Porca Miseria! Pig of Misery!
(The Sorry State of Things)
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
-MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
A 7.1 tremor had been felt throughout the Southland that morning, the epicenter somewhere out in the hinterlands of Lancaster, unnerving residents, but the offices of Flask, Flask, Gardiner, Bulkington, Bartleby, and Peleg were seemingly immune. Ten floors up in the sybaritic conference room, the air conditioner purred; the air was filtered, ionized, and subtly scented of cedar. Ann looked out the plate-glass windows at the expansive, gaseous hills of West Los Angeles as a contemplative might look out of her meditation temple. Smoke was pouring from a Spanish Colonial Revival house halfway up a nearby manicured hill, and as she watched, toylike candy-colored fire engines curled up the narrow canyon roads to put it out. The glass was proofed; no siren sound reached her. She was protected from the ninety-degree heat outside, the fume-laden gridlock below, the merciless sunlight above that leeched color from the landscape.
"You drowned my twenty-year-old bonsai collection," Mrs. Peters accused the neighbor she was suing.
Her client was blowing it. Catlike, Ann leaned over and whispered in her ear. "Picture where you want to be a year from now."
The client, Mrs. Peters, the fourth wife of a major Hollywood producer, was not hearing no; her husband was a prime client of a senior partner at the firm, Bartleby, and he had told Ann to "nuke the nuisance suit" in arbitration.
Ann, junior partner, was smartly dressed in an expensive, Italian-cut skirt suit, low-heeled Blahnik pumps, and black-framed eyeglasses that she didn't need but used for effect. The firm's philosophy: Big fish eat little fish. The lesson to be derived? Make sure you are a big fish. She meant to exude big-fishness, but she had been mostly silent for the last fifteen minutes of the meeting, causing Mrs. Peters to think she had been handed down to the office dud.
The defendant's attorney, obvious small fish Todd Bligh from his own one-man, eponymously named firm in Marina del Rey, was wearing jeans and flip-flops. He looked like he should be a bartender on a beach somewhere. For the last fifteen minutes, he had been droning on about soil erosion, mudslides, environmental degradation, and acts of God. Blah, blah, blah.
Ann ran a fingernail along the condensation ring of her water glass on the waxed Brazilian rosewood conference table. The endangered species table had been purchased illegally by the Flask brothers precisely because it was politically incorrect, proving how badass and above the law the firm held itself. Out the window, the Spanish Colonial was being delicately licked by flames.
"Acts of God," Ann said dreamily.
"Yes," said Bligh.
"I've been to your property, Mrs. Brenner. It's stunning. So well groomed. Your gardener..."
"Avelino."
Ann pretended to check a piece of paper, although she had the gardener's name, immigration status, and driver's license memorized. "Yes. Mr. Avelino Aragon is quite skilled."
Mrs. Brenner perceivably relaxed at this acknowledgment. "He's been working for me for ten years. He's invaluable."
"So skilled and experienced in fact that he advised you it would not be a good idea to remove the cinder block retaining wall that had been in place twenty years, reinforcing the hillside."
Silence in the room, and now Mrs. Peters was the one smiling, albeit tightly. She had insisted on going ahead with her scheduled preholiday chemical peel, and she exuded a bruised, melted beauty, like a middle-aged Barbie.
Ann sighed. "Mrs. Brenner, didn't he also tell you it wasn't a good idea to bring in two truckloads of topsoil, spreading it on top of a clay hillside to plant flowers for an outdoor party? That it would run off in a rain? Straight into my client's patio, choking her prize, exotic plant life. Yes?" Again, the faked note check. "A rare imperial, eight-handed bonsai imported directly from Takamatsu, Japan, replacement value in the five-figure range."
Todd Bligh now had beads of sweat rolling down his face despite the cool air blowing on him.
Ann did not mention the crucial and probable cause of the lawsuit-that her client had been snubbed and not invited to said party. "Just as an aside, when I looked into your tax records, I did not see withholdings for Mr. Aragon. Ten years, plus penalties. Also, in case this goes to trial and is reported in the press, can you confirm or deny your absence from the residence during the landscaping work while staying at Voyages Rehabilitation facility in Malibu for an OxyContin addiction?"
It was a dirty, shower-inducing job, but someone had to do it. No, correction, she was being paid to do it; it was her specialty, to land the eviscerating mortal thrust. As the settlement papers were drawn up in the firm's favor, Bartleby dropped in and shook Mrs. Peters's hand, effectively taking credit for the outcome. "Tell Jerry to call me for tennis this weekend." He gave Ann a terse nod and was gone.
When Todd Bligh left with his client, he refused to make eye contact with Ann. He appeared visibly shaken, smarting from the hardball she had just served. She heard the slapping sound of his defeated flip-flops as he walked down the hallway. He would be happier as a beach bartender.
* * *
After the others had all left the conference room, Ann closed the door, locked it, and turned off the punishing fluorescent lights. Rumor was senior partners from decades before had installed the lock in order to conduct liaisons-the only glass looked outward into the lozenge of golden, poisonous air. A design psychologist claimed that the fishbowl effect so popular in most conference rooms, suggesting openness and transparency, was detrimental in a city of entertainers, who when observed did what came naturally: they acted. Once the walls became concealing solid maple, settlements skyrocketed.
Ann threw off her pumps. She unbuttoned the back of her skirt and unzipped it a few inches, rolled down her control-top panties, freeing her bloated stomach. A small moan of relief like a burp escaped from her diaphragm. Sweat had broken out on her forehead. Bloating, pimples, swollen breasts and feet, and a fine mustache on her upper lip were the fun part.
After the clomiphene failed to induce pregnancy, the doctor had switched her to hormone injections. The drive to the doctor's office was too difficult with an eighty-hours-a-week work schedule, so Richard gave her the painful shots as she bent over the bathroom counter, fighting back tears. This was not what she was supposed to be doing with her husband while bent over the bathroom counter, but even though she must have been dropping eggs like a goose, the effect of the drugs made even the idea of sex horrific in her present crazed, engorged state. Its main effect was to hone her bloodlust at work, as she had just so ably demonstrated (the OxyContin bomb was a scorched earth tactic, but she was tired and wanted a quick kill). Only when she wrote out the monthly exorbitant checks to the fertility clinic, which was not covered by the firm's cut-rate health insurance, did she feel like getting her money's worth. Then Richard and she had sad, porno-inspired sex. Maybe they should have adopted.
Ann opened her briefcase and pulled out her stash of Mars bars, the only food she craved, even though she had promised Richard she would save herself for dinner. She ripped the wrappers off and dropped the bars into her mouth, opening another before she devoured the first, an obscene assembly line of gluttony. Only when her mouth was crammed full of chocolate did she at last feel a glorious calm descend. This was her true shame and infidelity: the sugary, waxy, acrid grocery-bin chocolate she was addicted to. In disgust, Richard threw them into the trash every time he found a stash. Food snobbery was the price to be paid for marrying a professional chef.
"How can you?" he'd say, his lips twisted as if forced to taste something fantastically bitter. He gave a tight nod-a tic that drove Ann up the wall-then stoically forgave her. "Sweetheart, you know that crap messes up your palate."
But Ann didn't want his gourmet Felchlin Gastro 58% Rondo Dark Chocolate that puddled on the tongue like silk, that left an aftertaste of cassis. She wanted her nostalgie de la boue, love of the gutter, an attraction to what was unworthy. Exactly.
She rooted around in her briefcase and found the book she had stayed up late into the night reading, The Moon and Sixpence, the story of a Gauguin-like figure who runs off to Tahiti. She rewarded herself for tasks done by sneaking away to read a few pages. Today she deserved a chapter at least for settling the case. She unfastened the top buttons of her blouse to cool off. If only she could get her prickling, rashed skin dry for a second. Soon her blouse was off, and there she stood in her new mom-bra. The polished rosewood beckoned like the glassy face of an ocean. She lay down on it under the wash from the air-conditioning vent till the cold cedar air raised goose bumps on her arms. Her breasts ached, but she wouldn't go so far as to unhook her bra. Her chest size had gone from flat A-cup to grapefruit-sized D-cup, and was just one more thing Richard wasn't getting to enjoy.
Savagely, she ripped open another candy bar wrapper. One of the new age ideas was that failure to conceive was a proactive reaction to the body's not being ready. The prospective mother developed a kind of allergy to the father. What she needed to do was visualize her future baby to make herself user-friendly. Although Ann had thought the idea abysmally simpleminded, she was surprised that this ended up being her favorite fertility activity: she pictured cute baby girls with blond hair and pink cheeks, boys with Richard's brown eyes who bounced on their chubby legs like puppies. The happiness she experienced in these fantasies gave her a wan assurance that she might make an okay mother someday.
Of course she wanted a child, but since it had not happened naturally, she was oppressed by the likelihood that she would have hormone-induced twins at the least, possibly triplets or quintuplets-what were they called when the number went even higher?-while she was daunted by the prospect of even one baby. A biological clock had gone off, but she wasn't sure it was inside her; rather, it seemed outside, in everyone else. Newspapers, magazines, TV talk shows, her girlfriends, her mother, celebrity baby bumps on the covers of tabloids in the grocery store line. Even her gynecologist of twenty years had joined in. Fertility was the new über-lucrative specialty compared with plain-vanilla gynecology or obstetrics. When Ann put her feet in the stirrups-in the early years worrying mostly about STDs, then about trying not to get pregnant-she now was assaulted by pictures stapled to the ceiling of babies dressed like cabbages. The Fertility-Industrial Complex, she joked with Richard until they found themselves inside of it, when it became distinctly less funny. Since when had procreation turned into a job?
A knocking on the conference door shook her out of her reverie. "Ann, are you in there?"
She said nothing, swinging her feet into a nearby leather swivel chair. Candy wrappers littered the table and floor like spent condoms.
She heard another voice. "Maybe she's in there with someone."
"The Scorcher? She's probably playing alone. After devouring her mate. The lady praying mantis. She's ruthless. The Peters case was settled in an hour. The Brenner woman ran out of here crying. Dolan crushed."
"Have fun in there." The smirking voices moved off.
This was why she deserved partnership over the other junior partners-because unlike them, she knew that the seemingly solid, soundproof conference room doors had been specially hollowed out so that private negotiations could be overheard. Yes, she'd won. Her consolation prize. But they were wrong. She wasn't ruthless; she was just trying to be a big fish. Things would get better. They had to. Today was her thirty-eighth birthday.
* * *
Richard was determined to test-run a few new recipes before he baked Ann's cake for dinner that night. It was his favorite time in the kitchen, before Javier and everyone else showed up, and he opened the back door onto the alley, enjoying the whiff of sea breeze. He put on Pavarotti's Neapolitan songs, and set a pot of Yukon Golds to boil. When the phone rang, it was yet another credit collection agency asking for Javier. "He's on vacation," Richard said and hung up. He needed to work on his potato-and-fennel au gratin-he still hadn't gotten the right mix of creamy and sharp cheese. As a substitute for pedestrian Gruyère, he was thinking of maybe a Cantal or Reblochon? Or finding a source for a salty, buttery, earthy L'Etivaz?
The delivery buzzer rang, breaking Richard's thoughts. He slapped at the intercom with floury fingers. It was UPS.
"Where from?"
"Overnight from Lodi."
Shit. The rabbits. Richard and Javi's brainchild. Hardly a restaurant in the LA basin served rabbit-just hole-in-the-wall ethnic places in the Valley-yet in Europe it was a well-respected staple. He would explain on the menu that rabbit was lower in fat and higher in protein than chicken. The challenge was overcoming the bad image. Richard's solution was to substitute it in some well-known recipes. He would transform coq au vin to lapin au vin. Rabbit Abruzzi in a sauce of tomatoes, olives, and artichokes. Then he would feature one French classic such aslapin aux pruneaux, rabbit with prunes. But the delivery-a box of fryers for experimenting-wasn't supposed to be till tomorrow, overnighted on dry ice from a free-range rabbit farm in Northern California. Should he dare try making a dish for tonight?
Richard took delivery and put the box on the counter, grabbing a pair of bone shears to cut the plastic binding. His palms were just the slightest bit sweaty. When he took off the lid of insulating dry ice, the sight that met his eyes set him back years. Not anonymous, cut-up fryer pieces sanitized in plastic but four whole, furry white bodies funereally laid out in the interior. Unskinned. Was this a joke? Was the supplier some kind of sadist? He put the Styrofoam lid back on, spinning away and stumbling over a chair, his shirt soaked in flop sweat.
A throbbing engine stopped in the alley. Richard staggered toward the door to close it to keep the fumes out. It was Javi behind the wheel of a new silver Corvette convertible.
"What are you doing in that?"
"Leased it."
"With what?"
"Almost the same as the Honda." Which in Javi-speak meant double what the Honda cost.
"Creditors have been calling all morning. Not about my gnocchi."
"Want to take a ride?"
Richard thought of the leporid sarcophagus and the unpleasant task ahead of him. "Give me a minute." He shoved the box in the walk-in refrigerator and fled.
* * *
It was way past noon by the time Richard and Javi made their way back to the restaurant, arms fraternally around each other. They'd gone up the coast highway, the day so spectacular they had decided to continue all the way to Malibu, and once in Malibu they couldn't not stop off for a quick seafood lunch of fritto misto and beer on the pier, and then they ran into a chef friend who staked them to a round of reposado tequila. The only blip in the afternoon occurred after Richard bought yet another round of drinks for the group and his card was declined, but he laughed it off as having overspent for the restaurant and paid in cash.
It was late by the time they returned, and he went to check messages in his office-electric company, credit card company, linen supplier, bank. The only call he returned was from the car dealership verifying Javi's employment and a salary that was more wishful thinking than reality. When he arrived back in the kitchen, Javi had the box of rabbits out, butcher paper spread, with a splayed white body in the center.
"Looks like the Easter Bunny arrived early."
Richard forced himself to look at the matted fur. He lost it at the sight of the delicate, folded-back velvety ears. All the blood in his body sloshed down to his feet so that he had to hold on to the counter to keep from falling through the floor.
"Whoa, you okay, partner?" Javi asked.
"Not feeling so good."
"Why don't you leave this to me? Start on Annie's cake."
"I almost forgot." Richard went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. What had happened to him? Unheard of-a chef with an aversion to cooking meat. The idea of stockyards made him faint. Boiling lobsters made him queasy. The easy acceptance of foie gras, roasted whole baby lamb, and, his own undoing, rabbit paralyzed him. He looked at his blotchy face in the mirror and considered googling "psychotic breakdown."
His shins itched to the point of him scratching himself raw; his doctor had diagnosed stress-related eczema. He had developed a tic under one eye that at random moments made him appear to be winking. Earlier that day in Malibu, it had happened in front of a toned young woman in spandex who, thinking he was being lewd, gave him the finger. Now he swallowed half a bottle of probiotics, washing it down with copious amounts of Pepto-Bismol in an attempt to curb the chronic indigestion, PUD (peptic ulcer disease), and irritable bowel syndrome that had started during the last few months and threatened to ruin the upcoming evening.
The enormous strain of trying to make the opening a success and at the same time cover for Javi's threatened implosion was wearing him down. On top of that, he felt guilt over Ann's working so hard and in good faith handing over all her money to him for the restaurant, some of which he had to hand over to Javi to keep various collection agencies off his back so he would concentrate on designing the menu. Now Richard had to tactfully broach the matter of new car payments that were out of the question.
The itching grown unbearable, his medicated cream at home, in despair Richard headed back to the kitchen for olive oil to slather on his raw skin. When in doubt, olive oil. Javi was on his cell phone, and when he saw Richard, he scowled and went outside for privacy. Often Richard wished he could invite Javi to live with them; just do away with the pretense that the man was a fully functioning adult and treat him like the willful, tantrum-prone five-year-old Freudian id he was.
* * *
As Richard finished up Ann's cake (Javi having mercifully taken over the "rabbit issue," creating a fricassee with cilantro and onions as an appetizer for that night), he had a stroke of inspiration and whipped up a bowl of crème Chantilly. He had not had time to buy a present, but what kind of present would it be anyway, with them both knowing it was Ann's money that bought it? He went into his chaotic office, shoved whole stacks of paperwork out of sight, and spread a long tablecloth for ten on the sagging sofa, the ends puddling nicely. Standing back to assess the makeshift effect, he raided the supply cabinet for votives and set them on every surface: the room itself turned birthday cake. He placed a butane Iwatani brûlée torch at the ready to light them for Ann's arrival.
* * *
Ann let herself in through the front entrance of the restaurant. The beauty of the dining room consoled her, despite the fact she was tired and had a stomachache from all the Mars bars. It was her baby, designed from scratch from notes she had taken from their favorite places over the years. Instead of the modern, antiseptic dining spaces then in vogue, theirs would have a rococo feel. The room had deep-red velvet walls with chocolate-brown wood accents and was hung with ornamental mirrors in heavy gilded frames. On the center of each virginal white linen tablecloth stood a small crystal vase, which would be filled with choice blooms spotlit from a halogen light in the ceiling. The tables would not have candles, which were an inefficient use of limited table space, but hundreds of votives would be lit on shelves projecting from the walls. Ann wanted each customer to feel like a prized truffle nestled inside a Valentine box of sweets.
That was the future. Right now she wanted nothing more than to go home, put on a bathrobe, and hole up in bed with a thick novel, but there stood Richard, inexplicably winking at her. He took her hand and led her to his office, the fiery room fragrant with melted wax and burned sugar. A rubber bowl of whipped cream stood on his desk.
"Strip," he said softly, "my sexy thirty-eight-year-old goddess."
She giggled.
"Where's Javi?"
"I sent him for ice. An hour-long ice trip to be exact."
The lit candles heated the room more quickly than Richard would have thought possible. Stripped down to his undershirt and boxers, he suddenly realized that the room was a classic firetrap. As he led Ann to the sofa, he tried to recall exactly where the new box of fire extinguishers had been stored.
Meticulously Richard basted her arm in a coat of whipped cream that he then licked off. "No fair!" Ann laughed, and he fed her dollops off his fingertips. He couldn't help himself-as much as he loved Ann, the whipped cream was making his throat so acidic he felt close to throwing up. He moved to another position, licked spoonfuls off her inner thighs, but the angle made his neck crick. He drove himself on, denying the pain, moaning to release some of the agony, which Ann mistook for passion, prompting her to grab his head and cant his neck at a forty-five-degree angle of torture as she kissed him. He buried his head in her cleavage to hide the tremoring like a Mexican jumping bean beneath his eye.
They made love. It was nice. Friendly. Comfort sex. She had the sense that Richard was clenched inside; his mind seemed far away. Because he had seemed to enjoy it so much, she grabbed his head again and gave him another hard, bad-girl kiss. Afterward Ann felt a purring contentment as she got dressed, as well as a stickiness under her clothes that she couldn't wait to go home and wash off. She was still wearing her good suit from the office-she had come straight there from another ten-hour day-but it seemed petty to complain when Richard was trying so hard. He was under such strain, she was surprised he even remembered her birthday. A dry cleaning bill and a potentially ruined wool skirt. Life could be worse than being desired by your husband under a mountain of whipped cream.
* * *
They sat in the restaurant's new kitchen with its gleaming stainless steel appliances, its spotless linoleum floor-within weeks the kitchen would never again be as quiet and pristine. Richard and Javi had cooked up a special five-course dinner and dragged a small table in from the dining room, complete with tablecloth and tapered candles.
Richard had pulled out a 1974 Louis Roederer Cristal Brut Rosé champagne, known for its silky bite and salmon color. They toasted.
"Did you braise the sirloin tips?" Javi asked.
"No, I thought the main dish and roasted broccolini would be enough."
Javi winked at Ann. "Carrots scream, too."
They polished off Javi's rabbit appetizer, then a Roquefort-and-sautéed-apple quesadilla, an organic baby greens salad with hearts of palm, and then a mango ice as palate cleanser. Javier, the mad-genius chef, had created a new dish in honor of Ann's birthday: soba noodles with pink Florida prawns, braised bok choy, miniature scallops in soy sauce, rice wine, and serrano chilies. Richard's broccolini was brought to the table as an afterthought.
Javier's reputation for achieving culinary ecstasy had the tables booked up for two months solid from opening night. Every restaurant critic from Santa Barbara to San Diego planned to make the pilgrimage to their obscure location on the wobbly border of Santa Monica and Venice, braving chronic lack of parking and the abuse and urinary insults of homeless people, the indigent, and the belligerent who haunted the canyons of urban blight west of the 405. There were rumors of national foodies from Esquire, Travel & Leisure, etc., booking under aliases.
Javier's fiery temper, moderately good Latin looks, vulgar mouth, and lewd behavior toward anything female created an outsize personality that fit perfectly in a profession where chefs were under the onus of not only cooking delicious meals but also having that magic celebrity "it" factor promising that just around the corner the Big Break would happen, which would render same-week reservations a thing of the past.
The fire from the serranos was delightfully unexpected, but after the initial surprise one realized the taste was not quite right.
Richard's aversion to cooking meat was becoming a problem. It had started when he was a teenager, but then abated at CIA, Culinary Institute of America, where he had to learn how to french-cut a rack of lamb, divide a pork loin into chops, carve steaks, and grind meat and sausage. The constant pressure to perform prevented him from dwelling on the meats' previous incarnations-that is, until the master charcuterie/butchering course a year after he met Ann. It was an honor to be invited, and he was flown coach to France and put up at a youth hostel in the Marais, with a bathroom down the hall that had never seen a scrub brush. They couldn't afford the airfare for Ann to join him, and besides, she had just started at the law firm. Still, it was Paris. He was young and in love with food.
The pig slaughter set him back years.
Everyone knew it. The French were cruel eaters: foie gras, veal, live-boiled lobsters. Their philosophy affected all dishes, and all of it bothered Richard. Even tomatoes were blanched, peeled, cored, seeded, and whatever remained was then pureed and strained until all tomato essence had been deracinated. If there was a God, how could people peel asparagus? He considered switching to the pastry track, but the truth was that for all his modesty, his "Aw, shucks"-ness, his love of the anonymity and camaraderie of the kitchen, he wanted Emeril Lagasse superstardom. There had never been a celebrity vegan chef in the history of the world for a reason. One didn't open a restaurant on the strength of puff pastry and ganache. In the testosterone-filled world of chefdom, pastry was for pussies. So he cooked meat and suffered in silence.
When Javi left the table and disappeared after the main course, Richard grabbed Ann's hand and pressed it against his chest. "This is the happiest time in my life. Or it will be soon when we open. And it would mean nothing if you weren't by my side."
Ann wiped at her eyes. The serranos were killing her.
"You've sacrificed a lot. It hasn't been easy. Pretty soon it will be your turn."
"Her turn for what?" Javi yelled, out of sight, deep in the bowels of the walk-in refrigerator. "You two will finally have babies and make me an uncle?"
"My turn to go to art school," she answered. "A solo gallery show. Then children." Because even after the financial sacrifice of law school, the ungodly hours that hopefully soon would come to fruition in an offer of full partnership, Ann already had the sinking knowledge that this was not the life she wanted to be pursuing for the next thirty years. She was ready to spit the bit of family tradition.
Richard scowled at Javi's eavesdropping. He shrugged and gave Ann that goofy, lopsided grin that still had the power to charm her-he was her big, helpless, fuzzy puppy. "With the help of a little whipped cream?" Richard whispered.
* * *
The whipped cream foreplay had started during their days of courtship while he was still at culinary school. He was in downtown St. Helena during a sudden thunderstorm when he ducked under the overhang of a building to get out of the rain. Cowering in the corner was a thin young woman with the most intense green eyes he had ever seen. Inexplicably, she was wearing a pink satin dress and matching shoes that were drenched. She looked like a fairy gone bad. He said hi, and she bit her lip. He saw she was shaking.
"Can I help?"
"I'm scared of thunder."
Amazing. This Richard could do. He took off his jacket and wrapped her up, put his arm around her for warmth, then led her down the street to the best bakery in town where he fed her floury, raisin-studded sweet rolls and coffee while telling her cooking stories until the rain stopped. She was not a defrocked fairy, he found, but was in town for a wedding that she had now missed. Hours passed, and next thing they knew the sun was out.
"Can I cook you dinner?" he asked.
Back at his apartment, as he unpacked groceries, she opened his refrigerator to confront four shelves piled with cartons of whipping cream. He was on dessert rotation, and overachiever that he was, he practiced at home.
"But what do you do with bowl after bowl of whipped cream?" she asked.
She dipped her index finger deep in the bowl and swirled it. Then she raised her creamy finger to her lips and licked it clean. Slowly. She dipped and swirled again, dabbed it on Richard's lips until he caught on and began to lick her finger. The girl was afraid of thunderstorms but not calories. After that night, they flew up and down the state to see each other whenever a night opened up. By the time his dessert rotation was finished, they had both gained ten pounds, Ann's skin was milky soft, and they were in love.
* * *
Now she leaned over to return Richard's kiss as Javi began singing. They stopped before their lips touched, turning toward the gaping refrigerator door where he stood holding Richard's cake of green-tea ganache between layers of rosewater-scented sponge cake, which blazed with candles as the room plunged into darkness. Richard joined in singing "Happy Birthday" and then "Feliz Cumpleaños."
The bonfire of flames in the sudden darkness blinded Ann. She felt grateful even though all this fuss embarrassed her. She took a huge breath, closed her eyes, and dreamed that soon her life as a painter would start, or her life as a mother, or as co-owner of a successful restaurant, even if she kept her law day job, which was really a day-and-night-and-weekends job. At least she had delivered Richard safely to a success that he so wanted. Ann felt that happiness rubbed off, like newsprint but in a good way. Once the restaurant took off, she hoped to finally quit the firm and work the front of the restaurant. At home she would convert the extra bedroom into a studio looking out over the canyon. Real life would finally begin. She wouldn't allow for the thought that perhaps she didn't have the talent, because why would someone have a desire for something that she wasn't good at?
Every firm Christmas party, Flask Sr. put his canvases up for the charity auction, and under his vengeful eye the rest of them were forced to bid. By playing it safe, had she already proved that she wasn't the real thing? But one had to eat, right? After all, wasn't that what all the last years of denial had been about? To achieve Richard's dream first, and then parlay his success into her own? Was that too crass? She couldn't imagine van Gogh or even Pollock thinking like this, but being an artist in the twenty-first century was financially becoming more and more a hobby, like poetry or scrapbooking. She closed her eyes and blew the candles out in a single hopeful puff, and they were plunged back into total darkness.
The truth was, she would settle for being the first face people saw when they came to the restaurant. She loved the idea of making people happy, even if it was as temporary a fix as a good meal.
"You can turn the lights back on," Richard said.
"I didn't turn the lights off," Javi said. "You did."
"Shit, a fuse," Richard said.
"Don't spoil the mood," Ann begged.
More candles were lit, a slightly lesser bottle, a 1998 Philipponnat Clos des Goisses Brut, was opened, and Ann made a prophetic toast: "May this restaurant's success be everything you two deserve."
"May it make us famous," Javi added.
Richard and Javi made a sloppy vow that they would remain lifelong friends. Running a restaurant wouldn't sunder that, as it had the relationships of so many of their peers from CIA.
"Besides," said Richard, stifling a belch, "I don't need to be the star."
A moment of uncomfortable silence opened into which Ann rushed to exclaim about the deliciousness of the cake because the truth that all three of them acknowledged, separately and in various combination, was that Richard wouldn't be a star even locked in a room by himself. Among his quiet charms, charisma was not one of them. He had no choice but to hitch his wagon on the psychopathic joyride that was Javi to even have a chance of creating culinary buzz. A restaurant was about more than just food, sacrilegious as that sounded. It was about branding, cloning copies across the gastronomic map in San Francisco, Honolulu, Las Vegas, New York, Miami, with the goal of later branching out into cookbooks, signature tableware, maybe even a show on the Food Network, etc.
They talked and drank another hour. Ann would later look back and consider that night the death knell of her innocence.
"I love you guys," Javi said, the alcohol turning him maudlin.
"Time to get home." Ann yawned. "I'm exhausted and have to be up early for a briefing."
"The little lawyer," Javi said, hugging her so hard that her shirt stuck to her sticky back. "You smell like dulce de leche."
"Let me fix that fuse first." Richard jumped at the chance to go outdoors in privacy and release some of the noxious gases building up inside him. The chilies were burning his esophagus, and there was a scary liquid rumbling in his stomach. He got a flashlight and went out to the alley.
Alone, Javi stared at Ann in the candlelight, his eyes made dreamy by too much alcohol.
"Stop it," she said.
"I'm remembering you also tasted like dulce de leche."
Richard came back in. "That's funny-nothing flipped." In the dim candlelight, he couldn't detect Ann's flushed face.
"Probably something electrical. I'll call someone in the morning," Javi said. "You two go on home."
"Are you sure?" Ann asked.
"Go be lovebirds."
* * *
But the next morning when Richard (recovering from last night's dinner with a panade of aspirin and antacids) got to the restaurant, Javi was still sitting at the table in the middle of the kitchen, drinking out of a bottle of their best tequila. A large ceramic cutting knife lay on the table in front of him, although so far he had only used it on limes. Clearly he had not been home yet.
"Did they fix it?"
"Seems I forgot to pay the bill. I put it on my credit card this morning."
"You could have written a company check."
Javi's handsome face darkened. Now it was Richard's turn to look at his partner more closely. He did not like what he saw. Purplish circles under his eyes, the eyes themselves bloodshot, not to mention his breath, which was both sour and alcoholic and vaguely canine. Richard worried about lighting a match too near him.
"Have you slept?"
In answer, Javi, ham actor, pushed a pile of bills across the table.
"Tell me it isn't as bad as it looks. Do that. Tell me," Richard said.
"It's fucking Armageddon!"
It was an acknowledged fact that if you knew Javi, you knew he was a spendthrift. Richard's mistake was in not learning the true scope of his debt before going into a partnership, which was in every bad way akin to a marriage without even the conjugal perks. As he flipped through the bills, his temples began to pound, his skin was drenched in a malarial ooze, and then Javi made it worse.
"Inez, that greedy sow, is suing me for more money. She says I lied and hid income. They froze the restaurant's account."
Javi had always been the wild playboy with women problems all through CIA. After he married Inez, Ann and Richard thought he'd calm down, especially after the baby was born, but he still stalked the pretty young sous chefs, the hostesses/wannabe actresses. Javi joylessly womanized all through his divorce, and this pile of bills was an ugly diary of debt for back alimony, child support, health insurance, workers' comp, rent, credit cards, utility bills, car payments, and a whole slew of unpaid disasters going back to and including student loans at Culinary Institute, going back even further to student loans for his first year of medical school, which he dropped out of, going all the way to the primordial debt of UC Riverside undergraduate. The ex-wife had sued and filed an injunction to freeze the restaurant's accounts, claiming he had misrepresented income, although the money was Ann and Richard's life savings, earmarked for a year's worth of rent, payroll, purchase of kitchen equipment, dining tables and chairs, china and stemware, cutlery, the services of an interior decorator and florists, all of which had already been contracted out. They had committed to a five-year lease, signed with personal guarantees. In the parlance of the food industry, they were cooked.
Things were so dire, Richard was actually roused to action. "I'll talk to Inez. I'll explain it's our life savings. She'll understand."
"Maybe not."
"Inez likes us."
"I might have misstated things, like that you embezzled money from me."
That Richard didn't even blink at this admission was an admission itself of how deep the trouble was.
"Just so you know, I need to leave town for a few days."
"Now?" Richard was going to kill him with that ceramic knife.
"I borrowed from some loan sharks to keep us afloat."
"Us?"
"And I took the rest of the petty cash to the casino last night. Guess what? I lost."
"That's the thing. I could win betting that you would lose."
Javi took a slug from the Cabo Uno Anejo. "Javi says, 'Let them eat blinis.'" He cackled, the careening laugh, hysterical and threatening, then veering over into self-pitying sobbing.
"They can't do this," Richard said, now considering using the knife on himself. "Ann will never forgive me. She'll leave."
"Ann will never leave you. Trust Javi on this."
Richard's insides had now gone to the last stage-hot, molten lava in danger of erupting any moment-the divergent tectonic plates of Javier (why was he suddenly referring to himself in the third person?), Ann, divorce, failure, penury, and possibly a future bout of shingles tearing him apart.
* * *
After Richard called Ann at work, she consulted with the only senior partner still there on a Friday, Flask Sr. Waiting while he finished up a phone call on a long, tubular Bang & Olufsen phone that came out from his ear like an ice pick, she stared at his latest artwork hanging directly behind his head on the wall-a grove of arthritic eucalyptus trees that looked as if they had a bad case of infectious skin disease.
"So before we start, since we are fellow artists, how do you like my new plein air piece?"
Ann nodded appreciatively, searching the canvas for something non-career-threatening to say. She was furious her artistic aspirations had somehow leaked out, and especially to a senior partner, who might use it to deny her the partnership that she didn't want. "It's like ... I can actually smell the trees."
Of course. There had been a stupid morale-booster seminar months ago in a downtown hotel ballroom. Each of them had to stand up and tell what his or her hobby was, which was essentially a joke because, except for the senior partners, no one had time to sleep, much less have hobbies. "I'm a painter," Ann had said. "I mean, I'd like to be. Paint on weekends, that is. Someday. When I'm not working." She had kept on standing there, qualifying, like a punctured tire slowly leaking air.
When Flask got off the phone, she outlined the basic parameters of her "friend's" situation: the account had been frozen due to pending legal action, which could take years to resolve. Flask frowned. "What kind of friend are you?" He laughed, so Ann immediately backpedaled and tried to minimize the situation's severity. He informed her the creditors could indeed freeze the account if it was opened as a legal partnership. Of course she knew this, but she was looking for some kind of insanity loophole, covering the possibility of your partner losing it and proceeding to ruin your life.
"It's unfair," she said.
"That's the law, honey."
Now literally she was in the client's Italian-designed seat, and the view was very different. She knew only too well how she could be messed with, the agony and lack of ecstasy of interminable litigation, a long, slow bleed that won by attrition. Was this one of those karmic retribution things like in the movies? She felt deep remorse for causing Mrs. Peters's victory the day before. She reddened at the memory of the OxyContin gambit. Shame,shame on her.
Outside the senior partner's heavy, closed mahogany door, with its raised gold lettering that spelled out his name, Ann stood, realizing with a sense of premonition that she would never be behind such a door with letters spelling out her name; that the plush gray Berber carpet, the paneled walls, the tastefully spotlit artwork that had given her such a sense of permanence and security working there were not actually there for her at all. They were to instill awe and respect among clients, who were billed astronomically, by the hour, as they sat on those deep, ergonomically designed sofas in the waiting room, or enjoyed the espresso-pod coffee brought over by the discreetly sexy receptionist; the intention of the furniture, the offices, the fine accoutrements of lawyering was to lull, to make believe that the law had some weight to it, that the clients weren't at the mercy of chance, that their fates weren't left to the vagaries of interpretation. These partners, who were so tastefully and expensively dressed, whose whole presentation shouted success, were not saviors or even guides of the legal system; they were enablers. Like in Las Vegas, the house always won, and the Flask, Flask, Gardiner, Bulkington, Bartleby, and Peleg partners-mostly male, quickly walking, making adjustments midstride to go around the marooned and stationary Ann in the hallway-were sharks who kept moving, kept litigating, or died. Ann had made a terrible, terrible mistake, thinking herself a shark, spending all those years in law school honing a bloodlust she had no appetite for. Now, after a decade practicing law, she had to admit she didn't understand the first thing about the law; it was beyond right or wrong or justice; it was about hours billed and petty vendettas, and the lawyers were paid mercenaries sent out to do unfair battle. The last time Ann felt she had truly ministered justice was as a five-year-old, when she presided as judge over a friend who had stolen her toy: "Guilty," she had pronounced, "but still innocent." Ann hadn't gotten any smarter since. Drifts of briefs like snowfall blanketed her desk, covered and muffled every good intention. She could not bear the thought of growing old inside these walls; she had worked there ten years and did not have a single person whom she could truly call friend, if "friend" meant someone she could tell of her unhappiness in being there. The embarrassing truth was that she wanted to be loved, and people hardly ever loved, or even liked, their attorneys; they were a necessary evil, like dentists or hookers.
* * *
Mrs. Peters, riding high on her bonsai win, had sent a Swedish, pink-leather, hammered-silver cocktail shaker with a big "A" embossed on it as thanks. After Richard's call, Ann had stared at the extravagant accusation of it on her desk and then broken down in tears.
And then the revelation. It occurred to her that the court order might not yet have arrived at the bank. In a daze, Ann drove to the local branch and told the teller she needed to get a cashier's check for the entire total in the account. House down payment. To hide her shaking hands, she clutched her cell phone. The teller had been there only a week and was impatient to close up her window and get to her salsa class, all of which she told Ann as she processed the paperwork.
"I've always wanted to learn to dance," Ann said, light-headed, black spots floating in front of her eyes. "We're buying a second house in Mexico, and they demand all cash."
"Really?" The girl did it without question, impressed by Ann's expensive handbag, her expertly highlighted hair, the glasses that clarified nothing.
For the first time in her good-girl life, Ann got the adrenaline high of being on the wrong side of the law. She simply stole what was about to be stolen from her, but the cashier's check was a hot potato because any claim on the payee, Ann, would render it void. Her only option was to cash it somewhere fast. The only person she could call was her loyal, unprincipled best friend from law school, who also happened to be a kick-ass class-action attorney, Lorna Reynolds. Lorna would get off on the risk and, if necessary, handle any legal ugliness that arose.
* * *
In her less kind moments, Ann thought Lorna had lately turned a little neocon in her politics, but she preferred to remember the two of them as they had been a dozen years before, smoking pot and listening to rock music. Lorna's irreverence had saved her through a dark period.
According to Ann's family, becoming an attorney started with having to go to the right school. Her father and sister went to Yale; her brother rebelliously opted for Harvard. Ann had dutifully applied and gotten into both, with UCLA as her backup. Her siblings were back east when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ann could not, would not, leave her alone with her father, who, although not unkind, was incapable of transcending the cool logic of his profession. Exhibit A: He was incapable of boiling an egg. Exhibit B: He rose from the dinner table in the certain knowledge that the dishes somehow always made their way back to the cupboard clean without him. Ann's compromise was accepting the backup and living at home.
All families have their peculiarities, but it was impossible to describe to outsiders how shaming her decision was to them. Her father could barely look her in the eye; her siblings distanced themselves. They all thought her weak-everyone except her mother. Fifteen years later, her mother was fine, and Ann never once regretted her decision. But it was Lorna who got her through.
They used to joke about dropping out of law school and becoming groupies to some of the bands they were enamored of like American Music Club, the Talking Heads, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Rolling Stones, the Wallflowers, U2, Guns N' Roses, and Prospero, especially the lead singer, Dex Cooper, whom they met one night stone-cold drunk at the Troubadour. They were there pretending to be bad, wild girls and not buttoned-down law students. After plying them with whiskey sours (Ann's first), he invited them both to come back to his place, provided they could drive him since his license had been revoked courtesy of a DUI.
As luck would have it, Ann was driving. Dex promptly fell asleep in the backseat. She remembered getting lost as they wound up into the steep, overgrown canyons of the Hollywood Hills. The house was a throwback to the '50s, a glass-and-stucco bachelor pad at the top of the hill. As they walked to the front door, Ann noticed the yard was weed-choked. Inside, it smelled of cats, although none were in evidence. Dex quickly went to the bar, backed up by a plexiglass panel into the pool, very James Bond. Ann rolled her eyes at Lorna. Dex poured gigantic drinks and then took off his shirt.
"So what do you girls do?" he slurred.
"Go to school," Lorna said, gulping down her drink.
"Which high school?"
The girls dissolved into laughter while Dex patiently drank.
"Where's the bathroom?" Ann asked and made her escape.
The bathroom, along with the rest of the house, was filthy. It seemed Dex was camping rather than living there. She poured her drink down the toilet. When she came back to the living room, Lorna was French-kissing Dex on the sofa.
"I need to get home," Ann said.
"Curfew?" Dex asked. "Want to get high first?"
"No!" Ann said.
Lorna sat up and straightened her blouse. "Don't bother. Ann's a prude."
Dex nodded. "That's too bad."
Once they reached the driveway, they fell into each other's arms giggling.
"Oh my God," Lorna said. "Oh my God!"
"I know!"
"Dex Cooper!"
"You kissed him!"
"I would have given him a BJ if you didn't barge in."
"Lorna!"
"Dex Cooper!"
"Still."
They broke down in laughter all over again.
Later, Lorna said she was holding out for her number one, Axl Rose, as unlikely as that was to happen. Ann claimed to have always preferred Eddie Vedder, but it lay as an unspoken truth between them that Lorna had passed the wild test while Ann failed.
* * *
With the hot-potato check, Ann drove aimlessly in her Toyota as she dialed Lorna. "You won't believe the shit that has just covered my entire life."
Lorna directed her to go to the nearest branch of her bank, which she GPS-ed on her iPhone, and told her to put the signed-over check in the night deposit box, directed into Lorna's account. "I'll figure the rest out. Lie low. I've got contacts at my bank. Come by my office tomorrow, and I'll give you cash. Then get out of town for a while so you can't be deposed. Out of sight and the limits of jurisdiction, out of mind."
* * *
The previous April, Ann and Richard had been to their first and only session of couple's therapy, courtesy of a social acquaintance Ann knew through one of her professional women's groups. The problem, as Ann saw it, was that she hardly knew her husband anymore. For the last ten years, they had both worked so hard they never saw each other. She had deferred her dreams of being a painter to first creating a successful restaurant for Richard, and that required earning money as an attorney, while what she wanted-a happy life with Richard-was moving further and further away till it was just a blur on the horizon. She was tired of catering to her spoiled clients, people who had either inherited their wealth or earned it too easily, dealing with children in the guise of adults for her livelihood. As she sat in the office, she realized the miscalculation of being there. She did not need to pay someone to tell her what was wrong. She needed a new life.
She knew the therapist, Eve, from her Women Ethically For the Environment (WEFE) group that met monthly at various trophy houses on the Westside, and served organic vegetables paired with expensive imported alcohol. Eve's style had impressed Ann, and the monthly WEFE meetings had made improvements in her life that made her feel nominally better, such as: she now recycled, ate organic and grass-fed, and wrote out checks (albeit for small amounts) to various international NGOs to make clothes and furniture out of recycled garbage.
At Eve's office, they sat marooned on a Balinese opium bed carved from sustainable teak.
"Should I take off my shoes?" Ann asked, uncomfortable and unhappy. Through Eve's eyes, Ann was aware that Richard appeared slump-backed and slope-shouldered, that his potbelly topped his belt like a muffin rising over its tin, or, in Richard's case, a brioche. Eve's husband, Guy, who attended black-tie environmental events with her, was a former B-list actor who now worked strictly as an activist, allowing him free time to spend every day at the gym maintaining his six-pack abs. He was on the correct side of open land, clean water, sustainable farming, and baby seals. The only thing that sustained Ann through her present mortification was that years ago, at an event, Guy had put his hand on her ass and made a pass, a klutzy move that she had deflected. Richard would never do that.
"Shoes on, shoes off. Ann, do what makes you feel comfortable."
Which was impossible, because leaving the room was the only thing that would accomplish that. Ann dropped one pump, and then the other, with a loud clatter on the Saltillo tile floor. "Nice floors," she said to cover the noise.
"Eduardo is the best. I'll give you his number," Eve said. "He's a wizard. We just came back from a design trip to an island in French Polynesia. We discovered exotic woods. The heat and the light. The place is pure sex."
"Did Guy like it?" Ann asked.
"He couldn't come. So let's get to work. Now what I'd suggest is for you and Richard to lie side by side and close your eyes."
Ann, grateful for the privacy of closed lids, felt herself burning with shame. It drove her crazy how Eve repeated their names back to them, as if reading off index cards, as if they might forget who they were. Too late, Ann saw the conflict of interest in discussing one's personal issues with someone one ate canapés with. Someone who took her floor man to the South Seas. She would have to quit the environmental group and find another cause. A waste because she didn't believe in therapy-in fact, prided herself on being the problem solver for others-and this exposure made her feel doubly humiliated. Thank God for the small favor that Eve had revealed that Guy had cheated on her numerous times (this after the hand-on-the-tush incident), and had come to see her a year ago about a divorce that never materialized.
Eve coughed and spoke in a soft voice. "Now, Ann and Richard, I want you two to picture where you want to be a year from now."
Ann moaned, her eyes still closed, poisoned by her own words used against her. This was the question she had posed to Eve the year before, her standard for divorce cases. Eve had stolen it. Apparently the answer for Eve ended up being staying with Guy, whom she claimed had reformed. The law had shown Ann that people rarely changed. At best, the behavior went inward, underground, where lust carved out a dark and dangerous hole in one's heart.
"See," said Richard. "Always a negative, knee-jerk reaction."
"Could I have some water?" Ann asked.
"Of course," Eve answered. "Flat or sparkling?"
After Ann downed the full glass in a few gulps, Eve continued.
"I'll have to use tough love with you two. I'm sending you on a trip alone together. Tell me the first thing that pops into your mind, Richard, for a romantic place."
"Romantic?" Richard repeated, seemingly stumped by the meaning of the word, as if he were on a quiz show. "Something French?"
"Good! Now, Ann, a landscape that speaks to you."
"A desert," she said, to be contrarian. Fat chance they were going anywhere with the restaurant about to open. They had no money to go on vacation, but she wasn't about to admit that either.
"Now we're getting somewhere!" Eve was so excited she clapped her hands. "You're building a vision of the future together. Let's refine. Richard?"
"Desert? You hate the desert-"
"No, Richard, please," Eve said. "No judgment."
But both of them knew judgment was all that was left.
"Okay," he said, narrowing his eyes in an effort to undo Ann's choice. "Ocean."
"That pretty much leaves Algeria," Ann said.
"Okay, okay. You're making it tougher," Eve conceded.
"A desert island!" Richard yelled.
"That's it! Perfect!" Eve shouted. "I know just the place. Picture water the palest blue. Sand blinding white. The breeze is warm and caressing. No crowds, no kids. It's like the world has disappeared, and it's only the two of you. With thousand-count Sferra cotton sheets and the best French wine. Here," she said.
"What?"
"Open your eyes."
Ann saw a brochure with pictures not unlike the tropical screen savers she drooled over in her office. "It's lovely," she said.
"It's required. Don't come back till you've gone."
Ann and Richard never went back to therapy.
* * *
It was the beginning of high season in the South Pacific. Although there were still plenty of vacancies at the bigger resorts, Ann had her own reasons for seeking out the most isolated, lonesome destination she could find, preferably sans telephone, WiFi access, or electricity.
She had been obsessed with islands since she was a child. Had it started with Treasure Island, continued throughGilligan's Island reruns (while her friends debated whether they wanted to be Ginger or Mary Ann, she had always wanted to be the Professor)? Had it ignited with that treacly remake of The Blue Lagoon with Brooke Shields? All the endless incarnations of Mutiny on the Bounty? Had it solidified through multiple viewings of Swiss Family Robinson and Island of the Blue Dolphins (she preferred the book)? Her obsession wasn't even diminished by the depressingly realistic Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, although the relationship with Wilson, the volleyball, was a disturbing glimpse into the void.
Sure, she had the same triad of tropical island screen savers as everyone else, except for everyone else it represented a vacation, with the promise of alcohol and mindless sunbathing. For Ann, it was something without which her life would remain unfulfilled. These were not the ideal circumstances to live out this fantasy, but really, when would it be ideal? No man was an island, but maybe a woman could be.
She charged the whole trip on their last credit card that still had room on it and then went out shopping for the most expensive flip-flops she could find-beautiful Italian ones with jewels and buckles sewed on the thin, butter-soft leather straps. That she couldn't afford them seemed even more reason to have them now.
When Richard came home from the restaurant and saw the sales receipt, he pounded his fist on the desk till his skin was bruised.
He was at the vertigo-inducing, ruthless edge of defeat that he'd stepped back from so many times before. It had finally gotten too hard. Richard was tired to death, his body going rogue on him, exhausted by the relentless, penny-pinching life that had befallen them. He revolted from the cheap therapist psychobabble optimism of Eve: things would probably not get better. They were screwed. He would not utter the lie that things would work out because actually it looked like the Dark Horseman of the Apocalypse himself had ridden up. Richard clutched his chest, worried that he might be having a heart attack that their shitty piecemeal insurance would not cover. So be it.
Then Ann showed him the bag of their stolen, about-to-be-stolen-from-them money.
"You could be disbarred," Richard whispered.
"I'm tired of the law," she countered.
* * *
By bedtime the next night they were on a plane, hurtling over the vast light grid of Los Angeles, the plane flinging itself into the darkness of sky and ocean that was farther west. Ann knew enough about the law to know they weren't worth pursuing out of the country. Criminal intent in this case was a comfortably gray area.
Ann looked around and wondered, did other people have a fantasy of how life should be lived? Would any of them pick up and change their circumstances if given the opportunity? She had the fantasy part down, but did she have the guts?
They clinked umbrella-stabbed cocktails at thirty thousand feet. "Think of it as our first vacation." Ann took another sip of her drink.
In the old days, California was the end of the line, but now, with the forces of globalization, one could just keep flinging oneself farther and farther west, hopefully landing somewhere that fulfilled one's dreams of happiness before one ended up back in the place one started.
Copyright © 2015 by Tatjana Soli
