The Last Good Paradise (20 page)

“That’s our best cash crop. Spending money,” Cooked said.

He introduced her to about twenty women from his immediate clan who were working on various projects around the compound. His mother kissed her on the cheek, greeting her in French, which Wende did not speak. Then Cooked led her to his bedroom and closed the door. He dropped his shorts.

“They all know we’re in here!”

“It’s okay. It’s cool, lady.”

“Wende.”

“Windy.”

“With an ‘
e
.’”

Cooked’s English-language skills were not advanced so she tried not to be critical. His single bed had dirty sheets; the room was a pigsty. He was basically a twenty-something teenager like herself. He also wasn’t terribly romantic. They smoked a joint, and he got down to business. Apparently, kissing wasn’t big in their culture, but he was young and indefatigable.

Afterward, bed-rumpled, glowing, they came out into the kitchen, and two dozen adults and children smiled and giggled at the lovebirds. Within minutes she was a member of the family.

Wende didn’t want to be so creepy, imperialistic, or colonialistic as to ask Cooked if this was an everyday occurrence—bringing home a
popa’a
tourist for a little afternoon nookie. She wasn’t going to turn mushy—was she special? No, the whole clan seemed genuine in their kindness and in their lack of surprise.

Cooked’s mother opened up some cans of Punu Pu’atoro and fried the corned beef up with onions, then served it with roasted breadfruit, coconut bread, and
po’e
, baked papaya in banana leaves. Afterward, Cooked led her back to his bedroom, where they started all over again.

Wiped out, Wende fell asleep squashed against the wall and woke up when the late-afternoon sun glared through the window. “Hey, we need to go! Poor Ann.”

Cooked grunted and tongued her knee.

It was when Wende was reaching under his desk for her shorts that she saw the pictures of the babies with horrendous birth defects, some of an unidentifiable jellyfish-like appearance.

“What is this—?”

“I must confess to you,” Cooked said solemnly. “I am a revolutionary.”

Wende had not traveled enough to understand the faked, tabula rasa quality of the resort compared with real island life. Her whole life was tabula rasa, and she was dying to experience the authentic. Traveling made her feel like an anthropologist. Wherever she went, she tried to picture living there. What would her life look like in Cooked’s village? It was certainly poor, dirty, and chaotic, but it was alive in ways that the resort could never be.

Cooked had grown up hearing the adults talk about injustice. His own father had been lured from their village to Papeete with the promise of high pay in construction work on military and government buildings. The whole family moved with him, leaving their large hut that they’d built themselves on family land, to live in a subsidized apartment in a bad part of town. For the first time in their lives, they did not know their neighbors.

Cooked remembered how ashamed he was when he saw his mom and dad smiling, scraping, and humbling themselves in front of the French. Only in the privacy of their apartment could they pretend to talk back. There they boasted; they preened. So it was natural when Cooked became a teenager that he’d admired the gangs that formed, that took power through fear. They had renamed him from his birth name, Vane, to Cooked, legacy of a long campaign of oppression. But Cooked didn’t want to terrorize his own neighborhood. He admired the activists that were fighting the outsiders.

“My parents were servants. I’m a servant. Will my children and their children be servants also?” He told Wende about the dual ravages of economic inequality and the aftereffects of decades of nuclear testing on his family. His brother Teina was on his way to becoming a minor thug. “Instead I want to lead a revolution.”

Wende’s eyes were wide open. This was, bar none, the best date she had ever been on.

“We’re wage slaves. We protest, wave signs, and are ignored. I want to wake them up. I want them to start paying attention.”

His sense of purpose excited her more than his lovemaking, and as he told her his plans, all she could think was
Yes, yes, yes yes yes yes
.

The truth was Wende had been attracted physically to Cooked but had found him boring until this moment. Suddenly he transformed before her eyes from a Polynesian Justin Bieber to a Polynesian Che Guevara. She pulled him back down on the bed one last time. Revolutionaries could be sexy! She’d had no idea.

*   *   *

She said good-bye to Cooked’s bedridden aunt, Etini, who had leukemia. Although there was government health care, it was hard to access. The island had only a primitive clinic with basic services. Staying in Papeete was expensive and lonely. Being sent to France for advanced therapy was unthinkable. Etini was too ill to work. A class-action lawsuit for the poisoning had been stalled in the courts for years as the victims died off. How did the resort and tourists look from Etini’s window? All of it made Wende even angrier with her current stupid, frivolous life. Sacrilegious thought: Did the world really need another pop song?

As little as Cooked’s family had, comparatively, they seemed more content than the resort’s guests. Or was that a Gauguinesque projection, wishful thinking by dissatisfied, exploiting colonists? The clichéd dream of the happy native? She’d given gladly when Cooked asked to borrow some cash before they left. In full view of everyone he gave all five twenties to his mama with a kiss. Wasn’t that kind of sharing, giving to those in need, what it was all about? Maybe her mother’s commune idyll had rubbed off on her?

Wende hummed “Road to Nowhere” (her favorite song from the retro ’80s music scene that she obviously liked—for example, her crush on Prospero—but which drove Dex crazy), and buried her face in Cooked’s warm shoulder on the ride back to town.

*   *   *

If Richard had told his friends back home that he was hanging out with Dex Cooper, he would have been envied, but the reality was something else.

Dex brought out a supersize spliff, which they smoked down to a nub; they started in on alcohol next.

“Maybe we should get some exercise?” Richard asked, realizing he sounded way too goody-two-shoes.

They proceeded to lazily lob the volleyball back and forth in the saunalike temperature. Titi came out and watched them, grinning, estimating they’d suffer from heatstroke within minutes, and went back inside. Soon they were stretched out under a palm.

“Ah, those look yummy,” Dex said, pointing at the cannonball coconuts right above their heads.

“Loren told me getting hit on the head with those is the leading cause of injury here.”

“Nah, I’m sure it’s more like getting eaten by a shark.”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s paradise here,” Dex said. He began grappling up the slick trunk of the tree. “Help me.”

“No way,” Richard said.

“Come on, bro. Let me stand on your shoulders to get a leg up.”

Richard knew it was stupid. One of them would probably end up getting hurt, but he did weigh a lot more than Dex, and after all, he
was
getting to be Dex Cooper’s buddy.

They scrambled for long minutes before Dex finally gained purchase on a ridge of bark and shimmied up to his goal. Richard limped away, afraid he’d dislocated a shoulder. His skin was abraded by Dex’s toenails digging in.

“View’s fine up here.”

“Shake them off and get down.”

Richard moved away as coconuts rained on top of him.

Titi came out, cross. “You come down.”

As Dex tried and failed to reverse his course, his former ease vanished. He was hugging the tree for dear life. “Easier said than done.”

He made the first rappelling move downward and came flying off the tree, landing with a thud. Titi and Richard ran to him.

“You okay?”

“I burned it.”

“He’s delirious,” Richard said. “Get Loren.”

“The
song
.”

“I don’t understand.”

“On the beach. It felt righteous, but now…”

Richard shrugged. “Write another one.”

“This was the big one.”

“Okay…” Richard was exhausted. This felt a few degrees beyond even Javi’s neediness. “Write it again.”

Dex opened his eyes. “Will you stay with me? You’re my good-luck charm. You saved my life yesterday, man. I can’t manage it alone.”

Midwifing the birth of a rock ’n’ roll song. What if this was the next “Satisfaction” or “Imagine”? Richard felt a tightening in his chest. They’d morphed from buddies to bromance. “I’d be honored.”

They locked themselves up in Dex’s
fare
, which Richard discovered was twice as big and much fancier than his and Ann’s, and ordered Titi to play bouncer, keeping everyone out and a steady supply of booze and food coming in.

At first Richard felt uncomfortable in his role as witness. “You sure you don’t want to be alone?”

“I need you here. You saved my life, man.”

The unkind thought passed through his mind that he wished Dex would stop mentioning the rescue. He didn’t want to be reminded of the disturbing mouth-to-mouth, or that maybe he was being befriended because of his CPR technique and not for himself. But what American male had not at one time or another fantasized that he was a rock star up on the stage—torn jeans, sweaty and grubby, pounding away, jabbing with the none-too-subtle phallic symbol of electric guitar at groin level? This was beyond a dream come true to watch the music being made. Richard took a slug of dark rum and passed the bottle over.

Dex’s creative process was deceptively unorganized. He wrote words on a notepad that Richard thought weren’t exactly literature:

The White Whale

Wanted it so bad and got it

Didn’t know what to do and burned it

Who knew it had such deep, deep, sharp teeth.

But as Dex started playing chords, the words grew meaning beyond themselves. Chords exploded, changed key. A melody in the beginning disappeared, then returned, transformed, deepened. It was about something unknown in the singer’s life—if Richard didn’t assume it was this afternoon’s disaster of burning the song and falling out of the tree—but also about more than that.

Went down that pole of darkness

Hit the earth and went on in

The words became beside the point. Richard thought about the music he had loved as a teenager—Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle”—realizing he had never questioned the meaning of those lyrics. The essence was inside the music, and it was clear that Dex had the magic, was able to weave lyric and melody with a genius utterly unexpected from the person he had observed during the previous week. It took four straight hours of playing before perfectionist Dex was satisfied, and an exhausted Richard could tell no difference between each version, but he could hear the difference after every tenth playing—a subtle refining process, an accentuation of improvisatory riffs. Even after a hundred repetitions, the final time Dex played the song brought tears to Richard’s eyes. He didn’t care if it made him a wuss: he had just witnessed a genuine birth. Something new and beautiful existed in the world.

“Did you get it back?” he said after waiting a respectful time till the last chord faded away.

Dex shook himself as if he had been in a trance. “It’s better than the first time.”

“Cool.”

The two men walked out victors into the roseate island sunset.

*   *   *

The women returned to the resort as the horizon faded to purple. The group toasted the end of the day with rum punches. With a sphinxlike smile, Ann showed a mystified Richard her half-shark tattoo, then swaggered to their
fare
to change for dinner. Wende’s lips were kiss bruised. Cooked jumped out of the boat and moored it to the dock. Dex felt sick to his stomach when he heard him humming an approximation of “Road to Nowhere” as he carried a small battered valise to one of the vacant
fares
. On his neck was a purpled love bite.

Titi stood at the kitchen threshold, scowling, waiting for Cooked to notice her. When he did, she turned her back to him and stomped inside.

*   *   *

“What have you guys been up to?” Ann asked. She was surprised at the sudden camaraderie of the two men after they had mostly ignored each other for the past week.

“You have no idea.” Richard grinned.

Titi moved around the table, banging down bowls and plates so they jumped. When Wende looked up at her, she saw her diamond
WILD
pendant suspended from Titi’s ear.

“Hey, that’s mine!”

Titi smiled. “I thought we were sharing everything, Polynesian style.”

Wende bit her lip as Dex buried his head in her neck.

“Oh, baby, it was awful,” he said.

She stroked his back, distracted. “You fell out of a tree?”

“I thought it died. But it’s back. The best.”

“The tree?”

“The song.”

Wende rolled her eyes at Ann, with an I-told-you-so expression. “That’s great. Let’s eat.”

“This song changes everything. If only Robby could hear it.”

Ann looked pointedly at Loren, who kept passing dishes and offered nothing in the way of assistance.

Finally she got up. “Come with me,” she said.

The two couples went to Ann and Richard’s
fare
(Richard embarrassed that it looked almost threadbare in comparison with Dex and Wende’s), and they pointed flashlights into the plunge pool while Ann poked around the grassy bottom with her foot.

“Here it is,” she said, pulling up the dripping sat-phone. Thank God Javi had thought far enough to get a waterproof one.

“You could probably store it in a drawer,” Richard said.

Dex called Robby, and they talked briefly. Once Robby turned his recorder on, Dex played his guitar and sang into the phone. They all clapped at the end.

“Let’s celebrate!” Dex howled. “Where’s my herbalista? Cooked!”