Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

“I lined up an interview on BBC News. Is that all right by you?”

“Let me set up.”

Dex and Robby crowded in front of the monitor in the office and did their interview. Dex described how he had discovered himself on the island, how it had been a period of deep self-reflection (Wende jabbed Ann in the ribs at that one). He was done with rock ’n’ roll for its own sake. All their future work would be tied to activism.

“We don’t think we’re the center of the universe anymore,” Robby said deadpan into the camera.

They were leaving the islands to go back to LA and record a new album.

“But we will have an ongoing interest in the issue of reparations in Polynesia,” Robby added. “These people are family.”

Which they weren’t, especially not for Robby, who had been there for all of forty-eight hours and kept giving his laundry to Titi and Cooked whenever he saw either one.

“We are dedicating the album to our dear friend Loren, who lost his battle yesterday,” Dex said.

“Yes, to Loren,” Robby said, despite the fact he had barely known him.

Ann felt disloyal sitting with Wende and Lilou on Loren’s bed, listening to the broadcast. It felt smarmy, no getting around it, his death being broadcast around the world.

“He shouldn’t have mentioned Loren,” Ann mumbled.

“There are people who would dirty Loren’s memory. Dex gold-plated him. It was a generous move,” Wende, astute spin doctor, said.

Ann flinched. The sad truth was that in the modern world packaging mattered more than message, and her little Machiavellian protégée understood and accepted this in a way Ann could not.

None of those closest to Loren had known the entire man. It came down to Dex, an almost stranger, to give Loren a flash of immortality, all the while positioning himself as some kind of humanitarian. Savvy Wende was right — it would be impossible to stay within Dex’s orbit without one’s life becoming grist for his fame.

The guys wrapped up and came out of the office. Robby stuck out his hand to Lilou.

“Can I buy you a drink? I’d love to hear more about your father. He sounds like a visionary.”

Lilou laughed, her expression of bemusement reminding Ann of Loren.

“Has Dex told you about Jamie?”

“No,” Lilou said.

“My sister Jamie is Dex’s ex-wife. We’re all close here. I feel like we’re family already.”

Lilou laughed but accepted his invitation.

Life went on, as it should and must, yet it drove a stake into Ann’s heart. She was moping. She longed for the spectacular gesture — Loren chopping off part of his finger as in a Greek tragedy. She, who had the least vested interest in the island, who had known Loren the shortest time, wanted some type of closure that seemed unnecessary and redundant to everyone else. They spoke of moving forward, but that was not a solution for her any more than it had been for Loren.

The idea of returning to LA filled her with dread: long lines of traffic, each car filled with a tense soul; high-rises that left deep valleys of shadow in the streets below; her hermetically sealed office with its numbing drifts of paper accumulating in her absence; the gray Brooks Brothers suits of her fellow inmates. She felt in her bones that if she remained a lawyer in that office for enough years — motivated by ambition, or greed, or self-righteousness, or even simple duty or just plain old inertia — some part of her would never stop being a lawyer in that office.

Wende got up to leave. “Typical Robby to offer drinks that are free.”

“When Dex and you fought, I was the one who comforted you in the kitchen. Not Loren,” Ann said.

Wende rubbed Ann’s arm hard. “It made Lilou feel better. Where’s the harm?”

Wende walked out, but Ann sat, not ready to leave.

“Because it’s not what happened,” she said to the empty room.

* * *

After dinner, there was for once no music. Everyone was busy packing.

Ann felt her time on the island was slipping away. She jumped at the chance to accompany Titi on a mystery journey concerning Loren. They walked in the dark to the dead center of the island, hidden from the beach by thick palms. Titi and Cooked’s old fare was even more battered and threadbare than Loren’s. Why had he not taken better care of them? But in truth he had not even taken proper care of himself.

Titi stopped for a moment on the bottom step of the lanai.

“What’s wrong?”

She motioned for silence. After a minute, she smiled.

“Did you hear something?” Ann asked.

“They say it’s too early, but I know he is there.” She tapped her stomach.

“You’re pregnant? How do you know?” Ann pictured some primitive method, a divining through stars or fish bones or something equally mysterious.

“Pregnancy kit.”

Ann hugged her.

“When Loren painted, Cooked loved to watch so much that Loren gave him lessons.”

Ann wasn’t expecting much. Probably amateur pieces of the sort she was so afraid to make. As Titi opened the door and lit a lamp, she put on a prepared face that quickly failed her.

The walls were covered with canvases. Along the baseboard, stretcher-barred canvases were stacked a dozen deep. If one pictured the color-saturated pictures of Gauguin, these were their opposite. Whereas Gauguin had given an exoticized view of his subjects, these paintings were from behind those subjects’ eyes — depictions of ordinary village people going about their lives. The originality was in turning the exotic into the mundane. The color was spare, bleached out, as if one was squinting at the scene in noontime sun. The line work was blunt, forceful, almost Japanese in its suggestiveness.

Ann felt a drag in her limbs. These were the real thing, and her recognition of raw genius in another confirmed that she would rather appreciate art than make it. That had been the nagging doubt back in Los Angeles, the antipathy for Flask’s dilettantish efforts, the apathy since she had been there. Surprisingly, the realization came as a relief. So this was the source of rancor between Loren and Cooked. They were master and pupil, and Loren’s artistic legacy would extinguish with his only student squandering his talent. What did revolution matter compared with art?

“Why doesn’t he sell these?”

Titi shook her head. “He says it would be no different from selling trinkets to tourists.”

“How else will people know about him?”

How could fame not matter? The whole idea of throwing away such talent outraged Ann. It also made her realize that she was as guilty of commodifying as Wende and Dex. She, after all, had been the one with the idea of renaming the website.

“We want to give you this.”

It was a small oil painting: mostly white sky, tan beach, a yellowish-green palm tree with a bronzed man resting beneath it. Loren. It was stunning.

“I don’t know what to say.”

Titi blew out the lamp. “Thank you, I guess.”

“Did you ever want to be anything, Titi?”

Titi closed the door, shrugged. “Happy.”

* * *

Ann went down to the beach to be alone for a few minutes. The alone part was necessary, but so was the idea of someone eventually coming to look for her, and not a search-and-rescue team; it had to be a person who understood her enough to know why she had gone off in the first place. There was a hollowness in her stomach at the thought that the person she most needed to talk to at that moment was Loren. Like a punch to the gut, the obvious: no matter how long she sat there, he was not coming back.

In her old life, she had loved attending art retrospectives. There was a richness in being able to view an artist’s oeuvre in a single show, from the newborn mewling of debut works to the death rattle of late ones. One could grasp what was usually ungraspable during the artist’s evolution. Perhaps Lilou was right to try to resurrect Loren’s name and save him from the oblivion that otherwise would consume his work. Even as Ann thought it, though, she knew Loren would find the whole thing hopelessly bourgeois. Perhaps he wouldn’t care that Cooked chose not to paint. Maybe the island, maybe they were his retrospective.