The Last Good Paradise: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  Dex had been pouting over the sudden departure of John Stubb Byron, especially without even a good-bye or the promised signed books. “But I get it,” he said. “Artist to artist. Mano-a-mano. We blew his cover, his anonymity. He couldn’t be the observer but became the observed. It’s an artist thing.”

  “You always want people to recognize you,” Wende said.

  That’s when Dex feigned sleep, wedged into the back of the boat, propped up on the life jackets that no one wore. The islands were very French in their disdain for safety regulations.

  Richard knew how unworldly, how adolescent it was, but how did the French handle this topless thing? Their everydayness about it made it all the more erotic. Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe the puritanical streak in Americans made any sighting of off-limits flesh all the more seductive. His parents had been affectionate with each other, but he still marveled at the fact of his conception, as prudish as they were around the house: a peck on the cheek or an embarrassed hug passing for intimacy.

  When Cooked, their instructor and safety monitor, dropped anchor at a picturesque cove, they put on flippers and masks, then jumped into the water while he waved them off and took a nap.

  They paddled to a huge coral forest, watching clouds of parrot fish swim by. As beautiful as the sea life was, even more beautiful to Richard were the mermaid flutterings of Wende, her hair a halo around her. At one point, he grew so bold as to grab her ankle to point at a glorious burst of angelfish behind her bare back. She nodded in pleasure. He longed to place starfish over her perfect breasts, if not his own outspread, starfishlike hands. After half an hour, Dex signaled that he was ready to return to the boat. Wende went with him, but as much as Richard missed her company, he found he didn’t mind being alone. He was never alone in his regular, workaday life; working in a kitchen was a team activity.

  He could not describe the sensation of being underwater, but if anything, this time was even more intense than the dive lesson. It put the car-crash reality of his life in perspective. The closest he had come to this kind of experience was when he was in the hospital five years before after lifting a too-heavy crate of steaks.

  Richard never allowed himself to relax. Always he felt pressure. His life was a constant round of being late, hustling, making do, and catching up. Even on the rare occasions when he was ahead of schedule, he would prep in advance for future chores so that eventually he forgot what it meant to unwind. Even in his sleep he dreamed of chores he had done during his waking hours so that his entire twenty-four-hour day ended up being an endless treadmill of anxiety. In the hospital, nothing had been expected of him except sleeping and eating; the pain was a minor inconvenience. He had the unprecedented luxury of sitting on the toilet for a leisurely bowel movement instead of straining while someone pounded on the door with a delivery that waited for his approval. Technically, that had been his last time off till now.

  If he could have only imagined that a place like this existed. Underwater, there was no blame. Underwater, there was no possibility of talking with Ann about their troubles. Underwater, the possibility of Ann leaving him became more remote. A relief. All one could do underwater was marvel at the perfection of the world that one normally let pass by. Like Wende’s breasts. Floating facedown in the ocean, his ears stoppered by water, he joined the fish in their fishy daydreams.

  The truth was this leisure made him feel guilty because during those long ago summer days with Chloe, learning about the joys of French food, Richard had found his bliss, and he had pursued his love of cooking all these years, cocooned away from those who worked just for money. People, for example, like Ann. Just because he followed his bliss didn’t mean he should have allowed Ann to support his dream. It wasn’t as if that bliss kept Richard from having to hustle, kept him from getting tired and discouraged. Kept him from doubting if it was worth the price he was paying. Everyone encouraged one to “live the dream,” but no one talked about how to pay for it.

  Floating above a particularly spectacular growth of coral, Richard would have exchanged it all to be a fish—just not one fated for his own frying pan.

  He was learning the hard way that even divine cooking didn’t make one immune to being unloved. Sadly, food wasn’t always enough.

  Toward the end of what he would call his Summer of Food, Richard had gone over at the preappointed time to Chloe’s to practice a pâte brisée. Claude was away at baseball practice. He found Richard’s interest in cooking with his mother a little freaky and now made himself scarce.

  The kitchen was empty. Sun streamed in and filled the air with floury dust motes. Richard made himself at home, sitting at the kitchen table and thumbing through Larousse’s The Best of French Cooking. Time passed. He looked up from the recipe for a complicated torte ganache, and his head was hot from the sun beating through the window. How long had he been there? He got up and filled a glass with water from the sink when it occurred to him that he had heard no sounds from upstairs. Was the house empty? Had Chloe forgotten? Suddenly he felt strange, as if he were trespassing. What if her husband or Claude came in and found him?

  “Chloe?” he called up the stairway.

  Nothing.

  He should have left, gone home. Even years later he could not say why, but he stayed. Instead, he climbed the stairs and entered the room he knew was the master bedroom. It was the one Chloe always came out of dressed in her Capri pants and sleeveless shirts, trailing musky perfume, ready to cook.

  The bedroom was disappointingly ordinary, not the French boudoir of Richard’s nighttime imaginings. No flocked wallpaper or gilded mirrors. The realization that he had been picturing it startled him. He looked hard at the king-size bed, memorizing for later its chenille spread, creepily like the one on his own parents’ bed, trying to picture Chloe’s brown hair splayed on the pillow. Somehow he knew she slept on the right side, by the window. He walked to the dresser, ostensibly to look at the wedding picture of the professor and Chloe, but even as he bent to compare the younger Chloe with the one he now knew, his hand was yanking the handle of the top drawer. There, as he’d hoped, were her undergarments. He clutched at a lacy bra and brought it up to his nose—it smelled of Chloe’s signature perfume mixed with her skin, only more so. Then he saw underwear—in flesh tones and black—not skimpy and shiny and candy-colored, like glimpses he’d caught of girls’ at school, but not the big beige granny pants of his mother either. He felt a flush through his body—intense pleasure and discomfort combined—utterly unlike anything he had experienced alone in his room at night. He picked up the underwear and balled them under his nose, feeling the stiffness of the crenulated lace waistband, but they smelled only of detergent and line drying, a soft powdery baby smell that did nothing to encourage his fantasies. He held the panties up to the sunlight, imagined Chloe’s narrow, boyish hips in them, the Bermuda triangle of her dark pubic area. He spread the panties and examined the cotton insert at the crotch. Pristine. Inexplicably he brought the fabric to his tongue, tongue against dry cotton, and felt another fierce shudder. Just at the moment he was ready to sink to the ground to relieve his unbearable tension, he heard a watery slosh from the bathroom.

  Impossible. His heart hammered up into his throat. “Pervert” would be the kindest of labels. Chloe would tell his mom and dad in the guise of concerned parenthood. He would be expelled, grounded, ridiculed. He was doomed. He threw the underwear back in the drawer and slammed it shut with a bang, and then tiptoed back to the bedroom door. Clearly, he had lost his mind.

  “Chloe?” he said, his repentant voice weepy. He was dead meat.

  Nothing. A minute later, another watery thump.

  He walked to the bathroom door and knocked. “Everything okay in there?”

  Nothing. Then the softest of moans.

  There was the disgrace of being discovered snooping in Chloe’s bedroom, more specifically in her underwear drawer, or the larger cosmic catastrophe of doing nothing. Wasn’t this one of those moments you re
ad about in books, a character-defining moment that could screw up your life forever if you chose wrong? He opened the door.

  Chloe lay naked in the bathtub, her knees and breasts and head forming islands in the filmy grayish water. Her head rested on the lip of the tub, but she didn’t open her eyes at his entrance. On the bath mat was an overturned amber vial of pills.

  “Fuck, fuck me,” Richard breathed as he bent down to touch her skin, which could only be described as feeling like a refrigerated piece of raw chicken. The water, gone cold, rippled with her shivering. “Did you take these?” he yelled, his Mrs. Robinson suddenly morphed into the senior hearing-impaired, but she shrugged him off in her deep slumber. He had no idea what to do. He tried to lift her out of the water, but her previously lusted-after, lithe body was now as heavy and unwieldy as a sack of ancestral potatoes. He put a sneakered foot on the tub rim for leverage, but that didn’t work either. Finally, thinking all the while how he was going to catch hell for getting his shoes wet, he stepped in with one foot, trying to brace under her arms and lift, his fingers oblivious to the fact that they were brushing against nipples, but he almost slipped, nearly braining them both. If he let go, he worried, she would slip beneath the water and drown. Oh my God. Fuck. Me. Now he stepped in with both feet as Chloe’s weight started to burn the muscles in his arms. With his outstretched foot, in a balletic feat that almost cost him his hamstring, he yanked the chain of the plug, then squatted down as her head lolled on his shoulder and the soapy amniotic water around them drained away.

  Now he was slimy wet and cold. He bit his lip to keep from crying. From that moment a strange twinning of sex and safety lodged itself in his unconscious.

  He maneuvered around and rested Chloe as comfortably as possible in the tub’s bottom while he stepped out and ran to what he hoped was the linen closet, water squishing in his shoes, and pulled out an armload of towels. He paused before he covered Chloe, feeling a tenderness (he had never seen a naked middle-aged woman’s body before, certainly not his puritanical mother’s). Her breasts were small and high, slightly concave on top, the nipples darker and more pronounced compared with the small, pink, puppy roundness in magazines his friends passed around. Even at his young age, he recognized that the images in the porn mags were not the real deal, but fetishistic, consumerist fantasies that encouraged the substitution of anatomically supersized body parts for attraction, a paid voyeurism of man-made boobs, airbrushed crotches, inflated inner tube lips. Chloe’s body was real. Slim and toned, it contained a history. Her stomach, although flat, was soft, the lower belly pouched. Her rear end was gloriously full—one could see its contours even under clothes—with tiny ribbons of stretch marks around the hips. He worshipped this woman and, given the chance, would have married her a thousand times over the silly girls his own age.

  When Richard had used all the towels from the linen closet—under her head as a pillow, wedged underneath her body for warmth, on top for modesty—he at last felt safe enough to leave her. He ran into the bedroom, grabbed the phone, and called his mother.

  * * *

  Sarah Dolan, née Donnelly, was the third daughter, fifth child, of a large alcoholic Irish family, and the appearance of one overdosed woman in a bathtub did not greatly perturb her. She did want to know what part her Richard had in this, but first things first. She took the pulse of the stylish Frenchwoman, a woman who had snubbed her and instead befriended her young son. She slapped her awake, then asked her a barrage of inane questions like name, date, and current president, determining that if Chloe had taken enough pills to kill herself, the job would already have been done. When she mentioned calling an ambulance, Chloe became so agitated it was clear that she didn’t need one, or the attending scandal that would follow. Sarah hunted around the medicine cabinet until she found the ipecac, then forced a dose down Chloe’s throat. She got her out of the tub and into underwear, a robe, and tube socks.

  “Where is Claude?” Sarah yelled into the bedroom.

  “Not here,” Richard mumbled.

  A cloud darkened Sarah’s prim blue eyes. This, too, would have to wait. “Go make a pot of coffee and bring us a cup,” she said, to get her son out of the room and preserve whatever innocence he had left.

  Sarah sat on the edge of the tub while Chloe hugged the toilet, retching out the last toxic remnants of her stomach. Periodically Sarah got up, once to fish around the drawers for hairpins, which she used to pin Chloe’s bangs back, and another time to find a washcloth, which she repeatedly wet, wrung out, and handed over. After the toilet had been flushed a last time, Chloe put the lid down, laid her head down on top of it, and began to sob. The lavishness of her grief impressed even a stern Irish girl. Now that the danger was over, Sarah was getting impatient to leave. She had left the dinner preparations in midstream—uncooked hamburger in the pan, frozen corn in its boiling bag.

  “Dear, would you like me to call the professor?”

  A loud wail came up out of Chloe’s chest as she stood up, her robe gaping open and revealing her body once more just as Richard came through the door with the cup of coffee.

  “That piece of shee-ittt. Merde. He’s left me for his little pute secretary. He’s such a cliché, he can’t even be original in his choice.”

  “Richard, go find alcohol—vodka or gin—and pour a glass for Mrs. Arnoux.”

  “Claude’s father sleeps with the mother of Claude’s first girlfriend. The girl my little boy lost his virginity with. It will make him sick in the head.”

  “Richard!” His mother yelled down the stairs. “Bring the bottle and two glasses.”

  After her own family’s boisterous drunken example, Richard’s mother was a teetotaler who sipped only enough wine to make toasts on special occasions, so this was a big deal.

  Richard went to the cabinet that he knew from long habit held the liquor. During sleepovers, Claude and he used to sneak into it, watering down the alcohol until the remainder was the color of pale tea. All he could think of was that Claude had done it with a girl and not told him, a major breach of best friend etiquette. He was not anxious about Chloe despite the horrific events of the afternoon. Truth was his mother was the person you most wanted in charge during times like these.

  When Richard was six years old, it had seemed an excellent idea to steal grass clippings out of the garbage can, add flowers from the garden, and pour bottled salad dressing on top, just like his mom’s salad. Then eat it. Out came the ipecac.

  Calmly his mother kneeled and held his tiny shoulders as he vomited in the wastepaper basket, dabbing his lips with Kleenex, washing his forehead with a damp cloth nonchalantly as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world to happen—your son eating grass.

  “Mama’s little cow,” she crooned.

  He slept through the afternoon, night, and next morning, finally waking at noon. No mention of school missed. She brought him his favorite, grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off, not once scolding him, figuring rightly he had already suffered enough. She was mystified by her son’s precocious love of cooking but defended it, especially against her husband, who called him a sissy. A good Catholic girl, she believed it was a mysterious gift that demanded to be used by its recipient.

  Now, as Richard sat on the stairs at Chloe’s house, Sarah made a call to the family doctor, explaining the situation in as vague terms as possible, not using names, although it would be common knowledge soon enough. He said the only responsible thing to do was take the woman in question to the hospital, where she could be monitored. That, or have her personally supervised.

  The hospital wasn’t an option—Chloe had made that much clear—but she was surprisingly willing to live with the Dolans. She moved into the guest room while Claude shared Richard’s room in a kind of extended sleepover.

  “How come you never told me you did it?” Richard whispered.

  “If you ever tell anyone about this, I’ll say you were banging my mom,” Claude hissed back.

  For t
he next week, Richard’s parents lived in terror.

  Chloe stayed up all night, playing cassettes of Edith Piaf and Nina Simone over and over. She drank profusely, although the doctor had strictly forbidden it, and smoked her black cigarillos like a chimney. Smoking wasn’t allowed in the house, but his mother said nothing, instead choosing to focus on keeping the house from being burned to the ground. Brown-rimmed holes scorched into the fabric of the sofa revealed the white eyes of stuffing. Years later, the faint reek of tobacco still hung in the curtains.

  Chloe spent her days and nights in her bathrobe, unwashed, crying. Sarah sat next to her in silence and listened to long drunken tirades against the professor. Many times Chloe switched to French to more easily utter a particular obscenity in regards to her husband, and Sarah, grateful for her lack of fluency, was able to muse over what a melodic and romantic-sounding language it was. She would buy tapes, she thought, and teach herself a second language.

  The whole week, the family took shifts, making sure someone was always there to watch over Chloe and potentially douse the house, although Sarah never left Richard alone with the woman, sensing that some potentially disastrous relationship between the two had been narrowly avoided. Claude distanced himself from the whole fiasco and spent his time at school or at other friends’ houses. At the end of the week, realizing her welcome was coming to an end, Chloe took a shower, put on her raisin-dark lipstick, and gave them sloppy hugs on her way out. A week later, a moving van pulled up.

  Richard and Chloe kept in touch through letters, exchanging recipes and finds of rare ingredients, such as Calabrian chili-infused oil, tangy raw-milk French cheese, or Japanese umeboshi, salt-pickled plums. They never referred to that day, just as they avoided mention of the visit to the butcher.