Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

“I’m glad another woman is here,” Wende said. “All this macho crap.” She thumbed the lagoon, the sharks.

“What about the other couple?”

Wende frowned and shook her head. “Nonstarters.”

Dex’s band had been big when Ann was in high school in the early ’90s. They had plateaued by the time Lorna and she had found him drunk at the Troubadour. Wende didn’t look a day over twenty. It must have been lonely to be stuck there with the geriatric crowd. Not that Richard and she were in vacation mode.

“I was in Prospero’s last video, ‘Buy My Freedom,’” Wende said. As if that would clear Ann’s puzzled expression. “I’m his muse.”

Ann laughed out loud. “That seems a very old-fashioned word.”

“Did I use it wrong?”

“It’s the perfect word.”

“It really just means we get drunk, stoned, and have sex. Then Dex works all night. I don’t do anything. Pilates, yoga, swim. I guess that’s what a muse does.”

“You’re young. You’ll grow out of it.” Indeed, being Dex’s groupie was exactly what Ann could have done that night at the Troubadour, and if she had had a child from that union, Wende could conceivably have been the product, give or take a few years. All the girl had to do now was finish college and go on to grad school, work herself to death for the next decade, and then lose the fruits of that labor to an unscrupulous ex-lover/business partner, and then she could be said to have outgrown it like Ann. The self-pity was welling up in her; she forced it back down.

During the time they were crazy about each other, Ann and Richard had wanted to travel, but, deciding to be responsible, they had moved that goal off into the future. Like a mirage, it had remained always just beyond their reach. Now it was too easy to imagine washing up on the shores of fifty or sixty — tired, worn out, indifferent, having fulfilled none of their dreams. Maybe being a muse was as good a thing to be as anything else.

The water in front of them suddenly exploded. Richard bobbed up like a rocket.

“That was amazing!”

Loren looked pleased.

“Ann, did you see that?” Richard yelled.

“I didn’t see anything. It happened underwater.”

But that was not the entire truth. She had seen the fin and later the surface bubbling with motion. Richard was down there, his helpless white, flabby body as bait, but what could she do to prevent the steamrolling of fate? So she faked nonchalance.

“You could at least pretend to take an interest.” Richard sulked.

* * *

After dark, the absence of electricity shrank the island to the size of the dining area. Loren sat at the head of the table and entertained, keeping the party lively. He drank copiously but picked at the food. During dinner, the bearded man, who Loren hinted was a quasi-famous writer, said nothing, simply studied them through his thick glasses. He was traveling under a pseudonym, his real identity only just found out because of a message sent from the main resort — his agent trying to contact him about a film deal — had given away the game.

Ann knew the heavy frames were a hiding mechanism. Try as hard as she could, she could not think of his name, although he seemed vaguely familiar; it was one of those three-part ones that always stumped her.

“I’m a big reader,” she said, in her best cocktail-party mode. “What are the titles of your books?”

He gave her an appraising look. “I write about the universality of the human experience, using the devices of thinly disguised autobiography and increasing brevity. Long books are as passé as the missionary position.”

“Oh.”

“My debut, Colossus , was a hundred and twenty-nine pages about a boy’s awakening sexuality and realization that he is a genius. I was awarded a Genius Grant for it. My second book, Lunch , was eighty-nine pages about a little-read genius novelist deciding what to eat for lunch. It won a major prize you’ve probably never heard of, and got me labeled a ‘writer’s writer’ by the New York Times .”

“What does the novelist end up eating?” Richard asked.

The writer stopped for a moment and squinted at Richard, trying to decide if he was being ridiculed or Richard was just stupid. He decided the latter, and went on.

“Currently I’m writing my third, Sand , which should run sixty-seven pages about a novelist so brilliant no one reads him so he goes to a desert island to write a book about it with his homely wife who supports him. The woman’s money emasculates the man so he betrays her.”

No one said a word.

“He betrays her with the comely, nubile, sexually promiscuous young girlfriend of an embittered, washed-up, immature pop singer. The writer’s lovely new mistress begs him to take her away and use her as his muse.”

Ann coughed. She was mistaken. She had never heard of him, nor did she want to. “You don’t have any of your books with you, do you? For sale?” His lip curled; she was deeply sorry she had asked.

“It would be a bit ‘used-car salesman’ to carry one’s own books around, no?”

“I always wanted to try to write a book.”

“Yes, and I always wanted to try to do brain surgery in my spare moments.”

Ann was drowning in a toxic swamp and needed a lifeline. “Is this your wife?”

He leaned forward so that Ann was prevented from extending her hand to the woman.

“Hello,” the woman mumbled over his extra-large, balding, genius head.

“Enough gossiping!” the writer said.

“Hold on,” Dex said. He had been talking with Loren and only half listening. “You aren’t the John Stubb Byron?”

The man actually flushed in pleasure.

“Man, I had no idea. You haven’t said two words to us the last week. Colossus is one of my favorite novels of all time. It changed my life. Lunch is pure poetry. This man is a genius!”

“Please,” he said, staring into his goblet of wine. “I try to pass through the world anonymously in order to observe its truth without the distorting lens of my little fame, thus the nom de guerre.”

“If only I had my copies here for you to sign,” Dex said.

“I can probably dig some up in my suitcase.” He turned to the woman. “Go. Bring a copy of each and my Sharpie.”

For the rest of the meal, the satisfied writer was silent and openly contemptuous of the whole table except for Dex, giving his wife significant looks until dessert was served, which the two promptly carried away to their fare . The two remaining couples lingered in the oasis of oil lanterns.

“Love it here,” Dex said.

“How long have you been at the resort?” Richard asked.

Ann knew that Richard had never heard of Prospero, but even if he had, it would have made no difference. One of the things she admired in him was his absolute imperviousness to the seductions of celebrity outside the culinary world. He was just on his usual friend-making mission. She thought Dex sensed it, too, and that’s why the two men hit it off.

“A month? Longer? It’s so good I lost track of time,” Dex said.

Wende rolled her eyes.

“Really?”

“Thinking about buying my own motu . No offense, Loren, but you charge pretty steep.”

Loren smiled. “What is paradise worth, my rich friend?”

On a speck of coral halfway across the vast Pacific, the conversation degenerated, as it did between most Californians, to speculation about real estate prices back home. The popping of the real-estate bubble into the ugliness of the mortgage loan crisis was an unprecedented loss of innocence for most Golden State residents.

“But the high-end is okay,” Richard said, trying to be upbeat.