A Drink Called Paradise

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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.

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.

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