Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

She lifted herself to the bottom step of the ladder and sat shivering in the moonlight.

A mistake to have left the firm citing a personal emergency, handing her caseload over to a coworker who would undoubtedly bad-mouth her now. This would be seen as weakness. One of the senior partners, Peleg, whose wife of thirty-five years died of cancer, managed to put in a half day after the morning funeral. No mercy would be shown to Ann.

She didn’t always hate the law.

During her summer breaks from law school, she interned for eccentric Professor Faucett, who drove a beat-up old VW van and lived in a shack in the shabby part of Silver Lake, brilliantly defending clients against corporations. Ann spent all-nighters, all-weekenders, with a group of a half dozen other idealistic types known as the “Faucetts,” who literally ate and slept in order to come to work, driven by the passion he inspired to do good.

Faucett had bad teeth, frizzy gray hair, and irregular laundry service, but none of that mattered because he was beating up the bad guys. After taking out living expenses (minimal), paying alimony (hefty) to a wife in the Palisades, who was not about to wait for the meek to inherit the earth, and child support (hefty) for their daughter, who attended private school and drove a BMW convertible, Faucett plowed every remaining last dime into defending the defenseless.

Ann was as in awe of Faucett’s selflessness as she was appalled by the wreck of his personal life. From his example, she, too, longed to do good. That summer she liked feeling that what she did mattered. She loved bolting out of bed in the morning like a legal knight in shining armor. But everything around her, from the expensive clothes in the Beverly Center to the big houses in Bel Air and Brentwood, suggested that the direction Faucett had taken was a fool’s path, one not capable of being followed, as impossible to replicate as trying to imitate Mother Teresa.

Just as in med school, where all the first-years professed a desire to help mankind and by the fourth year were clawing for specialties in dermatology or plastics, Ann noticed during the last year of law school that the aspirations of her fellow Faucetts underwent a seismic shift. Gone was the talk of pro bono work and public defenders. Now they were trying to guess the needs of the big firms: Patent defense? Estate planning? Now it was the address of the firm, the view from the office, the make of one’s car that determined one’s choices.

She never got in touch with Faucett again after being hired by FFBBP because she couldn’t bear confessing that the summer had been the equivalent of a moral one-night stand. She had sold out when the concept was still a valid one. Now guilt over selling out was as quaint and old-fashioned as knitted doilies, what with A-list actors hacking sheets through Kmart, and famous lawyers making cameos on TV shows. She joined the ranks of the dissatisfied, hating her job and dreaming of the day she could retire early and follow a passion — painting, or producing artisanal cheese, or deoiling penguins.

Ann was climbing back to their deck to towel off when she heard the snap of a door closing nearby.

* * *

In the harsh morning light, Loren, hungover, watched Ann come out of the hotel and walk down to the dock in a somber brown one-piece suit that looked proper for a grandmother taking a pram walk on the cold, rocky coast of Normandy. The suit flattened her breasts and covered every inch of derriere. A crime. An oversize straw hat hid her face, the zinc oxide 50 SPF sunblock giving her a Kabuki-like ghostly glow underneath.

If he didn’t know better, he would have thought her coldhearted, but he guessed she was merely unhappy, like many of his tourists. In the old days, if she had been single, he would have had her in bed within a day. If married, two. She was his type: good-looking but not flashy, intelligent but not dried out. Out of his league in the States, but all was possible in the islands.

One discovered interesting things about people when they were on vacation. Loren would take out a high-powered, arrogant businessman on a diving trip — the kind of guy who wouldn’t give anyone the time of day back home, insulated by at least three levels of assistants — but stick an oxygen tank on his back and drop him in shark-infested waters, and he’d become as docile and compliant as a puppy.

Couples were trickier. Other than lust-besotted honeymooners, one either had two partners who were sick to death of each other or two strangers who hardly knew each other, suddenly thrown together with no distractions. Always a volatile mix.

Droves of Westerners flew to the islands with some variation of castaway fantasy. He got a high percentage of honeymooners, who were the best because they stayed in their fares most of the time, only coming out for food and alcohol, and they rarely complained. The second biggest group was the retireds — wrinkled, tired, unsure, bewildered by their sudden release into leisure. They would stare at the overpriced menus in the tourist hotels, wondering if this was what they had worked so hard for, saved for so parsimoniously, to waste money like this. An existential question for sure. They complained about everything because nothing could measure up to their impossible longings. He was sympathetic, but these weren’t his bread and butter. The last group — the unhappys — these had been Loren’s specialty.

* * *

The sun rode hard and yellow against the thin green sea. Richard and Ann got into the boat with their two small bags while Loren was still carrying on supplies of groceries and gasoline. After a few boxes, he stopped, exhausted, to wipe his face and light up a cigarette. After ten minutes of inaction, Richard got out and began to load boxes himself. Loren idly watched with neither thanks nor a request to stop. Finally he stubbed out his cigarette and helped. By the time they were finished, every square inch was packed, with barely enough room to sit. It was disconcerting to see everything they would be eating for the next week or so loaded around them in the hot sun. In true third-world style, the can of gasoline nestled next to the grapes, mangoes, and pineapples they would be eating; bottles of bleach cozied up to the meat and bread; plastic cartons of milk sat unrefrigerated.

“Make sure you have gone to make pee-pee. The boat trip is an hour and a half, with lots of bouncy-bouncy,” Loren said. He enjoyed the grimace on Ann’s face as she turned away. He found it amusing how squeamish Americans were at the mention of bodily functions. Didn’t they understand that all humankind was mere flesh, animated by spirit, if one were so inclined to believe? “We are riding the pass into the lagoon. Twice a day a big tide comes in and out, bringing many animals: the sharks, the porpoises, turtles. We will come back for diving.”

“I took my first dive yesterday,” Richard volunteered.

This was another of Richard’s traits that irked her — how he tried to befriend everyone he met, even this condescending Frenchman.

“Yes?” Loren said.

“Did you say sharks?” Ann asked.

“I loved it,” Richard said.

“Many, many sharks,” Loren said. “The sharks in Polynesia outnumber the people. Mostly safe to swim in the lagoon in the daytime. They have so much food. Unless they are hungry. I will take you to feed them — give you the thrill of the deep.” Loren looked at Ann. “Never swim at nighttime, though. That’s when they feed. It’s very dangerous.”

Ann turned a shade whiter under her zinc oxide. The memory of the dark shape underneath her, taking her measure, proving that it was master, that it chose the time and place of mortality before swimming away, spooked her.

The ride, as promised, was long and bumpy. Loren rode at a fast clip, carelessly plowing the nose of the boat into each wave crest, dousing them with spray. Wind whipped the water from blue to green and back to blue. In every direction, the world spread out — a horizontal, watery desert.