This was the first time Cooked had taken a tourist home. Taboo. Even if it was just to get away from the crybaby Dex, he had crossed an unspoken line. He had told the girl everything and included her in his crazy schemes that even Titi refused to have anything to do with. Why would a big-breasted blond American girl get involved in their trouble? It made no sense unless — Titi swooned — she had fallen in love with him. Women did crazy things for their men.
As much as Cooked complained about how the French cheated, he was flattered when one of the foreign women found him attractive. Besides everything else, this was bad for business. Titi was the one who charged on the manna line of Dex Cooper’s credit card every week. The nice lady’s bag of money grew smaller each week. He was keeping them open. Other tourists would be more demanding.
* * *
Titi had first started at the resort as the maid after being a poli-sci major in college. Cooked was the boat driver and dive instructor; he had been studying for a phys-ed degree. Now they also had added the chores that Loren had dropped over the last year. She became concierge, bookkeeper, and cook. She was even thinking of taking an online course in web design to build a new website for the place. Cooked took on the work of handyman and now, apparently, gigolo. What couldn’t be replaced, what Loren did expertly, was entertain foreigners. When he discovered Cooked’s plan, he would be furious. Titi had to stop it without getting Cooked fired, or causing the foreigners and their money to leave.
Loren had been drunk almost every day for the last five years she worked there. Sometimes he disappeared for days, and they covered for him as best they could. This sickness was a new complication they couldn’t keep hidden for much longer. What to do? Titi recalled Bette and Lilou from when they were all children together, playing on the beach. Her grandmother told her that one of the girls, Bette, had died from a disease. She supposed it was true because the only letters that had ever come over the years were from Lilou. None had come for a very long time now. Was it time at last to make amends for the past?
Titi stared into the refrigerator, unable to come up with yet another meal. Usually she prepped and served for Loren but didn’t make the fancy foreign dishes from start to finish. Under Loren’s supervision, the cooking had been good, if basic, but with his absence, meals had degenerated into fruit, yogurt, and sandwiches served by a lovesick Titi.
She decided to chop fruit and make ambrosia salad for the fifth time in a row. She sliced the baguettes from Cooked’s love trip to town and jabbed salami and pickles into their fluffy insides. Their people were not jealous like the Westerners, but still … Titi chopped harder and harder, castrating mangoes, gutting pineapples, shaving the salami paper-thin, putting sharp little gouges into the cutting board that dulled the blade of the knife.
Cooked was making a fool of himself. She knew of his secret dream to be like the great and mighty Temaru, to stand up to the government, to foment revolution. Titi even suspected he wouldn’t mind being imprisoned for a short while to add to his street cred (he was still famous mostly for his soda ads). What infuriated Titi was that he complained so loudly about the foreigners and then let himself be the plaything of an American girl. How could any of them be strong with a leader like that?
She was tempted to throw up her hands and take the boat to Papeete. Her cousin was having a baby, and there would be celebrations. Maybe she would meet someone new, someone unlike Cooked, who cared more about politics and foreign women than he did about her. If it came to that, their vows could be undone.
After dinner she would go to Loren’s room and describe what was happening, what Cooked was planning, and avert disaster. Cooked would hate her. Things would change for better or worse. Maybe, just maybe, she would start her own revolution.
When the dishes were cleared, as usual Dex picked up his guitar, Wende and Richard set up their checkerboard, and Ann relaxed in a hammock. Once everyone settled, Titi made ready to go to Loren, just as Ann rose theatrically and stretched, arms overhead, then made the trip to his hut herself.
* * *
Ann lay on Loren’s bed while they drank their green fairy nightcap.
Loren chuckled. “Oh, how I would have liked to have had you.”
“Really?” Ann downed her shot. They were kindred souls; he saw the artist in her that no one else did, or else, at least he didn’t see the lawyer in her. She got up and swayed back and forth at the foot of his bed. The tattoo ached, and since she had already broken the prohibition against alcohol while healing, she saw no reason to now stop. At least the pain was numbed. The absinthe made her invincible, or was it Loren’s words? Or was the tattoo already wreaking its talismanic effect?
“We would have been good together,” he said.
The past tense of his desire, the implied hopelessness of his present, threatened to start tears that she would not allow in front of him. At one of their monthly WEFE cocktail parties, Eve had suggested volunteering at a hospice in order to feel she was contributing to the community and counter her disgust with the law. Even after completing basic training, the staff found Ann bawling away at the bedside of patients. “You are depressing the dying,” they said. One of the nurses had puffed her lips, disappointed. “You’re a crier.” She was fired from the volunteer position.
Now she worried over how to distract them both. She unbuttoned her shirt and swayed to the faraway strains of Dex’s guitar, channeling her thinner, early-twenties self (although she had never done anything remotely like this back then), pulling the fabric slowly down over her arms, her approximation of what a low-key striptease might look like. The shirt looped over her head in a slow circle, a lasso of lust. Wearing only Wende’s bikini, she drowsily danced around the bed, moving her hips, holding the bottle of absinthe.
“We can have this. I can give you this,” she said.
She pulled at the string around her neck, felt the pieces of fabric fall away from her breasts. Of course, toplessness didn’t really count for the French, but still. The shock of her nakedness made her hesitate. Unable to look down, she looked into Loren’s eyes; his delighted gaze gave her confidence to continue dancing, newly emboldened.
Loren reached for the bottle, and as she came close, he ran his hand up the inside of her leg, touching her tattoo.
“Ouch!!”
It burned as his fingers touched the outlines of the half shark, and the physical contact broke the spell. She motioned with her hands water flowing down her neck and over her breasts, throwing her head back, a backstroke with her arms as she danced away toward the door and the night beyond it, escaping straight into the disapproving bulk of Titi, who stood there.
“Oh!” Ann said, her arms covering her breasts, an unequivocal confession of guilt. Was that Wende’s pendant dangling from Titi’s ear?
The whole world has gone mad, Titi thought. She was so furious she turned and stalked out.
* * *
The next day, Dex and Richard cannabized and played volleyball while Ann sulked in her hammock, depressed at the twinned dark fates of Loren and herself, and read Moby-Dick:
… that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
On the salty, hot wind she thought she smelled a coming storm. She felt the approach of a calamity: Loren’s slowly losing battle with his mortality made everything around her seem too fragile to be trusted. Every few hours she rose and made her pilgrimage to Loren’s hut to check on him. Each time she left, Richard smashed the volleyball into the net or into a nearby coconut palm. When it got stuck, Cooked had to shimmy up the trunk to lob it out. Dex had been forbidden to go near a tree. For differing reasons, each person pretended to not notice Wende and Cooked slipping away into an unoccupied fare.