See You in Paradise

by J. Robert Lennon

  The next day, everything was back to normal. Philip returned to the half-time, halfhearted work his firm now offered him, perhaps out of pity; Evangeline returned to the office. Months passed in much the same sort of stasis they used to, with the exception that, every once in a while, Evangeline assumed an expression of squinting intensity, as though she was looking at something very small and very far away. But he didn’t ask what she was thinking of. Once, while wheeling past the recently expanded bathroom, with its widened door, chrome support hardware, and disinfected-daily bathtub stool, he heard a small surprised sound escape his wife, a kind of chirp or hoot, which reverberated on the tile like a gunshot. It was repeated seconds later, longer this time, drawn-out, a coo. When she came out a couple of minutes later, smoothing her dress with her long fingers, she didn’t look any different.

  Her birthday was approaching. Philip trolled his usual internet haunts to find something for her that might result in some kind of reaction. Kitchen supplies, he thought—she uses them daily, and not without pleasure. At least he would get to see his gift in action, see it making her infinitesimally happier. He browsed a commercial kitchen retailer, noticed the chef’s hats, remembered their night out. Typed “Hibachi” into the search box. Hit enter.

  There it was! The Oiled Birch and Stainless Steel Professional Hibachi Kitchen Island and Accessory Kit, fourteen hundred dollars plus freight delivery. His finger hovered over the mouse button. Philip was no good at gifts—he usually bought Evangeline jewelry, because it was something that men were supposed to buy for women, though he had never seen her wear any of it, nor any other jewelry, either. It was months after giving her earrings that he noticed her ears weren’t pierced. Even the leather eyeglass case he had gotten her had gone unused; her glasses were only ever on her bedside table or her face.

  And so the accountant in him, which almost entirely filled his broken self, told him not to pull the trigger on the hibachi set. It was expensive and untested; its size would prevent Evangeline’s being able to pretend it didn’t exist. And if it was a mistake—surely, it was?—it would have to be rectified. And able-bodied Evangeline would be the one to whom this responsibility would fall.

  Nevertheless, he did it. He clicked that button, signed off on the exorbitant shipping charge, and let out a long, light-headed breath.

  The following week, a DHL truck pulled into the driveway and a slim, large-headed, babyish man with gangly, flopping arms hand-trucked several enormous cardboard cartons onto the front stoop. The man was sweating and panting and stared unabashedly at Philip’s strapped-down legs as he handed over the plump electronic signature tablet.

  While Philip signed his name, the man asked, “So what happened to you?”

  Being asked this was so unusual that Philip stared, briefly, in incomprehension before answering, “I got run over.”

  “You got somebody to unpack this for you, right?”

  “No,” Philip said, handing back the tablet.

  “What is it, like a grill?”

  “Sort of.”

  The guy stood there, nodding. It dawned on Philip that the man’s arm-flopping was actually a kind of tic. The unoccupied arm was twitching and flexing, the hand pale and dead-looking at its end. He couldn’t have been thirty, but his chin was underslung with loose flesh, which was misted over by a few days’ beard stubble, gray like a mold. He glanced at his watch.

  “Can you help me, maybe?” Philip asked him.

  “Whaa, with this?”

  “I can’t open it. I can’t even stand up.”

  The man looked at his watch again, and suddenly began to chew a nonexistent stick of gum. “Hunh,” he said. And then, unexpectedly, “Yeah hell sure.”

  No UPS driver would ever have even bothered stopping to chat, let alone open packages, but that’s what this guy did. He hung around for a good hour and a half, unboxing and assembling the hibachi set as Philip looked on in wonder. All the while he chewed his lack of gum (wasn’t this supposed to be the purview of very, very old men?) and maintained a steady stream of random chatter, touching upon barbecuing (good eatin’ but not worth the effort), neighbors (annoying), dogs (indispensable, but annoying), cats (not worth a shit), women (can’t live with ’em etc.), alcoholic beverages (a curve-ball here—“a real destroyer of families”), fathers (all bastards), and finally (via a story about his own father stealing the cushions off his neighbor’s porch furniture as a practical joke, and the neighbor calling the cops, and his father actually spending the night in jail) back to neighbors. And as it happened, both the man’s arms, though equally floppy, were entirely functional, brilliant in fact, assembling the hibachi in a blur of flesh and metal, while the instruction manual lay untouched on the counter.

  It was even more impressive in person than on the web site. It filled the kitchen like a car someone had parked there. The dully gleaming brushed-steel cooking surface, outlined by a grease channel and then by a six-inch expanse of waxed hardwood; the attached stainless accessory trays, with their cargo of squeeze bottles and seasoning shakers and cleaning and cooking implements; the galvanized tent overhead, suspended upon four sturdy posts, which housed the state-of-the-art whisper-quiet exhaust system, as efficacious at the displacement of air as (so said the manual) “a small aircraft engine”—all of it gave the impression of power, efficiency, professionalism. It looked like the real thing. Philip hoped to hell Evangeline liked it.

  To the DHL delivery man he offered his profound thanks and a fifty-dollar tip. The former was accepted, the latter refused. “Nah, nah, I could get in hot water over that.”

  “You won’t get in hot water for being two hours behind schedule?”

  A squint, a nod. “Yeh, that’s true,” he said, taking the fifty bucks. He turned to leave. “Yeh, so, sorry about the legs! Hope you get better.”

  “I won’t, I’m afraid.”

  This seemed to anger the man. “Hey. Miracles happen.” And he was gone.

  Philip wheeled himself across the house and into the kitchen. It was strange and slightly frightening, being alone with the hibachi—the thing seemed faintly, subtly alive, like a killer robot from space. He took stock of the transformed room: the gleaming refrigerator, humming in the corner; the oven and dishwasher; the coffeemaker and toaster and bread machine and all the other useful stuff he could only reach and operate with great and humiliating effort—they now seemed to be in collusion with the hibachi, in a concerted effort to make him feel very small and weak and soft. But he was thirsty, so he attempted to wheel himself carefully around the hibachi in order to reach the sink. There was perhaps half an inch of clearance on either side of his chair, and his knuckles aligned perfectly with the sharp flange of aluminum that supported the hibachi’s oaken rail. But then he had to avoid a cabinet knob on his left, overcompensated, and felt the skin flaying off two of his right knuckles. For crap’s sake. Well, he’d develop calluses. He finally reached the sink, where he filled a glass with water and left the tap running gently and pinkly over his bleeding hand.

  It was there that Evangeline found him. He hadn’t heard her footsteps, only the little gasp that escaped her as she entered the room. He turned off the water, wrapped a dish towel around his fingers, and backed out to sit beside her. Her hand fell to his shoulder. She was standing very straight and tall, gazing with preternatural alertness through her thick glasses, her eyes roaming over the hibachi, taking in its stunning alien solidity. “Oh,” she said. She stepped forward, ran her hands over the wood, the steel. She lifted each utensil out of its holder, opened the drawers, found the utility belt and hat. These she removed and put on, adjusting the belt around her waist, smoothing out her dress underneath it. She slipped the utensils—the long two-tined fork, the chef’s knife, the oil and teriyaki sauce—into the belt and let her hand travel over them, not quite touching, as though testing their aura.

  She looked very sexy. The belt accentuated her hips, and with her hair bundled underneath the ivory chimney of a hat, year
s had dropped from her face. Already tall, she now appeared, from his vantage point, to be some kind of giant, some impossible avenging force. She was smiling at him, a smile simultaneously of pity and gratitude, and he smiled back.

  “I hope you like it.”

  Her only response was a nod.

  “Happy birthday.”

  But already she was trying to figure out how to operate the thing, opening the double doors underneath and adjusting the valve on the propane tank. Philip tied the dishrag fast around his hand and wheeled out carefully, trying not to make any noise. He closed the kitchen door behind him and went to the living room to read.

  For much of a week he saw little of her. She went to work, returned from work, and headed straight for the kitchen, and from behind the closed door he heard all manner of scraping, clanking, hissing, and sizzling. The house smelled wonderful at six, when he was hungry, and the food she placed before him at the table was fresh and flavorful, every bit as good as what they’d eaten at the restaurant. But at ten, eleven, twelve midnight, burning onions were the last thing he wanted to be smelling, and he wished that she would shut the thing down and come to bed.

  When she finally did, however, his patience was rewarded—at least this is how he chose to see it—by a strange new phenomenon. She strode into the dark bedroom, shucked off her clothes, showered, and then crawled into bed beside him, naked. She had never used to sleep naked. Philip had, in fact, never been in bed with a woman who slept naked. In any event, her nakedness was, for three days, otherwise uneventful; but starting on the fourth she began, and there was no way around recognizing that this was what she was doing, masturbating. Not the furtive sort that an unsatisfied spouse might wish to keep from his or her mate: no, she levered herself against him, then reached down and touched herself, emitting into his ear noises of pleasure he had not heard from her for a long time, if ever.

  The first time she did this, he was simply shocked, and said and did nothing. He pretended, in fact, to sleep. But on the second, he hazarded a glance in her eyes, which were wide open and staring, and the two of them gazed at one another with great intensity for the three minutes the experience lasted. The next night they kissed, and the night after that she tried to get him going, too. She undressed him, touched him, kissed him, and though his blood quickened, his palms perspired the way they had before the accident, he could feel nothing where it mattered, and he wept.

  Somehow, though, it must have gratified her, because she persisted night after night, and slowly his humiliation drained away—part of it, anyhow—and he was able, at last, to enjoy this new intimacy, however limited, however unsatisfying it had to be. During this ritual, they never spoke, and they said nothing about it during the day, either, and it was like a secret between them, a secret not from the world outside, which they had never been open to anyway, but from each other, and from themselves. It was strange and, at least to Philip, not quite right. But life was much better with it than without.

  A couple of weeks after the hibachi arrived, Evangeline informed him that they were going to have a dinner party.

  “Why?” he couldn’t help asking.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of inviting Bob, Candace, Roy, and June. They’re coming here on Friday night.”

  For a moment, Philip thought, Who? Then he remembered their old acquaintances, and the question again turned to Why? The answer, for the moment anyway, did not reveal itself in Evangeline’s face. Her eyes blinked behind her thick smeary eyeglasses. Her smile could be described as beatific. She looked and sounded nothing like the woman he had come to know from their marriage bed. “There is nothing you need to do,” she went on, continuing to ignore his question, “other than enjoy the show.”

  “The show?”

  She patted his hand and went back to her book.

  On Friday, their guests arrived at the promised hour, simultaneously but in separate cars. Bob was a round man with a round face who nevertheless was considered handsome, and by and large was. He had thick hair without any gray and large, deep, newscaster eyes, which always focused just over Philip’s head. His voice was deep and his manner authoritative. His wife was taller than he was, but in contrast to Evangeline seemed frail and tentative, despite being the youngest among them. When confronted with any awkwardness, Candace had a tendency to turn her head to one side, squint, and quietly tsk. Roy and June, on the other hand, were quite similar in appearance and manner, stocky and loud. They liked to tell jokes, which they got off the internet. They slapped each other’s knees when amused, usually by the jokes they told. To their credit, they were the ones who had persisted the longest in visiting Philip during his recuperation, though in his presence they mostly talked with each other.

  Now these four were arrayed around the living room, holding glasses of wine and looking uncomfortable. “Please sit anywhere,” Philip had told them, and Roy had replied, “Except for your chair, right!” and roared with laughter. He and June were chuckling randomly and reassuring one another with pats on the leg, and Bob kept holding up his wineglass to the light. Every now and then Candace coughed, her mouth a thin flat line. Philip recalled all his previous evenings with these people, the hours of mild boredom and unintentional ostracization, and he wondered if he ever would have seen them again even if he’d never been injured. Probably not. It occurred to him, perhaps for the first time, that he didn’t actually like having friends. He liked to be alone. This is why he liked being an accountant—there was no greater pleasure than being alone with the numbers, putting them in order, making them add up. Actually, no—the only pleasure as great was Evangeline. She made him feel the same way: as though all was right with the world, as though everything added up. He wondered how she had persuaded their guests to come, after all this time. He wished she were here now, in this room with them.

  Where on earth was she?

  The kitchen door banged open. There she was: bent half over, in a ploughman’s stance, wheeling the hibachi before her. It was very large, too large to move really, and it gouged the wall and pushed an ottoman into an end table, setting the vased flowers upon it into a treacherous wobble.

  “Would you like help with that, my dear?” Bob asked her, rising to his full height, and Evangeline ignored him, and eventually he sat down again. The hibachi stood before them now, its exhaust tent forming a proscenium inside which she stood, white-apron’d and white-hatted, her gaze settling briefly upon each guest. She nodded, and everyone but Candace nodded back.

  From somewhere underneath the grill Evangeline produced five bamboo trays, five plates, and five sets of utensils wrapped in a napkin. The trays were affixed with wooden bracing that swung down to make a little table. Philip had no idea where they had come from. She distributed the trays, placed a plate upon each tray, a rolled napkin beside each plate.

  When she set Philip’s place, she winked.

  “Well, look at this!” June cried.

  “Perhaps,” Bob muttered, sounding uncertain, “we would be more comfortable at table?”

  “What’s this ‘at table’?” Roy said. “What language are you speaking, Bobert?” He guffawed. June guffawed.

  “It’s a common expression,” Bob replied.

  “A common expression is ‘put your money where your mouth is,’ or ‘you get what you pay for,’ not ‘at table’! ‘At table’!” Roy laughed, and June laughed, and soon they were both caught up in hysterics. Bob was leaning slightly forward, his brow furrowed, and Candace continued to cough. Philip again wondered why Evangeline had invited them over. He hoped it wasn’t for his sake.

  By now she had fired up the propane tank and was smearing oil over the surface of the grill. Roy and June were still giggling, but Bob had grown curious and leaned forward for a better view. Philip recalled, with a small shudder, the onlookers who had observed him lying there, broken on the pavement—long after 911 had been dialed, long after the reassuring words had been spoken, people just stood over him, staring at his ruined legs, twisted
underneath him, had watched his face contort in pain. On the edge of unconsciousness, he had lain there, thinking, For chrissake, you idiots! What in the hell are you standing there for? It wasn’t that he hated them for it, or that he even minded. What did it matter to him? All he wanted at the time was not to die. But he didn’t understand them. He didn’t understand people at all.

  Except Evangeline—he understood her, a little. He was so grateful to have her. He was so very much in love with her.

  For a minute there, he hadn’t been paying attention. But what she had done was to spin the egg on the cooking surface, just like the guy at the restaurant, and then toss it into the air, and catch it in the hollow of her hat. And, like the guy at the restaurant, she let it fall from there, and allowed her spatula to split it in two, and she caught the eggshell with one hand and scrambled the egg with the other, the very same way he had. And she grabbed from her caddy a canister of salt, and a canister of pepper, and tossed them from hand to hand, so that they tumbled in the air, spilling just the right amount of their cargo onto the egg, and Philip did not remember the restaurant chef even attempting to do that. And she brought out a bowl of steamed rice and fried it, and sprinkled on sesame seeds, and squirted on soy sauce and teriyaki, all with a balletic, nearly acrobatic, precision, and he realized that his wife had discovered something in herself she never knew was there—she had mastered her body.

  By now everyone was rapt, staring at Evangeline in awe and, quite possibly, admiration. She threw her spatula down on the surface, hard, at such an angle that it bounced up, flipped over once, then again, and tucked itself neatly into her apron belt, which she had been holding open with her fingers to admit it. Again, Philip had not seen this trick at the restaurant, and he joined in their guests’ shocked applause.

  Now she brought out the onion half. Philip knew what was coming, he had seen it already, but he couldn’t help grinning at the prospect of watching Evangeline do it. She balanced the onion half on its edge, launched the butcher knife from her belt, spun it in the air before her, and brought it down on the onion once, twice, three, four times. She hollowed each ring with the knifetip, flicking the inner layers onto the rice pile, and she stacked the shell into a dome, with a tiny hole on top. She sheathed the knife, reached behind her for the oil, and squeezed it into the onion half. And then, with a motion so swift and subtle it was hard to be certain it had happened, she pulled a wooden match from a pocket, scraped it against the exhaust hood, and set the onion alight.