The Last Good Paradise: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  “Ah, those look yummy,” Dex said, pointing at the cannonball coconuts right above their heads.

  “Loren told me getting hit on the head with those is the leading cause of injury here.”

  “Nah, I’m sure it’s more like getting eaten by a shark.”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s paradise here,” Dex said. He began grappling up the slick trunk of the tree. “Help me.”

  “No way,” Richard said.

  “Come on, bro. Let me stand on your shoulders to get a leg up.”

  Richard knew it was stupid. One of them would probably end up getting hurt, but he did weigh a lot more than Dex, and after all, he was getting to be Dex Cooper’s buddy.

  They scrambled for long minutes before Dex finally gained purchase on a ridge of bark and shimmied up to his goal. Richard limped away, afraid he’d dislocated a shoulder. His skin was abraded by Dex’s toenails digging in.

  “View’s fine up here.”

  “Shake them off and get down.”

  Richard moved away as coconuts rained on top of him.

  Titi came out, cross. “You come down.”

  As Dex tried and failed to reverse his course, his former ease vanished. He was hugging the tree for dear life. “Easier said than done.”

  He made the first rappelling move downward and came flying off the tree, landing with a thud. Titi and Richard ran to him.

  “You okay?”

  “I burned it.”

  “He’s delirious,” Richard said. “Get Loren.”

  “The song.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “On the beach. It felt righteous, but now…”

  Richard shrugged. “Write another one.”

  “This was the big one.”

  “Okay…” Richard was exhausted. This felt a few degrees beyond even Javi’s neediness. “Write it again.”

  Dex opened his eyes. “Will you stay with me? You’re my good-luck charm. You saved my life yesterday, man. I can’t manage it alone.”

  Midwifing the birth of a rock ’n’ roll song. What if this was the next “Satisfaction” or “Imagine”? Richard felt a tightening in his chest. They’d morphed from buddies to bromance. “I’d be honored.”

  They locked themselves up in Dex’s fare, which Richard discovered was twice as big and much fancier than his and Ann’s, and ordered Titi to play bouncer, keeping everyone out and a steady supply of booze and food coming in.

  At first Richard felt uncomfortable in his role as witness. “You sure you don’t want to be alone?”

  “I need you here. You saved my life, man.”

  The unkind thought passed through his mind that he wished Dex would stop mentioning the rescue. He didn’t want to be reminded of the disturbing mouth-to-mouth, or that maybe he was being befriended because of his CPR technique and not for himself. But what American male had not at one time or another fantasized that he was a rock star up on the stage—torn jeans, sweaty and grubby, pounding away, jabbing with the none-too-subtle phallic symbol of electric guitar at groin level? This was beyond a dream come true to watch the music being made. Richard took a slug of dark rum and passed the bottle over.

  Dex’s creative process was deceptively unorganized. He wrote words on a notepad that Richard thought weren’t exactly literature:

  The White Whale

  Wanted it so bad and got it

  Didn’t know what to do and burned it

  Who knew it had such deep, deep, sharp teeth.

  But as Dex started playing chords, the words grew meaning beyond themselves. Chords exploded, changed key. A melody in the beginning disappeared, then returned, transformed, deepened. It was about something unknown in the singer’s life—if Richard didn’t assume it was this afternoon’s disaster of burning the song and falling out of the tree—but also about more than that.

  Went down that pole of darkness

  Hit the earth and went on in

  The words became beside the point. Richard thought about the music he had loved as a teenager—Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle”—realizing he had never questioned the meaning of those lyrics. The essence was inside the music, and it was clear that Dex had the magic, was able to weave lyric and melody with a genius utterly unexpected from the person he had observed during the previous week. It took four straight hours of playing before perfectionist Dex was satisfied, and an exhausted Richard could tell no difference between each version, but he could hear the difference after every tenth playing—a subtle refining process, an accentuation of improvisatory riffs. Even after a hundred repetitions, the final time Dex played the song brought tears to Richard’s eyes. He didn’t care if it made him a wuss: he had just witnessed a genuine birth. Something new and beautiful existed in the world.

  “Did you get it back?” he said after waiting a respectful time till the last chord faded away.

  Dex shook himself as if he had been in a trance. “It’s better than the first time.”

  “Cool.”

  The two men walked out victors into the roseate island sunset.

  * * *

  The women returned to the resort as the horizon faded to purple. The group toasted the end of the day with rum punches. With a sphinxlike smile, Ann showed a mystified Richard her half-shark tattoo, then swaggered to their fare to change for dinner. Wende’s lips were kiss bruised. Cooked jumped out of the boat and moored it to the dock. Dex felt sick to his stomach when he heard him humming an approximation of “Road to Nowhere” as he carried a small battered valise to one of the vacant fares. On his neck was a purpled love bite.

  Titi stood at the kitchen threshold, scowling, waiting for Cooked to notice her. When he did, she turned her back to him and stomped inside.

  * * *

  “What have you guys been up to?” Ann asked. She was surprised at the sudden camaraderie of the two men after they had mostly ignored each other for the past week.

  “You have no idea.” Richard grinned.

  Titi moved around the table, banging down bowls and plates so they jumped. When Wende looked up at her, she saw her diamond WILD pendant suspended from Titi’s ear.

  “Hey, that’s mine!”

  Titi smiled. “I thought we were sharing everything, Polynesian style.”

  Wende bit her lip as Dex buried his head in her neck.

  “Oh, baby, it was awful,” he said.

  She stroked his back, distracted. “You fell out of a tree?”

  “I thought it died. But it’s back. The best.”

  “The tree?”

  “The song.”

  Wende rolled her eyes at Ann, with an I-told-you-so expression. “That’s great. Let’s eat.”

  “This song changes everything. If only Robby could hear it.”

  Ann looked pointedly at Loren, who kept passing dishes and offered nothing in the way of assistance.

  Finally she got up. “Come with me,” she said.

  The two couples went to Ann and Richard’s fare (Richard embarrassed that it looked almost threadbare in comparison with Dex and Wende’s), and they pointed flashlights into the plunge pool while Ann poked around the grassy bottom with her foot.

  “Here it is,” she said, pulling up the dripping sat-phone. Thank God Javi had thought far enough to get a waterproof one.

  “You could probably store it in a drawer,” Richard said.

  Dex called Robby, and they talked briefly. Once Robby turned his recorder on, Dex played his guitar and sang into the phone. They all clapped at the end.

  “Let’s celebrate!” Dex howled. “Where’s my herbalista? Cooked!”

  * * *

  The next morning they lounged around the breakfast table hungover. Loren had deigned to make an appearance after avoiding the partying the night before. He wanted to see Ann, but she had not come out yet.

  “I’m bored,” Wende said.
<
br />   “Do you know about the island’s cannibalism?” Loren asked her.

  Field trip. Everyone would go, with Titi and Cooked bringing lunch later. At the last minute, Ann canceled, deciding to stay in bed for the morning. Loren took them the clockwise route around the island, slyly dodging the camera by turning inland and walking a few hundred yards into a palm grove in which stood a rubble of stones and a large cut block. He was irritated that he wasn’t seeing the one person he planned the trip for.

  “What’s this?” Richard asked, brushing away dead leaves. He snatched his hand back as an eight-inch-long banana-yellow centipede went scurrying for cover.

  “Be careful,” Loren said. “Those are poisonous.”

  The place was clearly not on the list of must-sees for the resort’s regular clientele. Loren used a fallen palm frond to clear off the overgrown debris. The stone dais was big—the size of a mattress. On top were carved figures, the largest a whalelike fish on which there were cup-sized depressions.

  “This is where they did human sacrifices. Those were used to collect the blood.”

  “Yuck.” Wende turned away, hot, pocked with mosquito bites, sorry she had come. Why hadn’t she stayed on the beach, drinking like Dex wanted? But then she felt ashamed. That was the old Wende. She turned back and forced herself to stare into the stone cups, imagining them full.

  “Real live cannibals?” Dex said.

  “On the Marquesas. The last owner of the island had this brought here.”

  “Why?”

  “He bought it cheap from a chieftain over there. But then things got confused. He wasn’t allowed to send it out of the country to the museum that paid for it.”

  “So he left it?” Richard asked.

  “Yes. He left it. There was a lawsuit when he lost the island to me. The government forgot about it. Then he died. End of story. Ready for lunch?”

  * * *

  To “make nice” with Richard after the tattoo, Ann agreed to go out on the boat for a day of diving even though she was loath to lose a day full of solitude. Wende joined the men in the water, and all three came back with tales of black-tipped sharks whipping by.

  Cooked assured them that the sharks were harmless. “They just check you out. Bump, bump,” he said, grinning at Wende.

  When they motored to a sheltered cove for snorkeling, Ann still would not join in.

  “Don’t be scared,” Wende said. “I’ll protect you.”

  Ann bit her lip, not wanting to mention the unresolved shark circling her thigh that very moment. Wende seemed a bit weak in the execution stage. They finally convinced Ann to float in the shallowest part, but every moment in the water she was on the lookout for an approaching dark shape and didn’t rest until she was back safely in the boat. She missed the mysterious largeness of a day spent alone on the beach—the description of what paradise should be. What was Loren doing? She smiled, thinking he was undoubtfully grateful for the reprieve of an afternoon without entertaining.

  Back on shore, evening came in another blaze of violet.

  * * *

  It was understood that Cooked and Titi were betrothed to each other from childhood and would marry in the future. It was also understood that Cooked fell for the tourists once in a while. As per custom, both were allowed to have outside casual relationships before marriage, but Titi had already had her experience and wanted no more. She pretended Cooked’s excursions didn’t bother her, but this time, especially, Wende did.

  The locals working the hotels were used to coddling tourists like spoiled children. Foreigners had the most outlandish ideas about life on the islands, as if it were some kind of paradise, another Eden. As if Tahitians didn’t have all the regular problems that existed back home and then some. On vacation, tourists loved it when you fussed over them, brought them their favorite fruit all cut up and served in a pineapple boat for breakfast as if they were small children. Not only did they smile, but then they tipped big. They wanted you to stroke and pamper them in luxury. They pretended to want to know the history of the islands, but they did not want to know the reality. The businessmen from Papeete came and built, destroyed the ecosystems of land and water, made money and left. They drove the gods away. Some of their own people betrayed them, profited by pretending development meant progress. Instead, their home had become a ghetto in paradise. So why was this girl so nosy?

  This was the first time Cooked had taken a tourist home. Taboo. Even if it was just to get away from the crybaby Dex, he had crossed an unspoken line. He had told the girl everything and included her in his crazy schemes that even Titi refused to have anything to do with. Why would a big-breasted blond American girl get involved in their trouble? It made no sense unless—Titi swooned—she had fallen in love with him. Women did crazy things for their men.

  As much as Cooked complained about how the French cheated, he was flattered when one of the foreign women found him attractive. Besides everything else, this was bad for business. Titi was the one who charged on the manna line of Dex Cooper’s credit card every week. The nice lady’s bag of money grew smaller each week. He was keeping them open. Other tourists would be more demanding.

  * * *

  Titi had first started at the resort as the maid after being a poli-sci major in college. Cooked was the boat driver and dive instructor; he had been studying for a phys-ed degree. Now they also had added the chores that Loren had dropped over the last year. She became concierge, bookkeeper, and cook. She was even thinking of taking an online course in web design to build a new website for the place. Cooked took on the work of handyman and now, apparently, gigolo. What couldn’t be replaced, what Loren did expertly, was entertain foreigners. When he discovered Cooked’s plan, he would be furious. Titi had to stop it without getting Cooked fired, or causing the foreigners and their money to leave.

  Loren had been drunk almost every day for the last five years she worked there. Sometimes he disappeared for days, and they covered for him as best they could. This sickness was a new complication they couldn’t keep hidden for much longer. What to do? Titi recalled Bette and Lilou from when they were all children together, playing on the beach. Her grandmother told her that one of the girls, Bette, had died from a disease. She supposed it was true because the only letters that had ever come over the years were from Lilou. None had come for a very long time now. Was it time at last to make amends for the past?

  Titi stared into the refrigerator, unable to come up with yet another meal. Usually she prepped and served for Loren but didn’t make the fancy foreign dishes from start to finish. Under Loren’s supervision, the cooking had been good, if basic, but with his absence, meals had degenerated into fruit, yogurt, and sandwiches served by a lovesick Titi.

  She decided to chop fruit and make ambrosia salad for the fifth time in a row. She sliced the baguettes from Cooked’s love trip to town and jabbed salami and pickles into their fluffy insides. Their people were not jealous like the Westerners, but still … Titi chopped harder and harder, castrating mangoes, gutting pineapples, shaving the salami paper-thin, putting sharp little gouges into the cutting board that dulled the blade of the knife.

  Cooked was making a fool of himself. She knew of his secret dream to be like the great and mighty Temaru, to stand up to the government, to foment revolution. Titi even suspected he wouldn’t mind being imprisoned for a short while to add to his street cred (he was still famous mostly for his soda ads). What infuriated Titi was that he complained so loudly about the foreigners and then let himself be the plaything of an American girl. How could any of them be strong with a leader like that?

  She was tempted to throw up her hands and take the boat to Papeete. Her cousin was having a baby, and there would be celebrations. Maybe she would meet someone new, someone unlike Cooked, who cared more about politics and foreign women than he did about her. If it came to that, their vows could be undone.

  After dinner she would go to Loren’s room and describe what was happening, what Cooked was plannin
g, and avert disaster. Cooked would hate her. Things would change for better or worse. Maybe, just maybe, she would start her own revolution.

  When the dishes were cleared, as usual Dex picked up his guitar, Wende and Richard set up their checkerboard, and Ann relaxed in a hammock. Once everyone settled, Titi made ready to go to Loren, just as Ann rose theatrically and stretched, arms overhead, then made the trip to his hut herself.

  * * *

  Ann lay on Loren’s bed while they drank their green fairy nightcap.

  Loren chuckled. “Oh, how I would have liked to have had you.”

  “Really?” Ann downed her shot. They were kindred souls; he saw the artist in her that no one else did, or else, at least he didn’t see the lawyer in her. She got up and swayed back and forth at the foot of his bed. The tattoo ached, and since she had already broken the prohibition against alcohol while healing, she saw no reason to now stop. At least the pain was numbed. The absinthe made her invincible, or was it Loren’s words? Or was the tattoo already wreaking its talismanic effect?

  “We would have been good together,” he said.

  The past tense of his desire, the implied hopelessness of his present, threatened to start tears that she would not allow in front of him. At one of their monthly WEFE cocktail parties, Eve had suggested volunteering at a hospice in order to feel she was contributing to the community and counter her disgust with the law. Even after completing basic training, the staff found Ann bawling away at the bedside of patients. “You are depressing the dying,” they said. One of the nurses had puffed her lips, disappointed. “You’re a crier.” She was fired from the volunteer position.

  Now she worried over how to distract them both. She unbuttoned her shirt and swayed to the faraway strains of Dex’s guitar, channeling her thinner, early-twenties self (although she had never done anything remotely like this back then), pulling the fabric slowly down over her arms, her approximation of what a low-key striptease might look like. The shirt looped over her head in a slow circle, a lasso of lust. Wearing only Wende’s bikini, she drowsily danced around the bed, moving her hips, holding the bottle of absinthe.