The Last Good Paradise: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  * * *

  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.

  But salvation finds us wherever we are hiding.

  Back in Stockton, new neighbors moved in across the street: a professor at the local college with his FRENCH! wife, Chloe, and their son, Claude, who was the same age as Richard. Richard’s first meals over at their house, as Claude’s new best friend, were remembered more fiercely, were more formative, than his first sexual experiences: melted Brie on a toasted baguette with fresh arugula on top, for dessert meringue over a plain vanilla custard. The first time he tasted Chloe’s baked zucchini—topped only with extra virgin olive oil, fleur de sel, pepper, lemon juice, and Parmigiano-Reggiano—he felt the force of religious conversion. The transubstantiation of simple ingredients into divine, gourmet manna convinced him that there was more to life than he had previously guessed. He went home, walked into the pantry, and threw out his mother’s green can of Kraft Parmesan Cheese.

  Chloe was much ahead of her time in the ’70s, searching out local farms and backyard enthusiasts to purchase produce directly, a precursor to the ubiquitous farmers’ markets of today. Richard went with her and learned to buy only fresh brown eggs; to hunt out heirloom varieties of lettuce such as Red Deer Tongue, Bronze Mignonette, and Black-seeded Simpson; to smell tomatoes and cantaloupes for their sugar level. He never looked back, and long after he had lost touch with Claude, Richard and Chloe continued to exchange recipes and food gossip. She was the proudest person at his graduation from culinary school. Unfortunately, she was also the person responsible for his meat aversion.

  Chloe, like all dedicated gourmands, insisted on close contact with her food at its source. It was one thing to get vegetables at the farmers’ markets, or even search out eggs and milk at nearby farms; it was an entirely different thing to go to an old-fashioned butcher. Richard, middle-class, sheltered teenager, had never thought of beef, chicken, and pork past the fact that they came in neat little sanitized packages of Styrofoam and cellophane. At the worst, there was the absorbent pad underneath that would be pinkish when you lifted up the meat, giving off a sour whiff of mortality, but that could be quickly buried away in the garbage. Chloe had wanted special parts not availa
ble at S-mart, and so she researched and found a local butcher operation.

  As they walked through the door—Chloe in her bulky, lumberjack hiking boots that she wore bare-legged with shorts decades before it became fashionable—Richard broke out in a sweat. The chilled air had a heavy mineral smell of blood. Oblivious, Chloe went to the case and began to talk with the owner about offal, oxtails, baby lamb, and the possibility of French cuts such as roti, cotelettes, jambon, jarret. She was excited as they were ushered to the back, a warehouse filled with wooden tables and a sawdust floor. The walk-in meat locker had the expected upside-down carcasses of cows and pigs, but also the grayish body of a dog-sized baby lamb. Richard looked at its head, saw the curled-back lips revealing teeth the size of corn kernels. He felt dizzy and concentrated on not upchucking in front of the skinny man with the mitt-sized hands. Butcher’s hands.

  Suddenly he hated Chloe for her casual cruelty, her toned, pale legs that disappeared into the netherworld of her faded denim shorts. A pig carcass had been hauled in and set down on the table. A bone saw lay next to it, with a disembodied swine’s head, which, to Richard’s horror, Chloe had ordered to make fromage de tête. He ran out of the place, bawling like a little kid. They drove home in silence, Chloe chewing on her lower lip, her paper-wrapped plunder hidden in a liquor box in the trunk.

  At Culinary Institute, talented but plodding Richard almost immediately fell into the orbit of Javi of the mercurial temper, whose dishes vacillated between sublime and inedible. Javi had satyric dark good looks, and didn’t wash often enough, but women lined up. Teenagers, middle-aged housewives, wealthy tightened socialites, all were after him. When Richard confided to Javi his dad hadn’t been thrilled to find out his only son wanted to be a cook, Javi laughed.

  “Your pop’s a philistine. Cook, my ass! We are food artists!”

  Richard knew, however preposterous it sounded, it was also true—nothing could describe that first zucchini experience except art. Chloe had led him to his vocation, but Javi sealed the deal. Ann had understood his passion intuitively from their first date. But now time had done its dirty work to them all.

  * * *

  The boat slammed down hard on a wave, almost pitching Richard overboard. Loren drank from a bottle of cognac and offered it around. Ann prissily declined and was shocked when Richard nodded. Loren dug out a new bottle, handing it back. “What made you choose my resort?”

  Richard shifted, turning his back to Ann’s sullenness. He knew that embracing this experience was the right thing simply for the fact that his eye twitch had stopped. “A friend gave us your brochure. Eve Capshaw.”

  “Evie.” Loren nodded. “A crazy one. She and her boyfriend, Eduardo, fought like animals. Everyone heard. Then they made love. Then fought. They exhausted us.”

  Richard blushed. “Eve’s husband’s name is Guy.”

  “My mistake,” Loren said. “I must have the wrong Eve.”

  Loren gave a lewd wink to Ann that she ignored.

  “The travel website said your place was the most remote,” she said.

  “Ah, so you two can feel the fire of romance?”

  Neither Ann nor Richard uttered a word.

  “We attract a quixotic clientele,” Loren said, leaning back and steering only with his fingertips. “Only people with special reasons come this far. You are surprised I use such a word? From Don Quixote, the knight who tilted at windmills, thinking they were giants. There is much time to read here.”

  “My favorite book in the world is Robinson Crusoe,” Ann said.

  “You never told me that.” Richard turned back to look at her.

  “You never asked.”

  * * *

  By the time they reached the motu, they were more than ready for solid ground. Loren cut the engine, but the noise still drummed in Ann’s ears, deafening her. They climbed out and waded, knee-deep, to shore. A sturdy young Polynesian woman waited, holding two flower leis, which she held out to them with a small bow.

  “Maeva,” she said. “Welcome.”

  She lifted a tray of pinkish fruit juice. She had the broad, square face and black eyes of a Gauguin figure.

  Ann felt like she had stepped into a painting. She bent and kissed the girl’s cheek.

  Loren took a sip from a glass of the juice and grimaced. “Oh, cut the crap, Titi. These people are cool. Put rum in it.”

  Titi’s face turned dark as she stalked away. As was fast becoming habit, Richard helped unpack supplies and ferried them to the kitchen while Ann, crestfallen, stood looking at the place: the ring of white sand beach, gently rising ground that led to a pate of coconut trees in the center; six fares and the main communal kitchen and dining area. Exactly what the brochure showed, but the reality disappointed nonetheless. In her desperation she had entered a kind of magical thinking where place would take care of situation, but this place, so free of distraction, seemed to threaten the opposite.

  Under a palm tree sat a bearded man reading a book. Next to him, under an umbrella, a woman knitted. They both looked up at the new arrivals, but when Ann lifted her hand in greeting, neither waved back.

  “I’m thirsty,” she said.

  “Titi!” Loren yelled, clapping his hands. “Where the hell are you?”

  * * *

  In the kitchen, Titi stood over the tray of guava juice, fuming. The juice, icy cold when she’d poured it, was lukewarm already. What to do? Dump it out and pour more? She couldn’t waste like that with Loren’s penny-pinching. Should she drop ice cubes in and dilute it? Loren was getting worse about tanking up the guests right away, trying to keep them high and happy, which translated to less work for him. Cooked’s plan was to multiply that to give Loren a scare. She had decided to ignore Cooked, but Loren was pushing her to her limit. Maybe he deserved scaring.

  Titi wondered again for the umpteenth time if Cooked was right. She didn’t feel particularly oppressed, she earned good money compared with her cousins in Tahiti, but still she resented the easy, careless lives of these tourists, resented Loren’s loafing and lechery, leaving all the work to her and Cooked while he holed up in his shack. None of their family could ever afford to vacation there, and that seemed wrong.

  She pondered the brown bottle on the shelf. Local moonshine that should knock the new guests off their feet for days, although when she had used it on Dex and Wende they had asked for a refill. Cooked said it was long past time to start making trouble. Trouble was what probably had got his brother in jail so long. Titi used Teina as a cautionary tale to keep Cooked in line. She poured all the juice into an ice-packed cocktail shaker, then held the brown bottle over the frosty canister, lost in indecision, when she again heard Loren’s sour yell for her. She was just about to pour when she heard him tell the new guests of her family’s claim to fame: Titi’s mother, Faufau, had been one of the great beauties of the islands, descended from royalty. Her grandmother had greeted Thor Heyerdahl when he landed on the shores of Raroia on the Kon-Tiki.

  A few years before, Titi had been paid by a publicist to be on the same beach when the explorer’s grandson Olav re-created his grandfather’s expedition sixty years later. Hearing the story always pleased her, but she still would have poured if the new lady guest hadn’t kissed Titi’s cheek when she held out the lei. The lei stuff was Hawaiian tradition, started up for tourism, but since Loren insisted, what the hell? But the kiss had touched her. This lady didn’t deserve to drugged, with a wicked hangover to boot, for Loren’s crimes.

  Titi had bigger concerns. Cooked was on his way to big trouble. He lectured her on how the islands were like the children of France—the neglected stepchildren—much like the two of them were the neglected children of Loren. Loren had won the islet in a poker game from an old Frenchman long dead, while Titi’s family had grown up, made love, married and had children, worked and died on these islands, generation after generation slowly forced to sell off their family lands to survive the rising costs brought by these foreigners. On top of that, there wa
s Moruroa, the leaking of radioactive poison into the waters. Cooked’s involvement in protests put him on a police list of troublemakers.

  Like a fist, she, too, felt the pressure to fight. Newly resolute, she was about to tip the bottle into the shaker when Cooked whistled through the window to her. When she looked up into his face, she could tell he was amorous. He had placed a hibiscus flower behind his ear to lure her. It would be a full afternoon of lovemaking, and she didn’t want to risk sick guests interfering with that. She stuffed the cork into the brown bottle and put it back on its shelf, splashed some of Loren’s expensive dark rum into the shaker, swizzling with her index finger and licking off the drops as she poured. She winked at Cooked. Revolution could wait another day.

  * * *

  After they toasted their arrival, Loren, Richard, and Ann, still clutching her tote, made their way to a thatch bungalow, what they called a fare on the islands.

  “List of amenities—sun, ocean, sand. No electricity. No refrigerator, no phones, no computers, no WiFi, no radios. No exceptions, don’t ask. Welcome to paradise.”

  Loren plopped Richard’s light backpack down on the teak wraparound lanai and tucked his hands against his lower back, as if the minute-long walk had strained him. “You’re in luck,” he said. “Only two other couples here. Automatic upgrade to the Royal Kahuna Suite. Everyone else canceled.”

  “Why is that?” Richard asked as Ann pushed past him and walked into the room, pleased with the open-air lava rock shower, the grass-bottomed plunge pool with flowers floating on top. So this was what white-collar exile looked like.

  “They predict a few raindrops.” Loren looked up to the spotless sky and shrugged. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s better this way … too much trouble. Let the damned tourists stay in Papeete and go shopping.”