See You in Paradise Page 5

  It took a couple of seconds for the hilarity to wane and for the guests to realize that they would now be expected to amuse themselves. During this awkward silence, Peck turned to Brant and, loudly enough so that others should hear, said, “You must be that Brant.”

  “Yes!” Brant replied brightly.

  The two stared at each other for a moment, and in that moment Brant saw his chance with this man roar past, flag-waving revelers shouting out its bunting-underslung windows, and recede into the distance. It was gone before he even knew what it was, a distant speck leading a dust cloud.

  Peck was smiling at him. Brant had seen this face before, of course, in flash photographs in magazines or pen-and-inked onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal; it was familiar but unmemorable, like a second-rate old pop song. And the eyes: you’d expect the eyes of a man like this to be direct, penetrating, alive: but instead they were furtive, blurred, facing in slightly different directions. The skin was sallow, blotched, creased; the cheeks cadaverous. But the forehead! This, Brant thought, was what did all the work, this gleaming hemisphere that looked like it had been dragged here by a glacier. It bore neither hairs nor pores, this wall, and behind it the killing thoughts cozied up against one another. As Brant gazed at it the mouth beneath it opened and words came out. “Perhaps we ought to shake hands, Brant.”

  “Oh, sure!”

  Peck took Brant’s hand, but took it limply, making Brant’s strong grip, intended to express a marriageable masculine confidence, instead seem like a withering critique of the old man’s waning virility. Peck actually winced, and Brant jerked his hand away. “Uh, I ought to thank you, sir, for the—”

  “Please,” Peck said, secreting the hand back under the table, “there’s no need to grovel. Now, Brant.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You’re diddling my daughter.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re thinking of marrying her, right?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Getting yourself a piece of the family fortune?”

  “Well, that’s—”

  “Don’t be ashamed, Brant, that’s how I got started on mine. I took one look at Cynthia’s mother, at that stunning horse face and that glorious udder, and I said to myself, there’s a twenty-four-carat cunt if I ever saw one. You can believe I got in there but quick.”

  There was nothing Brant could say to this; if he protested, he would be branded a liar; if he agreed, he would be a prick. If he said nothing, he would be a weakling. He said, “Uh huh!”

  “But I’m not a pussy, Brant, and neither are you. I had to work for my supper, and so will you. I did my time at her father’s company, and so will you.”

  “I will?”

  “Yes. You’re going to man the home office.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. You’re going to become chief of operations at headquarters.”

  Brant didn’t get it. He said, “In New York?”

  Peck laughed—it was what he wanted to hear. “Guyamón.”

  “Guyamón?”

  “It’s a lesser Bermuda. A tax dodge. We have to have an office there. Staffed by a staff of one. The job is currently occupied, but if you say yes, he’s fired.” Peck removed a cell phone from his pocket—a rather large one by present standards, mid-nineties vintage, a charming affectation. “If you say no, you can get the hell out of my daughter’s graduation party, and if you ever again so much as fondle a tit I’ll have all your arms broken. And don’t think I can’t do it.”

  Brant looked past him to Cynthia, who, though while theoretically engaged in a conversation with an avid middle-aged couple, was glancing his way, her eyebrows expectantly arched, her mouth tilted in a hopeful, nervous smile. He had to admit that, for the whole night up until now, he had not been feeling super about Cynthia. The party had cast a tawdry light upon her; she did not seem worth all the hoopla, which in turn felt excessive, striving. But now, after staring at her father’s creepy mug for minutes on end, Brant experienced a loosening of critical faculties, and saw Cynthia as lovely and strong, and remembered her playfulness, her sexual enthusiasm, and her beautiful car, and suddenly he felt that he could not do without her. Something about her laugh, the one her father had drawn from her, made him hesitate, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted her. Hell, he loved her! He turned back to her father. He said, “I’ll do it.”

  “Great,” said Peck, without much enthusiasm, and pushed two buttons on the phone. “Serkin? Peck. You’re fired. The plane leaves at seven p.m. Thursday. Get on it, or you’re stuck. Goodbye.” He pushed another button, and then two more. “Book Brant’s flight,” he said, and hung up.

  “Go home,” he said now to Brant, tucking the phone back into his jacket pocket.

  “Home?”

  “To pack. You’re leaving tomorrow. A car will pick you up at noon. Good luck.” He cleared his throat and fell upon his meal, which had been placed before him by a napkin-draped arm.

  “But don’t I—”

  “Go,” muttered Peck through a mouthful of broccoli. “Don’t worry about the details. A packet will be waiting for you in the car. Go ahead, smooch your honey and vamoose.”

  He rose, went over to Cynthia. “I have to go,” he whispered in her ear.

  “So you said yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Brant!” she said, and craned her neck to kiss him. When he hazarded a glance at her father, he could see that he was paying no attention at all.

  He left a message for his boss on voicemail. “I’m sorry,” he explained, “Peck’s making me take this job. I’ll send you an email.” But he wondered if there would even be email on Guyamón, or restaurants, or television. He would miss restaurants and television—would miss delivery food, football. But surely Guyamón had these things—it was the Bahamas, it was a tourist destination. Probably there would be cool mixed drinks served at rattan taverns on the beach. There would be friendly natives in colorful shirts, and drunk Americans, and crazy birds that made crazy sounds. “Don’t worry about your apartment,” a voice had said on his answering machine when he got home from the commencement dinner. “Don’t worry about anything. It will all be taken care of. Bring only those things you can’t do without.” For Brant, these were: his “property of” shirt from the business school, his Bob Marley CDs (and wasn’t Guyamón near Jamaica? Maybe he ought to have an atlas), a picture of his mom, a picture of Cynthia (presented to him on his birthday, it was taken by a famous fashion photographer Brant had never heard of and tucked into a neat silver frame), and a toothbrush. He brought along three suits and seven shirts, as well. All the next morning he tried to get in touch with Cynthia, but she wasn’t home. He left five messages. His boss called him and pleaded. He called his mother and sister, both of whom told him he was nuts. That was okay. In fact it was great! He felt, briefly, as if he were on the threshold of a fabulous future. “We thought he was nuts, but in the end, Brant was right.”

  A dented Lincoln picked him up; the driver wore an old-fashioned driver’s hat and called him sir. He checked in at the airport, got on a plane, and flew first to New York, then Nassau. There, a gangly black man wearing aviator sunglasses (and why not?, he was an aviator) led him across a steaming tarmac to a little four-seater with a picture of a turkey stenciled on the side.

  “What’s with the turkey?” Brant shouted over the buzz of the engine, a buzz that seemed somehow insufficient.

  The pilot pointed to his ear, shrugged.

  In an hour they were above Guyamón, circling what appeared to be a volcano. Smoke was issuing from it in long windless streaks. The air was hot as hell, even in here. Brant was pitting out big time. It was evening. They landed on a cracked strip of concrete, the pilot swearing all the way in. Brant shuddered in his seat and conked his head on the roof.

  “Hey, man,” he asked the pilot as he got out. “That thing’s inactive, right?” Meaning the volcano.

  The pilot laughed good and long.

&nb
sp; There was a car here, a jeep actually, US Army issue as far as Brant could tell, repainted with what looked like yellow latex house-paint. The driver was a fat white man wearing a spotless white shirt and a gigantic straw hat.

  “You gonna need a hat for that bald patch,” he said.

  “I don’t have a bald patch,” said Brant. “Do I?”

  The drive took half an hour. They traveled a mudded and pot-holed road to the base of the volcano, then turned right and edged around it. There were a lot of trees and ferns, except in the places where fresh lava had mowed them down. In places the lava covered the road and the jeep bumped jauntily over it. At last they arrived somewhere—a small stretch of paved cement before which stood a long row of cinder-block huts, about fifteen in all. They’d been built twenty or so years ago, and since then had been treated variously, some clearly abandoned and the windows and doors removed, some dolled up like vacation cottages. The jeep stopped in front of a middling one, its terra-cotta roof cracked and mossed, its walls in need of paint. The driver didn’t bother turning off the engine. He handed Brant the key. Brant took it, then waited for instructions.

  “You’re supposed to get out,” the driver said.

  “What then?”

  “Then I leave.”

  When the jeep was gone, Brant stood before the door, sweating. He put the key in the lock and turned it. The door creaked open.

  The place had been ransacked. The mattress was slashed, stains that appeared to be red wine covered the walls. A dresser that stood at the foot of the bed seemed to have been urinated in. And in the middle of the floor sat a small pile of human feces, holding in place a handwritten note that read:

  ENJOY THE TROPICS, WHORE!

  A few days later, though, Brant was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. The cottage was equipped with a telephone, a computer, a fast internet connection, and satellite TV. He had spent most of his time so far watching baseball games, talking to friends in America, and enjoying pornography. He’d never liked pornography before, he hated to cave in to such base desires, but there didn’t seem to be any girls here, and nobody he knew was likely to burst in on him, and so, from the computer’s tiny speakers could be heard, at all hours of the day, the quiet moans of nude actresses as they masturbated before the masturbating him. Three times daily a little truck came clanking by, and the denizens of the cottage row—six in all—would amble out of their dens and eat the food their respective companies had paid for. There were burgers and french fries and imported beers. There were omelettes and apples—apples!, in the Bahamas!—and Dove bars and club sandwiches. The six men were always in, because they all had to answer the phone if it rang, although the phones never rang. After the truck left, they would stand around and talk, clutching their brown paper bags of loot. They didn’t introduce themselves to Brant, but included him in their conversation as if he’d been there for a hundred years.

  “See the Yanks?”

  “Nah. Drooling over Nudie Village.”

  “Ya see the chick with the giant thatch?”

  “Hell yeah!”

  “What’d’ya get today?”

  “Ham.”

  “Everybody got ham.”

  “I got yesterday’s Molson if anybody wants it. I hate Molson.”

  “Hell yeah I want it.”

  “What’ll you give me then?”

  It took Brant a couple of days to find the courage to jump in, but once he did he was one of the guys. He caught a few names—Ron, Kevin, Pete. Pete was a cheerful man of thirty, thick around the middle, with dark eye bags that seemed genetic, rather than circumstantial. He held down the fort for an agribusiness conglomerate. One afternoon Brant was left alone with him after the others had gone home. He said, “So, does anybody go to the beach? Like, on breaks?” For he was allowed breaks, one hour out of every eight, and he had Sundays off. Sunday was tomorrow, his first here.

  “There’s a path out back. But it isn’t much of a beach. Like ten feet, the rest is rocks.”

  “Is there a bar or something? In town?”

  “No town. But there is a bar.”

  “Wanna go sometime?”

  The question seemed to send shooting pains into Pete’s head. He winced. “Ah, it’s kinda far, and there are no girls.”

  “Oh.”

  So on Sunday Brant went to the beach, and Pete was right, it sucked. The rocks were sharp, and everything stank of fish. He went home, dejected. It had only been four days, and he could feel himself, his personality, shrinking to more or less nothing. He was Friendly Brant! He needed to greet passersby, to shake their hands! He wished there were some leaves to rake, some weatherproofing to do. But there wasn’t any weather here. A little rain, a little sun. A little rain, a little sun. By noon he had already jerked off twice and played forty games of Donkey Kong. He decided to go visiting. He washed his hands and walked down to Kevin’s place. Kevin had seemed okay to Brant, he told a joke once after Breakfast Truck, he had a nineties beard.

  He knocked. “Yo, Kev!” he said.

  From behind the door came sort of a muffled mumble that Brant thought was an invitation to enter, but when he opened the door Kevin was busy covering his and another man’s (Brant hadn’t gotten his name) naked sweating bodies with a sheet.

  “Buzz off, asshole!”

  “Sorry, dude!”

  So much for dropping by. He had begun to prepare himself mentally for another encounter with his girl of the hour, Mandy Mounds, when he heard an unfamiliar noise coming from inside his cottage. What the hell was it? He opened the door and found that the noise, a kind of urgent, grating buzz, was the sound the phone made when it rang. The phone! It was ringing! Brant cracked his knuckles. Showtime!

  “Hello?”

  “I got a surprise for you!” The voice, though drunk, was recognizable as Cynthia’s. It was coming to him through a haze of crackling interference.

  “Hon bun!”

  “I am having something delivered to your door,” she said. Something about her tone seemed almost sinister, like the duplicitous sexpots in James Bond movies. He had to admit he liked it.

  He said, “Where are you? You sound so far away.” Duh!

  “I’m on my cell. In a—whoop!—car.”

  “Isn’t it illegal to talk on the phone while driving?”

  “It’s illegal to drive drunk, too, dummy. But I’m not driving.”

  “So what are you sending me?”

  “Sposeta be a surprise.”

  “Is it delicious?”

  “Yyyyes!”

  “So you eat it?”

  She snorted. “No, dipshit. You do.” And with that she hung up.

  Well. That was unproductive. He figured if she was sending the present now, he’d get it in what, two weeks? He opened up his browser and a couple minutes later Mandy Mounds filled the room with her delighted squeaking. He’d just got his shorts off when his door flew open and Cynthia came roaring in, hiking her sundress up to her waist. “You got yourself all ready!” she said, climbing on, and for ten or so minutes it was difficult to distinguish the sounds she made from the ones coming out of the speakers. Then they were finished and lay on the bed, unable to stop perspiring. At the computer desk, Mandy Mounds said, “More! More! More! More!”

  “’Scuse me,” said Cynthia, and she staggered naked across the room to switch off the computer. But first she paused, turning her head this way and that, checking out the competition. “I got better legs,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “And her boobs look like saddlebags.”

  He didn’t have much to say to that. She turned everything off. “I bribe Daddy’s people. They bring me down here whenever I want.” She hopped back onto the bed, sending him several inches into the air.

  “But this is the first time you’ve been down here.”

  “Right. Hey, you wanna go to town?”

  “There is no town.”

  “Who told you that?” she said.

  They we
nt to the other side of the volcano. The fat white guy drove them there. The little jeep shuddered and rumbled around lava flows and fallen trees, tossing them from side to side, against the doors of the jeep and each other. Cynthia laughed the entire trip, until they arrived at a little tent pavilion at the edge of what would have been a tourist paradise, if any tourists were there. Instead there were handsome black people in loose-fitting clothes, dancing to the music from a little amplified calypso band, and beyond them was a bar that was little more than a rusted metal cart covered with bottles and plastic cups, and beyond that was a dirt road leading to a lot of little houses. Cynthia paid the driver with a thick stack of bills, which he folded and stowed like a pro, and told him to wait. He said, “I’ll be easy to find,” and lurched into the fray.

  They danced and drank all afternoon, and then ate parts of some kind of giant pig roasting on a spit, and they ate some kind of spicy thing wrapped up in leaves, and some sort of reeking but impossibly sweet fruit, and then they danced and drank some more, and the people, the villagers, didn’t seem to mind them being there. Cynthia paid for everything and then some, handing people money at the slightest pretext, the band for playing something more up-tempo, the bartender for giving her a clean cup, a random bystander for letting her get ahead in the roasted-pig line. Soon after dark she took Brant by the hand and led him into the woods, where she fell to her knees at the base of a palm tree and puked, and then when Brant bent over to help her up, he puked as well. Then they sort of fell over on their way back, then they seemed to be asleep for a while, then they got up and found the jeep, which the driver was asleep in. They woke him up and he drove, drunk, back to the cottage row. Cynthia and Brant stumbled into his cottage and collapsed on the bed and woke up at noon. They tried sex but were too queasy to finish.