Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

Ann opened her briefcase and pulled out her stash of Mars bars, the only food she craved, even though she had promised Richard she would save herself for dinner. She ripped the wrappers off and dropped the bars into her mouth, opening another before she devoured the first, an obscene assembly line of gluttony. Only when her mouth was crammed full of chocolate did she at last feel a glorious calm descend. This was her true shame and infidelity: the sugary, waxy, acrid grocery-bin chocolate she was addicted to. In disgust, Richard threw them into the trash every time he found a stash. Food snobbery was the price to be paid for marrying a professional chef.

“How can you?” he’d say, his lips twisted as if forced to taste something fantastically bitter. He gave a tight nod — a tic that drove Ann up the wall — then stoically forgave her. “Sweetheart, you know that crap messes up your palate.”

But Ann didn’t want his gourmet Felchlin Gastro 58 % Rondo Dark Chocolate that puddled on the tongue like silk, that left an aftertaste of cassis. She wanted her nostalgie de la boue , love of the gutter, an attraction to what was unworthy. Exactly.

She rooted around in her briefcase and found the book she had stayed up late into the night reading, The Moon and Sixpence , the story of a Gauguin-like figure who runs off to Tahiti. She rewarded herself for tasks done by sneaking away to read a few pages. Today she deserved a chapter at least for settling the case. She unfastened the top buttons of her blouse to cool off. If only she could get her prickling, rashed skin dry for a second. Soon her blouse was off, and there she stood in her new mom-bra. The polished rosewood beckoned like the glassy face of an ocean. She lay down on it under the wash from the air-conditioning vent till the cold cedar air raised goose bumps on her arms. Her breasts ached, but she wouldn’t go so far as to unhook her bra. Her chest size had gone from flat A-cup to grapefruit-sized D-cup, and was just one more thing Richard wasn’t getting to enjoy.

Savagely, she ripped open another candy bar wrapper. One of the new age ideas was that failure to conceive was a proactive reaction to the body’s not being ready. The prospective mother developed a kind of allergy to the father. What she needed to do was visualize her future baby to make herself user-friendly. Although Ann had thought the idea abysmally simpleminded, she was surprised that this ended up being her favorite fertility activity: she pictured cute baby girls with blond hair and pink cheeks, boys with Richard’s brown eyes who bounced on their chubby legs like puppies. The happiness she experienced in these fantasies gave her a wan assurance that she might make an okay mother someday.

Of course she wanted a child, but since it had not happened naturally, she was oppressed by the likelihood that she would have hormone-induced twins at the least, possibly triplets or quintuplets — what were they called when the number went even higher? — while she was daunted by the prospect of even one baby. A biological clock had gone off, but she wasn’t sure it was inside her; rather, it seemed outside, in everyone else. Newspapers, magazines, TV talk shows, her girlfriends, her mother, celebrity baby bumps on the covers of tabloids in the grocery store line. Even her gynecologist of twenty years had joined in. Fertility was the new über-lucrative specialty compared with plain-vanilla gynecology or obstetrics. When Ann put her feet in the stirrups — in the early years worrying mostly about STDs, then about trying not to get pregnant — she now was assaulted by pictures stapled to the ceiling of babies dressed like cabbages. The Fertility-Industrial Complex, she joked with Richard until they found themselves inside of it, when it became distinctly less funny. Since when had procreation turned into a job?

A knocking on the conference door shook her out of her reverie. “Ann, are you in there?”

She said nothing, swinging her feet into a nearby leather swivel chair. Candy wrappers littered the table and floor like spent condoms.

She heard another voice. “Maybe she’s in there with someone.”

“The Scorcher? She’s probably playing alone. After devouring her mate. The lady praying mantis. She’s ruthless. The Peters case was settled in an hour. The Brenner woman ran out of here crying. Dolan crushed.”

“Have fun in there.” The smirking voices moved off.

This was why she deserved partnership over the other junior partners — because unlike them, she knew that the seemingly solid, soundproof conference room doors had been specially hollowed out so that private negotiations could be overheard. Yes, she’d won. Her consolation prize. But they were wrong. She wasn’t ruthless; she was just trying to be a big fish. Things would get better. They had to. Today was her thirty-eighth birthday.

* * *

Richard was determined to test-run a few new recipes before he baked Ann’s cake for dinner that night. It was his favorite time in the kitchen, before Javier and everyone else showed up, and he opened the back door onto the alley, enjoying the whiff of sea breeze. He put on Pavarotti’s Neapolitan songs, and set a pot of Yukon Golds to boil. When the phone rang, it was yet another credit collection agency asking for Javier. “He’s on vacation,” Richard said and hung up. He needed to work on his potato-and-fennel au gratin — he still hadn’t gotten the right mix of creamy and sharp cheese. As a substitute for pedestrian Gruyère, he was thinking of maybe a Cantal or Reblochon? Or finding a source for a salty, buttery, earthy L’Etivaz?

The delivery buzzer rang, breaking Richard’s thoughts. He slapped at the intercom with floury fingers. It was UPS.

“Where from?”

“Overnight from Lodi.”

Shit. The rabbits. Richard and Javi’s brainchild. Hardly a restaurant in the LA basin served rabbit — just hole-in-the-wall ethnic places in the Valley — yet in Europe it was a well-respected staple. He would explain on the menu that rabbit was lower in fat and higher in protein than chicken. The challenge was overcoming the bad image. Richard’s solution was to substitute it in some well-known recipes. He would transform coq au vin to lapin au vin. Rabbit Abruzzi in a sauce of tomatoes, olives, and artichokes. Then he would feature one French classic such as lapin aux pruneaux , rabbit with prunes. But the delivery — a box of fryers for experimenting — wasn’t supposed to be till tomorrow, overnighted on dry ice from a free-range rabbit farm in Northern California. Should he dare try making a dish for tonight?

Richard took delivery and put the box on the counter, grabbing a pair of bone shears to cut the plastic binding. His palms were just the slightest bit sweaty. When he took off the lid of insulating dry ice, the sight that met his eyes set him back years. Not anonymous, cut-up fryer pieces sanitized in plastic but four whole, furry white bodies funereally laid out in the interior. Unskinned. Was this a joke? Was the supplier some kind of sadist? He put the Styrofoam lid back on, spinning away and stumbling over a chair, his shirt soaked in flop sweat.

A throbbing engine stopped in the alley. Richard staggered toward the door to close it to keep the fumes out. It was Javi behind the wheel of a new silver Corvette convertible.

“What are you doing in that?”

“Leased it.”

“With what?”

“Almost the same as the Honda.” Which in Javi-speak meant double what the Honda cost.

“Creditors have been calling all morning. Not about my gnocchi.”

“Want to take a ride?”

Richard thought of the leporid sarcophagus and the unpleasant task ahead of him. “Give me a minute.” He shoved the box in the walk-in refrigerator and fled.