by Anna Tambour
Tomasi, Jimmo, and two other men backed into the big room carrying a massive table, followed by six other villagers, each carrying a throne of a chair. They placed them in the big airy open space that was the entertainment part of the room.
"For your party," Tomasi said. "A present from us all."
They left quickly, because they didn't want to embarrass Didier, who had started to cry.
When Moses arrived Wednesday afternoon to take a rested and blissful Dr. T. back to Paurotown for his flight home, Moses also dropped off his boatload of passengers.
First off was Ben, next was Lillian (and the boat rose in the water when she disembarked), then Satoru, then the two last guests—Abdul and Sean.
The whole population stood on the sand, heads garlanded with frangipanis, Fred going hammer and tongs on the ukelele, Thuro clacking a frenzied jig of a rhythm with his two steel spoons. All were singing, and the forty-eight other Sufisians either clapped or thigh-slapped to the intoxicating rhythm.
The sun was a persimmon ball over the shimmering sea. The palms on the beach bent their heads to the ocean in this idyllic scene. The visitors were charmed instantly, and Didier's eyes moistened with appreciation for this magnificent greeting.
The kiss on both cheeks was Abdul's way. Sean pounded Didier on the back. Satoru shook Didier's hand and bowed reflexively. Ben hugged him. And Lillian just stood there at arm's length, shyly smiling. Her riotously flowered muumuu, under which three 10-year-old boys could shelter from a thunderstorm, strained at the hips.
"I told you I had a surprise for you, Didier," she finally laughed. "Elegance these days lives on plates. But maybe it's the plates themselves. When they all got bigger, so did my clients. Or was it the other way around? I was losing business. It was redecorate myself or shut up shop. Now all my tours guarantee doggie-bags at every stop." She snorted. "It was work at first. I'd dieted for so many years." She looked down and patted her hips. "It isn't work now. They like it ... I must admit, I do too."
Didier chuckled. "You sound carefree."
"Not quite," she frowned. "I've got to find a new farm. My place has been hit by the rezoners. They're splitting it with a through-road to a new casino they're building. Time to move on."
Still, she acted relatively happy, Didier thought. Not as furtive as the old days.
Lillian had her misgivings though, looking at Didier. Nothing jiggled on him any more. He looked big, but hard and fit. In fact, all the welcoming beach party—everyone at Sufisi looked big but hard and fit—all of them except the wiry man with the beautiful calf's eyes. The people looked sculpturally monumental. The women reminded her of Soviet heroic art.
The most magnificently sculptural woman came forward. She was the hugest of the women, but smooth and hard as rock.
She placed a crown of frangipani flowers on Lillian's head and smiled at her, saying, "Welcome to Sufisi."
Tomasi couldn't take his eyes off Lillian. Those thighs that made him think of custard apples—or brain coral. Those buttocks—he could store all his savings between those cheeks. These past months had not gone well for him in the love department. Not only had Flora not fully appreciated his brilliance—she'd gone all skinny on him—must be only 250 pounds these days. Now that he could gaze on the two of them, still facing each other, he knew that Flora was only a princess to this queen of women who could sink a boat.
Satoru had been hard for Didier to track down. He was now owner of Russian Roué (Roulette was too much), a yakuza hangout on a sidestreet in Tokyo's red-light district. You spin a wheel to pick each round. Choices were few: fugu and saki; beluga and papaya seeds, with vodka; nori-roasted apricot kernels and absinthe. The Health Department banned the potato leaf pickles. Frequent visits from siren-wailing ambulances completed the ambience.
Satoru's life had been changed irrevocably eighteen months before. He'd been on one of his koala-turd collecting trips at Wilson's Promontory, at that strange holiday suburb on the southern Australian coast. It was winter. He was bending down, picking up the scats on the lawn under a small tree, a koala frowning down at him from the branches. Inside the square brick two-story, the front curtains were unexpectedly opened. Satoru looked up, and in the window, a four-year-old girl giggled delightedly as she held her dress over her head. Her mother rushed to pull it down—this habit was getting to be a problem. As she pulled the dress from behind, she glanced out the window and saw Satoru in suspended animation, his face a picture of guilty horror.
Did they guess his secret?
The mother sure did. She rang the police, and they miraculously arrived, siren screaming, two minutes later to find a mute Satoru two houses away, cowering in the bushes. He'd stashed his paper bag in a rubbish bin.
He'd never had to speak good English, and shame and terror only served to make him more linguistically incompetent. So when he was dragged out of jail to face the judge Mr. Justice Lionel Whithers, he still didn't understand the charge.
When the judge carefully explained the fix Satoru was in, he was stunned. He only dimly remembered the state of the girl—he'd been transfixed by anyone being at home, particularly the woman.
He pled "not guilty" and was led away.
Justice Whithers then held an interview with the adorably curled little Emma Hodgkins. Emma looked just like his own granddaughter. How could men prey on these innocent tykes?
By the third minute of the taped interview, a red-faced judge and a tearful mother met. Emma, her dimpled cheeks running with tears from an impromptu spanking, was severely buttoned into her long, tube-shaped coat, and taken away by Mrs. Hodgkins for years of expensive counselling.
When Satoru stood before Justice Whithers again, the judge cleared the room.
"What were you really doing, Mr. Yakaburo?"
Satoru hung his head. He felt rumpled and filthy, inside and out. "Looking at koalas."
Justice Whithers was almost impatient. "You told us that before, but the koala was above you, and you were crouching down. Please tell me the truth."
Satoru knew his life was over, his honour gone. "I was collecting koala droppings, your honour."
"Koala droppings?" Justice Whithers' brother Seymour was the Australian Museum's expert in marsupial poo of all kinds. His book Scats and Tracks of the Eastern Australian Coast had been a best-seller of its kind for twenty years.
" Mr. Yakaburo, why didn't you tell the police that you are a naturalist? It would have been much easier if you'd told us that all along. Good luck in your natural history endeavours. By the way, have you read my brother's book, Scats and Tracks—"
"Of the Eastern Australian Coast," Satoru completed, and he felt a huge wave of relief as they both smiled in brotherly understanding.
When Satoru walked down the steps from the court, it had been seventeen days since the "incident at the Promontory". Satoru's name was on every internet "Sexual Offender" site around the world.
He was a social pariah in Sydney, would not have been able to even find an apartment in the US, and had to go back to Japan. Even there, not to the respectable world.
The Roué and other spin-offs were his only avenue. To top things off, he needed money. His legal costs in Australia hurt, the restaurant there had no goodwill to sell by the time he left the country, and he'd owed the bank from an all glass-and-fountains refit.
Satoru looked lost. He felt trapped and bored.
Sean looked like Sean. Charming as ever, but he seemed like he needed a break.
Abdul looked hungry.
Ben was frankly curious.
~
After arriving, the guests all refreshed themselves with a swim. Didier had to pry Tomasi away from his concerned attendance to Lillian, who couldn't have drowned if weighted down by a Brinks safe.
Then the party began. Tomasi and Didier had decided to have it under the stars, so the table and chairs had all been dragged outside to the grass beside the beach.
Didier had spent days preparing the courses. Tomasi and the wome
n had designed the decorations—all for visual splendour. Rifle-bird feathers, scentless bird-of-paradise flowers, wraithlike dried sponges and shells off all textures and colours.
Crisp white linen, crystal, coconut-wood tableware, stark white bone china and Irish-green banana-leaf crockery. All set off Didier's meisterstück—the dinner party of his life.
The wines were sufficient, but never a Didier preoccupation. The food—ah—that was something else.
"The main course is the main course" was greeted with "cryptic" by his curious guests, but that is indeed what it was—hand. But each guest's main d'homme was a different dish altogether. They could taste each other's, Didier had planned. This way, six different facets of this jewel of ingredients could shine.
All had to be marinated—one of the down-sides of male-only.
Didier had to make do with his tough meat, without that lovely female fat layer he could have done so much with. This he considered a challenge to his art.
Now, you might have thought the original cause for Didier's visits to Ben had been solved long ago. But Didier's inner self never fell for the outer self-expression crap. To him, those towers were just colourful, stupid-looking, impractical stacks of good food gone to waste down the fronts and gullets of stupid, faddy, rich folks.
Ben, on the other hand, related to those stacks. He had urged Didier on to greater and greater heights, and it was he—Ben—who added the finishing touch: the exploding part. Those micron-thin pralines that shattered in your face soon as touch them, meringues that splattered little white bits and blood-red coulis into the roots of your hair, and best—those spun-sugar nests that could shoot caramel splinters into your eyes, built up like beehives gone mad, like women's late eighteenth-century hairdos.
Didier had remembered Ben's angry stomach with its craving for magnesia tablets, and had cooked for him in the style of traditional Thanksgiving turkey, paper bag and all. Long slow oven, a touch of butter basting, just enough for succulent tenderness. Just a pinch of ginger, sage, thyme, and roasted Spanish paprika for the blush.
Ben took one look at his glowing, crispy-skinned, russet-coloured main course, stood it upright on his plate, and exploded. Lillian shoved her chair back to go to him. All but Didier thought he was having an angina-induced heart attack, but Ben held up his hand and smiled weakly, "I'm fine. Just an old complaint."
Lillian clearly enjoyed her tajine-inspired main aux fruits. She ate everything on her plates, and picked up each banana leaf and licked it clean. But she was most intrigued by the snakefruit accompaniment rakishly placed like a Christmas toy beside her plate.
"Where do these come from?" she asked as she peeled off a skin like a cocaine lord's boot leather.
"I grow it," Tomasi shyly answered from the shadows. He came forward two steps.
Lillian looked at him for the first time.
"Would you like to see my aut'apo?" he asked politely.
"What's that?" Lillian asked.
Didier broke in smoothly before Tomasi could ruin his chances with a hand-description of the foot-long fruit shaped like a giant ear of corn.
"It's his monstera deliciosa."
Lillian had longed to know this fruit, but had never seen one. A fruit that only fruit adventurers ever eat because if you eat it wrong, the little black specks hurt like cut glass. Eaten right, it is ambrosia.
"It's very big," said Tomasi, almost in a whisper.
"Could you show me after dinner?" she smiled.
Tomasi could only nod yes.
Satoru had eaten his hand one finger at a time, carefully nibbling around the knuckles, slowly chewing. He was clearly preoccupied.
Didier, always a considerate host to his friends, was concerned, but left Satoru alone.
Finally, Satoru picked up the remains of his hand and held it up. It looked like a crazy Olympic torch.
"Can you imagine what I could charge for these?" he muttered to no one in particular.
Every eye gazed at him, until Didier emitted a breath of a little giggle.
Abdul was surprised how much he enjoyed the meat. Didier had gilded his, medieval-feast style. It was only lightly spiced, so that Abdul could savour the true flavour. It tasted a bit coconutty, with a hint of the sea. But he would have preferred it corn-fed like Didier's pigs. You just can't get top-quality meat, he ruminated. At least there are no drugs in the meat; but what did Didier say these people mostly eat—bully beef and rice? And, Abdul worried—feeding beef to this meat—BSE? He would have preferred totally organic. Vegetarian. A Hindi would be good, but maybe spice-tainted.
He was picking his teeth when Sean leaned back in his chair.
"You say, Didier, that all these folks agreed to this?"
"Of course," a mellow Didier responded, warmed by his favourite food and this rare companionship. "I have the certificates for each one. You're sucking on the knuckle of Dogabe Cyril Dunphy Ilaiva, a very happy man. A verry nice person, too (Didier wished he could drop the accent, but he couldn't ever again, even with this company).
"Nice people, too, eh?" mused Sean aloud. A smile played on his cherubic little lips. "Would a sinner taste as sweet?" His eyes dropped from the stars above to the eyes of Abdul across the table. Their eyes locked.
They were a match made for each other—a match made in their respective countries.
Abdul spoke first. "You can always find a thief when you want one."
Sean added, "And a traitor."
~
Over the next couple of days, the guests ate well but less extravagantly. Didier, Tomasi, and Lillian made an inspired curry for Thursday night, and on Friday, the villagers prepared an enormous fingi.
Didier had been, for the most part, somewhat disappointed in retrospect with his dinner party. He could tell—his guests, except maybe for Lillian, had not really appreciated his art. Ben was in need of professional help. Whatever it was that turned on Ben, they didn't share it. Satoru seemed sad and shrunken. Abdul admitted to Didier that he still liked pork best. And Sean and Abdul were almost rude in their new-found camaraderie.
When the boat came to take his guests away, Satoru boarded grimly. He looked tall (for him) again, but self-contained. Sean and Abdul chattered and bubbled with a private in-joke language they'd evolved between themselves. Ben hugged Didier in a spontaneous effusion of "the best evening I've ever had." Didier smiled professionally back. Lillian boarded carrying an enormous monstera and the heart of Tomasi, which she thought about with only half-amusement.
Hands were waved. Eventually the horizon swallowed the little blue speck.
~
Tomasi was in love and moped like a wet cat, but for everyone else, life was busy these days. There was Didier's Friday cooking class, attended eagerly by all the women, followed by the Friday night all-Sufisi dinner, held in Didier's kitchen, attended eagerly by everyone.
In return for cooking lessons, Didier was given basket-weaving classes. Basket-weaving had sunk to a low point by the time Didier had arrived, but he was such an enthusiastic learner that soon there was a new enthusiasm for that on the island, too.
These days, not only did the women get their Iced VoVos, but since the home cooking had improved so much, little presents of toilet water appeared, new flowered fulus, and two surprise pregnancies.
Little businesses now sprang up with no warning. Choku Pu'atoi's wife, Amelia, and Krishchin's wife, Eva, set up a bakery. They first asked if Didier minded if they used his secret pain d'épice recipe to make and sell little cakes to the Venture. They were planning to build an oven behind Choku's house. "Why don't you use the oven in the great kitchen?" Didier asked, highly tickled.
It was agreed that they would rent the kitchen from Didier while they made their cakes. That only seemed fair. And then and there, the Pan de Peace Cake Company began its busy little business.
Pilu, the compulsive self-whittler, took to wood, holding a knife in one hand, and a piece of wood with his feet. Although he regularly suffered toe slashes,
his work became popular in Paulotown's tourist shops for its highly original style.
The men who, with Tomasi, made the table and chairs, began a furniture business, again, selling their wares through the Venture.
But there were stirrings in the village. Choku and Krishchin were miserable. Their wives now brought in money and bought them treats, but they were gone so much. Both men were used to having the women at their fingersnap all the time, and they were lonely. Also, they wanted more. And, like another chum, Baby, they were jealous of the retirees. Of course, the three men's lives were much better than before Didier had arrived, and the retirees shared their fortunes, food, and happiness more than people would have in, say, a suburban neighbourhood in Australia, if someone there had won the Pools.
But still, they were jealous. They wanted pay-outs, too. Also, they were now getting nagged to work in the village garden. Baby, the bravest of the three, decided to act first, without telling his disgruntled friends. The next time Dr. T. came, Baby chopped off his left foot with Jimmo's giant meat cleaver. Then he dragged himself to Flora's hospital, knowing he'd get the best of care.
He did, but Flora, and then Krishchin, Choku, and then the whole village were furious at him. How dare he try to get out of work that way. The men who sold their hands worried, What if a foot's worth more?
Still, no one could let the foot go to waste, so it was voted by the village (mostly to teach Baby a lesson) that if Didier wanted, he could have the foot for half price.
Didier was delighted. He had wondered. Although, like the rest of the islanders' feet, this one had almost never worn shoes. Still, it was infinitely preferable to your typical soft athlete's-foot and corn-ridden shoe-wearer's foot.
He deliberated for two days before deciding on the method—slow baked ox cheek style.
It had an agreeable texture. He was reminded of osso bucco. The best parts were the little toe and the ball of the foot.
The heel was just too tough. Didier caught a maddening shred between two capped molars. He worried at it all evening before finally pulling it free. It was sturdy as ship's cord.