“Your pop’s a philistine. Cook, my ass! We are food artists!”
Richard knew, however preposterous it sounded, it was also true — nothing could describe that first zucchini experience except art. Chloe had led him to his vocation, but Javi sealed the deal. Ann had understood his passion intuitively from their first date. But now time had done its dirty work to them all.
* * *
The boat slammed down hard on a wave, almost pitching Richard overboard. Loren drank from a bottle of cognac and offered it around. Ann prissily declined and was shocked when Richard nodded. Loren dug out a new bottle, handing it back. “What made you choose my resort?”
Richard shifted, turning his back to Ann’s sullenness. He knew that embracing this experience was the right thing simply for the fact that his eye twitch had stopped. “A friend gave us your brochure. Eve Capshaw.”
“Evie.” Loren nodded. “A crazy one. She and her boyfriend, Eduardo, fought like animals. Everyone heard. Then they made love. Then fought. They exhausted us.”
Richard blushed. “Eve’s husband’s name is Guy.”
“My mistake,” Loren said. “I must have the wrong Eve.”
Loren gave a lewd wink to Ann that she ignored.
“The travel website said your place was the most remote,” she said.
“Ah, so you two can feel the fire of romance?”
Neither Ann nor Richard uttered a word.
“We attract a quixotic clientele,” Loren said, leaning back and steering only with his fingertips. “Only people with special reasons come this far. You are surprised I use such a word? From Don Quixote, the knight who tilted at windmills, thinking they were giants. There is much time to read here.”
“My favorite book in the world is Robinson Crusoe,” Ann said.
“You never told me that.” Richard turned back to look at her.
“You never asked.”
* * *
By the time they reached the motu, they were more than ready for solid ground. Loren cut the engine, but the noise still drummed in Ann’s ears, deafening her. They climbed out and waded, knee-deep, to shore. A sturdy young Polynesian woman waited, holding two flower leis, which she held out to them with a small bow.
“Maeva,” she said. “Welcome.”
She lifted a tray of pinkish fruit juice. She had the broad, square face and black eyes of a Gauguin figure.
Ann felt like she had stepped into a painting. She bent and kissed the girl’s cheek.
Loren took a sip from a glass of the juice and grimaced. “Oh, cut the crap, Titi. These people are cool. Put rum in it.”
Titi’s face turned dark as she stalked away. As was fast becoming habit, Richard helped unpack supplies and ferried them to the kitchen while Ann, crestfallen, stood looking at the place: the ring of white sand beach, gently rising ground that led to a pate of coconut trees in the center; six fares and the main communal kitchen and dining area. Exactly what the brochure showed, but the reality disappointed nonetheless. In her desperation she had entered a kind of magical thinking where place would take care of situation, but this place, so free of distraction, seemed to threaten the opposite.
Under a palm tree sat a bearded man reading a book. Next to him, under an umbrella, a woman knitted. They both looked up at the new arrivals, but when Ann lifted her hand in greeting, neither waved back.
“I’m thirsty,” she said.
“Titi!” Loren yelled, clapping his hands. “Where the hell are you?”
* * *
In the kitchen, Titi stood over the tray of guava juice, fuming. The juice, icy cold when she’d poured it, was lukewarm already. What to do? Dump it out and pour more? She couldn’t waste like that with Loren’s penny-pinching. Should she drop ice cubes in and dilute it? Loren was getting worse about tanking up the guests right away, trying to keep them high and happy, which translated to less work for him. Cooked’s plan was to multiply that to give Loren a scare. She had decided to ignore Cooked, but Loren was pushing her to her limit. Maybe he deserved scaring.
Titi wondered again for the umpteenth time if Cooked was right. She didn’t feel particularly oppressed, she earned good money compared with her cousins in Tahiti, but still she resented the easy, careless lives of these tourists, resented Loren’s loafing and lechery, leaving all the work to her and Cooked while he holed up in his shack. None of their family could ever afford to vacation there, and that seemed wrong.
She pondered the brown bottle on the shelf. Local moonshine that should knock the new guests off their feet for days, although when she had used it on Dex and Wende they had asked for a refill. Cooked said it was long past time to start making trouble. Trouble was what probably had got his brother in jail so long. Titi used Teina as a cautionary tale to keep Cooked in line. She poured all the juice into an ice-packed cocktail shaker, then held the brown bottle over the frosty canister, lost in indecision, when she again heard Loren’s sour yell for her. She was just about to pour when she heard him tell the new guests of her family’s claim to fame: Titi’s mother, Faufau, had been one of the great beauties of the islands, descended from royalty. Her grandmother had greeted Thor Heyerdahl when he landed on the shores of Raroia on the Kon-Tiki.
A few years before, Titi had been paid by a publicist to be on the same beach when the explorer’s grandson Olav re-created his grandfather’s expedition sixty years later. Hearing the story always pleased her, but she still would have poured if the new lady guest hadn’t kissed Titi’s cheek when she held out the lei. The lei stuff was Hawaiian tradition, started up for tourism, but since Loren insisted, what the hell? But the kiss had touched her. This lady didn’t deserve to drugged, with a wicked hangover to boot, for Loren’s crimes.
Titi had bigger concerns. Cooked was on his way to big trouble. He lectured her on how the islands were like the children of France — the neglected stepchildren — much like the two of them were the neglected children of Loren. Loren had won the islet in a poker game from an old Frenchman long dead, while Titi’s family had grown up, made love, married and had children, worked and died on these islands, generation after generation slowly forced to sell off their family lands to survive the rising costs brought by these foreigners. On top of that, there was Moruroa, the leaking of radioactive poison into the waters. Cooked’s involvement in protests put him on a police list of troublemakers.
Like a fist, she, too, felt the pressure to fight. Newly resolute, she was about to tip the bottle into the shaker when Cooked whistled through the window to her. When she looked up into his face, she could tell he was amorous. He had placed a hibiscus flower behind his ear to lure her. It would be a full afternoon of lovemaking, and she didn’t want to risk sick guests interfering with that. She stuffed the cork into the brown bottle and put it back on its shelf, splashed some of Loren’s expensive dark rum into the shaker, swizzling with her index finger and licking off the drops as she poured. She winked at Cooked. Revolution could wait another day.
* * *
After they toasted their arrival, Loren, Richard, and Ann, still clutching her tote, made their way to a thatch bungalow, what they called a fare on the islands.
“List of amenities — sun, ocean, sand. No electricity. No refrigerator, no phones, no computers, no WiFi, no radios. No exceptions, don’t ask. Welcome to paradise.”