A Drink Called Paradise

by Terese Svoboda

  A Drink Called Paradise

  Terese Svoboda

  Dzanc Books

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1991 Terese Svoboda

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2014 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-65-4

  eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  To Pat Heller

  This time the islanders seem determined to let somebody else be the guinea pig.

  Bob Payne, “Diving with Bikini’s Ghosts,” Condé Nast/Traveller

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you Molly Giles, Esther Figueroa, Sondra Olsen, William Melvin Kelley, Jay Hartwell, Donald Sutherland, the Pukapukans I met on Rarotonga, and my dear Steve Bull.

  Part 1

  Ah, sex. That’s the subtext of roosters, all roosters. What could be more compelling than the undertones of sex on a desert island, an atoll exactly, with a blood-hot climate and a flame-headed fury of a rooster strutting around the thick uprightness of a coconut palm?

  But is this all it is?

  Barclay pronounces his lying yes, his polite lying yes, along with its denial of the rest of my life, and it could just as well be the rooster’s yes.

  What he means is he’s ready.

  Ready or not, I read it to mean.

  That is the least of it.

  I have a tan, but I am white enough. In books they write that people here stay indoors for weeks to get my color, that this is the color of love they wait for. I am also blond, although that is soon taken care of, day by day, a quarter-inch at a time. I see how the water moves each wave to leave a rope of the darkened sand, and that’s my hair, its true self, not saying sex or foreign or the two, inevitably, together.

  A week on an island is a wonder. A week after missing a boat is a reprieve, time to fix it in your head, every stripe in the sunset, everything last, last, last. It’s the next week that sticks in your throat when you try to forget how long it is, then you do and you go on to the next week, you can’t help but hear that yes Barclay makes, its crow. If weeks can be gone through like days, one as warm and wet as the next, then they’re not long, then there’s no worry, take a yes.

  Missing the boat is not a worry, it is a dumb thing. Ngarima says there is a spear I must see like all the rest that I must see before I leave: the taro pits, the shells ivory smooth, the way you beat bark, but the boat is coming in, is coming close. Don’t worry, she says, it is only for a minute, over here, she says. I worry, but she has seen many boats, she knows. Come over here, she says. It’s seven foot long, she says. The most beautiful, she says, the one more thing.

  The day before the day before the next time the boat should come, it rains in a release like a latch broken, and then it rains the week away, and then the next. Here lashes the tail of a typhoon and the typhoon’s brother and what else? I worry. Rain and its typhoon approach or Barclay’s can make you worry. Today it’s rain-you-can’t-lift-your-hand-in. All you’re allowed in this kind of rain is one foot in front of the other, and only just before the other foot disappears.

  Barclay has disappeared.

  Oh, I make a scene when I miss the boat. I know by the silence after I speak, the way waves lap so loudly in between what I say. Ngarima says the boat had a problem, it had to leave quick, and Barclay says his yes. They can say that because of a radio. I’m sure there is a radio. I ask every day about a radio to call some other boat, a boat that might be boating by, even here, and every day Barclay says, Yes.

  Today the rain drowns, literally it seems, even the rooster’s fervent and urgent riffs that break from that rain-sodden swollen chest. The cuckolding of every other rooster that has ever scratched or jerked in the surrounding circle of coral ends short, recedes to mere complaint, and then to nothing, and leaves me bereft and angry.

  I can’t find Barclay.

  He’s not in either of the two rooms inside. I run out to where I last saw his large self angling. The rain closes around me in its sheaf of wet and that’s all I make out until I find the porch ledge and then I’m back to where I drip on the porch.

  It’s an island, can he go far or forever? says Ngarima. He has gone for sex is what I think, sex outside this sandwich we don’t make here, and not to any radio if there is one. It isn’t a boat he cares about, it’s sex elsewhere, and my sex just sitting here, missing and waiting.

  I could plunge back into the rain and search the length of the rain for him, but why not wait now and believe his yes? Tourists wait and are waited on. Why not wait a week longer with my anger and no boat? There are no boats in a typhoon anyway, and there is probably no radio. The lack of truth is what makes me angry, all its yes promise.

  All Ngarima promises now is food. No, that is not all she promises. Like Barclay, she is a connoisseur of promising, but today she heaves her huge self out onto the porch with a piece of taro the size of a country ham and a machete tucked, as only an islander can tuck a knife, under her arm, then she settles, a dark enough cloud herself, not a yard away from me.

  The rain waggles. It could be a ghost, it could be a skirmish of hot and cold, it could be wind from Oklahoma out to lunch or a long shot slapped down right here in the middle of the Pacific. But most likely ghost.

  If she could talk over this rain, Ngarima would tell me ghost, the way she would tell me the kind of day this is for cooking or the size of the fish no one caught so there is just this can of fish to eat. She doesn’t show me this and that anymore, all that is finished with missing the boat as if missing the boat were why she showed me everything, but she still talks ghost. Ghosts lounge around here like everybody else. If she sneezes, there’s a ghost, if she finds a roach in with the food, a ghost stuck it there. After her ghost answer, she would ask if I have children because she likes that question, that’s a question I can’t answer well enough. The question sounds like one an anthropologist would ask over and over, as if there were another answer. Then she would ask if I like sex, as if it is something we are having for dinner. Or as if Barclay is having me.

  Barclay does like his service. Along with his name, which he took from something washed up, a biscuit tin or a sailor, he has that stealthy, passive, tilted pelvis when he speaks down to the seated Ngarima, and a washed-up wave of dark hair that cuts off his face while he talks. That face is a film star’s, good eyebrows and chin—you could yes him—but a look on the features says whatever sailor made that slim nose in the smallest part of his person left for good reason, and the colors of his logoed T-shirt scream so ugly I’m frightened for fashion, whatever it took to get it this far.

  All tourists think their island’s far, but this island’s really far. You can’t fly in—you have to take a boat. There isn’t even a brochure. I’m in ads, and a place without a brochure is some secluded place. I just stumbled onto it, hustling a soft drink I copywrote Paradise, which meant the drink needed an island better than where the fruit came from to shoot its ad in, in fact, the place we found wasn’t clean enough either, too many rocks on the beach, a lot of beer webbing and mangrove and guano, so we had to get on another plane, and once I got there, what is one more island, one more week away by boat?

  Crazy, the crew said. But I have spent the last six months moving si
x words into as many orders as six words will go—I know crazy. To be sure, my ticket had to be cleared. Someone looked at my ticket and then someone else looked at it, they both stamped it okay to show how they both looked, and then they looked at each other as if I were getting away with what?

  Paradise.

  Not that I don’t love ad life. Writing something from nothing is important in these days of few blue skies, no water clean enough to spit in, and no place to drive that Malibu four-wheel sheet-metal bomber that ad life said would take you. That I said would.

  It’s the romance of the thing I know how to write: the bent palm, the burn of a cigarette in the dark, pearls against a tawny neck, water reflections, most of what started here and was whispered, sailor to merchant to whore to chamberlain to some philosopher walking around a big lake in a cold country who made romance what it is so I can remake it, wrap dollars around it so people can burn their lives away answering yes.

  Ngarima takes her machete out from her armpit and sections the big, thick taro in her lap into three huge chunks, all white through, all gray-brown rough outside, then she pares it, hacks at it until its gray-brown outsides curl at her knees.

  This is what island life is really like: knives and rain. How else will you have growth? It is a mistake to think sex, that romance, and not to see how this kind of growth is part of it. Plants knife the rain at the end of the porch, waggle in the violent wind, shake with a drop in temperature or when a ghost moves the plant’s long, slender leaves—everything here is so stiff and ready to cut or come, it’s sex and death together. On this island you can see right where those two end: in a circle, curved, according to all the theories, curved and meeting at the edges with ocean.

  I’m on this island until the end of time. Not so terrible, you say. Relax, you say. A few extra weeks on an island, what’s the big deal? Those days of speed-dialing and demanding, with no time for food, for love, the present never present I am so nervous with fade to static now under this sun, under this lack of sun. No doubt there is a Zen lesson here, a long lesson, but one that lacks the amusing riddle.

  Maybe you think I exaggerate. Maybe you think the end of time is quite impersonal, Cretaceous or Pleistocene only with some future suffix, but I know the world and its end are inextricably linked to my personal decay, so that when I finish with the world in whatever hole I’ve stolen from somebody else, via some ad or other, time will simply perish because I am time. Bury me now and carbon dating will tell.

  The rain keeps falling. Ngarima and I stare into the gray, we listen to how the tin roof bangs back with the hard parts of the rain so we can’t possibly talk. We sleep instead, sleep without going to all the trouble of closing our eyes.

  The water that falls, parts. A helmet parts it. The top of the helmet says Green Bay Packers as it parts the water in a line straight toward us. The helmet’s approach makes Ngarima squeal and clutch her machete, her open-eyed sleep severed and over. Does she squeal from shock, the helmet running from dream to her porch, or has he come for sex, his small wet self an offering, and there I am in the way, with my flat-out Europeanness a flag of missionarydom despite my grown-out blond hair, my too-short shorts and halter?

  But he is the missionary. Ngarima issues an order to her boy, who abandons the roach toy he has brought to the porch’s edge, a roach coach and harness or a roach airplane, a pink cast-off thread from my shorts tying the three roaches together so they can still fly, and the boy rouses himself, but before he leaves he addresses the helmeted man Preacher. I know that address from my week of touristing the tumbledown this and that in bright colors at odd angles that dot the croissant that keeps the palms upright. Crescent, not croissant. The carnal inverts even the words here. So the man runs a church, but which one is not plain because there’s only a paper cross in one window. In the break in the rain—brought on by the helmet’s cleaving?—I ask after the preacher’s church.

  Latter Day sounds right for here, nearly postmodern, with Christ rising again in no time or at least in our time, whenever we can agree on what time while time is stopped like this. He runs a mission not a church because he finds his own food, his own cinder blocks and paper cross, while Latter Day just sends the paper. They do do that.

  The dripping helmet rocks on the porch floor between us. Cheerleading, concussions, crisp fall burnt leaves, and school bunting power through my brain, as far away in time as in place. I touch its dome, I mime a why? through the pounding rain.

  The missionary points at the wisps of hair plastered to his skull like the strands on a husked coconut and bends that skull toward me so I can see a brown scar slashed where a crack might be. He then points to the closest palm and its load, which waves and shakes, suddenly slingshot.

  No porch-leaving for me.

  From inside, the boy brings out Milo, a substitute of a substitute for coffee but the real thing here, and for me the heat above the cup, which exceeds the heat of the rain, is fiercely and unexpectedly refreshing. I drink it.

  We all stare at the rain.

  My eyes burn from the hour I must have left them open, not knowing I wasn’t awake. The gray, unflinching curtain continues like the inside of eyelid but solid and noisy in downpour. Even the inside of the missionary’s helmet is wet, and now a slight shift in the rain’s direction sprays us all an inch closer together.

  Will the boat come? I ask. Do you have a radio?

  The missionary gives me his yes, his no.

  We sit together for a long time, not speaking. I sense they don’t speak because I am present, although they could speak in their island way, but they don’t. But I don’t retreat. The porch holds what little light there is, and besides, inside sits Ngarima’s son, training more roach horses, letting them fly.

  It is more a kind of hesitation that the man and Ngarima have by not speaking or not leaving. It is not me, my presence. And it’s not a liaison I’m preventing. He and his cracked head, his missionary way of thanking the boy when he comes to collect the cups—all this doesn’t add up to sex. I have been sitting on the porch too long with warm rain coming through the boards. This is not something I’m always thinking. But maybe Ngarima is looking at him when I’m not looking—or maybe it’s just him, and their not talking, that makes me think they do think of sex.

  Should I go inside? I ask, as if this is what they’re thinking.

  No is one answer, Ngarima’s.

  In America, asks the preacher, where the Latter Day sits, they have deserts to drive on?

  You just go straight along, I nod with relief, until you’re gone.

  The three of us look where you could be gone, through all that water. This is no lush volcanic island, I say, despite all this rain.

  An atoll, says the missionary. The story, he says, is that a young man fished the land out of the water.

  Or did the sky and water use their sex? asks Ngarima.

  Aha, I think, she is thinking it. But then she sighs, making the sex less, like having relations. No, she says, they do that later, to make a man.

  The missionary strokes his scarred head. Really what makes land is all the coral animals squeezing in with each other. That makes it strong. That’s the way island people are. But coral does crack, says the missionary. I have seen cracks, he says.

  I’m not afraid of cracks, I say. LA could crack and fall right off, and it’s not even coral.

  When I mention some part of where I’m from that they don’t already know about, they look off. It is as if I am telling about a dream I have, that dull, that particular. I go on thinking about all my work in LA cracking off in a quake, sliding right down into the ocean, right off into the water. Maybe it has, maybe they have already finished with Paradise, people have bought it and have quit buying it.

  One drink and you think you’re Eve, that’s what I wrote. If you can drink this drink, you can live in paradise is mine too. A little snappier, but that is what it was, more or less. The war over it was: Is Paradise lemon-lime? Does it fizz? But when the b
ottle finally comes, who wants to drink it? Not even on the set did we drink it. We settled for water. But everybody wants the word paradise, it’s all dollar signs.

  Not pearly gates.

  I sip my Milo. Without milk or sugar, it is bitter vegetable, something you would beg a child to drink, telling him how it would make him grow. I steel myself to swallow.

  I can’t think about children.

  Ngarima’s son comes out with a pleated plastic rain hat. How does he know she needs her rain hat? No words that I hear pass between them. She hands him her finished Milo cup, the preacher helps her upright, and the porch shudders.

  She stands.

  The small bit of pleated plastic does cover her woolly island hair well enough, but the rest of her, with the bulk of some army vehicle, something large yet still moving, sweeps into the deluge with its shoulders bare, the water sluicing and splashing around her, parting the water for the preacher behind, who has to go on into the rain for some reason, and with her.

  Ngarima’s boy invents a dog. At least you don’t have to walk it, I say as he trains the roach to roll over.

  Insects are the future, he tells me. My father says so. He knows.

  What else does he know? When the boat’s coming back?

  The boy nods as if I don’t listen. He says, He doesn’t want me to go on the boat.

  Parents don’t want children to go anywhere.

  The boy rights his cockroach, puts it back inside a shell, and plugs the shell with a rock. This will help it learn.

  Where I live, I say, boys go swimming. Why don’t you swim? I ask. All the time I’ve been on this island I’ve never seen you swim. The only one who swims is there.

  I point to a head in the lagoon, just above the water from this angle. You can finally see the lagoon because the rain has stopped, and what you can see is what you see daily, a head, tiny like a baby’s, over a big board, with long arms like a man’s that go around it. When I go in, the head and arms are always gone, the board against a tree. What about that swimming? I say.