Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

“Dex?” Richard called.

Dex opened the door and walked out on the lanai. Richard sat on the stairs, gazing out at the water, wondering what his escaped wife was up to in town. When he turned and saw all of Dex, he went pale. Why was he wearing no clothes? His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“I think I’ve just messed up bad,” Dex wailed.

* * *

Wende kind of felt bad for Dex, but not enough to not do what she was planning with Cooked. Dex had been alive for a lot longer than she had. In the decade before she was even born and while she was growing up, how many women had he been with? How many would come after her? As far as she was concerned, she was owed a day off. Her loyalty toward him consisted of keeping the details of their relationship private, publicly allowing him to appear as the stud, but it did not extend to her remaining a muse, a.k.a. nursemaid, to his moodiness, insecurity, overdrinking, and overindulging in drugs, most notably weed, and underperforming in bed due to all of the above. Let Richard babysit for a few hours.

The sole benefit of the island was that there was no one else he was likely to try to sleep with — although Ann was hot, she definitely would not go for him — but Wende didn’t care about that anymore. Let him find someone else. Guys like him needed inexperienced, naïve girls like her former self who didn’t know enough to make demands, who were dazzled by all the flash. For a while. And then needed to be replaced.

It was good walking down the street with someone her own age, someone not famous, someone Polynesian. Would this technically qualify as going native? They held hands and ate ice-cream cones and giggled. Tourists gave them dirty looks.

Cooked had been eyeing her for the last two months, but only since the almost-drowning incident yesterday had that interest ignited her curiosity. Dex was so caught up in his creativity/destruction music crisis he didn’t notice the balance had shifted on the boat — granted he had been unconscious for part of the time. Playing his song the night before, he didn’t see that Wende paid no attention and instead beat out a rhythm of lust on Cooked’s drums. Dex should have heeded the fact that back in their fare for the night, she had shaved and depilated and made herself satiny ready, and then turned her back on him for a full night’s rest.

Cooked went into the town’s single grocery store, owned by friends, and borrowed a Vespa. Wende climbed on back, winding her arms around his muscled stomach. Ten minutes later, they were at his family’s village. Where the first town existed to cater to tourists and European tour workers, hotel staff, etc., this place was strictly local. Along the beach, piles of trash smoldered in the sun and were pushed back and forth in the waves. Empty cans, diapers, broken junk. When they walked through the trees, Wende’s eyes grew large at the sight of neatly planted rows of marijuana as tall as she was. It reminded her of Christmas tree farms in Idaho. A handmade sign read, WELCOME TO PARADISE.

“That’s our best cash crop. Spending money,” Cooked said.

He introduced her to about twenty women from his immediate clan who were working on various projects around the compound. His mother kissed her on the cheek, greeting her in French, which Wende did not speak. Then Cooked led her to his bedroom and closed the door. He dropped his shorts.

“They all know we’re in here!”

“It’s okay. It’s cool, lady.”

“Wende.”

“Windy.”

“With an ‘ e .’”

Cooked’s English-language skills were not advanced so she tried not to be critical. His single bed had dirty sheets; the room was a pigsty. He was basically a twenty-something teenager like herself. He also wasn’t terribly romantic. They smoked a joint, and he got down to business. Apparently, kissing wasn’t big in their culture, but he was young and indefatigable.

Afterward, bed-rumpled, glowing, they came out into the kitchen, and two dozen adults and children smiled and giggled at the lovebirds. Within minutes she was a member of the family.

Wende didn’t want to be so creepy, imperialistic, or colonialistic as to ask Cooked if this was an everyday occurrence — bringing home a popa’a tourist for a little afternoon nookie. She wasn’t going to turn mushy — was she special? No, the whole clan seemed genuine in their kindness and in their lack of surprise.

Cooked’s mother opened up some cans of Punu Pu’atoro and fried the corned beef up with onions, then served it with roasted breadfruit, coconut bread, and po’e , baked papaya in banana leaves. Afterward, Cooked led her back to his bedroom, where they started all over again.

Wiped out, Wende fell asleep squashed against the wall and woke up when the late-afternoon sun glared through the window. “Hey, we need to go! Poor Ann.”

Cooked grunted and tongued her knee.

It was when Wende was reaching under his desk for her shorts that she saw the pictures of the babies with horrendous birth defects, some of an unidentifiable jellyfish-like appearance.

“What is this—?”

“I must confess to you,” Cooked said solemnly. “I am a revolutionary.”

Wende had not traveled enough to understand the faked, tabula rasa quality of the resort compared with real island life. Her whole life was tabula rasa, and she was dying to experience the authentic. Traveling made her feel like an anthropologist. Wherever she went, she tried to picture living there. What would her life look like in Cooked’s village? It was certainly poor, dirty, and chaotic, but it was alive in ways that the resort could never be.

Cooked had grown up hearing the adults talk about injustice. His own father had been lured from their village to Papeete with the promise of high pay in construction work on military and government buildings. The whole family moved with him, leaving their large hut that they’d built themselves on family land, to live in a subsidized apartment in a bad part of town. For the first time in their lives, they did not know their neighbors.

Cooked remembered how ashamed he was when he saw his mom and dad smiling, scraping, and humbling themselves in front of the French. Only in the privacy of their apartment could they pretend to talk back. There they boasted; they preened. So it was natural when Cooked became a teenager that he’d admired the gangs that formed, that took power through fear. They had renamed him from his birth name, Vane, to Cooked, legacy of a long campaign of oppression. But Cooked didn’t want to terrorize his own neighborhood. He admired the activists that were fighting the outsiders.

“My parents were servants. I’m a servant. Will my children and their children be servants also?” He told Wende about the dual ravages of economic inequality and the aftereffects of decades of nuclear testing on his family. His brother Teina was on his way to becoming a minor thug. “Instead I want to lead a revolution.”

Wende’s eyes were wide open. This was, bar none, the best date she had ever been on.

“We’re wage slaves. We protest, wave signs, and are ignored. I want to wake them up. I want them to start paying attention.”

His sense of purpose excited her more than his lovemaking, and as he told her his plans, all she could think was Yes, yes, yes yes yes yes .

The truth was Wende had been attracted physically to Cooked but had found him boring until this moment. Suddenly he transformed before her eyes from a Polynesian Justin Bieber to a Polynesian Che Guevara. She pulled him back down on the bed one last time. Revolutionaries could be sexy! She’d had no idea.

* * *

She said good-bye to Cooked’s bedridden aunt, Etini, who had leukemia. Although there was government health care, it was hard to access. The island had only a primitive clinic with basic services. Staying in Papeete was expensive and lonely. Being sent to France for advanced therapy was unthinkable. Etini was too ill to work. A class-action lawsuit for the poisoning had been stalled in the courts for years as the victims died off. How did the resort and tourists look from Etini’s window? All of it made Wende even angrier with her current stupid, frivolous life. Sacrilegious thought: Did the world really need another pop song?