The Last Good Paradise (7 page)

Richard came back hours later, lips and fingers pruned, exhilarated. “You have no idea! The fish!” He promptly lay down and fell asleep.

Ann dozed until midnight, then was wide-awake. Jet lag and worry made rest impossible. Perhaps she had been too hard on Richard—didn’t he deserve any break from the tension that he could get? What was so bad about being underwater, looking at Technicolor fish, if it helped you forget your problems? She tugged on him, nibbled on his shoulder, but he swatted her away, unwilling to rise back up to consciousness.

She rose and stepped out on the deck, closing the glass door behind her to seal in the coolness. Better that Richard didn’t wake, that she didn’t make her desperate effort at intimacy. The air lay hot and close, heavy as if she were in a sauna; the lagoon a pellucid blue under the moon, inviting as one of those azure martinis they served in the hotel bar. Richard had compared it to drinking pool water, but Ann topped him, claiming it was like drinking antifreeze. She climbed down the steps of the ladder and dipped her toes, surprised at how deliciously inviting it felt.

They had both known what a wild card Javi was—brilliant and passionate and petty and malicious and, on top of it all, careless. Was it even possible that she once had thought she loved him, that she had considered leaving Richard for him? That was years ago, in the way past. Javi and she had put it behind them, yet this betrayal stung all the worse for it. Wasn’t there still some love, some protectiveness for her? For Richard, whom he supposedly loved as a brother? But she knew deep down in her heart that Javi was hurting the worst of all.

The scariest thing was that a secret part of her rejoiced at the news of Javi’s profligacy, the restaurant’s demise, her professional ruin. It forced her to do what she had been too cowardly to do otherwise: crush family expectations, risk the censure of friends and colleagues, endure her own guilt over failing Richard financially. She might very well have plodded on until retirement on the unhappy path she had picked. That was all over now.

Ann pulled her nightgown over her head and slid naked into the water, which had a refreshing bite to it once she was fully submerged. Underwater, rocks and bursts of coral appeared like dark clouds in the distance. The world turned topsy-turvy. She went on her back—the stars overhead hung ripe and heavy like fruit. Time passed, unmarked, as if she had fallen asleep, dreaming of floating, or floating while dreaming, when something slippery, cold, and bone-crushingly powerful brushed underneath her bare back, lifting her ever so slightly up out of the water. Out of nowhere came the image of Loren, teak chest and narrow hips, pressing against her. She pushed the thought away, dutifully replaced it with the matrimonially sanctioned image of Richard, before she flipped over on her stomach, looking down into the water in time to catch the pound of something dark throbbing away through the water even as she reached out her hand to touch and caress the danger at her fingertips.

She lifted herself to the bottom step of the ladder and sat shivering in the moonlight.

A mistake to have left the firm citing a personal emergency, handing her caseload over to a coworker who would undoubtedly bad-mouth her now. This would be seen as weakness. One of the senior partners, Peleg, whose wife of thirty-five years died of cancer, managed to put in a half day after the morning funeral. No mercy would be shown to Ann.

She didn’t always hate the law.

During her summer breaks from law school, she interned for eccentric Professor Faucett, who drove a beat-up old VW van and lived in a shack in the shabby part of Silver Lake, brilliantly defending clients against corporations. Ann spent all-nighters, all-weekenders, with a group of a half dozen other idealistic types known as the “Faucetts,” who literally ate and slept in order to come to work, driven by the passion he inspired to do good.

Faucett had bad teeth, frizzy gray hair, and irregular laundry service, but none of that mattered because he was beating up the bad guys. After taking out living expenses (minimal), paying alimony (hefty) to a wife in the Palisades, who was not about to wait for the meek to inherit the earth, and child support (hefty) for their daughter, who attended private school and drove a BMW convertible, Faucett plowed every remaining last dime into defending the defenseless.

Ann was as in awe of Faucett’s selflessness as she was appalled by the wreck of his personal life. From his example, she, too, longed to do good. That summer she liked feeling that what she did mattered. She loved bolting out of bed in the morning like a legal knight in shining armor. But everything around her, from the expensive clothes in the Beverly Center to the big houses in Bel Air and Brentwood, suggested that the direction Faucett had taken was a fool’s path, one not capable of being followed, as impossible to replicate as trying to imitate Mother Teresa.

Just as in med school, where all the first-years professed a desire to help mankind and by the fourth year were clawing for specialties in dermatology or plastics, Ann noticed during the last year of law school that the aspirations of her fellow Faucetts underwent a seismic shift. Gone was the talk of pro bono work and public defenders. Now they were trying to guess the needs of the big firms: Patent defense? Estate planning? Now it was the address of the firm, the view from the office, the make of one’s car that determined one’s choices.

She never got in touch with Faucett again after being hired by FFBBP because she couldn’t bear confessing that the summer had been the equivalent of a moral one-night stand. She had sold out when the concept was still a valid one. Now guilt over selling out was as quaint and old-fashioned as knitted doilies, what with A-list actors hacking sheets through Kmart, and famous lawyers making cameos on TV shows. She joined the ranks of the dissatisfied, hating her job and dreaming of the day she could retire early and follow a passion—painting, or producing artisanal cheese, or deoiling penguins.

Ann was climbing back to their deck to towel off when she heard the snap of a door closing nearby.

*   *   *

In the harsh morning light, Loren, hungover, watched Ann come out of the hotel and walk down to the dock in a somber brown one-piece suit that looked proper for a grandmother taking a pram walk on the cold, rocky coast of Normandy. The suit flattened her breasts and covered every inch of derriere. A crime. An oversize straw hat hid her face, the zinc oxide 50 SPF sunblock giving her a Kabuki-like ghostly glow underneath.

If he didn’t know better, he would have thought her coldhearted, but he guessed she was merely unhappy, like many of his tourists. In the old days, if she had been single, he would have had her in bed within a day. If married, two. She was his type: good-looking but not flashy, intelligent but not dried out. Out of his league in the States, but all was possible in the islands.

One discovered interesting things about people when they were on vacation. Loren would take out a high-powered, arrogant businessman on a diving trip—the kind of guy who wouldn’t give anyone the time of day back home, insulated by at least three levels of assistants—but stick an oxygen tank on his back and drop him in shark-infested waters, and he’d become as docile and compliant as a puppy.

Couples were trickier. Other than lust-besotted honeymooners, one either had two partners who were sick to death of each other or two strangers who hardly knew each other, suddenly thrown together with no distractions. Always a volatile mix.

Droves of Westerners flew to the islands with some variation of castaway fantasy. He got a high percentage of honeymooners, who were the best because they stayed in their
fares
most of the time, only coming out for food and alcohol, and they rarely complained. The second biggest group was the retireds—wrinkled, tired, unsure, bewildered by their sudden release into leisure. They would stare at the overpriced menus in the tourist hotels, wondering if this was what they had worked so hard for, saved for so parsimoniously, to waste money like this. An existential question for sure. They complained about everything because nothing could measure up to their impossible longings. He was sympathetic, but these weren’t his bread and butter. The last group—the unhappys—these had been Loren’s specialty.

*   *   *

The sun rode hard and yellow against the thin green sea. Richard and Ann got into the boat with their two small bags while Loren was still carrying on supplies of groceries and gasoline. After a few boxes, he stopped, exhausted, to wipe his face and light up a cigarette. After ten minutes of inaction, Richard got out and began to load boxes himself. Loren idly watched with neither thanks nor a request to stop. Finally he stubbed out his cigarette and helped. By the time they were finished, every square inch was packed, with barely enough room to sit. It was disconcerting to see everything they would be eating for the next week or so loaded around them in the hot sun. In true third-world style, the can of gasoline nestled next to the grapes, mangoes, and pineapples they would be eating; bottles of bleach cozied up to the meat and bread; plastic cartons of milk sat unrefrigerated.

“Make sure you have gone to make pee-pee. The boat trip is an hour and a half, with lots of bouncy-bouncy,” Loren said. He enjoyed the grimace on Ann’s face as she turned away. He found it amusing how squeamish Americans were at the mention of bodily functions. Didn’t they understand that all humankind was mere flesh, animated by spirit, if one were so inclined to believe? “We are riding the pass into the lagoon. Twice a day a big tide comes in and out, bringing many animals: the sharks, the porpoises, turtles. We will come back for diving.”

“I took my first dive yesterday,” Richard volunteered.

This was another of Richard’s traits that irked her—how he tried to befriend everyone he met, even this condescending Frenchman.

“Yes?” Loren said.

“Did you say sharks?” Ann asked.

“I loved it,” Richard said.

“Many, many sharks,” Loren said. “The sharks in Polynesia outnumber the people. Mostly safe to swim in the lagoon in the daytime. They have so much food. Unless they are hungry. I will take you to feed them—give you the thrill of the deep.” Loren looked at Ann. “Never swim at nighttime, though. That’s when they feed. It’s very dangerous.”

Ann turned a shade whiter under her zinc oxide. The memory of the dark shape underneath her, taking her measure, proving that it was master, that it chose the time and place of mortality before swimming away, spooked her.

The ride, as promised, was long and bumpy. Loren rode at a fast clip, carelessly plowing the nose of the boat into each wave crest, dousing them with spray. Wind whipped the water from blue to green and back to blue. In every direction, the world spread out—a horizontal, watery desert.

Under the roar of the engine, Ann whispered into Richard’s ear: “I think this is a mistake.”

Richard shook his head. He hated this about Ann, how she took a headstrong position and then reversed herself. “It’s paid for. We’re doing this.”

The truth was that Richard had been so stressed by the restaurant opening he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but now that the obstacle had been removed, he felt … empty. What did one do without crushing pressure every waking moment? The lack of tension scared him, but there was a moment yesterday while he was deep underwater when he had felt curiously at peace, as if the pressure of the water both held him down and together; without it he was in danger of flying apart. He still hadn’t processed the experience and was shy to describe it.

He had never imagined the sun from underwater, had never seen such brilliant tropical fish—not in a pan, or even baked whole—but alive, swimming. It was a mystical experience to be at the source of one’s food, swimming in the same element it did. For twenty minutes, he forgot about everything, including, blissfully, the disaster of his career. Not quite true. Underwater, the words of his hero, Brillat-Savarin, came to him and made sense for the first time:
The universe is nothing without the things that live in it, and everything that lives, eats.

He was so mesmerized that the dive master had to bang on his tank and angrily signal for him to ascend. It was a moment as pure as his first discovery that food could be something more than mere sustenance.

*   *   *

Richard’s parents were first-generation immigrants from Ireland. They had squatted down in a nondescript suburb of Stockton, California—his father, a mechanic; his mother, a schoolteacher—and never looked up again. Richard’s childhood was a long, devastating rotation of Hamburger Helper, Wonder Bread, Jell-O, and tuna melts blanketed in Velveeta cheese.

His parents took no joy in eating. Food was simply ballast. Taught by their parents to prepare for a rainy day (and all the days in Ireland were rainy), Richard’s parents felt the necessity of building a fortresslike nest before starting a family. First they saved to buy the garage Richard’s father worked in (becoming a small-business owner was the holy grail they had come to America for). Then they decided they needed to own a house. Substantial savings were essential, and after that a college fund, which ended up half filled by the time Richard was finally born to now very middle-aged parents. As a teenager being raised by the near elderly, gray hair and bad knees the norm, Richard himself developed a preternatural maturity about him. At fourteen, he monitored his salt intake and watched
The MacNeil/Lehrer Report
every night, wedged on the couch between them.

Going back to Ireland during summer vacations, Richard confronted the dark sources of his parents’ parsimony. His grandparents had slogged through a carb-laden adulthood in a postwar Europe marked by lack. The apartment they lived in all their lives was dark, with small, high windows that blocked the cold, as well as air and sunlight; the place had the permanent odor of root vegetables and things kept beyond their prime. His grandmother tortured him with an unimaginable repertoire of family recipes passed down through the Dolan generations: mutton broth, nettle soup, rarebit, white pudding sausage, cabbage-and-bacon pie, skirlie, boiled or fried or baked boxty, potato champ, more potatoes, potatoes on potatoes, on and on. A sadistic, starchy, leaden nightmare.