Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

After getting out of prison, Loren got into brawls at the local working-class bars, letting loose a rage that had ballooned inside him, indulging in vices he had been too diplomatic to indulge in before, until finally he rescued himself by escaping to the more uninhabited outer islands. He worked plantations on Tahiti Iti, Bora-Bora, Mooréa, learning the hard business of copra, vanilla, potatoes, noni. He ran a cattle ranch in Fiji. After a time, the lushness of the islands bored him, and he went farther, to the remotest archipelagos — bleached, skeletal atolls precariously floating mere inches above the ocean, guarding womblike lagoons. The sky overwhelmed, stars burned, the Southern Cross flared. It felt like the beginning of the world, and it suited him. The more that was subtracted, the more powerful what was left became. Over the years, the past gradually erased itself. Sometimes he wouldn’t see another white face for months, and yet he felt at home. He would never return to the confining society of France.

He had broken free.

But as with most liberations, there were lapses. Little had he guessed that his tastes would be accepted on the islands, with little rancor or shame. Beautiful brown-skinned men offered themselves without guilt. Later he also began to indulge in European women, but that was more for intimacy than lust.

He hoped when his daughters grew up, they would come back to him, and he would prove he was not a bad man, not an uncaring one, despite appearances to the contrary.

Every morning of his new life he swam in the warm, baptismal waters and thanked God for giving him this second life that was so removed from the first as if not to belong to the same person. One night he played poker, and his life changed again.

* * *

A week into living on the island, something strange was happening to Ann. Nothing seemed able to disturb her calm. This felt beyond strange to a person accustomed to being buffeted by her emotions this last year. After Richard found her on Loren’s bed, he had stalked off to the boat and a long day with nubile Wende. Certainly Ann felt sad it had gotten to this point — her husband jealous of a homosexual hotelier and flirting with a beach bunny — but it was what it was.

Ann looked forward with guilty pleasure to another day spent alone. She went to the kitchen and loaded her beach bag with a half bottle of wine, a sandwich, and fruit. She dumped in sunblock, a paperback, and the sat-phone just in case , but much like her attitude toward Richard, her need to confer with Lorna became less and less compelling. Even the menacing scenarios that might conceivably be hers in the future — fired from the firm, bankrupt, foreclosed house — only made her philosophical. If she allowed these thoughts in, she would be gloomy, making it yet one more lousy day. She was a hopeless, doomed rat on a treadmill of misery because, face it, there was no fixing this particular existential dilemma. So why hurry? At two thousand dollars a day, not including VAT taxes, she couldn’t afford to waste another single, precious minute of paradise.

Ann walked along the shoreline, looking for a good spot to spend the glorious afternoon, absorbed in the sensual details around her. The beach was picture perfect — white sand with a rosy pink mixed in, coconut trees leaning out over the water. She considered taking a picture with her phone, but why? What she should do was go beg some paper and pens off Loren and sketch the scene. But having to compare her own inevitably amateur efforts with the perfection in front of her, not to mention Loren’s talent, would destroy the happiness she felt in the moment. Better to just laze.

The sun was so penetrating, her skin felt infused with light. She sat down and reapplied a slather of sunblock. Despite her best precautions, her skin was darkening to a pleasing gold that she had not had since her teenage years, when she basted herself poolside, oblivious to sun damage two decades down the line. The demarcation line between the exposed skin and the skin under her old brown bathing suit was startling. Pulling the straps of her suit down over her shoulders to apply lotion, she sat still, allowing the sun to touch the stark white. She glanced around — her stretch of beach would remain deserted all day. Why not? She pulled her bathing suit down so it bunched around her waist, close enough to pull back up if needed. It was the most freeing sensation imaginable — the sun and air on formerly cloistered skin. With no witnesses, even witnesses who were used to the sight of bare-breasted women and nonchalant about it, Ann felt a primal lack of restriction, as if she were truly a child of nature, freed of her awful self-consciousness. Even Richard’s familiar loving gaze upon her would have made her shy.

Usually she only looked at her naked self in the mirror in order to find fault and then quickly cover up. At home, Ann felt she was existing under siegelike conditions of a particularly impossible notion of beauty that made low self-esteem a constant. The billion-dollar beauty industry battered one to insecurity month after month from magazine covers, TVs, movies, clothing stores. Men unconsciously held the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated as an ideal — a D-cup, six-feet-tall, one-hundred-pound, anorexic eighteen-year-old. No real woman — much less an approaching-middle-age woman, much less a working woman with an eighty-hour workweek, no personal trainer, and no plastic surgery — had a snowball’s chance in Tahiti of competing. Ann knew this whether she chose to acknowledge it or not.

She flung herself back in the hot sand, liberated. Nonetheless, as she closed her eyes, she put a straw hat over her face because, liberation or not, sun on the body was one thing but on the face, no way; it led to premature wrinkling, wiping out the last five years of her retinol regimen.

It felt splendid, the heat on her body, the slight breeze, which caused her nipples to harden. The effects of the hormone shots were diminishing, and her small breasts felt like her own again. Was it possible that the very dream she had been pursuing was the thing that had been blocking her happiness? She fantasized about being kissed on her mouth, her neck, down to those nipples that were now definitely erect. She couldn’t make out exactly who was doing the kissing. Was it Richard, Loren, or Javi, or more likely some combination? Or none of the above?

Then the unimaginable happened — she fell asleep.

Asleep as in an hour of deeply passed out. Only the rising tide nibbling the soles of her feet (“Richard?” she mumbled) woke her up. She sat up and was briefly scandalized to find herself bare-chested — who did that? — until she remembered. The tender white virginal flesh was now flaming pink. When she tugged her suit straps back up, the friction made her cry out in pain. Damn.

She scuttled backward to the shade of an overhanging palm, pulled her suit back down because the press of spandex stung, and took out her lunch. Pulling the cork, she drank straight out of the bottle. The joys of solitude. She ate the whole sandwich in big, unladylike chunks, wolfed through the fruit, spitting pits and seeds into the sand, and then glugged down the rest of the wine. Her head buzzed pleasantly as she watched the white-foamed surf ride in on green waves, heard the percussive roar of breakers on the reef. She felt literally at the edge of the earth, alone, and reveled in it.

After twenty minutes, she got a little bored and decided to pull out her paperback.

One longed for the Robinson Crusoe experience only to a point. Spirits picked up considerably when the character Friday showed up. No fun at all to be shipwrecked with nothing: no food, no clothing, no communication, no companionship. What Ann had was perfect — a day alone, topless, and then a gourmet dinner, a luxurious bungalow, a companionable-enough husband. It was the precarious balancing act between solitude and community that made perfection. She got to her feet, leaving her string bag behind for later. No one would steal it. Another part of the Crusoe experience: the lack of crime. It was as if you were president of your own country. Forget that — the president had hardly any control over the country. Instead you were benevolent dictator, king, or, better, you were a god, little g , over your terrain, and could make it over to your own liking.