The Last Good Paradise: A Novel Read online

  When Titi saw Loren and the blood-soaked towel, she ran for the first-aid kit and rubber gloves. Once he was bandaged, she joined them to eat dessert on the beach. Their conversation didn’t interest her, so she merely nodded her head to the rhythm of their voices and ate most of the custard and cookies herself.

  “It’s like having a shark bite your leg,” Loren said. “The leg is gone, but your mind cannot believe the reality. The old reflexes go on.”

  “How long?”

  Loren shrugged. “The symptoms, only in the last year. I pretended to myself that they were nothing. Years ago I had the fever. Then it was gone. I forgot. Maybe it disappeared, I thought. A year ago I started to have problems. I went to Papeete for treatment. But I can’t stay there … My kingdom needs me. The drugs make me sick so I stop taking them. Next time they don’t work as well. It goes on.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to go to the States or France?”

  “I’ll die wherever I am. Please say nothing. No one will come if word gets out. The story of me being a drunkard is much more picturesque.”

  There was nothing Ann could say. How badly she’d misjudged him that first day.

  Loren took a stick and drew shapes in the sand.

  “Which do you prefer?”

  She frowned. “The circle, I guess.”

  He nodded. “I thought as much. It is better than the square, more loving. But I prefer the squiggle—the wild, the unknown. For that I am paying.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Loren did not come out. Titi made her tsk-tsk-ing sound when questioned at the breakfast table, implying that it was due to overindulgence. When Ann went later to question her, Cooked was sitting at the kitchen counter, Titi hand-feeding him pieces of peeled fruit.

  “Tell me what’s really happening.”

  “He never takes the pills. The alcohol is very bad.”

  Determined, Ann walked to the remotest corner of the resort, where Loren’s hut was secluded behind bushes, set back in the jungle on a slight elevation. It had not been refurbished as the others had, the island’s punishing climate revealed in the brittle, rotted thatch, the bleached and cracked floorboards. A sign above the door read:

  DO NOT COME IN. YOU HAVE NOT BEEN INVITED.

  PRIVATE. OFF LIMITS.

  YES, THIS MEANS YOU.

  Ann knocked.

  “Go away,” Loren said. She tried the door and found it unlocked.

  Coming from the harsh sunlight, she waited a minute for her eyes to adjust to the dimness of the room. Pandanus mats against the windows blocked both sunlight and fresh air. The room echoed her first impressions of the island’s emptiness; its few pieces of furniture were scattered as if they’d been left where they washed ashore. Incongruously, one of those pieces was an ornate French sleigh bed that had seen better days, pushed into the corner. Loren was settled in a lair of pillows and sheets.

  “Guests are forbidden here.”

  Although the walls were empty, one door was covered with curled sketches and watercolors of palms, the ocean, a few sunsets, all hastily but expertly done. The paper was yellowed and split along the edges, suggesting they were not recent, yet it was hard to tell for sure. Everything aged prematurely in the tropics.

  “Are these yours?”

  “Get out.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him now that she could see in the gloom. The sight was not a good one. Loren’s gaze was cold, mineral, reptilian. This is how he’d learned to keep people at a distance. “You don’t scare me anymore, you know, with that whole snooty French bit.”

  “Tourist and native, never the two shall meet.”

  “We’re way past all that now, don’t you think?”

  “Since you refuse to leave, can you at least get me a bottle from the chest?”

  Ann made a face.

  “I’ll let you stay only on the condition you promise to stop the Florence Nightingale routine.”

  Ann went to the wooden seaman’s chest and pulled out a bottle of absinthe.

  “Do people still drink this? I thought it was banned.”

  Loren hissed out a laugh, which turned into a cough. “La fée verte, the green fairy. An old French vice. Will you share a drink?”

  “Titi said you shouldn’t.”

  “Titi is a young girl. She doesn’t yet accept hopelessness. Besides, we’ve already reached ten in the morning.”

  Ann uncorked the bottle and searched for glasses.

  “On the windowsill.”

  The tumblers were dusty; she dipped the corner of her wrap inside for a quick wipe.

  “No. For your first time, we should drink from the right glasses. Go to that cabinet.”

  Ann found small, delicate glasses with ballooned bottoms.

  He directed her on the amount of water to pour into the absinthe, watched as it clouded.

  “Oscar Wilde said of drinking this: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not.’”

  They drank in silence.

  “I admire you,” she said.

  “Hopelessness as a lifestyle?”

  “You’re not caught up in all the crap. Given it all up, out here, unplugged. It’s impressive.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It is, but it isn’t. You charge exorbitant rates and give us nothing … except peace. Because we’re paying so much, we think nothing is exclusive. If it was free, we might think it was a gulag.”

  Loren downed the drink and held out his glass for another. “To things as they are not.”

  Ann stretched out next to him, propped against the curving headboard.

  “Do you have family we can call?”

  “I had two daughters. I have no one to call.”

  All her ready-made answers and platitudes wilted; she could only pour the next drink.

  “Some would have been unhappy, but being here saved me.”

  Ann took Loren’s hand and brought it to her lips. “You are my monk of the South Pacific. My ascetic.”

  Loren’s face relaxed, the alcohol taking the edge off.

  “Monks are just followers. The sheep. The mystics are the wild ones, searching for the truth. They are the bad boys, the rock stars of religion.”

  As they clinked glasses, Richard stuck his head in the door. Squinting, he froze seeing them together on the bed.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “How could it not be? You have a lovely wife.”

  “Yes, I did,” Richard said, his cheeks puffing as if to add more, then deciding against it.

  “Did?” Ann said.

  “Do. I do. Have a lovely wife. We’re about to leave for snorkeling. Coming?” He abruptly closed the door before she could answer.

  Ann stood up and straightened her clothes. The absinthe had made her seriously drunk. “Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog?”

  Loren remained silent. He was in love.

  “The scorpion asks the frog to carry him on his back across the river. ‘But you will sting me,’ the frog says. ‘If I did that,’ says the scorpion, ‘we would both drown.’ That makes sense, so the frog puts the scorpion on his back and starts swimming. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings him. ‘Why?’ the frog says. ‘Now we will both drown.’ ‘I cannot help myself,’ the scorpion says. ‘It is my nature.’”

  “Are you calling me a scorpion?” Loren asked, enchanted.

  Ann giggled. “And I’m a shark. What a pair we make.”

  When she came out, Richard pounced. “What were you doing in there?” he said, pinched, as if he smelled something bad. He did that tight nod thing she hated, then did it again, like a schoolmaster or a judge.

  “It’s the 101 of human relations. What he wants, I can give.”

  * * *

  Was Ann one of the unhappys, after all? Impossible to tell.

  Loren himself had been. Married five years, a father. When he and Matilde, his wife, amicabl
y separated, he looked forward to moving from Lyon to Paris to explore what he thought was his true life. A life that required the anonymity of a large city with lots of like-minded partners. The gratifications of his body were unimaginable after being suppressed so long. Equally unimaginable was the loneliness of divorce. He missed his children. He needed men and loved women. A doomed hybrid lover.

  When his life as an artist took off, it was as much a surprise to him as to anyone. Success came too easy. It felt like stealing. No matter what he put up, if he told the right story about it, people accepted it. He did paintings of the interior of his closet. Then his real closet reconstructed in the gallery to compare with the paintings. A collage of photographs of movie stars and singers and girls from school who had provided inspiration while he had masturbated at age fourteen. For an important museum show on obscenity, he had a freshly slaughtered cow hauled in and put on a large white dais. A new cow forklifted in each day to comply with health department regulations. Newspapers condemned it, people protested it, but Loren maintained that killing millions of anonymous animals in stockyards was the true obscenity. His work developed a certain cachet, became in demand to the select. He had found his same hunger in others, and by answering it he fed them both. For a time, his future looked promising.

  Then his wife married a local man in Lyon known for his drinking and his foul temper.

  Loren asked for custody of his daughters, Bette and Lilou. Although his wife had been understanding of his reasons for the divorce, although they still spoke on the phone, she coaxing intimacies from him—Loren admitting to the ecstasy of a certain partner, or how a man he had lived with three months got up one morning and punched him in the face—now she used all these facts against him. An unfit father, a depraved lifestyle. Loren hired a lawyer. During visits suddenly circumscribed by a conservative judge, he noticed bruises on his ex-wife’s arms and legs.

  “Why do you allow this, Matilde?”

  Her eyes had deadened like spent coals. She turned her back on him. “Have the girls back at five, or even that will be taken away.”

  The price of his freedom had become too dear. When he saw a bruise on Bette’s shoulder, heard the child’s rehearsed lie of falling off a chair, Loren took the girls and fled. A long time ago.

  The happiest time in his life—standing on the deck of a copra boat, the roiling blue-violet ocean off the Marquesas, the green rocky vertical islands. His children asleep like puppies in the nest of coiled ropes at his feet. An intoxicating, rare mix of freedom and love. Life was not so much easy out in the Pacific as it was empty, so empty it made it possible to start over. What was the myth of the South Pacific about if not escape?

  * * *

  He ended up in Papeete and took a series of menial jobs in hotels and restaurants. Nothing was too demeaning because at the end of the day he got to go home to his girls—their kinked, silky hair and milky breath. It felt as sacred as being in church to watch them sleep, the sight of their tiny delicate feet.

  The house he rented was a bungalow at the end of a dirt road lined with pepper trees, backed against a coconut grove and the ocean. Two prehistoric-looking flamboyants anchored the small front yard. Bougainvillea smothered the house, so the girls were only half-lying when they told people they lived inside a flower. He hired a Tahitian grandmother, a large, kind-faced woman, to care for the girls. They developed golden tans and strong muscles from playing sunup till sundown on the beach with the woman’s granddaughter Titi and other local children.

  Loren didn’t touch a drop of liquor, or touch another man or woman.

  In the fall, he enrolled the girls in a French private school. They cried at having to force their feet into shoes again. When the nuns at the school requested school records, the authorities tracked him down and took the girls. Lilou screamed, and Bette bit like a feral animal, but the grandmother kept rocking in her hammock. Although tears ran down her face, she was too familiar with white men’s unfairness to protest.

  After getting out of prison, Loren got into brawls at the local working-class bars, letting loose a rage that had ballooned inside him, indulging in vices he had been too diplomatic to indulge in before, until finally he rescued himself by escaping to the more uninhabited outer islands. He worked plantations on Tahiti Iti, Bora-Bora, Mooréa, learning the hard business of copra, vanilla, potatoes, noni. He ran a cattle ranch in Fiji. After a time, the lushness of the islands bored him, and he went farther, to the remotest archipelagos—bleached, skeletal atolls precariously floating mere inches above the ocean, guarding womblike lagoons. The sky overwhelmed, stars burned, the Southern Cross flared. It felt like the beginning of the world, and it suited him. The more that was subtracted, the more powerful what was left became. Over the years, the past gradually erased itself. Sometimes he wouldn’t see another white face for months, and yet he felt at home. He would never return to the confining society of France.

  He had broken free.

  But as with most liberations, there were lapses. Little had he guessed that his tastes would be accepted on the islands, with little rancor or shame. Beautiful brown-skinned men offered themselves without guilt. Later he also began to indulge in European women, but that was more for intimacy than lust.

  He hoped when his daughters grew up, they would come back to him, and he would prove he was not a bad man, not an uncaring one, despite appearances to the contrary.

  Every morning of his new life he swam in the warm, baptismal waters and thanked God for giving him this second life that was so removed from the first as if not to belong to the same person. One night he played poker, and his life changed again.

  * * *

  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?