly emboldened.

Loren reached for the bottle, and as she came close, he ran his hand up the inside of her leg, touching her tattoo.

“Ouch!!”

It burned as his fingers touched the outlines of the half shark, and the physical contact broke the spell. She motioned with her hands water flowing down her neck and over her breasts, throwing her head back, a backstroke with her arms as she danced away toward the door and the night beyond it, escaping straight into the disapproving bulk of Titi, who stood there.

“Oh!” Ann said, her arms covering her breasts, an unequivocal confession of guilt. Was that Wende’s pendant dangling from Titi’s ear?

The whole world has gone mad, Titi thought. She was so furious she turned and stalked out.

*   *   *

The next day, Dex and Richard cannabized and played volleyball while Ann sulked in her hammock, depressed at the twinned dark fates of Loren and herself, and read
Moby-Dick
:

… that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

On the salty, hot wind she thought she smelled a coming storm. She felt the approach of a calamity: Loren’s slowly losing battle with his mortality made everything around her seem too fragile to be trusted. Every few hours she rose and made her pilgrimage to Loren’s hut to check on him. Each time she left, Richard smashed the volleyball into the net or into a nearby coconut palm. When it got stuck, Cooked had to shimmy up the trunk to lob it out. Dex had been forbidden to go near a tree. For differing reasons, each person pretended to not notice Wende and Cooked slipping away into an unoccupied
fare
.

Each night, Richard and Ann had to endure the awkwardness of being alone in their
fare
before going to sleep. Their early intimacy on the island had once again retreated. Richard, stoically virtuous after his dismissal by Wende, was boiling over.

“How’s Loren?”

“Fine.”

“You two are chummy.”

She blushed for him. “You’re not jealous?”

“No, of course not. Yes.”

She wasn’t going to tell, but then she did. “He’s dying.”

Richard felt a embarrassing mix of pity and elation. “Really?”

“I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”

And then, like the well-oiled machine that was every long marriage, they effortlessly rolled on to their regular workaday argument.

“We’ve been here a week and a half. Ten days times how much per day?” Richard asked.

“What does it matter?”

“It matters because in a few more weeks we’ll be broke and back home. Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

That stopped him. Ann always knew, always had a plan B, if not C, D, and F. His only conclusion was her plan didn’t include him, and she was too polite to mention it.

“Are you sure you don’t know, or you don’t want to say?”

“Lorna said stay away.”

*   *   *

The island’s library consisted of a one-room building with glass walls on two sides facing the sea. The rusty jalousies stayed cranked open to catch the breezes and only were closed for rain. The back two walls were filled floor to ceiling with books. Five freestanding bookcases took up half the room, filled with discards from guests, mostly cheap paperback thrillers and romances, except on one shelf where Ann found four signed copies each of John Stubb Byron’s
Colossus
and
Lunch
, dated the day before he left. Ann frowned and took one of the copies to keep. One wall consisted of Loren’s extensive collection of history and fiction centered on the South Pacific. In the front of the room, facing the beach, was a rattan sofa, and here Ann spent long hours reading. She was alternating between a history of Captain Cook and
Typee
by Melville, but at the moment both were splayed in front of her while she napped.