The Last Good Paradise (12 page)

Nothing. Then the softest of moans.

There was the disgrace of being discovered snooping in Chloe’s bedroom, more specifically in her underwear drawer, or the larger cosmic catastrophe of doing nothing. Wasn’t this one of those moments you read about in books, a character-defining moment that could screw up your life forever if you chose wrong? He opened the door.

Chloe lay naked in the bathtub, her knees and breasts and head forming islands in the filmy grayish water. Her head rested on the lip of the tub, but she didn’t open her eyes at his entrance. On the bath mat was an overturned amber vial of pills.

“Fuck, fuck me,” Richard breathed as he bent down to touch her skin, which could only be described as feeling like a refrigerated piece of raw chicken. The water, gone cold, rippled with her shivering. “Did you take these?” he yelled, his Mrs. Robinson suddenly morphed into the senior hearing-impaired, but she shrugged him off in her deep slumber. He had no idea what to do. He tried to lift her out of the water, but her previously lusted-after, lithe body was now as heavy and unwieldy as a sack of ancestral potatoes. He put a sneakered foot on the tub rim for leverage, but that didn’t work either. Finally, thinking all the while how he was going to catch hell for getting his shoes wet, he stepped in with one foot, trying to brace under her arms and lift, his fingers oblivious to the fact that they were brushing against nipples, but he almost slipped, nearly braining them both. If he let go, he worried, she would slip beneath the water and drown.
Oh my God. Fuck. Me.
Now he stepped in with both feet as Chloe’s weight started to burn the muscles in his arms. With his outstretched foot, in a balletic feat that almost cost him his hamstring, he yanked the chain of the plug, then squatted down as her head lolled on his shoulder and the soapy amniotic water around them drained away.

Now he was slimy wet and cold. He bit his lip to keep from crying. From that moment a strange twinning of sex and safety lodged itself in his unconscious.

He maneuvered around and rested Chloe as comfortably as possible in the tub’s bottom while he stepped out and ran to what he hoped was the linen closet, water squishing in his shoes, and pulled out an armload of towels. He paused before he covered Chloe, feeling a tenderness (he had never seen a naked middle-aged woman’s body before, certainly not his puritanical mother’s). Her breasts were small and high, slightly concave on top, the nipples darker and more pronounced compared with the small, pink, puppy roundness in magazines his friends passed around. Even at his young age, he recognized that the images in the porn mags were not the real deal, but fetishistic, consumerist fantasies that encouraged the substitution of anatomically supersized body parts for attraction, a paid voyeurism of man-made boobs, airbrushed crotches, inflated inner tube lips. Chloe’s body was real. Slim and toned, it contained a history. Her stomach, although flat, was soft, the lower belly pouched. Her rear end was gloriously full—one could see its contours even under clothes—with tiny ribbons of stretch marks around the hips. He worshipped this woman and, given the chance, would have married her a thousand times over the silly girls his own age.

When Richard had used all the towels from the linen closet—under her head as a pillow, wedged underneath her body for warmth, on top for modesty—he at last felt safe enough to leave her. He ran into the bedroom, grabbed the phone, and called his mother.

*   *   *

Sarah Dolan, née Donnelly, was the third daughter, fifth child, of a large alcoholic Irish family, and the appearance of one overdosed woman in a bathtub did not greatly perturb her. She did want to know what part her Richard had in this, but first things first. She took the pulse of the stylish Frenchwoman, a woman who had snubbed her and instead befriended her young son. She slapped her awake, then asked her a barrage of inane questions like name, date, and current president, determining that if Chloe had taken enough pills to kill herself, the job would already have been done. When she mentioned calling an ambulance, Chloe became so agitated it was clear that she didn’t need one, or the attending scandal that would follow. Sarah hunted around the medicine cabinet until she found the ipecac, then forced a dose down Chloe’s throat. She got her out of the tub and into underwear, a robe, and tube socks.

“Where is Claude?” Sarah yelled into the bedroom.

“Not here,” Richard mumbled.

A cloud darkened Sarah’s prim blue eyes. This, too, would have to wait. “Go make a pot of coffee and bring us a cup,” she said, to get her son out of the room and preserve whatever innocence he had left.

Sarah sat on the edge of the tub while Chloe hugged the toilet, retching out the last toxic remnants of her stomach. Periodically Sarah got up, once to fish around the drawers for hairpins, which she used to pin Chloe’s bangs back, and another time to find a washcloth, which she repeatedly wet, wrung out, and handed over. After the toilet had been flushed a last time, Chloe put the lid down, laid her head down on top of it, and began to sob. The lavishness of her grief impressed even a stern Irish girl. Now that the danger was over, Sarah was getting impatient to leave. She had left the dinner preparations in midstream—uncooked hamburger in the pan, frozen corn in its boiling bag.

“Dear, would you like me to call the professor?”

A loud wail came up out of Chloe’s chest as she stood up, her robe gaping open and revealing her body once more just as Richard came through the door with the cup of coffee.

“That piece of
shee-ittt
.
Merde.
He’s left me for his little
pute
secretary. He’s such a cliché, he can’t even be original in his choice.”

“Richard, go find alcohol—vodka or gin—and pour a glass for Mrs. Arnoux.”

“Claude’s father sleeps with the mother of Claude’s first girlfriend. The girl my little boy lost his virginity with. It will make him sick in the head.”

“Richard!” His mother yelled down the stairs. “Bring the bottle and two glasses.”

After her own family’s boisterous drunken example, Richard’s mother was a teetotaler who sipped only enough wine to make toasts on special occasions, so this was a big deal.

Richard went to the cabinet that he knew from long habit held the liquor. During sleepovers, Claude and he used to sneak into it, watering down the alcohol until the remainder was the color of pale tea. All he could think of was that Claude had done it with a girl and not told him, a major breach of best friend etiquette. He was not anxious about Chloe despite the horrific events of the afternoon. Truth was his mother was the person you most wanted in charge during times like these.

When Richard was six years old, it had seemed an excellent idea to steal grass clippings out of the garbage can, add flowers from the garden, and pour bottled salad dressing on top, just like his mom’s salad. Then eat it. Out came the ipecac.

Calmly his mother kneeled and held his tiny shoulders as he vomited in the wastepaper basket, dabbing his lips with Kleenex, washing his forehead with a damp cloth nonchalantly as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world to happen—your son eating grass.

“Mama’s little cow,” she crooned.

He slept through the afternoon, night, and next morning, finally waking at noon. No mention of school missed. She brought him his favorite, grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off, not once scolding him, figuring rightly he had already suffered enough. She was mystified by her son’s precocious love of cooking but defended it, especially against her husband, who called him a sissy. A good Catholic girl, she believed it was a mysterious gift that demanded to be used by its recipient.

Now, as Richard sat on the stairs at Chloe’s house, Sarah made a call to the family doctor, explaining the situation in as vague terms as possible, not using names, although it would be common knowledge soon enough. He said the only responsible thing to do was take the woman in question to the hospital, where she could be monitored. That, or have her personally supervised.

The hospital wasn’t an option—Chloe had made that much clear—but she was surprisingly willing to live with the Dolans. She moved into the guest room while Claude shared Richard’s room in a kind of extended sleepover.

“How come you never told me you did it?” Richard whispered.

“If you ever tell anyone about this, I’ll say you were banging my mom,” Claude hissed back.

For the next week, Richard’s parents lived in terror.

Chloe stayed up all night, playing cassettes of Edith Piaf and Nina Simone over and over. She drank profusely, although the doctor had strictly forbidden it, and smoked her black cigarillos like a chimney. Smoking wasn’t allowed in the house, but his mother said nothing, instead choosing to focus on keeping the house from being burned to the ground. Brown-rimmed holes scorched into the fabric of the sofa revealed the white eyes of stuffing. Years later, the faint reek of tobacco still hung in the curtains.

Chloe spent her days and nights in her bathrobe, unwashed, crying. Sarah sat next to her in silence and listened to long drunken tirades against the professor. Many times Chloe switched to French to more easily utter a particular obscenity in regards to her husband, and Sarah, grateful for her lack of fluency, was able to muse over what a melodic and romantic-sounding language it was. She would buy tapes, she thought, and teach herself a second language.

The whole week, the family took shifts, making sure someone was always there to watch over Chloe and potentially douse the house, although Sarah never left Richard alone with the woman, sensing that some potentially disastrous relationship between the two had been narrowly avoided. Claude distanced himself from the whole fiasco and spent his time at school or at other friends’ houses. At the end of the week, realizing her welcome was coming to an end, Chloe took a shower, put on her raisin-dark lipstick, and gave them sloppy hugs on her way out. A week later, a moving van pulled up.

Richard and Chloe kept in touch through letters, exchanging recipes and finds of rare ingredients, such as Calabrian chili-infused oil, tangy raw-milk French cheese, or Japanese
umeboshi
, salt-pickled plums. They never referred to that day, just as they avoided mention of the visit to the butcher.

A year later, Richard received a photo of Chloe in a white skirt suit, a small, insouciant pillbox hat perched on her head, standing in front of a Gothic church on the arm of the man who was her new husband. His mother shook her head and
tsk-tsk
ed, but he guessed she was impressed at Chloe’s resilience. After that, Richard received postcards from exotic places: France (of course), but also Spain, Morocco, India, Thailand, and Japan. The notes always centered on food. At Christmas he would receive packages: herb bundles from Provence, a tea set from Japan, Turkish delight from Istanbul. Chloe was his proof that second acts were possible.

*   *   *

Getting into CIA had been a culmination of everything Richard had worked for starting from those Chloe days, but for Javi it was a reprieve, an escape, a place to chill out. The housing department had put them together simply because Javi’s last five roommates had moved out of the apartment within a month’s time. Javi cultivated a constant party atmosphere. Strangers could be found wandering the rooms at all times of the day and night. Because he was a lady’s man, there was always a couple of mournful women in tow—women who cleaned the place and brought flowers, trying to win his heart. As often as not, Javi would go straight from CIA to some other party and would never show up at home at all, and these women fell into Richard’s sympathetic orbit.

Was Richard taking advantage? Was he a cordial predator? He had a certain desperate, grateful charm. They were all beautiful in his opinion—women he wouldn’t have been brave enough to talk to in any other circumstance—but there they were in his apartment, alone, jilted, and he was willing to pour them wine and listen to their heartache. Usually he was rewarded. He realized years later they were probably in all likelihood simple mercy beddings, but you had to start somewhere.

Afterward, he would take these lovelies, wrapped in his old bathrobe, to the kitchen and begin his true seduction. Perhaps a simple apple-and-sage
croque monsieur
toasted in the oven? Maybe a
salade frisée aux lardons
with poached egg and bacon fat? Or maybe a basic roasted-cherry-tomato-and-feta omelette, accompanied by an appropriate wine? He would try to make another date as they finished the last forkfuls, almost never offering to share. They adored his food but warily stood at the front door like loyal dogs waiting for the return of their prodigal master, deflecting his efforts at getting their number. Future meetings would be left vague. Already he knew they would not return to clean the apartment or to warm his bed. As they kissed him on the cheek good-bye, it was always with the same words: “You should really open a restaurant. Please tell Javi to call me.”

That all changed when he met Ann. When she came to the apartment, it was only for him; she was not even aware of Javi’s existence. On their first date, while his famous
coq au vin
was simmering on the stove, he snuck downstairs and left a bread bag tie on the mailbox, his and Javi’s signal that the apartment was romantically occupied. The tie stayed in place the whole weekend.

*   *   *

When Richard took off to go snorkeling with the other couple, Ann sat under a palm tree and pouted. She admitted it—she was angry that he was taking it all so well. As if in fact they were on a vacation instead of hiding out. Why did she want him beside her—to beg her forgiveness, plead for her to be a little happy? Richard was being Richard. He tried to be sympathetic, to act like their mutual problems were mutual, but he easily reverted to his perpetual Zen state where all he thought about was food. Even after all this, his mistress was still the kitchen, and he longed to be back with her. It was like infidelity, but in a more subtle, unfightable form.

Despite her best efforts, Ann could not hold on to her pique. The island took care of that. She looked across the beach at the gently spooling waves and thought, this is what paradise means. Her dream. What struck her was that there was so very little to it. It was characterized by lack, like a minimalist painting. How could you paint it and not have it turn out like a souvenir-shack paint-by-numbers? How to convey the fullness of the experience rather than emptiness? She thought she was on the verge of an original composition—a band of land and sea, with the majority of the canvas filled with sky—but her first impulse, rather than to try to find supplies to paint it, was to call Lorna or Javi to talk about it. Until she realized she couldn’t.