The Last Good Paradise (28 page)

*   *   *

Even when she was working at the firm full-time, Ann had never been on so many diplomatic missions. Now she made her way to Loren’s hut, except Wende had ruined it for her by making her feel like Madame Bovary, sneaking off to a lover. If anything, she felt more than ever like a lawyer. Knocking on the door as a formality, she was surprised when she heard “Come in.”

Loren was writing at his desk. He looked more energized than he had in days.

“Am I interrupting?”

“No more than usual.”

She watched the rolling waves on the monitor as he finished.

“All done,” he said.

“We need to talk about Cooked.”

Loren frowned. “That’s just what I’m doing.”

“Don’t turn him in to the police. You don’t know if he would have gone ahead with it. He’s an innocent. Deluded, but innocent.”

“I’m deeding the island over to him and Titi. It’s time they quit playing and married. Once he has something to lose, he’ll stop this nonsense. What is the saying, ‘Revolutionaries don’t have mortgages’? I don’t need to tell you—the world has sharp teeth.”

“How will you escape those teeth?”

“It won’t be my fight much longer.”

Ann bowed her head. “It’s a magnificent gift. A life-changing gift.”

“My reparations.”

“From what I can tell, you’ve always been good to them.”

“Maybe it evens out. You know, in the big score book of life.

“Will they accept?”

“The question is, are they ready to keep the vultures away? There probably isn’t time enough on earth for that.”

“You mean Cooked?”

“Can be tricked.”

“So stay around.”

Loren grimaced. After a moment his face relaxed again. “That isn’t a choice I have.”

*   *   *

Dinner that night was fish with a fluffy béarnaise sauce, canned green beans with toasted coconut, a pudding of banana and mango—supplies were running low, testing Richard’s creativity.

When Loren announced his gift, they all raised their glasses to toast Cooked and Titi.

“With this island, may you two rebuild the great power of
te fenua Ma ‘ohi
, the people and the land of
Ma ‘ohi
.”

“Whoa, Cooked. You be the boss,” Dex said.

Richard clapped. “Let me do the wedding feast.”

Titi shook her head. “My family must do that, but you can make one thing.”

“Name it.”

“The wedding cake.”

“Yes.”

Cooked had been silent and put down his glass without drinking. “I cannot.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Loren snapped. He had the tunnel vision of illness, and he fumed at Cooked’s pigheadedness.

“You’re buying us off.”

Loren slammed his fist down on the table. “I’m giving you shelter from the storm. A decent life.”

“What about the people who don’t get a fancy hotel?”

“Every last one would change places with you in a heartbeat. Fool.”

“You’re the fool!”

Loren sat back and took a deep breath, willing the pain away. “Do you think it will accomplish anything, blowing up a few rooms? They’d lock you up, throw away the key, and forget you existed. What good would you be then?”

“He’s right,” Ann said.

“What’s he talking about? What are you talking about?” Richard asked.

It was becoming a regular habit Ann regretted but couldn’t stop—keeping secrets from Richard.

“Tell them about the pictures,” Cooked demanded.

Wende nodded. “Jellyfish babies born to women exposed to radiation. Horrible birth defects. I saw the evidence for the lawsuits.”

“
That
was what you were doing with him?” Dex asked.

Cooked slammed the table. “If I take this place, I’ll be part of the lie, too. The military keeps us off balance so that they make money from tourists coming here.”

There was silence around the table. After all, they were those tourists.

“It’s kind of a
Kobayashi Maru
situation,” Wende said.

Everyone stared at her.

“You know.” She jabbed her chin at Dex. “Remember
Star Trek
? A choice between two bad scenarios?”

“My God,” Loren said. “You people believe life is television.”

“She’s got a point, though,” Dex said, pleased beyond reason that Wende had looked to him for help. He’d been wrong to turn her down the first time point-blank when she asked him to help Cooked. They were just kids and needed guidance. “What you need is a PR campaign. A defining action. No rogue butthead moves like you were going to do. We need to arrive at leaderless consensus.”

Everyone stared at Dex in silence.

“Just sayin’.”

“That’s why we were blowing up rooms at the hotel. To scare tourists,” Cooked said.

“No,” Wende said. “That puts people on their side. Dex is right.”

Ever since reading his marriage journal and realizing who was the settler and who was the settlee, Wende had seen Dex in an entirely different and more positive light. She even felt like sleeping with him for old times’ sake. “What we need to do is tell a story. No one wants to watch those downer stories on the news anymore. Those depressing pictures! Bah! But if we have a face, if we have a hero…” Wende trailed off.

“Hearts and minds,” Dex chimed in.

Maybe, Wende thought, I’ll become his mistress.

*   *   *

Wende’s father had been a used-car salesman in Boise, plagued with a consuming love for the bottle, when he met her mother. She was a hippie living on an organic farm in Oregon. Perhaps sensing the direction her future would take after marrying, she enrolled in junior college and became an accountant before Wende was born. Her father’s fluctuating commissions and subsequent changes of employment led him to an irrational resentment of her mother’s newfound constancy and steadfastness, which rescued the family over and over and put chicken potpie on the table. His solution was a series of get-rich-quick schemes that were made possible only by his wife’s constant infusion of start-up money, which further fueled his resentment into an ugly downward spiral of penury and failure. After the fifth business closure—a restaurant-food delivery service with such slim margins and large promises (within thirty minutes or free!)—he switched to guerrilla tactics to protect his ego.

He took his wife to an expensive night out, maxing the credit card, and coaxed her into the idea of having another child with the aim of anchoring her into the marriage. Once she was pregnant, he again lost interest in the family and changed his main place of business to a local bar stool. As a cautionary tale, Wende remembered her mother putting on her old wool coat that could only be buttoned at the top due to her protruding stomach, heralding the arrival of Wende’s baby sister, and trudging through the sleet and snow to retrieve him.

Wende never would understand the reason these two opposite souls came together. When they fought, he called her a commie-lib lesbian (she had mistakenly confided an experimental tryst on the organic farm), and she called him a gun-toting redneck hater. “Hater” was her mother’s ultimate condemnation.

After they lost their house, his next brainstorm involved moving to the small town of Cutthroat, Idaho, in the eastern part of the state because the rent was cheap and there was space. He began a last series of business blowups—mink farming that lasted six months, then bent-willow garden furniture.

Wende had been a thriving student in Boise, a star in the drama department, but the move to the boondocks shook her. The rural kids were both more innocent than those in the big city of Boise and more adult. The easy availability of drugs made her old public school look like a Catholic parochial one. The existential problem that she faced in Cutthroat for the first time in her young life was: nothing to do. Kids solved this by having sex much earlier. Teen pregnancies were the norm. Even to a fourteen-year-old, it looked like a tightening noose. Wende’s solution was to withdraw to protect herself from contagion.

She stayed home, enacting dramas that she wrote for her stuffed animals and dolls way past the age when such behavior was acceptable. Her parents, in the middle of their downward slide, ignored it. Truth was, outwardly, Wende had become a nerd success story. Her grade point average was 4.9, figuring in honors classes. She
was
the drama department, whipping her peers into performances of plays by Sam Shepherd and David Mamet when all they wanted to do was
Oklahoma!
and
Annie Get Your Gun
.

Her last year of high school, her dad’s borrowed used Buick stalled in a blizzard on his way home from his latest business venture, a Russian vodka bar featuring ice bar stools that you sat on with thermal cushions, which was too avant-garde by half for Cutthroat. After sliding down an embankment, he inexplicably rolled down the windows and fell asleep, freezing to death. At one a.m., no one was on the road to see or help him. The next day, her mother entered rehab. Her younger sister, Janelle, married her high-school sweetheart while still in high school and stayed in Cutthroat to raise Wende’s new nephew, Petey, who came seven months later. Wende left the day after graduation, propelled as if by rocket fuel out of there.

But true happiness was not as easy as a change of venue. She waitressed while attending Valley Junior College, then transferred to UCLA for her degree. She acted, took film studies, sang in a girl rock band, but nothing clicked. Then she met Dex. That brush with celebrity was seductive, allowing her to skip the whole struggling part and just enjoy his overflow of attention, but at bottom she knew that her life with him would only be a high-octane version of staying in Cutthroat.

*   *   *

“The problem in the past is that the protesters have all been framed as
haters
,” Wende said to the table that night. “Your story needs to be recast.”

In retrospect, in light of what it snowballed into, it was hard to remember how such an outlandish plan had begun. Why hadn’t the rest of them thrown out the idea immediately? Perhaps because Loren, a fatalist, was already caught up in his own personal unwinding. Titi and Cooked were pleased to get an American-style corporate makeover, though later they would be increasingly unhappy when they were pushed out of participating in their own revolution. Richard wanted to see the little man, the overlooked man, triumph at last. Dex thought of it as his brave grand adventure to win back Wende’s heart. They all let the implications slide because in the back of their minds they figured the naysayer of the group, Ann, recovering attorney, skeptic, would squelch it, which she didn’t, precisely because it was expected of her. She had a long history of saying no to the big idea, and what had it gotten her? Maybe naïve Wende had a point. Who would want to grow up and end up Ann? At the very least, what harm could come of such a harebrained idea?

In a partylike atmosphere, they stayed up all that night, eating dessert, then cheese, then fruit, drinking bottle after bottle of rum while hashing out Dex’s idea about a grassroots PR campaign. It was dawn by the time they straggled away to bed.

At noon the next day, hangovers be damned, everyone got up for breakfast and picked up where they had left off the night before, like a prolonged game of Monopoly. The mood at the resort had utterly changed. They were on a mission, and perversely, it felt more natural than the earlier enforced leisure.

Ann dug her phone out of a bottom dresser drawer (it finally had become too ridiculous to fetch it out of its liquid plunge-pool storage each time), and Titi called her relatives to inform them of the nuptials and to pass on invitations for the wedding feast. Cooked did the same (putting Wende on for a moment to say hi to his mom).

In the late afternoon, Loren made a production of handing over a key to one of the garden
fares
for Cooked and Titi’s use. Titi had to sit down on the step, she was so overcome.

“I never imagined this. I figured that all my life I would only clean these rooms.”

Wende, teary-eyed, patted her shoulder. Titi flicked off the girl’s touch.

“Even though I take naps in the beds during the day,” Titi continued, “I take showers, use perfume left out…”

*   *   *

Quickly, the computer had gone from taboo to everyday. There was always a line on Loren’s lanai, waiting to check email or surf the web.

While Richard waited for a cake recipe to print out, he sent a stealth email to Javi:

Hope you’re okay. Things are complicated here, but it’s incredible, too. Don’t tell Ann, but I feel guilty enjoying all this while you can’t. I’m making my first Polynesian-inspired wedding cake—how cool is that?

Loren called Steve the manager to see why it was taking so long to procure a boat. Richard was driving him mad with shopping lists.

“It’s on its way from Papeete. I’ll have it to you tomorrow.”

“We’re getting ready for a wedding and a change of ownership here.”

Silence on the other end.

“You should have consulted with me first,” Steve said.

“It had nothing to do with you.”

“Headquarters will make you a very sweet offer.”

“Cooked and Titi own it.”

Steve’s voice rose higher and tighter, like a cord being stretched to breaking. “I won’t be comfortable sending people over under those circumstances.”

“Nothing will change.”

“We need professionals. We need—”

“The resort is closed now. We’re having a wedding feast.”

“Luau style? How about I bring select guests? If you promise drums and dancers, I can charge two hundred fifty euros a couple. We’ll split it sixty-forty. Romantic? Primitive? We’ll get interest.”

“Come near this island, I’ll shoot you.”

“Is that a threat—?” Steve yelled before the connection went dead.

*   *   *

It was inexplicable how Wende knew exactly what to do, as if she’d been doing it all her life. Leaving Cutthroat had been nothing. Living in LA, ditto. Her life was finally taking off here on the island. For the last two years she had been observing and been disgusted by Prospero’s misguided and behind-the-times marketing and anemic social media campaign, and she had ideas …