The Last Good Paradise: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  “Hey, where’s the roasted pig?” Dex asked.

  Javi frowned.

  Richard sat back in his chair with a twisted smile on his face and downed a copious number of mai tais, along with beer, wine, and champagne. Having Javi around again was like having a slick little brother who was destined to become a used-car salesman. While Javi treated his arrival on the island as the most-favored sibling’s return to his rightful place at the center of attention, Richard emphatically did not. He had developed a liking for being the boss and refused to vacate the position. Maybe one kitchen wasn’t big enough for the two of them.

  Everyone was giddy at the luau, a bittersweet combination of the end of their time together on the island (with all the bathos of end of summer camp) and sadness from the events of the last few days. Of course, Robby, Javi, and even Lilou could not feel the somber absence of Loren at the head of the table as the others did. Cooked was drinking heavily, and Titi teared up and left the table at regular intervals, presumably from grief, although it could also have been from the too-spicy food.

  “I put a little Yucatan, habanero spin on the dishes. I found a bag of dried chilies in the kitchen—”

  “That I avoided,” Richard said.

  They had finished a salad of lettuce, garlic, raw onions, and dried chilies in a balsamic vinaigrette and moved on to the basted fish with sides of spinach seasoned with Calabrian red-chili oil and sweet-and-spicy baked yams.

  Richard avoided the fish, but ate the rest.

  * * *

  Even as one ghost came to rest, another replaced it. Ever since Loren’s death, Richard had started having seafood dreams that were so shameful he could share them with no one, especially not Ann, who would rightly view this as the final straw. Seafood—the last bastion of his cooking repertoire—and he’d gotten pretty inventive on the island. Thirty-six ways with grouper. Opah galore. Mahimahi forever. Tuna any way you want it. But Loren’s death and the boat trip with Cooked out to that lonely stretch of water had messed with him.

  Loren had told them that the early European explorers refused to eat shark because of its man-eating reputation—it would be akin to cannibalism once removed.

  Richard knew; he’d been down there, had witnessed the sublime, mechanized violence of the ocean as eating machine. He could totally imagine it because every diver came up against the temptation eventually … It just seemed so natural, like a child believing he could fly after seeing birds in flight. Down below, surrounded, outnumbered by fish, one felt shackled by the mask, with its blinkered tunnel vision; the hissing, heavy tanks; the clumsy rubber flippers—all of it a barrier to being at one with the ocean. No wonder mermaids were invented; that’s what you fantasized being—breathing water in and out, having a fish tail, seemed marvelous possibilities that were in reach. Poor Loren had wanted to trade in his failing, aching body for that, and it made some kind of crazy logic, although Richard would never admit that. Officially, it was a Tragedy. Officially, Loren had drowned (and the fanciful wish that he’d metamorphosed into a merman was not even capable of being uttered, no). But if Loren had drowned, and if his body floated down and down into that all-encompassing darkness, well, the ocean was an efficient undertaker, and the fish would have done their biological duty toward him. By now Loren would have literally become part of the ocean he loved so much, and there was no way in hell that Richard was eating any freshly caught fish.

  * * *

  At the table, Titi was back but Lilou excused herself.

  Dex downed glass after glass of water to get rid of the burn; giving up, he tapped his knife against a glass.

  “I’d like to make a toast. To Titi and Cooked. You guys have been so cool about everything. We’ve shared the whole life cycle from marriage to death with you. We’re leaving you tomorrow but not leaving you at all. I will be back plenty. My accountants will be helping with the concert money raised. Your input will say where every dime is spent.”

  Robby grabbed at his stomach and left.

  Cooked belched but seemed otherwise unfazed. “Can I have another helping of fish?”

  “I shouldn’t have,” Titi said, and again she left.

  “Hey, it’s okay. Let your emotions hang out. We all miss our friend,” Dex called after her.

  Javi came out of the kitchen. He grabbed a beer and raised it. “Should we announce?”

  “Yeah,” Dex said. “Absolutely. So Javi’s been filling me in, and I’m ready to be a silent investor in the new El Gusano.”

  “What?” Ann said.

  “What’s this about?” Richard slapped his chair down flat from its cocked position, ready to fly at Javi’s throat.

  “I told him what happened, bro.”

  “You had no right.” Was it the fact that Javi had shamed him, or jealousy that he was stealing Richard’s new guy friend?

  Dex held up his hands in his new role as peacemaker. “Dudes. This is good. Just being on this island, all that’s happened, has made me more money than if I’d been out on tour. I want to share some of that good fortune. Sprinkle a little fairy dust around for my friends.”

  “We won’t accept,” Richard said.

  “Look, no hard feelings, but Javi screwed you over. He is the worm. But I can fix it. All I ask is for free food and a table when I’m in town. I like the idea of being in business together.”

  “It fixes things between us,” Javi said.

  Titi had returned and drank down a glass of water in one gulp.

  Richard looked at Ann.

  Ann … had no one to look at. She felt ambushed. All the things she’d already written off as not worth having were now within her grasp again. Richard obviously thought that this would put things right between them. Did it mean that he’d also forgiven her?

  “We can go back and take up where we left off,” Richard said. “But better.”

  “To El Gusano,” Javi cheered and raised his bottle.

  Wende got up abruptly. “Excuse me.” She left at a half trot.

  Robby had returned but didn’t look well.

  “Sorry.” Titi was breaking out in a sweat and disappeared again. Then it was Ann’s turn to leave, the sensation of a wave rolling through her stomach.

  “Oh God.” Dex ran.

  Confirmed. The food had given them painful, acid-spewing stomachaches. Horrendous gas. Instead of enjoying their last night talking or playing music, they spent it spread out across the resort, roosting atop each available toilet. In desperation, Titi tried drinking coconut milk, which helped. She loaded up a tray with glasses and toured all the island’s bathrooms.

  * * *

  Richard sat for long hours on the toilet in one of the unused fares as if he were doing penance, each hot, spitting explosion of spice in his gut punishment for his past inaction. These last weeks on the island that had supposedly been all about Ann had in actuality healed him. He discovered a man inside who was almost DOA, but still alive enough to be resurrected. Cooking on his own, he had rediscovered his joy, which had gotten buried underneath Javi during all those years.

  Richard had changed. Hadn’t he announced that he was going back to open a bakery?

  So what happened to this new Richard when Javi reappeared? When he announced he’d fixed his messes, that Dex was bailing them out, that things could go back on track to where they had been before they fled Los Angeles? What had the new Richard done? Collapsed like a badly whipped soufflé. Become a yes-man. Proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that all his changes were illusory.

  Javi had already been on the islands for a week vacationing in Mooréa and Bora-Bora on money he’d borrowed from Lorna. He’d been hustling a job as executive chef at the Aloha Pearl, just in case, when he saw the Crusoe cam and decided he’d better hightail it over. On top of everything, he’d gotten buddy-buddy with Dex, but Dex was Richard’s friend (he sounded like a pathetic six-year-old). And then Javi made moves on Wende, not to mention in the far past he’d had an affair with Ann. Why didn’t Richard just punch
him out?

  But the pinnacle of Richard’s self-loathing was connected to the pink, hairless piglet that Javi had bought, yanking him out of the supply boat and draping the little fellow over his shoulders like some pillaging Viking. Richard wasn’t a child, Richard knew the porcine score, but he had turned a blind eye once again. With everything else happening—the wedding, Loren, and Ann—it was easy to shove to the back of his mind the image of the cute little guy in his pen, plowing through the piles of scraps coming out of the kitchen, an animated, curly-tailed garbage disposal. Richard lied to himself that the piglet was a kind of pet, that at the right moment he would be set free. Right. On a barren motu, surrounded by carnivorous, luau-obsessed Polynesians, owned by the reckless, heartless Javi, that piglet didn’t have a swine’s chance in hell, unless it had a protector. If ever fate arranged a stage for a man to stand up for what he believed in, this was it, Richard was that protector, yet he had almost done nothing.

  That morning they had been awoken from their hangovers by terrified squeals. Richard broke out in a sweat at the childlike screams of the restrained piglet. He knew what was about to happen; in fact he was imagining it in far more vivid, 3-D detail than he would see if he were watching the actual butchering. It was no different for him than listening to a grisly murder taking place, but he did not have the courage to jump out of bed and run to stop it. He worried about making a fool of himself. When at long last the air was still, the silence was trebly damning.

  And then it happened. As if spirits had entered him and given him the strength he longed for but always fell short of, he jumped out of bed, startling Ann. He ran in his underwear to the location of the pen. He saw the piglet tied down to a rock slab; Javi stood above him with a hatchet.

  “Don’t you dare touch that pig!”

  Richard didn’t care any longer if he looked like a fool as long as he knew he wasn’t a coward.

  As Javi made the entire non-piglet-highlighted luau, Richard sat on his lanai, petting his new snouted companion as he rested on a bed of banana leaves at his feet. Later he sat down at the judgment table and ate the terribly overspiced food, carefully avoiding the fish. There was lots of grumbling around the table about the inauthenticity of a luau minus a pig. That’s when he noticed it. Without Richard’s tempering influence over the last month, Javi had lifted off into the outer sphere of unpalatable. Each bite he took was inedible, yet Richard did eat it. He didn’t care. He was saved. The restaurant never would have succeeded without him.

  * * *

  Another foul spasm erupted from Richard’s bowels. Someone was knocking at his bathroom door. He wanted privacy.

  “Go away!”

  “It’s Titi.”

  “Go away, Titi.”

  “I brought you coconut milk.”

  “I can’t put anything in my mouth.”

  “It will help your stomach.”

  A pause.

  “Leave it at the door.”

  “Okay, but drink it.”

  “Titi?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Titi?”

  “Yes?”

  Pause.

  “It was a terrible meal, wasn’t it?”

  Titi sighed. “The worst I ever ate.”

  “I should never have let it happen.”

  “You are too kind to that man.”

  “I’m a coward.” What was that saying about dead lions and live dogs? Without a doubt, he was a dachshund.

  Titi didn’t know the details of the trouble, but it was clear that this stranger, Javi, brought agony to Richard and unhappiness to Ann, so she wanted him gone for their sake. She had dropped some leaves and powders into Javi’s sauces to ensure disgrace. As penance for making the others sick, she had eaten the food also.

  “Do you know what I think?” Titi asked.

  “What?”

  “This Javi is a very bad man.”

  “Really?”

  “I watch him. I see. He doesn’t wash his hands when he comes into the kitchen. He tastes everything with his fingers. He licks them.”

  “I see.”

  “You are a good man. Very clean.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Clean is important.”

  * * *

  While everyone else retired to a toilet with a burn that extended from the esophagus to the colon, Cooked and Javi stayed at the table and drank beer, both immune to the incendiary food.

  “This is a nice spread you have,” Javi said.

  Cooked nodded. He was very, very drunk.

  “Connor over at the Aloha Pearl said it was underutilized. Do you know my buddy, Connor?”

  Cooked shook his head, trying to block out Javi’s voice as well as his face.

  “Connor is someone you should know. I’ll introduce you two. We’ll go party sometime.”

  Cooked picked up a new beer and drank it down in one gulp.

  Javi watched, impressed. “That’s my man!”

  Cooked said nothing.

  “Anyway, his feelings were that maybe a partnership, a mutually exclusive arrangement—”

  “The Aloha Pearl is a shithole. They pay below the official wage and cheat their workers.”

  “Maybe they have a few issues.”

  “‘Aloha’ is Hawaiian. Do you understand how messed up that is? Aren’t you leaving today?”

  Cooked was towering over Javi, and somehow his hand was encircling Javi’s neck, not necessarily in a threatening way, unless one wanted to be picky and ask what good reason he could have for holding a man’s neck in his hand in the first place. To Javi’s credit, he didn’t appear unduly concerned; he just ducked out of Cooked’s hold to grab another beer.

  “Some dinner that was, huh?”

  “It made everyone sick.”

  Javi was tempted to try to get something negative out of Cooked about Richard’s dishes, but considering the recent hand around his neck, he thought better of it.

  “Well, got a long flight home, better hit the hammock.” Javi gave a fake yawn. He started to leave, then did a dramatic turn back.

  “Connor is probably a douche bag, agreed. But he did say Steve from the main resort would steal the place from you in a matter of months. He said they’d either buy it cheap outright, or put you in debt and take it as collateral. Just a warning. Nighty-night.”

  Those were just the words Cooked needed to stay up all night with the mother of all anxiety attacks.

  Over time what happened—what he feared now for himself—was that most activists lost energy. They lost fight. They got older, got married, started to have too much to lose by going to jail or, worse, getting killed. They forgot. Most likely, Cooked would do nothing. Justice, if it came, would be won by others.

  He didn’t like his new role of being envied. Loren’s gift was double-edged. It created a space between the villagers and Cooked because no matter how much he ignored it, they did not. Titi was different. She had royal Pomare in her blood somewhere way back. To her, this felt owed. The weight of stewardship was a crown to her. Not for him. No other way to look at it—the island was a rock tied around Cooked’s neck, and he’d better keep swimming or he would drown.

  * * *

  The next morning they gathered—bums sore, eyes heavy from lack of sleep, insides still rumbling and threatening to erupt—and mutually elected to skip breakfast.

  Ann sat next to her suitcase, wearing her old brown bathing suit. She would have thrown it away—it no longer fit who she thought she was—but now ironically it reminded her of Loren. Wende came and sat next to her, putting an arm across her shoulders. Less touched by grief, she could play the role of comforter. Detachment was a luxury the young had.

  “I’ll miss this place,” Ann said.

  “It’ll be cool opening a restaurant together.”

  “Dex said you’d have your reception there.”

  Wende bit her lip. “He doesn’t believe in my transforma
tion. He thinks it was a fluke. That I’ll go back to being his muse. That’s not going to happen.”

  Dex was coming out of his fare, and Ann didn’t want to stick around for that conversation.

  “I’m going for a walk.”

  The cool sand of early morning cupped her feet in slurpy kisses. The truth was she’d stayed up all night not only from a poisoned colon but also in grief at leaving the island. Although Loren was gone, the magic of the place was still palpable. She associated it with him, but it was anyone’s for the taking. Out of sight of the fares, she was again in Crusoe country—empty coral beaches, the relentless expanse of ocean beating up against the brittle slips of land, the desiccated shade under the palm trees. With a shift of light, it all became an indescribable paradise. The island was the ocean’s soul; without land, one could not appreciate the watery vastness. No other footprints were visible; she was the first human being to set foot on the morning’s newly washed sand. What a wonderful feeling of renewal each day. The thought of her old life chafed like clothes one had grown out of. Life here was pure unclothed pleasure.

  Although she had not intended to revisit it, she found herself near the cove with the camera. Its power over her was gone. Loren had been right—its privacy, its secrecy, its noneventfulness had been its magic. The original people drawn to that had been its true fans. Maybe Loren being an artist made him appreciate that not every work of art is intended for the multitudes; some works are meant only for the afición. Even if he wasn’t telling the truth about the slaughtered-cow installation (and the more she thought about it, the more she suspected he had been pulling her leg), he definitely understood this.

  Other than Wende monitoring the picture periodically and the feed being shared with telemarketers who were still selling Prospero singles at a brisk pace, no one was interested in the Crusoe cam any longer. When the millions of new viewers realized the show was over, they quit watching. Hits went lower than before because the original fans had been offended by the whole kidnapping farce, coupled with the commercialized benefit concert. She did not have the heart to do the right thing, which would be to pull the plug.

  Ann sat behind the camera and looked out at the same view that the camera looked out at. The green water moved back and forth teasingly, as if it were doing so only to make her departure more painful. Time was running out. The window on extraordinary in her life was closing. Would the possibility of happiness soon follow?