by Tatjana Soli
They sat around the table, red-faced, sweating, emitting a raucous laughter that was gut-busting, rib-breaking. More bottles of wine had been drunk than there were people—Titi counted. Richard ran out, his face sweaty and red from the heat of the stove, for quick bouts of eating before he ran back to the kitchen for the next dish—Jalisco-style sweet corn pudding.
“It’s good? You like?” he said.
“You could be French,” Loren declared, staring down dreamily into his plate. “It is divine.”
Richard glowed, in possession of himself for the first time since they had arrived. He would stay and fight for his wife.
Loren burped. “Excuse me, I was just recalling … Aren’t there steaks in the freezer?”
Richard looked at Ann a minute. She held her breath.
“Not for this chef.” He signaled to Wende, who rose unsteadily to her feet.
“Quiet everyone,” she yelled from the kitchen door. “We have a surprise.”
Richard appeared behind her, carrying a three-layer cake smothered under fluffy coconut frosting, burning with so many candles it gave the appearance of a bonfire. Surely he didn’t put all thirty-eight candles on? Richard made his way to the table, staggering under the weight of his love offering. Wende brushed back plates and silverware with her arm, knocking over bottles, breaking glasses in her drunken haste.
“It’s Ann’s birthday!”
Dex stood up, holding the table for balance, and sang “Happy Birthday,” jazz-style. He then sang the Police’s “Roxanne,” except his version was “Oh, Ann.” She was living out her teenage-girl dream. This was as close to groupie nirvana as she was getting.
The cake was huge, gigantic—disproportionate to the occasion, of which there was none. It was the size of a happy couple’s big family and circle of friends, of a successful restaurant and thriving law practice, of raised gold lettering on the door of a corner-view office, of a big McMansion, chemically induced triplets, fancy cars, and all the many people hired to keep the whole thing afloat—not so different, in fact, than this resort. Not. The cake was a lie, and even if she pretended to be happy about it, she couldn’t, because even if all those things had been true, she had a premonition that these weren’t even close to being enough. They were the fast-food solution to happiness. Besides, her birthday had been two weeks ago.
“It isn’t my birthday,” she said aloud, staring into the frosting that was so deep and thick one could drown in its curling rosettes.
“Of course it is,” Richard said. “Or maybe it’s the day I fell in love with the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. In her pink satin dress, scared of the thunder. I’m celebrating that day.”
“No, it seriously isn’t,” Ann said.
“Chicks hate getting older,” Dex said.
“‘Chicks’?” Wende said. “You actually use that word?”
“We’re here on borrowed time. Time and money we don’t have,” Ann said.
“What about the money bag in your room?” Titi asked.
“We’re all here on borrowed time,” Loren said. “‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’”
“That’s original,” Richard said. “Put it in a song.”
“No, man,” Dex said. “That’s the name of Gauguin’s masterpiece.”
“Pass the cake, chick,” Wende said.
“Hey!”
“Don’t ‘Hey!’ me.” She ate big dripping forkfuls of coconut frosting. Dieting was another thing she had done away with since she had become politically sensitized. The cake was the final straw that broke the camel’s back as far as she was concerned. Look what Richard did for Ann, and look what Dex wouldn’t do for her. “Did you ever hear the joke about how dogs resemble their owners?”
The table was silent. Wende was in a dark place no one wanted to follow.
“These scientists want to test out the idea. They get these three dogs. One dog belongs to an architect, one dog belongs to an accountant, and one dog belongs to a rock star.”
“I don’t think—”
“Let it go, Ann!” Wende snapped (Ann, the one everyone loved; they only lusted after her). “So the scientists bring the architect’s dog into a room with ten bones, and he builds a pyramid. ‘Wow!’ the scientists say. They bring the accountant’s dog into the room and give him ten bones, and he divides them up evenly. ‘This is amazing!’ the scientists yell. Then they bring the rock star’s dog into the room and put ten bones in front of him.”
“Babe, let’s stop—”
Wende does not stop—the pitch of her voice cants higher. “They bring the rock star’s dog into the room and put the ten bones in front of him. He pauses, licks himself, crushes the bones up and snorts them, fucks the other two dogs, then ODs.”
Wende ran away from the table.
Dex coughed. “Wine does that to her,” he said.
* * *
The night wore on until Titi now counted three empty wine bottles per person, a mathematically impossible reality considering that included her, and she didn’t touch alcohol. Dex and Wende reconciled (apparently wine did do that to her because she held no grudge; she was riding a pendulum between the old and new Wende). Loren came out of his fare with a ring of small halved coconuts threaded through a piece of rattan.
“Birthday present. It’s a shark rattle. The noise, it reminds sharks of birds feeding on small fish. They rush to join the pleasure.”
“It never occurred to me to want to attract them.”
“Only call when you are ready.”
“It’s not my birthday,” Ann said, but no one seemed to care.
Wende wanted to dance, so Dex brought out his fancy satellite radio. Loren made a face at this breach of the rules, but he was in no position to police them. Dex tuned the radio to a local station, but instead of music there was an announcement:
“Tahiti and surrounding islands … preparing for a category one hurricane. The demonstration timed to coincide with the arrival of a French delegation set to hold hearings concerning reparations … canceled.”
“Hey, no fair listening to a radio,” Richard said.
Was he the only one, Ann thought, not electronically cheating? “A hurricane?” she asked.
“Listening to music is the only way I can sleep. I put earphones on,” Dex said. “Pacific Island radio has some good stations. Otherwise I tune into KROQ in LA.”
“What’s the difference between a tropical storm and a category one hurricane?” Ann asked.
“Nothing to worry about,” Loren said. “Storms hardly ever come this far. A couple raindrops.”
Dex put on some music and jumped on the table, playing air guitar. They all danced: Richard with Titi, Loren with Wende, Ann with Cooked. Perhaps the love potion had worked after all. Cooked brought out pahu drums made of coconut wood, and soon Dex, Richard, and he were beating out a syncopated rhythm on them. Titi did a native dance, and Wende joined. Finally, with much pulling, Ann got up. All three women, hips rocking back and forth, circled Loren, who sat blissfully in the middle of them. He closed his eyes with a smile on his lips, looking like a skinny, contented Buddha. Their hips tumbled and tumbled, keeping tempo with the accelerating and branching rhythms of the drums, faster and faster, unable to release from their grip, circling, circling, until with a great thumping climax of music, the women draped their arms around his neck.
“Now I can die,” Loren said. “I’ve reached heaven.”
* * *
Sometime during the evening, the wind stiffened and ruffled the palm fronds. By the time Ann noticed and looked out on the water, a gray woolen cloud was unfurling across the water. Wende and Cooked again disappeared, while Loren, Richard, and Ann played poker at the table. Of course Ann knew better, but still she was disappointed that the love potion did not seem to have worked.
“Where’s Dex?” Richard asked.
They heard a tussling in the undergrowth. There were no wild animals to worry about on the island, so Ann went
to investigate. She found Dex crawling on his stomach with the kitchen rifle cradled in his arms.
“What’re you doing?”
He sat on his haunches. The farthest fare, Wende and Cooked’s probable love nest, was fifty feet away, and light shone out between the gaps in the matting.
“In the Gulf War. Did recon. Doing a little recon again tonight.”
Ann grabbed the rifle out of his arms. “What’re you talking about? You already were playing with Prospero then.”
Dex lowered his eyes. “None of your business.”
“You weren’t there,” Ann said. “What a stupid thing to say. You’re like a little boy.” She had the urge to hit him with the rifle. “Is this thing even loaded?”
She pointed it up to the sky and pulled the trigger. It exploded, the kickback knocking her to the ground. They both were in shock as everyone came running.
“I love her,” Dex whispered sloppily, drunken tears falling down his stubbled cheeks. “I can’t bear what she’s doing.”
“Oh,” Ann said—the possibility of his truly loving Wende had never occurred to her. How had she moved from potential groupie to den mother so quickly? “Poor you. I’m so sorry.”
* * *
For many years, Dex had imagined what combat was like, what moving around armed felt like, so when he actually did it that night, it was an unimaginable relief. Wende didn’t realize what she was doing to him, and the sadness that it had triggered.
His older brother, Harry, had been the smartest, the handsomest, the One Who Would Go Far. Dex was the ugly duckling in the family, tongue-tied and introverted. The one with acne; the one who got detention for smoking a doobie on school grounds; the one who drank too much at the school social and mooned the homecoming queen; the one who incessantly masturbated even after his mother told him it would make him go blind; the one who used raw liver for the family dinner to facilitate his bliss as an ironic literary homage, only to have his parents find out and then send him to counseling; the one neighbors thought was adopted because he didn’t look like his healthy, blond, outgoing parents, or his football player brother, or even his pretty baby sister. He was like a mongrel that got dumped in a litter of golden retrievers and had to pretend to their ways.
Even though the two brothers had nothing in common, Harry took his role as older brother very seriously. At the age-appropriate times, he introduced Dex to beer, porn, cars, and girls. Harry always laughed off Dex’s oddball ways: “He’ll grow out of it.”
The folks—conservative, Reagan-voting California Republicans—put all their faith in Harry making good, keeping up the legacy of going to Stanford, following in his father’s large CEO footprints. His sister, Janey, predictably, wanted to be a teacher. Only to Dex did she confide about her secret life of partying, drugs, and sex, her voice raspy from chain-smoking cigarettes.
It was a prideful shock when Harry enlisted, though not unexpected. Men were supposed to be men in his family. All through their childhood, Dex’s father had been an avid bird hunter. Along with his buddies, he had taken a young Harry out fall mornings toward Lancaster and Bakersfield to go shooting with his friends. Many of the male relatives in the family had done military service; it was considered a noble sacrifice. Dex hated guns, hated shooting, hated dead birds and war. In every way that mattered, he was a grave disappointment to his father.
Harry graduated summa cum laude and went straight into basic training just as Dex started playing in bands, skipping classes, and dropping acid. Coming home stoned one night, he overheard his father telling his poker friends about his “loser son.”
After Harry was reported killed by friendly fire, his father told the preacher, “I’m not coming back to church. God took the wrong one.”
Dex left home after that. No matter how famous, no matter how rich, he would always be just a slacker to his dad, a guitar player, the one who didn’t die. Dex didn’t contact him when his father’s company was accused of being involved in a plot with a pharma conglomerate to peddle substandard drugs to the third world. Neither did he contact him when it was discovered the firm had been involved in a cover-up of the effects of depleted uranium relating to Gulf War syndrome. He did not contact him after his father’s company was indicted or after it collapsed, or after his father’s high blood pressure diagnosis, or after his first stroke, or the second. None of it brought Dex home. He simply had his manager, Lori, write out the checks, both for his parents’ retirement home (they had lost all their money in attorney’s fees) and for Janey’s rehab, divorce, and monthly support for her and his little niece. He fantasized about telling his father that at least the money that they were now living off was clean. He didn’t tell the old man off because he loved his mom and Janey.
He missed his big brother something terrible. He knew his life would have gone better in all kinds of indefinable ways if Harry had been there by his side. Harry loved Dex, loved his music and supported his making it. He was the definition of what family should mean, a tie where blood was only the beginning. Some of the soldiers in Harry’s squad listened to Dex’s first tapes while deployed in Kuwait, and Harry burst with pride for his baby brother. He understood that everyone had to play the hand that he was dealt in life.
In the years that followed, Dex began to be haunted. He felt guilty that he had not been brave enough to enlist and go fight at his brother’s side. He had the grandiose fantasy that he might have saved him; more probably Harry would have been saved while looking after his inept little brother. Harry never would have allowed something paltry like death to interfere with that sacred duty. But the truth was that, even back then, Dex could think of nothing more devastating than making the accommodation in his soul that would have allowed him to kill another human being. Not even if the act was removed by advanced weapons to the level of a fancy video game. Becoming a soldier would have killed the musician in him. How did Harry—a better man than he was—make that accommodation in his own soul? They never had a chance to discuss it.
But Dex had so wanted to be brave.
Later he went to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan (because battlefields, like concert stadiums, were interchangeable, he suspected), not to fight but to play his music, not in some dippy, ’60s-style, peace, love, putting-flowers-in-gun-barrels kind of way, but in a strong, force-for-good way. He was brave in the manner possible for him. Every single soldier he played to was Harry. Every single soldier he played to was not.
Dex knew music, not guns, changed hearts and minds. He experienced it on tour, the unity of thousands at concerts. Power comes in all forms; the old man could never get his head around that one.
* * *
Rifle safely returned to its place, hours later Ann woke up on a bench by the kitchen. She found Richard asleep on the beach. She stroked the hair plastered to his forehead. In his sleep he looked as content as when they first met. Where had that Richard gone? For that matter, where had the old Ann gone? She lay down beside him. On the wind, she thought she heard voices arguing as she fell asleep.
A roaring woke her. The morning sky was a bright, glowing yellow. The silver ocean worried its way back and forth along the beachfront. Ann sat up, alone, sand in her hair, shivering.
Wende stood at the dock with a small battered valise—the same one that Cooked had carried back from their trip to town. Although Ann had grown fond of the girl and was sorry she was leaving, there was a part of her that was also glad. Wende’s youth exhausted her. She didn’t like her part serving as cautionary tale. Ann was tired of the girl’s lording it over the motu with her body; tired of the haunted, panting men; tired of the bikini and breasts and the promise implied by the dazzling belly button ring that could return at any time. WILD. Poor girl didn’t have the first clue. Wild could be in the heart of the most buttoned-down, burned-out lawyer. Wild was the ability to drop one life and pick up another. Wild was refusing the scratchy dry surface of things and digging into the rich loamy depths. Ann was searching for a wild far de
eper and grander than anything offered up so far. She had tried to rise to the occasion, had borrowed the skimpy two-piece bathing suit to jazz up her marriage, but it wasn’t her, and she knew it. Then she remembered her half tattoo. She walked to the dock and pointed to her thigh.
“You can’t leave. You didn’t finish this.”
Wende shrugged. “You never wanted it.”
“Now what am I supposed to do?”
“Dex proposed last night—you have to come to the wedding. Call me when you get back to LA, and I’ll finish it.”
Her words and her expression were at a disconnect.
“You don’t love him.”
Wende frowned. “It’s time to grow up.”
Ann sighed. Had this whole thing with Cooked been an act to get what she wanted from Dex? Had sweet little Wende played them all? Impossible to save another even if it was clear she was throwing away her dreams, however misguided. The girl had wanted to save sharks.
“What’s with Cooked?”
He was hunched over in the gloom of a palm tree, dark and glowering, one of his eyes black and swollen shut. Titi refused to let him in the kitchen while she prepared breakfast. Later, Ann found out Titi was the one who had given him the black eye, giving the lie to the Polynesian no-jealousy policy. The human heart guided itself. Was the slickness on Cooked’s cheeks from tears? He bolted from his place and ran to the water, holding a bucket.
“Go away,” Wende yelled into the wind, but Cooked ran into the water and threw a bouillabaisse of cut fish around him. He raked his fingernails down his chest, drawing streaks of blood. Wende screamed. Richard and Loren jumped into the water and dragged the boy out.
