The Last Good Paradise (16 page)

“I was going to propose when I got promoted to line chef.”

“Oh.”

“Now what?”

“How about opening your own restaurant?”

Richard nodded. “That’s my dream, but not yet. We don’t have the money or experience.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

Richard was excited by the prospect of his own place but scared at the reality. Ann didn’t know enough about the business to help. That’s when she thought about Javi. The next afternoon while in his bed, she brought her plan up.

“You need what he offers,” she said.

“What about us?”

“Us ends.”

But not before a last afternoon-into-the-early-evening of
amor
. She chastly kissed Javi on the forehead as she left.

Armed with a master plan, Javi and Richard moved to a new, high-concept restaurant chain and quickly went through the ranks from
commis
to sous chefs. Richard, with Javi covering for him during really noxious duties, did all the rotations, spending extra time (no Javi) as
garde manger
,
legumier
,
potager
, and
entremetier
; less time (50 percent Javi) as
friturier
,
grillardin
, and
rôtisseur
; no time (all Javi) as
boucher
. Surprisingly he excelled as
saucier
and was promoted to sous position ahead of Javi, but Richard was nothing if not loyal. Ann did her part by working long hours at FFBBP to raise capital.

Ten years later Ann’s memory of being with Javi was as unthinkable as incest. Not quite that bad, but knowing Javi and his history with women had cured Ann of ever being tempted again.

*   *   *

Hours passed. Ann swam and walked farther than she had ever gone before around the island. The solitude was so complete she couldn’t imagine it being broken. Her thoughts, instead of heading as usual to fixing the disaster of their life back home, stayed right on the island, right in the moment. Even though a week before Richard and she had been on the brink of the success they had so struggled for, today she couldn’t summon much sadness for its passing. How could a sacrifice of ten years be wiped away in a week and not matter? What was wrong with that picture? Did they know that the restaurant would be a success? What if El Gusano turned out to be just another type of prison? Was she becoming gun-shy of commitment of any kind? It felt like she had only done the prep work and skipped the climaxes of her professional life—partnership at the firm, running a restaurant. Already she was at the denouement. For the first time in her carefully planned life, the future remained opaque.

Surprisingly, it didn’t feel as bad as she thought it would.

She was gazing up the beach, feeling like some cross between a castaway and a mystic, when she saw it. A sight that literally stopped her in her tracks and took her breath away.

Her head pounded. The first thing that came to mind was the scene she had read in
Robinson Crusoe
—when after living alone for many years Crusoe found that single human footprint in the sand of his deserted isle. Far from making him happy, it terrified him. Granted, cannibalism was a problem she thankfully didn’t have. This was a twenty-first-century footprint. She felt dizzy, and then the reality of her nakedness occurred to her. One arm went across her breasts; the other covered her pubic area. Her chest went concave, as if she were less visible that way. Ann turned and ran, realizing, too late, that her bare ass was in full view.

It took her half an hour to scour the beach backward toward the resort for the heart-shaped cove and clump of five palms, where she found her string bag but no brown bathing suit. When she had retraced her steps to said cove for the fifth time with still no bathing suit in sight, she gave up and scurried to the resort. Her previous confidence and joy in her nakedness, her oneness with nature, had evaporated, replaced by the primal terror one had in dreams of appearing naked. Except she wasn’t dreaming. What were the odds—the first time she had done such a thing—that this would happen? Chastened, she was frantic to hide all evidence of her lapse.

The dive boat had returned and was tied up at the dock, but thankfully no one was in sight. She hid behind a palm for a minute, surveying the empty path, then made her run for her
fare
on the other end of the beach. Behind her a door slammed, but she did not dare turn, just barreled straight ahead, determined on invisibility. As she jumped on the lanai and placed her hand on the doorknob, she distinctly heard a wolf whistle. She did not look back.

*   *   *

The scuba diving ménage à trois had taken an interesting turn that day. Before they took off, Richard as usual checked the gas level in the boat, made sure there was an extra can of petrol, established that the radio was operational. Cooked was much too lax. Earlier Richard had talked Loren into teaching him how to check the gas levels in the scuba tanks and inspect them for leaks. On his own initiative, he gave the mouthpieces a quick antibacterial swipe.

A pattern had developed over the previous outings: At first the three of them would take off and look at things together. Then Dex and Wende would swim away, and Richard obligingly swam in the opposite direction to give them privacy. The first time he was alone, he heard a crunching sound, like someone eating cereal. He thought he was hallucinating when he spotted its source: a beautiful green-and-blue fish, munching on coral. Sometimes Richard was so still, fish came and nibbled on him as if he might be edible. He liked these nibbles and never shooed the fish away. Afterward his skin would have small purplish bites like miniature hickeys. Richard was growing to cherish these times when his mind was so concentrated on the sights around him—lacy fans of white coral; clumped brain coral in magenta, apricot, and green; clown fish; manta rays; sea turtles; blue starfish—that he literally lost himself until either Cooked or Wende swam to get him.

Needless to say, he greatly preferred Wende’s visits: the halo of blond hair floating, the flipper-elongated mermaid legs, the sparkle of belly button ring. He even liked how her lower jaw and mouth looked under the mask, like a goofy Muppet, making the beauty of her whole face less intimidating. Her running joke was to sneak up behind him and pull on the elastic waistband of his swim trunks, then let go, snapping him. When, lost in his fishy daydreams, he startled and sputtered in his mouthpiece, she found this hilarious. She would tap on his air gauge, indicating it was time to surface, and then they would ascend side by side, air bubbles promiscuously mixing, their heads finally breaking above water, masks crowning their foreheads.

“Don’t do that,” he said, mock angry even as their thighs brushed while treading water. “Naughty girl.”

Each day after lunch on one or another deserted atoll, Cooked and Dex lit up a joint, and soon both would be conked out. Although in truth Richard wouldn’t have minded a nap himself, Wende was wide-awake and, for his intents and purposes, alone.

Under normal circumstances, Richard would have put himself out of temptation’s way. He would have toked with the guys, then napped. He’d had years of practice turning a blind eye to pretty waitresses, hostesses, and even the occasional femme fatale chef. But the recurring vision of Ann propped up on that sarcophagal sleigh bed, sopping down that disgusting snot-green drink with Loren, burned behind his eyelids. So when Wende called, he went.

The first time this happened, they decided to explore a bird sanctuary on one of the islands. As they crawled up on the birds, trying to keep quiet and not scare them away, Richard put out his hand and laid it on her sun-warmed shoulder. He inhaled deeply. She smelled like good soup.

Another time, guiding her around a rocky shore, he held her hand. Even these chaste acts racked him with shame, as if the two of them were having wild crazy sex orgies each afternoon. He was a swine, a typical horny guy dry-humping as soon as an attractive young woman walked by, and yet … Wende
was
pretty, Wende
was
well built, Wende
was
young, sweet, unironic, worshipful, and, most important of all, Wende
didn’t
see him as an utter loser.

Although the demise of El Gusano, the fact of Javi’s profligacy, and Richard’s own carelessness in allowing things to come to this unforgivable pass were soul-shattering, what could be done now? His solution was to go back to work. Things would either straighten themselves out or not, but he didn’t envision no longer cooking. Richard cooked, therefore he was. This is where his guilt came in: Ann hated her job. She did it for them, and her sacrifice was on the verge of being wasted. How long would it take Javi to pay them back? It would never happen. There was nothing Richard could do about any of it, and so he lusted after Wende.

This last week had been revelatory. He had forgotten what normal people did with the empty hours of a day, how long and voluptuous said hours could be when wrapped around pleasure. His usual day started at six a.m., when he rose to accept deliveries at the kitchen, continued to cleaning and prepping, then cooking, ordering, managing staff, and at the end of a long day, two a.m. on average, falling back into bed exhausted. His view of the bigger world was out the kitchen’s back door to the alley. Of course his body was enjoying this leisure, but his soul was restless. The knowledge that he had done his best to be what Ann wanted and failed tore him up.

On that particular day’s rock-star-boyfriend-less excursion, Wende stubbed her toe, and Richard offered to massage it. She sat on the sand and put her shapely foot in his lap, oblivious to the fact that she was exposing the metallic-gold isthmus of thong bikini between her legs, or that her pumiced heel was pressing down on his groin.

“I love your hands,” Wende said.

Richard, mystified, looked down at his scarred, callused cook’s hands that he only noticed when they were damaged and got in the way of his work.

“I cook,” he said. “Escoffier said that good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.”

“I want a man who loves me like you love Ann.”

Had she really just said that? Richard smiled, a look he worried was mincing rather than seductive. Was this a test?

“Dex is such an old man, you know?” Wende said.

He ground his knuckles into the ball of her foot, then kneaded the tendon along her arch. Her toenails were frosted pink like the icing on a cupcake, and he surprised himself with the fantasy of putting one of her little toes in his mouth.

“Not that old,” he said.

“It’s his attitude. Like a father almost.”

“I could be your father.”

“Almost.”

“So why are you with such an old man?”

“I don’t believe in the limitations of age. I’m an old soul.”

Despite lusting after her, Richard had to bite the inside of his cheek not to smirk. “So the money didn’t attract you?”

She shook her head and flung herself back on her elbows. He tried not to notice that her breasts bulged out invitingly from their little gold lamé triangles of shelter. Forget soup. The
sillage
from her skin was of coconut, apricots, caramelized sugar.

“It’s more of a hassle than anything else. It attracts these hangers-on. People Dex shouldn’t be around. I came for the music. I stayed for the music. He’s a major talent. I worry about him being on his own, but I’m still young. I can’t be his mother. I want to find real love like you two have.”

Richard’s mind was an utter blank. You two? When it came to him that she meant him and Ann, it was like a pail of cold water. “Us!” He flung Wende’s foot off his lap and jumped up. “You should be fine now. Let’s go back.”

After all these years of faithfulness, Richard had for the first time (second time if you included fantasies of the Spanish sous chef Alicia, which he had never acted on) been willing to flirt with the idea of another woman, and yet he—stupid, stupid—had been unaware, blind to the fact that time was passing, had passed in fact, and that he had reached that critical stage where a man is no longer attractive on his own to younger women. Youth would no longer carry the day. He had to face the fact that the receding hairline and the pot belly and the hair sprouting out of his ears were not just aberrations, things that could be fixed or hidden away, but instead were precursors to the fact that Richard was on his way to turning into a middle-aged lech desiring but not getting the pootie. And what did a young woman want with a middle-aged lecherous man unless he was rich, glamorous, or preferably both, like Dex Cooper?

“You should go home to your parents.”

Richard just prayed that Ann would get over her infatuation with the cadaverous Frenchman.

Wende stuck out her pink tongue at him. “Who are you? My dad?”

She said it in such a snotty, schoolgirl tone it was all he could do to not bend her over his knee and spank her. That he kind of liked the idea mortified him. When they arrived back at the boat, she went aboard and put on a T-shirt, totally ignoring Richard. Had he angered her that much?

Dex didn’t open his eyes. “Cooked’s been telling me about the drift dive. It’s wild. We gotta do it.”

“Great,” Wende said, clearly indicating it was not. She stretched her arms above her head and arched her comely back while giving Cooked the hard, appraising look of a hungry person standing in front of an open refrigerator, desiring to be tempted. Her eyes scanned his triangular tattoos, slowly trailing down his torso (conscious of this ravenous gaze, he sucked in his stomach).

Cooked burst out into a big stoned grin, intuiting Richard’s flirtation was at an end.

“How about some beer?” Dex said, and stood up unsteadily just as Wende switched seats away from Richard to sit next to Cooked, teeter-tottering the boat. As if Dex had changed his mind and wanted to dive instead, he bent over the side of the boat and pitched in headfirst.

From underwater, Wende’s screams made the same scratching sound as the parrot fish Richard had heard earlier. Dex was in a dead man’s slump, oblivious to the fact he had fallen overboard. Richard grabbed him around the waist and kicked upward, thrilled that, despite his panic, his old Boy Scout training had sprung back into use. With Cooked’s help, they hoisted an unconscious Dex onboard, and Richard went to work. In the restaurant biz someone had to learn CPR, and Javi had been uninterested, so Richard had taken the course alone.