Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

“Exactly.” And like he had slapped her in the face, Richard stood and walked away.

* * *

The wedding party started early in the morning and went on relentlessly for three days. At first the food and the feasting, the dancing and the drinking, were welcome after all the nuclear showdown theatrics, and then, like other pleasurable things done to excess, it chafed and made one feel tired and bloated. The Tuamotuans never seemed to run out of energy — even the children were wound up like forty-eight-hour clocks — but the paparazzi were dropping off like flies. One had to be medevaced out for supposed alcohol poisoning, which ended up being mere exhaustion.

Dex and Robby disappeared into rehearsals, joined by the native drummers for the wedding. It was promoted as a cross-cultural event, with hot dancers brought in from Papeete, fire-eaters, more drummers, etc.

Wende, bored now with nothing to do, filmed parts of the wedding ceremony and parts of the music rehearsals, ending up with a mix of National Geographic rerun and a frat-house reality show. She and Ann filmed the traditional inking of his and hers wedding tattoos, the first few lines started with the traditional shark tooth and ink before a modern electric needle was used.

Ann looked down at her own dismembered fish forlornly circling her thigh.

“Can’t you finish?”

“I thought you hated it.” Wende grimaced as a tiare flower was tatted on the inside of her ankle.

“I need change.”

“Change is good.”

“It hurts.”

“Some things are worth it, right? Let’s do it.”

Wende took her time and carefully worked the needle as Titi and the other women looked on, impressed with her technique. “I considered opening my own tattoo parlor a while back.”

There was no comparison — the back of the shark was much finer work than the earlier front. A new maturity was evident in Wende’s work as she bent over Ann’s thigh and asked for the flashlight to be brought closer. She had become a perfectionist. It had nothing to do with flesh, everything with spirit, as if she had lived through lifetimes in these last few days.

When the tat was done, the women clapped, and Wende bowed her head.

“You’re good to go and conquer.”

* * *

Wende cringed as the production values of the wedding/benefit concert began slipping. The problem with authentic was that it didn’t look the way anyone under the age of fifty had been conditioned by movies to think it should look. The grass anklets and arm cuffs looked stringy; the stumpy headdresses lacked majesty. Never mind the girls in nylon shorts and Pearl Jam T-shirts. Wende pursed her lips and drank some vodka-laced guava juice.

The highlight of day two of the wedding ceremony was Cooked and Titi being carried in from a boat in the lagoon on thrones balanced on the shoulders of six men. The thrones were lowered onto a carpet of banana leaves on which tiare , hibiscus, and ginger flowers had been scattered. Combined with the flowered leis of the women, the crushed petals emitted a rich perfume into the air.

At the height of the ceremony, Titi and Cooked kneeled facing each other and exchanged a single flower. The impermanence of the flower instead of something solid like gold rings was to remind the couple of the transience of their bond, and thus its preciousness. Do not waste a single minute of this love.

Ann never cried at weddings, but now she did. She and Richard had squandered buckets of both time and love, and had only themselves to blame.

The hope of their simple civil ceremony years ago, the small dinner party with only their parents and Javi, had seemed to portend such an exceptionally authentic life, lived on their own terms. Richard had made reservations at the best French restaurant in town, a small place with only ten tables. They got married on a Friday afternoon, and when they arrived at the restaurant with their party, they found fire trucks in front. There had been a kitchen fire. Impossible to get reservations anywhere else on a Friday night — they ended up eating at a Chinese place down the block. Ann’s parents had been appalled, especially since she had refused their offer of a country club wedding. Richard’s parents seemed bewildered. In the way such things rarely happen, near disaster averted itself. Javi tried to lighten the mood by ordering a round of Chinese beer. When the staff found out it was a wedding dinner, they started to cook specialties not on the menu. Richard still talked about some of those dishes, which they never found again. The owner of the restaurant came out and sang Mandarin wedding songs, accompanied by a waiter on an oboe. The brillance and oddness of the evening broke down barriers between the parents. They closed down the place at midnight. It ended up being exactly the wedding they had hoped for.

Now Ann reached for Richard’s hand, and for a moment he allowed it.

* * *

Loren sat next to Faufau in the place of honor. He felt pleased looking at Titi, as if a great burden had been lifted. So this was what it felt like to make good. He’d been a cynical bastard these last years, but he had to admit feeling satisfied that night, as if he’d pulled off a slick heist. Titi and Cooked were his happy children; in the universe’s obscure system of checks and balances, some kind of amends had been made.

Ever since Bette’s death, he’d lived with a dread that he would continue to fail people when they most needed him. It made him shy away from all connection except what was absolutely necessary. Fatherless Titi was necessary, and yet the tie to her and her family had driven him to even more irresponsibility. Don’t think you can count on me. In the back of his mind, he was waiting for that one time too many when Faufau at last would tell him to leave, when Titi would refuse to come to the rescue in the middle of the night, to places a nice young girl shouldn’t go. Thing was, it never happened. He was ashamed to say that he got far better than he ever gave back. And so this was most deserved.

He looked around at the jubilant, hopeful faces and felt like doom. The deluded naïveté—believing that things would work out in the end — was as endless as it was maddening. Maybe that was the only way the human race could go on. Titi might as well have been wearing a “Happily Ever After” T-shirt. Cooked seemed dazed by his fast-approaching bourgeois future, resigned to it as only weeks ago he had been to the very different path of an outlaw. The world was a shark. One had to be ruthless, relentlessly moving forward; if forced to stop or move backward, one drowned. Loren fretted over these children of his, how ill-suited they were to the harsh realities of life. Titi felt his troubled gaze and blew him a kiss. Absolutely no rancor for how he had tested them these last years, no glee that now they would be calling the shots, proving his good choice.

* * *

After the feast was over, Loren sought out Ann. Time was running out. He needed to ask her a favor, but she would make demands in return.

“Care for a nightcap?”

In his room, he poured and they toasted.

“It was a beautiful ceremony,” she said. “Be proud.”

But Loren was all business. “You asked about my finger. That was so I would never forget Bette. But in my grief, I forgot about Lilou. A double sin.”

He had gone back to France to court Lilou. He hated being back in his home country, hated the flat white sky, the muted colors of the land, and the crabbed people. Matilde’s pinched eyes, her sallow cheeks — how was it possible he had ever been married to such a woman? Each time Matilde answered the door, she was more dour, announcing their daughter’s wish to not see him. If Lilou had asked him to, he would have agreed to stay in France, even though it was like living in a sepulchre after his life in Polynesia.