Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

Loren hissed out a laugh, which turned into a cough. “ La fée verte , the green fairy. An old French vice. Will you share a drink?”

“Titi said you shouldn’t.”

“Titi is a young girl. She doesn’t yet accept hopelessness. Besides, we’ve already reached ten in the morning.”

Ann uncorked the bottle and searched for glasses.

“On the windowsill.”

The tumblers were dusty; she dipped the corner of her wrap inside for a quick wipe.

“No. For your first time, we should drink from the right glasses. Go to that cabinet.”

Ann found small, delicate glasses with ballooned bottoms.

He directed her on the amount of water to pour into the absinthe, watched as it clouded.

“Oscar Wilde said of drinking this: ‘After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not.’”

They drank in silence.

“I admire you,” she said.

“Hopelessness as a lifestyle?”

“You’re not caught up in all the crap. Given it all up, out here, unplugged. It’s impressive.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is, but it isn’t. You charge exorbitant rates and give us nothing … except peace. Because we’re paying so much, we think nothing is exclusive. If it was free, we might think it was a gulag.”

Loren downed the drink and held out his glass for another. “To things as they are not.”

Ann stretched out next to him, propped against the curving headboard.

“Do you have family we can call?”

“I had two daughters. I have no one to call.”

All her ready-made answers and platitudes wilted; she could only pour the next drink.

“Some would have been unhappy, but being here saved me.”

Ann took Loren’s hand and brought it to her lips. “You are my monk of the South Pacific. My ascetic.”

Loren’s face relaxed, the alcohol taking the edge off.

“Monks are just followers. The sheep. The mystics are the wild ones, searching for the truth. They are the bad boys, the rock stars of religion.”

As they clinked glasses, Richard stuck his head in the door. Squinting, he froze seeing them together on the bed.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“How could it not be? You have a lovely wife.”

“Yes, I did,” Richard said, his cheeks puffing as if to add more, then deciding against it.

“ Did? ” Ann said.

“Do. I do. Have a lovely wife. We’re about to leave for snorkeling. Coming?” He abruptly closed the door before she could answer.

Ann stood up and straightened her clothes. The absinthe had made her seriously drunk. “Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog?”

Loren remained silent. He was in love.

“The scorpion asks the frog to carry him on his back across the river. ‘But you will sting me,’ the frog says. ‘If I did that,’ says the scorpion, ‘we would both drown.’ That makes sense, so the frog puts the scorpion on his back and starts swimming. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings him. ‘Why?’ the frog says. ‘Now we will both drown.’ ‘I cannot help myself,’ the scorpion says. ‘It is my nature.’”

“Are you calling me a scorpion?” Loren asked, enchanted.

Ann giggled. “And I’m a shark. What a pair we make.”

When she came out, Richard pounced. “What were you doing in there?” he said, pinched, as if he smelled something bad. He did that tight nod thing she hated, then did it again, like a schoolmaster or a judge.

“It’s the 101 of human relations. What he wants, I can give.”

* * *

Was Ann one of the unhappys, after all? Impossible to tell.

Loren himself had been. Married five years, a father. When he and Matilde, his wife, amicably separated, he looked forward to moving from Lyon to Paris to explore what he thought was his true life. A life that required the anonymity of a large city with lots of like-minded partners. The gratifications of his body were unimaginable after being suppressed so long. Equally unimaginable was the loneliness of divorce. He missed his children. He needed men and loved women. A doomed hybrid lover.

When his life as an artist took off, it was as much a surprise to him as to anyone. Success came too easy. It felt like stealing. No matter what he put up, if he told the right story about it, people accepted it. He did paintings of the interior of his closet. Then his real closet reconstructed in the gallery to compare with the paintings. A collage of photographs of movie stars and singers and girls from school who had provided inspiration while he had masturbated at age fourteen. For an important museum show on obscenity, he had a freshly slaughtered cow hauled in and put on a large white dais. A new cow forklifted in each day to comply with health department regulations. Newspapers condemned it, people protested it, but Loren maintained that killing millions of anonymous animals in stockyards was the true obscenity. His work developed a certain cachet, became in demand to the select. He had found his same hunger in others, and by answering it he fed them both. For a time, his future looked promising.

Then his wife married a local man in Lyon known for his drinking and his foul temper.

Loren asked for custody of his daughters, Bette and Lilou. Although his wife had been understanding of his reasons for the divorce, although they still spoke on the phone, she coaxing intimacies from him — Loren admitting to the ecstasy of a certain partner, or how a man he had lived with three months got up one morning and punched him in the face — now she used all these facts against him. An unfit father, a depraved lifestyle. Loren hired a lawyer. During visits suddenly circumscribed by a conservative judge, he noticed bruises on his ex-wife’s arms and legs.

“Why do you allow this, Matilde?”

Her eyes had deadened like spent coals. She turned her back on him. “Have the girls back at five, or even that will be taken away.”

The price of his freedom had become too dear. When he saw a bruise on Bette’s shoulder, heard the child’s rehearsed lie of falling off a chair, Loren took the girls and fled. A long time ago.

The happiest time in his life — standing on the deck of a copra boat, the roiling blue-violet ocean off the Marquesas, the green rocky vertical islands. His children asleep like puppies in the nest of coiled ropes at his feet. An intoxicating, rare mix of freedom and love. Life was not so much easy out in the Pacific as it was empty, so empty it made it possible to start over. What was the myth of the South Pacific about if not escape?

* * *

He ended up in Papeete and took a series of menial jobs in hotels and restaurants. Nothing was too demeaning because at the end of the day he got to go home to his girls — their kinked, silky hair and milky breath. It felt as sacred as being in church to watch them sleep, the sight of their tiny delicate feet.

The house he rented was a bungalow at the end of a dirt road lined with pepper trees, backed against a coconut grove and the ocean. Two prehistoric-looking flamboyants anchored the small front yard. Bougainvillea smothered the house, so the girls were only half-lying when they told people they lived inside a flower. He hired a Tahitian grandmother, a large, kind-faced woman, to care for the girls. They developed golden tans and strong muscles from playing sunup till sundown on the beach with the woman’s granddaughter Titi and other local children.

Loren didn’t touch a drop of liquor, or touch another man or woman.

In the fall, he enrolled the girls in a French private school. They cried at having to force their feet into shoes again. When the nuns at the school requested school records, the authorities tracked him down and took the girls. Lilou screamed, and Bette bit like a feral animal, but the grandmother kept rocking in her hammock. Although tears ran down her face, she was too familiar with white men’s unfairness to protest.