by Tatjana Soli
“We’re tourists,” Richard said.
“That reminds me. The main resort got a delivery from the airport.” He brought out a battered FedEx envelope from his canvas bag. “This cost a small fortune to get here. It must be important.”
Richard and Ann stood back as if the thing might bite. Finally, she took it and ripped it open the way one ripped off a Band-Aid, fast, to cause the least pain. It was an expensive Iridium sat-phone, like those used in documentaries about climbing Everest, where mountaineers conveyed heartfelt final words in a tent in a blizzard on the vertical face of the southeast ascent. She turned it on and saw 278 missed calls from Javi. She turned it off and for good measure threw it in the plunge pool.
Loren raised his eyebrows.
“We came here for an unplugged retreat. We do not want to be connected.”
“Then you are in the right place after all.”
As they stood on the lanai, Richard wondering if Loren was waiting for a tip, they could see a couple snorkeling in the lagoon. They surfaced, took off their masks, and kissed. Not just a peck but a deep, long, breath-stealing suck that made the watchers on the lanai suddenly feel like voyeurs. The two cavorted in the water like a pair of lusty porpoises, and then, with a scream, the girl swam like crazy for the beach. The man chased after her. Ann felt a cold sweat break out under her arms, remembering the dark throb of the shape beneath her in the lagoon at the hotel. How appropriate that her vacation began with her witnessing a shark attack.
When the girl reached the beach, she tumbled, laughing. She was tanned, topless (this was a French protectorate, after all), her breasts perfectly round like plastic fruit, powdered in sand. The man rolled over her. Her thong was like a piece of blue ribboned floss between her buttocks. Loren and Richard stared, dry-mouthed.
“Loren!” the girl yelled, revealing a high-pitched, girlish voice and the fact that they had known they were being watched, had in fact been performing for their audience. “You should have seen the sharks following your boat! It was crazy!”
“It’s always that way,” Loren yelled back. “They wait and hope for the pretty girls to fall in.”
“Amazing,” Richard whispered.
“What?” Ann said.
“Nothing.”
“Then they take a big, juicy bite,” Loren said.
The man standing beside the girl was tall, skinny, and cadaverously pale, spider-webbed with tattoos over his arms and legs.
“That’s Dex Cooper. A rock singer. Too much trouble. And that’s his naked little friend.”
“Dex Cooper?” Ann had never chronicled for Richard the infamous noninterlude with Dex.
* * *
Alone in the bungalow, Ann struggled to find a satisfactory hiding place for the money bag. The room was a simple thatch box, with a canopied bed, an armoire of rattan, and a wicker table and chairs. Everything open, no locks on the doors or windows, so that she despaired of hiding it and considered digging a hole outside. Did they have wild animals there? Boars, monkeys?
Richard pointed out that the water table was so high it might soak the money. “Carl said that’s why they can’t bury bodies on atolls,” he said.
“Who’s Carl?”
“The pilot. Traditionally they either burned bodies on raised pyres, sent them out to sea, or ate them.”
“Thanks.”
“We could ask if there’s a safety-deposit box.”
“Why didn’t I think of that? Do you think he has a dozen? Do you think it would look suspicious?”
In a panic she stashed the bag on top of one of the overhead beams, gambling on the unlikeliness of the location, while Richard unpacked and wiped down all the surfaces with his antibacterial sheets. Later Titi congratulated her for using the typical native storage system—slinging a rope over a rafter and hoisting a bag overhead. Ann decided the motu was small enough that, statistically, the thief would be found out. But what about the risk of rain, wind, insects, and who knew what else? There was always the unforeseen lurking. What if she and Richard drowned or got eaten by sharks? What if they were killed for the money, their bodies disposed of in any of the myriad ways Richard had just described? What then?
“You’re being paranoid. We haven’t done your hormone shots for days,” Richard said.
“I threw them away.” On the last night in Los Angeles, she had stood in her bathroom with the package of syringes and ampoules and thought, no more. One could only endure so much, and she needed to feel like herself again. Maybe she would start over when they returned home. Or maybe she wouldn’t.
Although Richard wouldn’t dare show it, he was relieved. Giving the shots had been oppressive, and enduring Ann’s moods even more difficult. “So now what?”
“I haven’t gotten that far,” she answered.
* * *
At sunset the group was called to the beach for the shark feeding. Not knowing the ritual, Ann peeked outside as Cooked blasted away on a conch. On the right side of his bare chest, a descending series of triangles were tattooed from shoulder to waist, continuing on under his only clothing, a loosely wrapped pareu. He looked like a travel brochure. In fact, a year before, Cooked had been paid to do an ad for a local soda, and his likeness on posters over all the islands caused a flood of fan mail and a big boost of orange soda sales. Titi had torn the fan letters up.
He waved at Ann. When Richard and she reluctantly made their way to the beach, Loren invited everyone into the water, then went to the kitchen for the feed. The bearded man and the knitting woman were nowhere in sight. Only Richard and Dex stepped forward, shaking hands as they stood waist deep in water. The girl had put on a bikini top so skimpy that it seemed more an accessory to her nakedness than a cover. A wrap clung around her hips. A belly button ring with a pendant spelled out WILD in diamonds.
“Hi, I’m Wende,” she said. “With an ‘e.’”
“Ah,” said Ann. “Yes, you are.”
“Oh my God,” Richard screamed. “Something’s bit me!”
Dex bent down and looked through his mask. “It’s just a gray saying hi. He bumped his nose against you.”
Ann looked away, embarrassed for her husband. Standing beside Dex, it was hard not to make unflattering comparisons. Dex had that uncanny rocker juxtaposition of not being physically handsome and yet being achingly sexy. No, it was more than that. His fame overwhelmed the reality of him. One had to concentrate hard either on who was in front of you or what you knew about him. Putting the two together was as head-splitting as wearing 3-D glasses.
“Please, Ann, Windy, go in,” Loren yelled from the kitchen.
“He refuses to get my name right,” Wende whispered.
“What if a shark attacks?” Ann asked.
Loren picked up a rifle from behind the kitchen door and waved it. “Boom, boom. Dinner.”
Ann frowned. If she feigned sickness, would they be entitled to a refund? Maybe they could still go on to New Zealand or Thailand.
“I thought Polynesia was all about peace and love,” Wende said.
Ann nodded in sympathy. “Looks can be deceiving. What about Cook, Crusoe, cannibalism?”
The men put on snorkeling masks and waded out into chest-high water, then squatted down. Again, Loren high-stepped like a comical bird straight into the water as he had at the hotel pool, this time holding a basket of fish remains. Ann saw this was his shtick, how he entertained people. The blade of a black fin rose and then submerged along the surface of the water. She closed her eyes.
“I’m glad another woman is here,” Wende said. “All this macho crap.” She thumbed the lagoon, the sharks.
“What about the other couple?”
Wende frowned and shook her head. “Nonstarters.”
Dex’s band had been big when Ann was in high school in the early ’90s. They had plateaued by the time Lorna and she had found him drunk at the Troubadour. Wende didn’t look a day over twenty. It must have been lonely to be stuck there with the geriatric crowd. Not tha
t Richard and she were in vacation mode.
“I was in Prospero’s last video, ‘Buy My Freedom,’” Wende said. As if that would clear Ann’s puzzled expression. “I’m his muse.”
Ann laughed out loud. “That seems a very old-fashioned word.”
“Did I use it wrong?”
“It’s the perfect word.”
“It really just means we get drunk, stoned, and have sex. Then Dex works all night. I don’t do anything. Pilates, yoga, swim. I guess that’s what a muse does.”
“You’re young. You’ll grow out of it.” Indeed, being Dex’s groupie was exactly what Ann could have done that night at the Troubadour, and if she had had a child from that union, Wende could conceivably have been the product, give or take a few years. All the girl had to do now was finish college and go on to grad school, work herself to death for the next decade, and then lose the fruits of that labor to an unscrupulous ex-lover/business partner, and then she could be said to have outgrown it like Ann. The self-pity was welling up in her; she forced it back down.
During the time they were crazy about each other, Ann and Richard had wanted to travel, but, deciding to be responsible, they had moved that goal off into the future. Like a mirage, it had remained always just beyond their reach. Now it was too easy to imagine washing up on the shores of fifty or sixty—tired, worn out, indifferent, having fulfilled none of their dreams. Maybe being a muse was as good a thing to be as anything else.
The water in front of them suddenly exploded. Richard bobbed up like a rocket.
“That was amazing!”
Loren looked pleased.
“Ann, did you see that?” Richard yelled.
“I didn’t see anything. It happened underwater.”
But that was not the entire truth. She had seen the fin and later the surface bubbling with motion. Richard was down there, his helpless white, flabby body as bait, but what could she do to prevent the steamrolling of fate? So she faked nonchalance.
“You could at least pretend to take an interest.” Richard sulked.
* * *
After dark, the absence of electricity shrank the island to the size of the dining area. Loren sat at the head of the table and entertained, keeping the party lively. He drank copiously but picked at the food. During dinner, the bearded man, who Loren hinted was a quasi-famous writer, said nothing, simply studied them through his thick glasses. He was traveling under a pseudonym, his real identity only just found out because of a message sent from the main resort—his agent trying to contact him about a film deal—had given away the game.
Ann knew the heavy frames were a hiding mechanism. Try as hard as she could, she could not think of his name, although he seemed vaguely familiar; it was one of those three-part ones that always stumped her.
“I’m a big reader,” she said, in her best cocktail-party mode. “What are the titles of your books?”
He gave her an appraising look. “I write about the universality of the human experience, using the devices of thinly disguised autobiography and increasing brevity. Long books are as passé as the missionary position.”
“Oh.”
“My debut, Colossus, was a hundred and twenty-nine pages about a boy’s awakening sexuality and realization that he is a genius. I was awarded a Genius Grant for it. My second book, Lunch, was eighty-nine pages about a little-read genius novelist deciding what to eat for lunch. It won a major prize you’ve probably never heard of, and got me labeled a ‘writer’s writer’ by the New York Times.”
“What does the novelist end up eating?” Richard asked.
The writer stopped for a moment and squinted at Richard, trying to decide if he was being ridiculed or Richard was just stupid. He decided the latter, and went on.
“Currently I’m writing my third, Sand, which should run sixty-seven pages about a novelist so brilliant no one reads him so he goes to a desert island to write a book about it with his homely wife who supports him. The woman’s money emasculates the man so he betrays her.”
No one said a word.
“He betrays her with the comely, nubile, sexually promiscuous young girlfriend of an embittered, washed-up, immature pop singer. The writer’s lovely new mistress begs him to take her away and use her as his muse.”
Ann coughed. She was mistaken. She had never heard of him, nor did she want to. “You don’t have any of your books with you, do you? For sale?” His lip curled; she was deeply sorry she had asked.
“It would be a bit ‘used-car salesman’ to carry one’s own books around, no?”
“I always wanted to try to write a book.”
“Yes, and I always wanted to try to do brain surgery in my spare moments.”
Ann was drowning in a toxic swamp and needed a lifeline. “Is this your wife?”
He leaned forward so that Ann was prevented from extending her hand to the woman.
“Hello,” the woman mumbled over his extra-large, balding, genius head.
“Enough gossiping!” the writer said.
“Hold on,” Dex said. He had been talking with Loren and only half listening. “You aren’t the John Stubb Byron?”
The man actually flushed in pleasure.
“Man, I had no idea. You haven’t said two words to us the last week. Colossus is one of my favorite novels of all time. It changed my life. Lunch is pure poetry. This man is a genius!”
“Please,” he said, staring into his goblet of wine. “I try to pass through the world anonymously in order to observe its truth without the distorting lens of my little fame, thus the nom de guerre.”
“If only I had my copies here for you to sign,” Dex said.
“I can probably dig some up in my suitcase.” He turned to the woman. “Go. Bring a copy of each and my Sharpie.”
For the rest of the meal, the satisfied writer was silent and openly contemptuous of the whole table except for Dex, giving his wife significant looks until dessert was served, which the two promptly carried away to their fare. The two remaining couples lingered in the oasis of oil lanterns.
“Love it here,” Dex said.
“How long have you been at the resort?” Richard asked.
Ann knew that Richard had never heard of Prospero, but even if he had, it would have made no difference. One of the things she admired in him was his absolute imperviousness to the seductions of celebrity outside the culinary world. He was just on his usual friend-making mission. She thought Dex sensed it, too, and that’s why the two men hit it off.
“A month? Longer? It’s so good I lost track of time,” Dex said.
Wende rolled her eyes.
“Really?”
“Thinking about buying my own motu. No offense, Loren, but you charge pretty steep.”
Loren smiled. “What is paradise worth, my rich friend?”
On a speck of coral halfway across the vast Pacific, the conversation degenerated, as it did between most Californians, to speculation about real estate prices back home. The popping of the real-estate bubble into the ugliness of the mortgage loan crisis was an unprecedented loss of innocence for most Golden State residents.
“But the high-end is okay,” Richard said, trying to be upbeat.
“My Holmby Hills place, the Montecito ranch, the hideaway in Palm Springs, the duplex in Venice—all upside down. Can’t unload a one. The property taxes alone are eating me alive,” Dex said.
Ann wondered how fast they could dump their fixer-upper starter house, fully furnished, if they had to. It felt like divorce, thinking this way. The house had been the symbol of their early marriage. One of the casualties of being an attorney was seeing houses, furniture, cars all reduced to their base value. Their life reduced to an equation of location times square footage, totally ignoring the fact it was a charming old Craftsman bungalow with a deep backyard lined with royal palms and walls covered in bougainvillea. It had been the place they had dreamed their dreams. In the beginning, they devoted their weekends to refurbishing it: painting walls, replacing molding
s, laying down vintage-style tile. They splurged installing stained glass to replace the glass in the transoms above the doors. Just as they had finished the wide-plank, distressed pinewood floors, Richard and Javi, tired of working for others, had decided to open a restaurant.
The house fell into a spell of neglect that Ann assured herself was only temporary. The kitchen remodel would have to wait. Weeds appeared in the backyard, the pool turned green, Optimistically, Ann still shopped flea markets—a French wire egg basket, a needlepoint stool—a habit she had developed with her mom when times looked bleak. As she would have argued in a court of law, they still had a dream—it had just been postponed.
* * *
During the chemo and radiation treatments, her mother suddenly had decided that the house needed remodeling. This from a woman who allowed her husband’s frat house sofa to be in the den years after they married.
“Are you sure?” Ann asked, not wanting to ask the obvious: Did she have the energy for that kind of undertaking?
Each day they drove to antique shops and estate sales, studied books to learn about period furniture, zeroing in on French. They discovered parts of Los Angeles they had never been to before. They stopped for breakfast and lunch at places no one they knew went to. It was their first adventure together. The house transformed from casual ’70s-style ranch house to bohemian Parisian apartment.
When they hauled in a particularly large toile French settee, her father took her aside. His eyes, magnified by thick lenses, appeared anxious. “I just don’t understand this furniture obsession, do you?”
“I don’t know…”
“What happened in Paris?”
* * *
Ann understood that houses, like marriages, were about process, that one was never truly finished. Finished people, as per her clients, usually sold, divorced, or died. So Ann was fine with the empty bedroom that would one day be a studio. She bought a used easel at a garage sale and set it up in a corner; she stacked canvases against the back wall. All in the service of someday. Another bedroom, furnished with only a futon for Javi’s sleepovers, was the future nursery, although neither of them discussed that right now. It was at this juncture that Ann had to force herself to stop thinking. This was the point beyond which she could go no further. Beyond this point, there be dragons. The whole thing now threatened to have to be sold bare bones, dream-stripped.
