See You in Paradise (11 page)

Where on earth was she?

The kitchen door banged open. There she was: bent half over, in a ploughman’s stance, wheeling the hibachi before her. It was very large, too large to move really, and it gouged the wall and pushed an ottoman into an end table, setting the vased flowers upon it into a treacherous wobble.

“Would you like help with that, my dear?” Bob asked her, rising to his full height, and Evangeline ignored him, and eventually he sat down again. The hibachi stood before them now, its exhaust tent forming a proscenium inside which she stood, white-apron’d and white-hatted, her gaze settling briefly upon each guest. She nodded, and everyone but Candace nodded back.

From somewhere underneath the grill Evangeline produced five bamboo trays, five plates, and five sets of utensils wrapped in a napkin. The trays were affixed with wooden bracing that swung down to make a little table. Philip had no idea where they had come from. She distributed the trays, placed a plate upon each tray, a rolled napkin beside each plate.

When she set Philip’s place, she winked.

“Well, look at this!” June cried.

“Perhaps,” Bob muttered, sounding uncertain, “we would be more comfortable at table?”

“What’s this ‘at table’?” Roy said. “What language are you speaking, Bobert?” He guffawed. June guffawed.

“It’s a common expression,” Bob replied.

“A common expression is ‘put your money where your mouth is,’ or ‘you get what you pay for,’ not ‘at table’! ‘At table’!” Roy laughed, and June laughed, and soon they were both caught up in hysterics. Bob was leaning slightly forward, his brow furrowed, and Candace continued to cough. Philip again wondered why Evangeline had invited them over. He hoped it wasn’t for his sake.

By now she had fired up the propane tank and was smearing oil over the surface of the grill. Roy and June were still giggling, but Bob had grown curious and leaned forward for a better view. Philip recalled, with a small shudder, the onlookers who had observed him lying there, broken on the pavement—long after 911 had been dialed, long after the reassuring words had been spoken, people just stood over him, staring at his ruined legs, twisted underneath him, had watched his face contort in pain. On the edge of unconsciousness, he had lain there, thinking, For chrissake, you idiots! What in the hell are you standing there for? It wasn’t that he hated them for it, or that he even minded. What did it matter to him? All he wanted at the time was not to die. But he didn’t understand them. He didn’t understand people at all.

Except Evangeline—he understood her, a little. He was so grateful to have her. He was so very much in love with her.

For a minute there, he hadn’t been paying attention. But what she had done was to spin the egg on the cooking surface, just like the guy at the restaurant, and then toss it into the air, and catch it in the hollow of her hat. And, like the guy at the restaurant, she let it fall from there, and allowed her spatula to split it in two, and she caught the eggshell with one hand and scrambled the egg with the other, the very same way he had. And she grabbed from her caddy a canister of salt, and a canister of pepper, and tossed them from hand to hand, so that they tumbled in the air, spilling just the right amount of their cargo onto the egg, and Philip did not remember the restaurant chef even attempting to do that. And she brought out a bowl of steamed rice and fried it, and sprinkled on sesame seeds, and squirted on soy sauce and teriyaki, all with a balletic, nearly acrobatic, precision, and he realized that his wife had discovered something in herself she never knew was there—she had mastered her body.

By now everyone was rapt, staring at Evangeline in awe and, quite possibly, admiration. She threw her spatula down on the surface, hard, at such an angle that it bounced up, flipped over once, then again, and tucked itself neatly into her apron belt, which she had been holding open with her fingers to admit it. Again, Philip had not seen this trick at the restaurant, and he joined in their guests’ shocked applause.

Now she brought out the onion half. Philip knew what was coming, he had seen it already, but he couldn’t help grinning at the prospect of watching Evangeline do it. She balanced the onion half on its edge, launched the butcher knife from her belt, spun it in the air before her, and brought it down on the onion once, twice, three, four times. She hollowed each ring with the knifetip, flicking the inner layers onto the rice pile, and she stacked the shell into a dome, with a tiny hole on top. She sheathed the knife, reached behind her for the oil, and squeezed it into the onion half. And then, with a motion so swift and subtle it was hard to be certain it had happened, she pulled a wooden match from a pocket, scraped it against the exhaust hood, and set the onion alight.

The looks on their faces! They couldn’t believe what they were seeing! A tower of steam and fire, gushing out of the onion! Poor Candace reared back as though Evangeline had released a mountain lion from a cage; she collapsed into her husband, burying her hatchet face into his meaty shoulder.

And it was a good thing, too, because it was at Bob’s big bald head that Evangeline launched the first flaming onion ring. It traced an arc of oily smoke across the living room and came to rest just above his left eye. He barely had time to flinch. The burning ring stuck there, and for a terrible moment flared up, singeing his combover and leaving what would obviously be a painful and unsightly scar. He screamed, smacked the onion ring onto the carpet, and gawped at Evangeline with the expression of a big, miserable child who has just been called fatty by his own mother.

By the time it registered on the faces of Roy and June that something bizarre had occurred, the missiles intended for them had already been launched. The first caught June in the breast, where an embroidered silk rose brooch likely spared her from injury; nevertheless she squealed as if stabbed. Roy took his ring on the cheek, though it bounced off, leaving only a greasy smear. He said, much as though he were reading it from a script, “Ouch!”

It was not clear why Candace was spared. Evangeline was poised to strike, with Candace’s burning ring perched on the end of the knife; and Bob, having stood up in shock, left his wife exposed and cowering in her chair. Perhaps it was some kind of solidarity between quiet women; perhaps it was nothing more than pity. In any event, the onion never flew. The knife clattered onto the grill. Evangeline’s venom was spent. She bent down, turned off the heat, and walked calmly out of the room.

Leaving Philip alone with their stunned and injured guests, his mind racing. “Let me get you a cold washcloth,” he said to Bob, whose soft hand was cupped underneath the wound, as if something, his mind perhaps, might fall out. But Bob held out the other hand to stop him, and without another word walked out the door, Candace following close behind.

“Roy, I’m sorry,” he said, turning, and in spite of everything Roy’s eyes still harbored a hint of humor. He would have a good laugh about this, sooner rather than later, but for now he put his arm around June (whose eyes betrayed nothing but hurt, and whose protecting hands concealed her charred rose) and led her out the door.

Alone in the living room, Philip set to cleaning up. He folded up the trays, put away the plates and silverware, maneuvering his chair with what he was beginning to realize was expertise. He wiped down the grill surface and threw away the ruined food. All of this took him a good twenty minutes, during which he strove not to think about what had transpired. When he was finished, he looked around for something else he could do in order to avoid going to Evangeline. But there was nothing. He took a deep breath, navigated around the hibachi, and rolled into the bedroom.

She was there, still in her apron and hat, lying supine on the bed. He wheeled over to his side, unbuckled his restraints, and hauled himself up beside her.

“I don’t know what came over me,” she said.

“It’s all right.”

Her eyes were dry. She was looking at the ceiling. “We’re going to lose our jobs.”

After a moment’s thought, he said, “I’ll be able to keep mine. It’ll be enough.” It wouldn’t, of course—he worked under contract; she was the one with the salary, the benefits. And his medical bills remained high. But none of that seemed to matter.

“I was so angry,” she said, and he could hear the resignation, at long last, beginning to creep into her voice.

He was supposed to have been angry, too. He had gone to a psychiatrist after the accident, and she had told him, week after week, that the anger would come out eventually, in some form or other, and that he had to be ready for it. Over and over the woman told him this, but it just didn’t happen. And the psychiatrist seemed to lose enthusiasm for him, and eventually he stopped going to see her. Was it wrong to be able to absorb so heavy a blow with such perfect equanimity? Was it wrong to need no one but Evangeline, and to be glad for it, to be grateful for the excuse to renounce all others?

Philip took his wife’s hand. “Thank you,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

She turned to him and, as though she hadn’t heard, cried, “Please don’t leave me!”

“I will never leave you,” he replied, as if there was even the slightest chance he would do such a thing. “I will always be here.” He couldn’t go anywhere on his own, anyway. And that was fine with him. He didn’t need to walk to love her. He didn’t even need to make love to her. He didn’t need anything he didn’t have.

He was hungry, but they didn’t move. She slept through the night with her hat on.

They figured out how to bring people back to life—not everybody, just some people—and this is what happened to our friend Dan Larsen. He had died falling off a yacht, and six months later, there he was, driving around in his car, nodding, licking his pale, thin lips, wearing his artfully distressed sport jackets and brown leather shoes.

Dan’s revivification was his mother’s doing. Yes, it was his father, Nils Larsen, who greased the right palms to get him bumped up in the queue, but his mother, Ruth, was the one who had the idea and insisted it come to pass, the one who called each and every one of us—myself, Chloe, Rick, Matt, Jane, and Paul—to enlist our emotional support as friends and neighbors and decent, compassionate Americans. When Dan revived, she explained, he would need to rely upon the continuing attention and affection of his loved ones, and it was all of us—his old high school chums—whom he would need the most.

Of course we agreed, how could we not? Dan’s mother brought us all together in the living room of the Larsen penthouse—a place of burnished mahogany, French portraiture, and thick pink pile carpet, which none of us had ever imagined we’d see again—and told us what was about to happen. We stared, petits fours halfway to our gaping mouths, and nodded our stunned assent. A thin, bony, almost miniature woman of sixty with an enormous dyed-black hairdo like a cobra’s hood, Ruth Larsen gazed at each of us in turn, demanding our fealty with hungry gray eyes. The procedure would take several days, and then Dan would need a few weeks to recuperate—could we be counted on to sit at his bedside, keeping him company in regular shifts? Why yes, certainly we could! Were we aware just how important a part of the revivification process it was to remind the patient of his past, thus effecting the recovery of his memory? And did we know that, without immediate and constant effort, the patient’s memory might not be recovered at all? And so would we commit ourselves to assisting in this informal therapy by enveloping Dan in a constant fog of nostalgia for the entire month of March? Sure, you bet!

Excellent, Mrs. Larsen told us, her papery hands sliding over and under each other with the faint, whisking sound of a busboy’s crumb brush.

What remained unspoken that day, and went largely unspoken even among ourselves, in private, as we waited for Dan to be brought back to life, was that we had pretty much gotten over Dan since the funeral, and could not be said to have greatly missed him. Indeed, by the time Dan reached the age of twenty-five, the year of his death, we had basically had all of Dan we could ever have wanted. He was, in fact, no longer really our friend. The yacht he’d fallen off of belonged to some insufferable blueblood we didn’t know—that was the crowd Dan had taken to running with, the crowd he’d been born into, and all parties concerned had seemed satisfied with the arrangement. Dan’s being dead was no less acceptable to us than his having drifted out of our circle.

But Ruth Larsen didn’t know this, and so we were the ones she called upon in Dan’s time of need. Either that, or the insufferable bluebloods had refused. At any rate, we agreed to do what Mrs. Larsen demanded, and for better or worse he would be our friend once again.

The discovery of the revivification process had resulted, initially, in great controversy. Surely, the naysayers wailed, not everyone who died could be brought back to life. What would separate the haves from the have-nots? Science offered one answer. To be eligible for revivification, you had to die a certain way. Drowning was best. Suffocation. Anything that resulted in a minimum of harm to the body, other than its being dead. Freezing wasn’t too bad, and a gunshot wound, if tidy, could be worked around. Electrocution was pushing it, as was poisoning. Car crash, cancer, decapitation, old age? Right out.