See You in Paradise Page 6

  All day Brant lay half-in and half-out of sleep. At some point he opened his eyes to find Cynthia staring at his face, as if looking for something she’d misplaced. When he woke again, she was gone. Brant noticed the voicemail light blinking on his phone. He picked up the receiver, supporting himself with a trembling hand, and punched in his code.

  The first message said, “If you aren’t there in fifteen minutes, you’re fired.”

  The second message said, “If you aren’t there in ten minutes, you’re fired.”

  The third said, “Five minutes.”

  The fourth: “You’re fired. Your ride leaves at seven PM. Miss it and you’re stranded.”

  It was 7:35.

  Back home, behind his desk at the alumni magazine, the sounds of neighing, whinnying co-workers interrupted his concentration, causing him to forget the phone numbers he was dialing, to fumble his pleas to donors. He had to stand up in his cubicle and address the crouching, tittering crew in a strained voice: “Look, you guys, it isn’t funny, okay? I was stranded for almost a week with no home, and I don’t think I would be laughing right now if it was you it happened to.” He thought about quitting—that would show them—but the thoughts never got much past the vengeful-fantasy stage. Besides, you never got anything out of losing your cool. People respected you for taking their shit. He just decided to take it, and he took it, and eventually, though when, he couldn’t have told you, the whole thing would just up and blow away.

  The day after she left, he was awakened by his replacement, a man, or rather a guy, about his age, deep-voiced, clean-cut, sweating respectably little in his white oxford shirt. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I was under the impression that this was to be my cottage.”

  Brant had not given his next move much thought, beyond stopping by one of the other cottages and asking how often the plane came. Not very often, he learned. Now, he gathered his things and shoved them into his bag while the new guy checked out the computer. “May I erase these files?” he said, clicking around aimlessly.

  “No,” said Brant. “If you do, the computer will melt.”

  He took his suits—never removed from their garment bag—and slung them over his shoulder. Then he walked around the volcano to the pavilion, looking for the locals’ party. It took all day to get there, and when he arrived he found that the tent had been taken down, and everyone was in their houses. He sat on the paving stones where he had danced a few nights before, and panted, his tongue thick and dry as a towel. He almost cried, he was so sad. Eventually he got up and knocked on somebody’s door and blurted out the whole story, and the family that lived there gave him a drink of water and let him sleep on their floor.

  They were nice, this family—a man, a woman, two little girls. They spoke English but rarely spoke. They sat around all day making things—the man, thin and dark and thickly bearded, carved driftwood into interesting little sculptures, and the woman, who might have been the hottest human being Brant had ever seen, embroidered miniature tapestries that served as the facing for the macramé shoulder bags that the girls made. Every once in a while they all paused for a meal—fish and fruit, delicious beyond imagining, which they shared with him—and in the evening they watched the sun set, visited their neighbors, drank banana homebrew, and generally had a good, solid time. Each morning a man burdened by giant army duffels arrived on a bicycle, and forms were filled out and exchanged, and the things the village produced were stuffed into the bags and taken away to be sold to tourists.

  Through all this, Brant did basically nothing. He had a fever and the shits, slept in the daytime, and lay awake nights gasping for breath. He slept on the floor next to the girls’ bed and listened to their indecipherable whispers, to their quiet laughter as they talked themselves to sleep. Eventually, his host told him that the plane would come the following day, and the jeep would only go as far as the cottage row (he called it the Business Village), so he had better get back. Brant thanked the family profusely; he told them he would repay their kindness. “Like, in money I mean,” he added. “American dollars.”

  The man smiled. “No need for that.”

  “Seriously, no, I will.”

  The man shook his head. “Don’t worry. We are rich.”

  “Yes, of course,” Brant said, shaking his hand, “I can see that your lives are very rich here. Thank you.”

  “No,” the man said. “I mean, we are rich. Your corporations pay us money. The cottages are ours.” He smiled. “I could, what is it you say, I could buy and sell you many times over.”

  “Oh,” Brant said, dropping the man’s hand.

  “Oh,” the man repeated in apparent mockery, though his voice, his face, retained their earnestness.

  Brant walked all the way back, fortified by a canteen of water the family had provided. When he got to his old cottage, he knocked and entered. His replacement was sitting in the swivel chair, watching a Mandy Mounds video. His hand shot out and turned off the screen. “What do you think you’re doing!” he shouted.

  “Relax.”

  “This is my cottage!”

  “I’m just gonna sit here by the fan until the jeep comes, all right?”

  “No you’re not!” the replacement said, his arms flailing. He had cut off his chinos and the sleeves of his shirt.

  I should have shat on the floor, Brant thought, while I had the chance.

  In the end, he sat next to the road and dozed. The sound of the jeep woke him up. The fat guy unloaded the sack dinners and demanded money for the ride to the airport. Brant forked over what he had left. He was back home by morning, his house (thankfully, he had retained the lease) exactly the way he had left it. He took a shower, curled up in the hot and musty bed, and slept until the middle of the next day.

  And that, he decided, was that. He got his job back, having after all secured the magic donation from Leyton Peck—who had not, contrary to Brant’s worst fears, reneged on the deal. He reclaimed his cubicle, endured the jokes, and tried to forget about Cynthia. He stayed off the internet and enjoyed the cool fall weather.

  At some point guilt got the best of him and he tried to write a thank-you note to the family who had helped him through that terrible week. He managed a few lines about how grateful he was and how maybe someday they would meet again and stuffed it into an envelope, and then sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how the hell to address it. He got as far as—

  The family

  First cottage

  Behind the volcano

  Guyamón

  —before muttering “Fuck it” and tossing the whole thing in the trash. And then he had a change of heart. He reached into the trash can, picked out the crumpled paper, and smoothed it flat; then he dropped it into the recycling bin. After that he felt a hell of a lot better.

  Hibachi

  Five months after Philip and Evangeline were married, Philip dropped his briefcase and four folders worth of loose papers in a pedestrian crosswalk and was run down by an old woman in a large car who had failed to notice his crouched form in the road. The car’s fender—it was an SUV, a Chevy Tahoe—struck him just below the left shoulder, and he was knocked over and dragged forty yards down the street, resulting in the loss of much of the skin on his right arm. At this point Philip had broken only his humerus, collarbone, and several ribs, and might have been spared further injury had the driver noticed he was there. But she didn’t, and at the next corner the car loosed its grip on Philip, and he was thrown under the back right tire. The tire crossed him from hip to shoulder, breaking more ribs, all the bones of his right arm, and his spine. He was rushed to the hospital and remained unconscious for several days; when he woke, he was told that he was unlikely ever to walk again. Meanwhile, the woman who had run him down had continued on to Home Depot and bought three rhododendrons, a box of thirty-gallon trash bags, and a bottle of orange-scented kitchen cleaner, and when the police tracked her down, she snubbed them, apparently thinking they were collecting for the benevolent
association. Eventually she would be given a two-hundred-dollar fine and a one-month suspension of her license. It was two months before Philip had even the strength to sit in the electric wheelchair Evangeline’s health insurance had almost, but not quite, covered, and another four before a settlement came through that, to Philip’s mind, could only be called modest.

  Philip was forty-one; Evangeline was forty-three. They had no children and wanted no children. He was an accountant. She was an accountant. They both went by their full names and corrected anyone who mistakenly called them Phil or Angie. But such an occurrence was infrequent, as they had few friends. They lived in a small house on a quiet street one neighborhood over from the posh part of town, and by the time Philip had grown adept at maneuvering his wheelchair around the house, Evangeline had had a ramp constructed for his ingress and egress. Even so, winter had begun, and it was April before Philip ventured out.

  When he did, Evangeline was at work, and his batteries ran out six blocks from home. The policeman he hailed was one of the two who had arrested the woman who ran him over, and on the way back to the house, with the wheelchair awkwardly wedged into the trunk of the cruiser, this man said to Philip, “You got a raw deal.”

  “I suppose I did,” Philip replied.

  “I’m sure you heard,” he went on, “but that lady’s nephew won the lotto and she moved to Florida.”

  “No,” Philip replied, “I hadn’t heard that.”

  The policeman carried him, fireman-style, into the house, laid him down on the sofa, and gamely saluted before leaving.

  It would be fair, if not entirely accurate, to say that Philip’s accident and special needs put a strain on the marriage. Certainly, they were anxious now. But they had not been married long enough to know what normal was for them. They slept in the same bed, but never made love—Philip’s doctors disagreed on his prospects for sexual potency, and there had so far been no sign of its intruding upon their lives. That said, they had had little sex before the accident, either. Both of them claimed to enjoy it while in its throes, but neither had ever relished the negotiations, preparations, and embarrassments necessary for its initiation. They had friends—Bob from Evangeline’s office and his wife, Candace; Roy from Philip’s office and his wife, June—but after a few awkward bouquet-clutching visits to the hospital, Bob, Candace, Roy, and June disappeared, and nobody had come to the house since Philip returned to it wheelchair-bound. Occasionally Evangeline called them and left messages. Philip didn’t have the heart to tell her to stop. They did both like eating out, but had not got around to doing it much before Philip was hurt. They had liked to read on the sofa after dinner in the evenings, and they still did, but Philip was more comfortable in his chair, and usually became extremely sleepy at about eight thirty, after which his head would slump onto his chest, and his book would fall from his hands onto the floor. He had been reading the same crime novel since he came home from the hospital.

  Evangeline was a tall, modestly attractive woman with prematurely gray hair, a full face, the figure of someone ten years younger, and the eyeglasses of someone twenty years older. Philip, before his accident, had stood at about five feet seven, but gave the impression of strength, owing to a broad upper body and narrow hips, and a strong, plain, blocky face. In fact, he had never been especially confident physically, and always believed he was about to develop back pain like his father’s, though he never did, until now, of course, when it was the least of his worries.

  They only went on seven dates before they married, in a civil ceremony at the county courthouse. They had first kissed on the second date, gone to bed on the fourth, and gotten engaged on the sixth, and when, at their wedding, their families and coworkers had asked them who had proposed to whom, neither was able to come up with a definitive answer. It was the first marriage for both of them and, seventeen months after the wedding and a year after the accident, they both appeared certain that it would be the last.

  Because their first anniversary, owing to Philip’s recovery, had been inadequately observed, he decided to take Evangeline out for their year-and-a-half. He hired a driver to bring them to and from the restaurant so that she wouldn’t have to drive him, and he practiced getting in and out of the car by himself, so that she wouldn’t need to do that, either.

  The restaurant he chose was a new one in town—a Japanese hibachi steakhouse just off the highway, near the mall. Upon first glance, the place didn’t look promising, with framed posters on the walls and plastic willow branches arranged halfheartedly in vases on the chipboard tables. Six hibachi grills filled the far side of the room, arranged in groups of two and bracketed by countertops, where dining spectators were to sit. Philip and Evangeline were seated—with great fussing and wringing of hands over Philip’s wheelchair, so eager was the staff to avoid pissing off their first cripple—between a small family glumly celebrating a teenager’s birthday and a pair of college-age lovebirds with their arms wrapped around each other.

  Orders were taken, and the hibachi chef came out—a tall Asian man (though not, Philip believed, Japanese) whose hat made him appear taller still—pushing a sturdy wheeled cart of brushed aluminum. On the cart were arranged their uncooked meals, as well as a mountain of butter, squeeze bottles of various liquids, coffee-mug-sized chrome spice shakers, and a canister of utensils.

  A familiar dread came over Philip, the same one he felt whenever he was about to witness any kind of performance, whether on a stage or at his front door, behind the book of Mormon. He turned to his wife to express his feelings but was brought up short by the expression on her face: one of rapt attention and giddy anticipation. It would have taken a trained eye to detect these emotions, but a trained eye was what Philip had, and he kept his mouth shut.

  For the chef’s part, he maintained an expression of mock dignity and spoke not at all. Philip understood that women probably found him very attractive. He began his presentation by squeezing some kind of clear liquid onto the grill’s clean steel surface, then setting it on fire with a cigarette lighter. The flames shot up two feet and Philip reared back. Everyone laughed. The college girl screamed and snuggled deeper into her lover’s arms.

  Next he placed an egg on the grill where the flames had been and spun it with his thumb and middle finger. He drew a spatula from a holster on his belt—the belt was leather, with metal sheathes for his tools, giving him the air of a culinary Batman—and scooped up the spinning egg. He tossed it into the air; caught it, still spinning, on the spatula’s end; tossed it again. Finally, he lobbed it toward the college girl, then shot out a long-fingered hand without looking and plucked it from the air inches from her face.

  Her scream this time was truly earsplitting. Philip hated her, the way he had taken to hating random people since the accident: hated the scream, the lipstick, the giant breasts. He hated the boyfriend and his wounded masculine laugh, huh-huh-huh. But Evangeline—Evangeline was concentrating with all her might, her lower lip gently held captive between her teeth.

  The chef flung the egg into the air, bisected it against his spatula, flipped the shell into the trash. He scrambled the egg, spooned rice on top, spun his knife in the air—and by the time he caught it, a pile of green onions had materialized on the grill for him to chop.

  It went on like this for ten minutes. The guy was big on throwing. Chicken breasts, steaks sailed through the air. A rain of shrimp, a fusillade of squash. Sauce bottles he lobbed from hand to hand and back into their holsters. Metal glinted and chimed. There was a lot of winking, especially at the teenager’s nervous mother, and a lot of spinning around to catch things left suspended. When the cooking was done, the food rocketed onto the plates, and not a morsel was spilled. The diners clapped, the chef bowed. He scraped the grill free of debris, scrubbed it, and, with a final, comically deep bow, wheeled his cart away.

  Philip had to admit that his meal was very good, fresh and unadorned. He didn’t especially want to see the floor show again, but the food he liked. When they
were through eating, they left, and in a wild, impetuous gesture of magnanimity, Philip tipped nearly 20 percent. Their driver, unfortunately, had to be hunted down; they discovered him behind some shrubbery, smoking with a waitress from the Applebee’s next door. He brought them home and once again Philip tipped, though not so much this time around. Then they went inside and went to bed.

  The mattress conveyed to Philip the information that Evangeline lay awake, staring at the ceiling. She rarely said much, but tonight she had said nothing at all, not since they left the house. He glanced at her. In the light from the street, he could see that her cheeks were flushed, her forehead slightly wet. She exuded the tense stillness that came over her when she was trying to keep her breaths even, to trick her body into sleep.

  “Did you enjoy dinner?” he asked.

  “Yes,” was her immediate answer.

  “We should do that again.”

  She managed a nod.

  After a moment, and with considerable effort, Philip turned his body to face her, and snaked his hand up underneath her nightdress to cup one breast, then the other. After that he slid his fingers between her legs. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t help him out, either. It was warm and dry down there, and stayed that way. He thought perhaps he felt something, himself—some kind of faint stirring or itch? At times he experienced ghost sensations, dreams his body entertained while it slept. But maybe this was the real thing. He shoved a hopeful free hand into his pajama bottoms: no dice. Evangeline, having evidently read his mind, trained upon him a kind, pitying look. “Thank you, dear,” she said. Probably she was referring to the dinner.