The Last Good Paradise: A Novel Read online

  On that particular day’s rock-star-boyfriend-less excursion, Wende stubbed her toe, and Richard offered to massage it. She sat on the sand and put her shapely foot in his lap, oblivious to the fact that she was exposing the metallic-gold isthmus of thong bikini between her legs, or that her pumiced heel was pressing down on his groin.

  “I love your hands,” Wende said.

  Richard, mystified, looked down at his scarred, callused cook’s hands that he only noticed when they were damaged and got in the way of his work.

  “I cook,” he said. “Escoffier said that good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.”

  “I want a man who loves me like you love Ann.”

  Had she really just said that? Richard smiled, a look he worried was mincing rather than seductive. Was this a test?

  “Dex is such an old man, you know?” Wende said.

  He ground his knuckles into the ball of her foot, then kneaded the tendon along her arch. Her toenails were frosted pink like the icing on a cupcake, and he surprised himself with the fantasy of putting one of her little toes in his mouth.

  “Not that old,” he said.

  “It’s his attitude. Like a father almost.”

  “I could be your father.”

  “Almost.”

  “So why are you with such an old man?”

  “I don’t believe in the limitations of age. I’m an old soul.”

  Despite lusting after her, Richard had to bite the inside of his cheek not to smirk. “So the money didn’t attract you?”

  She shook her head and flung herself back on her elbows. He tried not to notice that her breasts bulged out invitingly from their little gold lamé triangles of shelter. Forget soup. The sillage from her skin was of coconut, apricots, caramelized sugar.

  “It’s more of a hassle than anything else. It attracts these hangers-on. People Dex shouldn’t be around. I came for the music. I stayed for the music. He’s a major talent. I worry about him being on his own, but I’m still young. I can’t be his mother. I want to find real love like you two have.”

  Richard’s mind was an utter blank. You two? When it came to him that she meant him and Ann, it was like a pail of cold water. “Us!” He flung Wende’s foot off his lap and jumped up. “You should be fine now. Let’s go back.”

  After all these years of faithfulness, Richard had for the first time (second time if you included fantasies of the Spanish sous chef Alicia, which he had never acted on) been willing to flirt with the idea of another woman, and yet he—stupid, stupid—had been unaware, blind to the fact that time was passing, had passed in fact, and that he had reached that critical stage where a man is no longer attractive on his own to younger women. Youth would no longer carry the day. He had to face the fact that the receding hairline and the pot belly and the hair sprouting out of his ears were not just aberrations, things that could be fixed or hidden away, but instead were precursors to the fact that Richard was on his way to turning into a middle-aged lech desiring but not getting the pootie. And what did a young woman want with a middle-aged lecherous man unless he was rich, glamorous, or preferably both, like Dex Cooper?

  “You should go home to your parents.”

  Richard just prayed that Ann would get over her infatuation with the cadaverous Frenchman.

  Wende stuck out her pink tongue at him. “Who are you? My dad?”

  She said it in such a snotty, schoolgirl tone it was all he could do to not bend her over his knee and spank her. That he kind of liked the idea mortified him. When they arrived back at the boat, she went aboard and put on a T-shirt, totally ignoring Richard. Had he angered her that much?

  Dex didn’t open his eyes. “Cooked’s been telling me about the drift dive. It’s wild. We gotta do it.”

  “Great,” Wende said, clearly indicating it was not. She stretched her arms above her head and arched her comely back while giving Cooked the hard, appraising look of a hungry person standing in front of an open refrigerator, desiring to be tempted. Her eyes scanned his triangular tattoos, slowly trailing down his torso (conscious of this ravenous gaze, he sucked in his stomach).

  Cooked burst out into a big stoned grin, intuiting Richard’s flirtation was at an end.

  “How about some beer?” Dex said, and stood up unsteadily just as Wende switched seats away from Richard to sit next to Cooked, teeter-tottering the boat. As if Dex had changed his mind and wanted to dive instead, he bent over the side of the boat and pitched in headfirst.

  From underwater, Wende’s screams made the same scratching sound as the parrot fish Richard had heard earlier. Dex was in a dead man’s slump, oblivious to the fact he had fallen overboard. Richard grabbed him around the waist and kicked upward, thrilled that, despite his panic, his old Boy Scout training had sprung back into use. With Cooked’s help, they hoisted an unconscious Dex onboard, and Richard went to work. In the restaurant biz someone had to learn CPR, and Javi had been uninterested, so Richard had taken the course alone.

  He bent over and blew in Dex’s mouth. His only practice before was on a rubber dummy. He had never had contact with a man’s lips; of course it was his fate that today, instead of Wende’s lips, he should be touching Dex’s. Now Dex opened his eyes, and they stared at each other for a long intimate moment before he turned away and retched out a cupful of lagoon.

  * * *

  Ann didn’t bother to shower off but threw a shirt over her sticky, burned skin, tugged on her khaki shorts, and stalked to Loren’s hut. When she reached his lanai, Titi was blocking the door by sitting in a lounge chair as she braided her long hair.

  The sight was stunning. It made Ann want to ask if she might sketch her later. For a second, she wondered if Loren might have some pastels or oil paints to lend her, but then she remembered her righteous black cloud of outrage and pushed on by.

  “He’s tired,” Titi said.

  “Sorry, but I must.” Ann jumped over the end of the lounge and used her shoulder on the door, flinging it open. Loren was in bed.

  “You lying bastard!”

  “Can I help you?”

  “I can’t believe that you would do something like this.”

  “You will tell me any minute what ‘this’ is?”

  “Robinson Crusoe island? Back to the primitive? While you have a camera setup like some creepy reality show? You are a perverti.”

  “You did venture far today.”

  “So you are responsible? Leaving it all behind. Mr. Buddha here.”

  “You called me those things.”

  “You accepted being called those things.”

  Ann had been in a transcendent state when she came to that particularly picturesque cove, and it didn’t register at first sight—the six-foot aluminum pole or the camera bolted at its top. After futilely searching for her bathing suit, she had snuck through the trees and watched the camera’s movement—it seemed stationary, rotating neither left nor right but focusing straight ahead on the last fifteen feet of sand and the ocean beyond it. When Ann literally turned tail and ran, she had not been filmed in all likelihood, but the spell had been broken. She felt violated. On the way back to the resort, she no longer communed with the sand, water, and sky; no, she was looking for likely hiding places of more cameras because the reality of one presaged the likelihood that the whole island was being surveilled.

  Loren sighed. “It’s a very long story.”

  “I have time.”

  “It was started for my daughter. It’s become popular. A million regular viewers around the world.”

  Ann’s eyes grew big as the implications sunk in. As she looked around the room, her glance stopped at the door papered in watercolors. She moved toward it.

  “No, Ann. Please.”

  She gently opened it. Inside was a desk upon which sat a huge Apple monitor. File cabinets lined the wall. Computer, printer, modem, cell phone, everything a tech geek could desire to hide out on an island and still be totally plugged in. Above the desk was a large world map with
little colored pins stuck all over it. Was there a term yet for technological infidelity?

  “Bastard! You are such a supreme hypocrite!”

  Loren said nothing.

  Ann came back, stood at the footboard, hands on her hips.

  He sighed. “Aren’t we being self-righteous? What do you think—that this is a real experience? Ann? Talk to me. This fantasy of escape that comes with premier cru French wine and vegetables flown in from Australia? You’re sleeping on Frette sheets, for Christ’s sake. Vous êtes une femme folle.”

  “You’re right.” Anger leaked from her quickly.

  What was her grave disappointment about? Loren had called her out. Meek Richard let her get away with more than was good for either of them.

  “I run a resort. I need to contact Papeete, the parent hotel across the lagoon, potential customers. Emergency services if need be. I have to live in the modern world, non?”

  “Of course.”

  She felt defeated, and worse, her fantasy shattered. She needed the island to be pure to validate her choice in coming there. Truth was, her confidence at the wisdom of having dumped her job was crumbling. She was scared. She was burning through money like no tomorrow. If she flew back and begged the senior partners, went on her hands and knees to that windbag Flask, would they take her back? She had a crush on a gay hotelier who might be a pervert and certainly got off on spycraft. She was probably not going to have a baby. Her husband might have stopped loving her in favor of an uncomplicated nymphet. Une femme folle, indeed.

  Ann was hardwired into the American dream, and, by necessity, she saw every tick downward as a temporary aberration, a pit stop, a state from which she would roar back to triumph. Unthinkable that she would go down in the world and then stay down. Un-American.

  “Tell me the truth about one thing: Do you have cameras on us? In our rooms, on the beach?”

  “I swear … just the one.”

  “So what’s it for?”

  Loren broke into the sly smile of a ten-year-old boy playing a fast one. “It’s my masterwork. During my best years at the gallery in Paris, maybe a few hundred people saw my work. Too avant-garde, too obscure, too expensive. It appealed only to snobs—and people too embarrassed to admit they didn’t understand it so they praised it instead. It’s like those nightclubs that are exclusive only because of who they keep out. I’ve finally done something that reaches hundreds of thousands of people.”

  “Are you making money?”

  “No, no,” he said, as if the idea was distasteful. “It’s anonymous. It’s a website of nothing except the empty beach. It’s on all the time. The only interaction possible is to leave comments. There is a visitor counter. Thousands of repeat visitors. Some people go regularly every day. Some go only when they are in crisis, to calm themselves. Death of a parent, spouse, child, or pet; divorce; loss of job; illness. Ended romances. Like the Buddhist explanation of the universe—Indra’s net. It’s like the most fantastic dream—to be part of all these lives.”

  “I’m … speechless.”

  Loren sat back, pleased. “Imagine a spiderweb with drops of dew along each strand. Each drop reflects all the others. Then each reflected drop reflects all the other reflected dewdrops. On and on forever. Pour us some absinthe.”

  “How do people find out about it?”

  “Word of mouth. I will not do press. No ads. I want no one to find out where the actual beach is or about me. The privacy and anonymity of the experience are essential. That’s part of the magic. Promise?”

  “But you could charge.”

  “I don’t want to profit—it’s a memorial.”

  “To who?”

  “I don’t wish to say.”

  Ann nodded at the incongruity of an anonymous memorial. “Show it to me.”

  It was a huge relief to sit in front of a computer again, staring into a screen. In reflex, her hand curled itself around the mouse like holding a lover’s hand as Loren brought the site up. There it was. Kind of. A strip of sand and then the ocean. There was sound so that you could hear the surf. Ann watched it a few minutes and had to admit it was peaceful. But one didn’t see the beautiful palms behind the camera; one couldn’t feel the burn of the sun or the silk of the breeze. No bite of salty ocean. No way to convey that infinity of space.

  “Did my visit get recorded?”

  Loren wagged his head and scrolled down the comments.

  “People thought they heard footsteps, then a woman’s voice cursing, then running that faded away. It caused a bump in viewership. People asked to have it replayed. That’s against the rules.”

  “Whose rules?”

  “Mine.”

  “Unbelievable.” Ann paused. “What do you call it?”

  “Plage. Beach.”

  “That’s imaginative.”

  “It’s about pure experience. Not my interpretation of that experience.”

  “How do you know it’s not accidentally visited by people looking for beach party videos? Or bikini watchers?”

  “They’ll get bored.”

  “But you want to attract the people the site was meant for? Right? Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  “How would that happen?”

  “Call it ‘Robinson Crusoe.’ If you put ‘South Pacific,’ they’ll be looking for hula girls.”

  Loren frowned. “Too much like Mickey Mouse. Disneyland. They’ll want some castaway staggering around on the sand, eating a live fish.”

  “No. It’s the solitude. That’s the experience people want. That’s what we spent the money to come here for. That’s why I’m here. Give them that gift.”

  As frail and tired as Loren had looked before, now his eyes lit up. The prospect of bringing new life to the webcam got him out of bed. When Titi came with fruit juice, he drank his down without a thought and shushed her away. He jostled Ann out of his chair, then went about purchasing his new domain name, waving to her as she left to get ready for dinner.

  Hours later, Loren hosted dinner but left before dessert. Dex started the nightly concert, announcing he would play a new song he had just written. Richard sat alone with his beer, glowering as Wende bent over Cooked beating out a slow rhythm on his to’ere drums. Then she took his seat, latching the big drums between her lithe thighs, as Cooked bent over behind her, his arms over hers, virtual Polynesian nesting dolls, and they tapped out a rhythm together. Unbearable. He looked away, just in time to observe Loren rejoin the group. He leaned over Ann and whispered in her ear. Great. Ann broke into a huge smile and hugged Loren, reaching up to kiss his cheek.

  His wife’s burgeoning affair.

  Only later would he understand that success, even anonymous, could be a wonderful medicine.

  Rock ’n’ Roll Will Save Your Life

  For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

  —MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

  Dex got into it like everyone else—for the girls. A license for pussy. Beautiful girls and ones tending toward plain, tall and short, fat and skinny, smart and slow, with every combination in between, and they had all become inexplicably available. Rock music was the last refuge of the misfit, which Dex considered himself at age sixteen; ditto, the unathletic. Musical ability was a ticket out for guys who were pale and thin-chested, smoked pot and skipped classes. Grow your hair, get some tattoos, and start learning to play that guitar that you cradled at first mostly as a prop, and magically, everything that formerly labeled you as a loser—lack of social skills, lack of education, lack of a good future—converted to cool. You didn’t even have to wash regularly.

  Dex had lost count of the number of days they had been on the island. Northward of two months, he guessed, but he didn’t want to know. He had this idea of falling outside the confines of time, and avoiding the calendar and not wearing a watch were part of that plan. Loren was cool about not making them feel like they were on the meter. In fact, the as
tronomical charges that Dex got when he finally read the statements months later came as a kind of betrayal, showing just how unlaid-back the whole arrangement was in reality. The fine print stated categorically that “inclusive” included a two-bottle-per-day limit on alcohol, after which huge, nasty surcharges began to sprout up for such things as extra booze, as well as requests for special food or service outside of regular dining hours. Ditto for Cooked’s supply of pot, billed under miscellaneous.

  “Just charge the Visa when you need a bump,” Dex instructed, and boy did they.

  The six months before Dex arrived at the island had been a hell of touring town after town, or rather auditorium after auditorium, because after a while he didn’t bother finding out the names of the towns or even the states they were in. The band members, especially his lead guitarist, Robby, and he were fighting, arguing about the music, the schedule, the recording contract, even about the drug supply at each stop. They had turned from being the bad-boy conquistadors of rock into little old ladies bitching over the sandwiches at a bridge lunch. The only thing they did not argue about was the need to earn more money because the band had become its own animal and needed constant feeding.

  It was the first time in twenty-five years that it felt like a job.

  The usual high he got from playing had gone MIA. The songs tasted like leather in his mouth. As short of the true experience as jerking off was to making out with the love of his life, currently Wende. Or, rather, the pyrotechnics, the glitz and glam, the selling of CDs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and hats almost made the real-live musicians beside the point. Although they refused, their label would have preferred Prospero lip-synching for a more foolproof performance. The goal was to imitate the record instead of improvising and keeping the music alive and changing. It had become de rigueur for many bands. Generic, zombie boy bands were drawing bigger crowds with their fake, manufactured, forgettable sound. Dex swore before he stooped to Milli Vanilli–ing his music he’d quit. Attitudes such as this led to the perception among corporate that he had grown “difficult.”