Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

Every firm Christmas party, Flask Sr. put his canvases up for the charity auction, and under his vengeful eye the rest of them were forced to bid. By playing it safe, had she already proved that she wasn’t the real thing? But one had to eat, right? After all, wasn’t that what all the last years of denial had been about? To achieve Richard’s dream first, and then parlay his success into her own? Was that too crass? She couldn’t imagine van Gogh or even Pollock thinking like this, but being an artist in the twenty-first century was financially becoming more and more a hobby, like poetry or scrapbooking. She closed her eyes and blew the candles out in a single hopeful puff, and they were plunged back into total darkness.

The truth was, she would settle for being the first face people saw when they came to the restaurant. She loved the idea of making people happy, even if it was as temporary a fix as a good meal.

“You can turn the lights back on,” Richard said.

“I didn’t turn the lights off,” Javi said. “You did.”

“Shit, a fuse,” Richard said.

“Don’t spoil the mood,” Ann begged.

More candles were lit, a slightly lesser bottle, a 1998 Philipponnat Clos des Goisses Brut, was opened, and Ann made a prophetic toast: “May this restaurant’s success be everything you two deserve.”

“May it make us famous,” Javi added.

Richard and Javi made a sloppy vow that they would remain lifelong friends. Running a restaurant wouldn’t sunder that, as it had the relationships of so many of their peers from CIA.

“Besides,” said Richard, stifling a belch, “I don’t need to be the star.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence opened into which Ann rushed to exclaim about the deliciousness of the cake because the truth that all three of them acknowledged, separately and in various combination, was that Richard wouldn’t be a star even locked in a room by himself. Among his quiet charms, charisma was not one of them. He had no choice but to hitch his wagon on the psychopathic joyride that was Javi to even have a chance of creating culinary buzz. A restaurant was about more than just food, sacrilegious as that sounded. It was about branding, cloning copies across the gastronomic map in San Francisco, Honolulu, Las Vegas, New York, Miami, with the goal of later branching out into cookbooks, signature tableware, maybe even a show on the Food Network, etc.

They talked and drank another hour. Ann would later look back and consider that night the death knell of her innocence.

“I love you guys,” Javi said, the alcohol turning him maudlin.

“Time to get home.” Ann yawned. “I’m exhausted and have to be up early for a briefing.”

“The little lawyer,” Javi said, hugging her so hard that her shirt stuck to her sticky back. “You smell like dulce de leche .”

“Let me fix that fuse first.” Richard jumped at the chance to go outdoors in privacy and release some of the noxious gases building up inside him. The chilies were burning his esophagus, and there was a scary liquid rumbling in his stomach. He got a flashlight and went out to the alley.

Alone, Javi stared at Ann in the candlelight, his eyes made dreamy by too much alcohol.

“Stop it,” she said.

“I’m remembering you also tasted like dulce de leche .”

Richard came back in. “That’s funny — nothing flipped.” In the dim candlelight, he couldn’t detect Ann’s flushed face.

“Probably something electrical. I’ll call someone in the morning,” Javi said. “You two go on home.”

“Are you sure?” Ann asked.

“Go be lovebirds.”

* * *

But the next morning when Richard (recovering from last night’s dinner with a panade of aspirin and antacids) got to the restaurant, Javi was still sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen, drinking out of a bottle of their best tequila. A large ceramic cutting knife lay on the table in front of him, although so far he had only used it on limes. Clearly he had not been home yet.

“Did they fix it?”

“Seems I forgot to pay the bill. I put it on my credit card this morning.”

“You could have written a company check.”

Javi’s handsome face darkened. Now it was Richard’s turn to look at his partner more closely. He did not like what he saw. Purplish circles under his eyes, the eyes themselves bloodshot, not to mention his breath, which was both sour and alcoholic and vaguely canine. Richard worried about lighting a match too near him.

“Have you slept?”

In answer, Javi, ham actor, pushed a pile of bills across the table.

“Tell me it isn’t as bad as it looks. Do that. Tell me,” Richard said.

“It’s fucking Armageddon!”

It was an acknowledged fact that if you knew Javi, you knew he was a spendthrift. Richard’s mistake was in not learning the true scope of his debt before going into a partnership, which was in every bad way akin to a marriage without even the conjugal perks. As he flipped through the bills, his temples began to pound, his skin was drenched in a malarial ooze, and then Javi made it worse.

“Inez, that greedy sow, is suing me for more money. She says I lied and hid income. They froze the restaurant’s account.”

Javi had always been the wild playboy with women problems all through CIA. After he married Inez, Ann and Richard thought he’d calm down, especially after the baby was born, but he still stalked the pretty young sous chefs, the hostesses/wannabe actresses. Javi joylessly womanized all through his divorce, and this pile of bills was an ugly diary of debt for back alimony, child support, health insurance, workers’ comp, rent, credit cards, utility bills, car payments, and a whole slew of unpaid disasters going back to and including student loans at Culinary Institute, going back even further to student loans for his first year of medical school, which he dropped out of, going all the way to the primordial debt of UC Riverside undergraduate. The ex-wife had sued and filed an injunction to freeze the restaurant’s accounts, claiming he had misrepresented income, although the money was Ann and Richard’s life savings, earmarked for a year’s worth of rent, payroll, purchase of kitchen equipment, dining tables and chairs, china and stemware, cutlery, the services of an interior decorator and florists, all of which had already been contracted out. They had committed to a five-year lease, signed with personal guarantees. In the parlance of the food industry, they were cooked.

Things were so dire, Richard was actually roused to action. “I’ll talk to Inez. I’ll explain it’s our life savings. She’ll understand.”

“Maybe not.”

“Inez likes us.”

“I might have misstated things, like that you embezzled money from me.”

That Richard didn’t even blink at this admission was an admission itself of how deep the trouble was.

“Just so you know, I need to leave town for a few days.”

“Now?” Richard was going to kill him with that ceramic knife.

“I borrowed from some loan sharks to keep us afloat.”

“Us?”

“And I took the rest of the petty cash to the casino last night. Guess what? I lost.”

“That’s the thing. I could win betting that you would lose.”

Javi took a slug from the Cabo Uno Anejo. “Javi says, ‘Let them eat blinis.’” He cackled, the careening laugh, hysterical and threatening, then veering over into self-pitying sobbing.

“They can’t do this,” Richard said, now considering using the knife on himself. “Ann will never forgive me. She’ll leave.”

“Ann will never leave you. Trust Javi on this.”

Richard’s insides had now gone to the last stage — hot, molten lava in danger of erupting any moment — the divergent tectonic plates of Javier (why was he suddenly referring to himself in the third person?), Ann, divorce, failure, penury, and possibly a future bout of shingles tearing him apart.