Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

“My Holmby Hills place, the Montecito ranch, the hideaway in Palm Springs, the duplex in Venice — all upside down. Can’t unload a one. The property taxes alone are eating me alive,” Dex said.

Ann wondered how fast they could dump their fixer-upper starter house, fully furnished, if they had to. It felt like divorce, thinking this way. The house had been the symbol of their early marriage. One of the casualties of being an attorney was seeing houses, furniture, cars all reduced to their base value. Their life reduced to an equation of location times square footage, totally ignoring the fact it was a charming old Craftsman bungalow with a deep backyard lined with royal palms and walls covered in bougainvillea. It had been the place they had dreamed their dreams. In the beginning, they devoted their weekends to refurbishing it: painting walls, replacing moldings, laying down vintage-style tile. They splurged installing stained glass to replace the glass in the transoms above the doors. Just as they had finished the wide-plank, distressed pinewood floors, Richard and Javi, tired of working for others, had decided to open a restaurant.

The house fell into a spell of neglect that Ann assured herself was only temporary. The kitchen remodel would have to wait. Weeds appeared in the backyard, the pool turned green, Optimistically, Ann still shopped flea markets — a French wire egg basket, a needlepoint stool — a habit she had developed with her mom when times looked bleak. As she would have argued in a court of law, they still had a dream — it had just been postponed.

* * *

During the chemo and radiation treatments, her mother suddenly had decided that the house needed remodeling. This from a woman who allowed her husband’s frat house sofa to be in the den years after they married.

“Are you sure?” Ann asked, not wanting to ask the obvious: Did she have the energy for that kind of undertaking?

Each day they drove to antique shops and estate sales, studied books to learn about period furniture, zeroing in on French. They discovered parts of Los Angeles they had never been to before. They stopped for breakfast and lunch at places no one they knew went to. It was their first adventure together. The house transformed from casual ’70s-style ranch house to bohemian Parisian apartment.

When they hauled in a particularly large toile French settee, her father took her aside. His eyes, magnified by thick lenses, appeared anxious. “I just don’t understand this furniture obsession, do you?”

“I don’t know…”

“What happened in Paris?”

* * *

Ann understood that houses, like marriages, were about process, that one was never truly finished. Finished people, as per her clients, usually sold, divorced, or died. So Ann was fine with the empty bedroom that would one day be a studio. She bought a used easel at a garage sale and set it up in a corner; she stacked canvases against the back wall. All in the service of someday. Another bedroom, furnished with only a futon for Javi’s sleepovers, was the future nursery, although neither of them discussed that right now. It was at this juncture that Ann had to force herself to stop thinking. This was the point beyond which she could go no further. Beyond this point, there be dragons. The whole thing now threatened to have to be sold bare bones, dream-stripped.

* * *

“So what do you do?” Dex asked Ann.

Silence.

“Ann is an attorney,” Richard volunteered.

His answer was truncated, unsatisfactory. It was too little. A pause opened up for her to fill, which she emphatically chose not to.

Why did Americans always insist on asking about occupation, as if what you did was who you were? In other cultures it was considered rude, like asking someone’s income or weight or age. Or maybe it was Ann’s hypersensitivity to her profession, being pigeonholed. The silence echoed with the pain of a thousand lawyer jokes that had rained down on her over the years:

Q: What’s the difference between a jellyfish and a lawyer? A: One’s a spineless, poisonous blob. The other is a form of sea life. Q: How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Three. One to climb the ladder, one to shake it, and one to sue the ladder company. Q: What does a lawyer get when you give him Viagra? A: Taller. Q: What’s the difference between a lawyer and a vulture? A: The lawyer gets frequent-flier miles. Q: If you see a lawyer on a bicycle, why don’t you swerve to hit him? A: It might be your bicycle. Q: What’s the difference between a lawyer and a leech? A: After you die, a leech stops sucking your blood. Q: What’s the difference between a lawyer and God? A: God doesn’t think he’s a lawyer. Q: How are an apple and a lawyer alike? A: They both look good hanging from a tree. Q: How can a pregnant woman tell she’s carrying a future lawyer? A: She has an uncontrollable craving for bologna. Q: How many lawyer jokes are there? A: Only three. The rest are true stories. Q: What are lawyers good for? A: They make used-car salesmen look good. Q: What do dinosaurs and decent lawyers have in common? A: They are extinct. Q: What do you call twenty-five attorneys buried up to their chins in cement? A: Not enough cement. Q: What do you call twenty-five skydiving lawyers? A: Skeet. Q: What do you call a lawyer gone bad? A: Senator. Q: What do you throw to a drowning lawyer? A: His partners. Q: What is brown and looks really good on a lawyer? A: A Doberman. Q: Why did God make snakes just before lawyers? A: To practice. Q: What’s the difference between a lawyer and a herd of buffalo? A: The lawyer charges more. Q: What’s the difference between a tick and a lawyer? A: The tick falls off you when you’re dead. Q: How was copper wire invented? A: Two lawyers were fighting over a penny. Q: Why does the law society prohibit sex between lawyers and their clients? A: To prevent clients from being billed twice for essentially the same service. Q: How can you tell a lawyer is lying? A: His lips are moving. Q: Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California all the lawyers? A: New Jersey got to pick first. Q: Why don’t lawyers go to the beach? A: Cats keep trying to bury them. Q: What do you call five thousand dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start. Q: What’s the difference between a dead skunk in the road and a dead lawyer in the road? A: There are skid marks in front of the skunk. Q: What do you call a smiling, sober, courteous person at a bar association convention? A: The caterer. Q: Why are lawyers like nuclear weapons? A: If one side has one, the other side has to get one. Once launched, they cannot be recalled. When they land, they screw up everything forever. Q: What do lawyers and sperm have in common? A: One in three million has a chance of becoming a human being. Q: Why won’t sharks attack lawyers? A: Professional courtesy.

Ann felt sick to her stomach.

Dex was a celebrity, a rock star. No one asked what he did. He looked like what he did, even if one didn’t know his band or his music. Wende was a muse. Loren, a hotelier. A darker realization came to Ann — soon she wouldn’t even be a lawyer. One couldn’t possibly introduce oneself as an ex-lawyer. It was a little like explaining one used to be a genocidal dictator. Once … always.

“I’m a chef,” Richard said.

“A chef? Whoa, I love that.”

“We own a restaurant.” Richard downed his wine in one swallow and poured another glass to the brim.

Ann looked at him, startled, then pleased. Under the table she squeezed his knee.

Richard had upped his alcohol consumption considerably since leaving Los Angeles, and yet he felt surprisingly peppy. His stomach had stopped its fierce gurgle; his hives had calmed down. “It’s called El Gusano.”