The Last Good Paradise: A Novel Read online

  The audiences, disappointingly, did not seem to register the empty, hollowed sound in the music. They were enthusiastic as always. Grooving. In almost all ways, they were the best part of the concerts. Even when Dex insisted on throwing in a few blues pieces—moody fuckers—fans tasted it, then howled and begged for more. Maybe the change was just in his mind. So he compensated with the drugs, which left him totally strung out by the time they came off the road. The band members scattered in different directions immediately like opposing politicians who had been forced together for a photo op.

  * * *

  Wende and Ann had taken off in the boat for a shopping trip in town with Cooked, so Dex was alone for the first time in months. He didn’t like being alone, but today it was half okay because he was still riding high from the day before. He lit up his morning budski. He was proud of going cold turkey from the heavy drugs on arrival, and sweet Wende had nursed him through that ugly first week. Now he was on a rigorous regimen of alcohol and weed only, and he felt like a million bucks. Frisky as a teenager, and the song ideas had started coming again. He had not written a new piece in ten months, and he was in fear that he had gone dry, but no, he had simply abused the muse. Some roadie had given him a book of Buddhist teachings, and he had read it—proof he was going soft in the head, but it had forced him to see the error of his ways.

  Yesterday in the boat, while Richard and Wende went off to check out birds, Dex had heard a whole damn song delivered entire in his head. A gift. It made him feel drunk, bottled up with magic, and he was in some artistic fugue state when he fell overboard. When he came to, he looked up into Richard’s eyes overjoyed that he hadn’t lost the song. Dex hardly talked on the trip back, scared that it would leak out of him. Without a word to anyone, he jumped out of the boat and ran to his fare, slamming the door behind him, and grabbed a pen and paper. For the next couple of hours, he was in heaven. The lyrics flowed in his ear, and he wrote like a possessed vodoun priest because one misplaced word and the whole shimmering house of cards would come crashing down. Then he grabbed his guitar and notated the riffs, the change-ups, not entirely but enough so that there was the skeleton of a song.

  As he had with his former addictions, Dex now craved a phone for the first time since they had been on the island so he could play it for Robby. A peace offering. More than that, a golden egg because the band had had enough hits that Dex could smell one, and this was a winner. The lodestone to anchor a new album. He felt spent, expansive, like after the best sex, a high beyond where any drug could take you. Drugs weren’t for the music; they were for getting through the periods without the music. And yet …

  Was creation just another addiction? Didn’t the Buddhist stuff talk about the illusion of all worldly success? Which turned out to be especially true once the band finished paying the label back their advances; gave another cut to their business manager, their producer; took care of rehab expenses (nonrecoupable), houses, wives, kids, mistresses, and shrinks. At forty-plus years old (he was as cagey about his age as some long-in-the-tooth soap-opera actress), hadn’t he been there, done that? Illusion, no shit. He had a deep suspicion of himself—that this detoxing, dropping off the grid, the monogamy with Wende was really just about process, like that of a boxer in training. Was it possible that all Dex really wanted was a new hit single? How could he prove to himself the purity of his intentions?

  He didn’t even want to go there with the fact that, besides Wende’s most excellent boobs, what really turned him on was her most excellent ear. Untrained, she could pick out a particularly sweet riff in a sea of demos. She intuited the real players from the pretenders. It didn’t hurt that she also fell into their most important demographic. After six marriages, two to the same woman, Dex swore that he had finally found his soul mate.

  * * *

  With Ann’s suit gone, she had borrowed one of Wende’s bikinis. Richard’s eyes narrowed as he watched her walk across the sand and into Cooked’s waiting craft for the trip to town. She skipped her usual sunblock and instead greased herself up with Wende’s monoi oil. The men had not been invited and would stay behind.

  Outcast, Dex and Richard stood on the beach, waving to the women as they sped off across the lagoon. Richard thought he saw Cooked place his hand on the small of Wende’s bare back, but he said nothing. Titi moaned and returned to the kitchen.

  In the small tourist trap of a town, Wende led Ann to a tattoo parlor and convinced the sullen staff to let her work on her friend. The owners were unsmiling, but not nearly as unsmiling as Ann. Wende gave Cooked a hundred and told him to get beers for everyone, and the mood lightened.

  “I’ll make sure all the sterilization procedures are done,” Wende whispered.

  “You should be a diplomatic envoy … someplace that needs it, like the Middle East. Your talents are wasted here.”

  “I’m a semi orphan,” Wende said. “I’ve learned to be resourceful.”

  “You said you had a mom.”

  “I do. She was living on a commune when she met my dad. She never really got over being a hippie. We kind of self-raised. Then dad froze to death in his car. David Copperfield kind of stuff.” Wende swabbed down the needles with alcohol. “Where do you want it?”

  “On my shoulder?” Ann asked.

  It had seemed a good idea the night before when they all got drunk celebrating Dex’s new song, but now she wished she hadn’t agreed to it.

  “I know just where. And what. Trust me.”

  As Wende worked on the inside, tenderest part of Ann’s thigh, Cooked joked with the workers who stood watching and drinking beer. He regularly stole looks at Wende. After what seemed like hours, Ann couldn’t stand the pain any longer. “Enough! We’ll finish it later.” She looked down and saw the front half of a shark—looking either as if it were cresting out of the water or as if it had been bitten in half. When it was done, it would appear to be circling around and around her thigh.

  “What do you think?” Wende asked.

  A slow smile spread on Ann’s face. “I’m not the kind of woman who does this.”

  “Maybe now you’ll have to become her.”

  “It burns.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go have a drink.”

  Wende and Cooked exchanged looks. “Cooked wants to take me on a tour for a couple of hours.”

  * * *

  Along the main street of the place, Ann found a shabby café with outdoor tables, and she rested in a chair, nursing her stinging thigh by drinking down a carafe of house white. It had not occurred to her to find a phone or computer to contact anyone. Only when she read over the care brochure from the tattoo parlor, which clearly read Do not drink alcohol during or immediately after, did she begin to feel paranoid. When had she become this reckless woman?

  In front of her was the turquoise lagoon. Across the street between two low-slung buildings, the violet pounding ocean. Could such cutting beauty become mundane? The locals passed through it with hardly a glance. What was it that Loren found here all those years ago? Perhaps as easy an answer as that it was the furthest thing he could imagine from his former life.

  Without Richard the beauty of the place would crush her.

  She knew his little infatuation with Wende had ended, but what if it hadn’t? She was too mature to say that she couldn’t live without him, but life without him would lose its flavor. Why was it that while separated she felt her love most clearly? He was her pain au chocolat.

  On the beach, fishermen stretched their nets, knotted tears, shouting back and forth to one another, laughing so much that the progress regularly came to a stop. A man paddled a pirogue, the brown curved hull cutting through the pale green water like a blade. A woman, draped in a coral muumuu, walked down the sidewalk, stopped, and clucked to a scabby, nut-colored dog trailing behind her. The scene could be a painting by Gauguin.

  Ann felt a pang of remorse that she was not brave enough to leave everything behind as the great artist had. Would he hav
e been as great if he had stayed in Paris? His life was mythologized because it was such a hard thing to do. Wasn’t Gauguin’s renunciation of everything what finally had allowed him to paint as he had? In Paris he had been a stockbroker—almost as bad as being a lawyer. Easier that he was in a loveless marriage. She still loved Richard, but was love enough? Gauguin left behind five children. He took up with a fifteen-year-old Tahitian girl and had four more. He painted a paradise that was more fantasy than reality. Fantasy for all the poor saps back home not brave enough to make the leap. He was a selfish bastard and a genius. Ditto Picasso, Pollock. Women didn’t act like that. How much damage was Ann willing to wreak on those around her? How dare she—lowly associate at FFGBBP—think she could ever remake her life at this late date?

  * * *

  The summer before law school started, Ann’s mother insisted on going to Paris before chemo. Her father opposed the idea. He pleaded a heavy workload, but then he always pleaded a heavy workload. The one time her parents had gone to France had been a disaster, and Ann suspected that was his real reason. Usually, if he traveled at all, it was on educational/cultural tours arranged through his alma mater. Trips that were an endless round of lectures, museums, and hard drinking with alums. Kind of like being back in the frat house. Ideally, he liked spending the entire time speaking English, minimizing his contact with local people. Her mother hated these trips and refused to go. Her idea of travel was to wander, to get lost, to talk to strangers, to live life spontaneously, every last thing her father disliked.

  So Ann and her mother went without him.

  August in Paris was hot and dusty; the city abandoned by locals. Her mother took her to all the sights she remembered from her first trip, places discovered while alone—walking along the Seine, stopping along bridges, the Promenade Plantée, the Tuileries. They ate at romantic restaurants at ten at night, a dining time her father would have found scandalous, and finished entire bottles of wine.

  On their last full day, instead of sleeping in, her mother went out to have her hair done. She returned carrying a new dress in a plastic sleeve. She had been eyeing it at a nearby boutique all week long but only now had made a decision. It was cotton, sleeveless, a frivolous deep red that she would usually deem impractical. By the time Ann had showered, her mother had put makeup on for the first time during the trip. She wore heels and perfume.

  “What’s going on?” Ann asked.

  “We’re going to visit a friend.”

  This was news because they knew no one in Paris. It was half an hour by Metro across the city. They took a cab to a nondescript, middle-class neighborhood. The cab stopped at an old square with an oversize fountain in the center. A movie theater anchored one side, a Gothic church the other. Restaurants crowded the sidewalks with outdoor tables shaded by umbrellas.

  Ann’s mother stood unsure.

  “Is this the right place?” Ann asked.

  “Joanna!” a man’s voice called out.

  His name was Marc. He had been an exchange student and had befriended her mother in college. Later Ann would try to recall his features—silver hair, aquiline nose—but could not. It wasn’t that he was unattractive. His features were transformed as he looked at her mother, and that was only the half of it.

  Before her eyes, this mother that she swore she knew everything about turned unrecognizable. The tightness, the tentativeness, the somberness dropped away. The woman who took Marc’s arm was relaxed. She glowed.

  One of the restaurants was his, and he seated them at a table by the fountain. Waiters brought a bottle of champagne, and Joanna, who never drank in the daytime, toasted.

  The day passed like an alternate reality, another life her mother could have lived instead. Marc had his car brought, and he drove them to his house in the country for lunch. The car was a convertible, and Ann scrambled into the tiny backseat while her mother tied a scarf over her hair. As they drove out of the city, the open fields and rolling hills eased the scary constriction Ann had been feeling. For the first time she acknowledged fear over her mother’s illness. Up front, Joanna looked like a ’50s movie star, oversize sunglasses and head flung back to let the sun warm her face. Even though Ann was an adult, she felt every child’s dismay at the evidence of her mother having had a life, and apparently a lover, before Ann existed.

  The old stone farmhouse was at the end of a lane in a small village. When they got out of the car, people surrounded them: Marc’s three grown children, two daughters and a son, their spouses, and a handful of grandchildren. It was the birthday of one of the grandchildren, and neighbors had come to celebrate. Ann helped the oldest daughter carry food outside from the kitchen while Marc led Joanna around the property.

  “He was so excited about her visit,” the daughter said. She had a dark beauty that Ann guessed was the mother’s. The elegant dress she wore was protected only by an apron.

  “So was she,” Ann said, although of course her mother had told her nothing about it.

  “He told me Joanna was his first love. Before he met our mother.”

  “Is she here?”

  “She passed away. It’s been hard on him, so this visit is good.”

  Lunch was served under the trees at a long wooden table. The children sat on blankets scattered across the lawn. Marc sat with Joanna beside him at the head of the table. From where Ann sat, she would have sworn they were a couple, had always been together; they fit each other so naturally. She had never seen her mother like this, had never before seen her in love. Compared with this table, their life back home paled.

  As each dish was passed, Marc put a spoonful on Joanna’s plate and then served himself. He carefully arranged a bit of cheese and a fig and fed it to her. Ann’s eyes stung. Her father would never have thought of doing such a thing.

  When they returned to their hotel that night, Ann questioned her: “Why did you never mention him?”

  “He was the first man I fell in love with. You don’t talk to your children about that if he’s not their father. How could I uproot my life and live in France? He went home and married. Later I met your father—”

  “But you knew the difference.”

  “Who I loved. Every person we love changes us.”

  * * *

  Wende was nowhere in sight, and Ann’s thigh stung. The waiter was eyeing her for occupying the table so long. To hell with it—she ordered more wine and a sandwich to go with it.

  The thought of returning to her windowless office—reward for being promoted from junior to senior associate—filled her with despair. Hadn’t Napoleon bragged he could make grown men die for little bits of ribbon? She had spent years of her life to win those cubic feet of gloomy office space with the mushroomy-smelling ventilation system blowing down on her head. On her cluttered desk, Mrs. Peters’s hammered-silver monogrammed cocktail shaker in pink leather was waiting to be taken home to join a cabinet full of similarly expensive useless gifts, which the firm regularly doled out at holidays and birthdays and which clients gave in gratitude: designer nut trays, monogrammed silver ice tongs, crystal jam pots, expensive scented candles in their own Italian terra-cotta jars. The kind of uselessly lavish things that one immediately thought of regifting. Ann took a big sip of wine.

  Richard was moping at being left behind back at the resort. Was she taking out her anger on him? They could not keep going on this way. At the very least, they would burn through all of their money. Eventually they would have to either go forward or go back; one couldn’t tread water forever.

  * * *

  Richard was sweating.

  The day was hotter than previous ones—the air heavy with rain, although the sky was immaculately cloudless. The women had deserted. Ann had been distracted and distant when she left that morning. From long years of marriage he recognized that dormant-volcano quality she had when about to make a declaration, and he dreaded the inevitable explosion. He needed to talk, to hold hands, to cuddle, and yet on this empty island the only time they spent toge
ther was at night in bed, and so far every night Ann had turned her granite back to him and slept like the dead. What was she so tired from anyway?

  Loren, his rival, scowled when he invited him to a game of chess. Alone, Richard drank a morning beer and sat down to read, but the slapping of the waves against shore, the boom of the reef beyond, the floodlight glare of the sun on the white sand beach made it impossible to concentrate.

  Above a clump of palms, tiny puffs of smoke appeared. Gratefully, Richard threw down his book to go investigate, thinking maybe Titi was preparing one of those Polynesian earth ovens he always wondered about. As he rounded the shoreline, the sight in front of him stopped him in his tracks.

  Dex sat cross-legged in front of a large bonfire. In the blazing daylight, the fire appeared fake, like pretend flames in a stage play, harmless and funny. Tears tracked down Dex’s pocked, sharp cheeks as he swayed back and forth, chanting something. Listening more closely, Richard decided he was singing—maybe the new song from the night before?—although he couldn’t be sure. His first instinct was to retreat, but his overriding second one, honed by years in the Scouts up to the level of Eagle Scout, was to help. He was fairly fluent in crazy due to Javi and knew the best offense often was none at all.

  He strolled at a leisurely pace up to the fire and flopped down on the sand. It was too disconcerting to look at Dex’s face, twisted in agony—bad drug trip?—so instead Richard stared at the flames, their orange tongues leeched of threat under the pounding sun.