Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

Another time, guiding her around a rocky shore, he held her hand. Even these chaste acts racked him with shame, as if the two of them were having wild crazy sex orgies each afternoon. He was a swine, a typical horny guy dry-humping as soon as an attractive young woman walked by, and yet … Wende was pretty, Wende was well built, Wende was young, sweet, unironic, worshipful, and, most important of all, Wende didn’t see him as an utter loser.

Although the demise of El Gusano, the fact of Javi’s profligacy, and Richard’s own carelessness in allowing things to come to this unforgivable pass were soul-shattering, what could be done now? His solution was to go back to work. Things would either straighten themselves out or not, but he didn’t envision no longer cooking. Richard cooked, therefore he was. This is where his guilt came in: Ann hated her job. She did it for them, and her sacrifice was on the verge of being wasted. How long would it take Javi to pay them back? It would never happen. There was nothing Richard could do about any of it, and so he lusted after Wende.

This last week had been revelatory. He had forgotten what normal people did with the empty hours of a day, how long and voluptuous said hours could be when wrapped around pleasure. His usual day started at six a.m., when he rose to accept deliveries at the kitchen, continued to cleaning and prepping, then cooking, ordering, managing staff, and at the end of a long day, two a.m. on average, falling back into bed exhausted. His view of the bigger world was out the kitchen’s back door to the alley. Of course his body was enjoying this leisure, but his soul was restless. The knowledge that he had done his best to be what Ann wanted and failed tore him up.

On that particular day’s rock-star-boyfriend-less excursion, Wende stubbed her toe, and Richard offered to massage it. She sat on the sand and put her shapely foot in his lap, oblivious to the fact that she was exposing the metallic-gold isthmus of thong bikini between her legs, or that her pumiced heel was pressing down on his groin.

“I love your hands,” Wende said.

Richard, mystified, looked down at his scarred, callused cook’s hands that he only noticed when they were damaged and got in the way of his work.

“I cook,” he said. “Escoffier said that good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.”

“I want a man who loves me like you love Ann.”

Had she really just said that? Richard smiled, a look he worried was mincing rather than seductive. Was this a test?

“Dex is such an old man, you know?” Wende said.

He ground his knuckles into the ball of her foot, then kneaded the tendon along her arch. Her toenails were frosted pink like the icing on a cupcake, and he surprised himself with the fantasy of putting one of her little toes in his mouth.

“Not that old,” he said.

“It’s his attitude. Like a father almost.”

“I could be your father.”

“Almost.”

“So why are you with such an old man?”

“I don’t believe in the limitations of age. I’m an old soul.”

Despite lusting after her, Richard had to bite the inside of his cheek not to smirk. “So the money didn’t attract you?”

She shook her head and flung herself back on her elbows. He tried not to notice that her breasts bulged out invitingly from their little gold lamé triangles of shelter. Forget soup. The sillage from her skin was of coconut, apricots, caramelized sugar.

“It’s more of a hassle than anything else. It attracts these hangers-on. People Dex shouldn’t be around. I came for the music. I stayed for the music. He’s a major talent. I worry about him being on his own, but I’m still young. I can’t be his mother. I want to find real love like you two have.”

Richard’s mind was an utter blank. You two? When it came to him that she meant him and Ann, it was like a pail of cold water. “Us!” He flung Wende’s foot off his lap and jumped up. “You should be fine now. Let’s go back.”

After all these years of faithfulness, Richard had for the first time (second time if you included fantasies of the Spanish sous chef Alicia, which he had never acted on) been willing to flirt with the idea of another woman, and yet he — stupid, stupid — had been unaware, blind to the fact that time was passing, had passed in fact, and that he had reached that critical stage where a man is no longer attractive on his own to younger women. Youth would no longer carry the day. He had to face the fact that the receding hairline and the pot belly and the hair sprouting out of his ears were not just aberrations, things that could be fixed or hidden away, but instead were precursors to the fact that Richard was on his way to turning into a middle-aged lech desiring but not getting the pootie. And what did a young woman want with a middle-aged lecherous man unless he was rich, glamorous, or preferably both, like Dex Cooper?

“You should go home to your parents.”

Richard just prayed that Ann would get over her infatuation with the cadaverous Frenchman.

Wende stuck out her pink tongue at him. “Who are you? My dad?”

She said it in such a snotty, schoolgirl tone it was all he could do to not bend her over his knee and spank her. That he kind of liked the idea mortified him. When they arrived back at the boat, she went aboard and put on a T-shirt, totally ignoring Richard. Had he angered her that much?

Dex didn’t open his eyes. “Cooked’s been telling me about the drift dive. It’s wild. We gotta do it.”

“Great,” Wende said, clearly indicating it was not. She stretched her arms above her head and arched her comely back while giving Cooked the hard, appraising look of a hungry person standing in front of an open refrigerator, desiring to be tempted. Her eyes scanned his triangular tattoos, slowly trailing down his torso (conscious of this ravenous gaze, he sucked in his stomach).

Cooked burst out into a big stoned grin, intuiting Richard’s flirtation was at an end.

“How about some beer?” Dex said, and stood up unsteadily just as Wende switched seats away from Richard to sit next to Cooked, teeter-tottering the boat. As if Dex had changed his mind and wanted to dive instead, he bent over the side of the boat and pitched in headfirst.

From underwater, Wende’s screams made the same scratching sound as the parrot fish Richard had heard earlier. Dex was in a dead man’s slump, oblivious to the fact he had fallen overboard. Richard grabbed him around the waist and kicked upward, thrilled that, despite his panic, his old Boy Scout training had sprung back into use. With Cooked’s help, they hoisted an unconscious Dex onboard, and Richard went to work. In the restaurant biz someone had to learn CPR, and Javi had been uninterested, so Richard had taken the course alone.

He bent over and blew in Dex’s mouth. His only practice before was on a rubber dummy. He had never had contact with a man’s lips; of course it was his fate that today, instead of Wende’s lips, he should be touching Dex’s. Now Dex opened his eyes, and they stared at each other for a long intimate moment before he turned away and retched out a cupful of lagoon.

* * *

Ann didn’t bother to shower off but threw a shirt over her sticky, burned skin, tugged on her khaki shorts, and stalked to Loren’s hut. When she reached his lanai, Titi was blocking the door by sitting in a lounge chair as she braided her long hair.

The sight was stunning. It made Ann want to ask if she might sketch her later. For a second, she wondered if Loren might have some pastels or oil paints to lend her, but then she remembered her righteous black cloud of outrage and pushed on by.

“He’s tired,” Titi said.

“Sorry, but I must.” Ann jumped over the end of the lounge and used her shoulder on the door, flinging it open. Loren was in bed.