MEMORY OF PARADISE

We were deep into yet another Upper West Side dinner party at a newly renovated brownstone fueled by bottles of Pinot Noir and quasi-ironic talk of crypto schemes when Brad announced there was a plain red door in the old servants’ quarters upstairs which opened out onto a windswept Caribbean island.

“What is this? Pomegranate?” Eloise vetted her fork with the exacting eye of an Antwerp diamond dealer. “I’ve never eaten chicken with pomegranates before. How interesting.”

“It’s an Israeli recipe,” Brad informed her. “I read somewhere that the prunes could be tax deductible for anyone over the age of sixty.”

“Let’s get back to the door.” There was a sense of urgency in my voice. Conversations with Brad would careen off in multiple directions once dessert was served. Even the existence of a portal to another part of the world might be swallowed up whole with the appearance of his signature Crème Brûlée.

He turned to me with his perfectly vacant smile. “Yes. The damnedest thing, really. You know how we’ve been looking to remodel the top floor? Well, last Tuesday we removed a section of the woodwork and there it was. Lucy and I have been exploring the island all week.”

The look on my face must have signaled my skepticism.

“I know it sounds utterly crazy, but I assure you it is very real,” Brad said. “I’ll show you after dessert.”

_____

We were a party of six that evening. Brad and his wife Lucy, myself, the Russells (never one or the other – Jim or Eloise – they came as a pair, like conjoined twins or knitting needles), and Cynthia, the latest in a procession of blind dates Brad had set up for me in the year since my divorce. His architecture firm brought in clients from all walks of life, as long as they were financially solvent, and the single ladies were carefully curated then shuffled my way. Figure skaters and fashionistas. A psychoanalyst from Belgrade and a romance novelist from Bushwick. No sparks yet, nothing but awkward politeness on both sides, but Brad continued in his quest.

“Have faith,” he would say. “The next one could be it. You’ll see.”

Cynthia was a maritime insurance broker who’d grown up in landlocked Kansas.

We trundled up the mahogany stairs like gear-laden firemen in silence, our unspoken concern that Brad and Lucy had somehow been severed from reality. Still, all of us were curious. What would the existence of a trans-dimensional gate on West 88th onto an idyllic beach in the West Indies do for property values bordering Central Park?

The door was, as promised, aggressively plain and red. Brad gripped the handle, humming a theatrical melody to build anticipation.

Jim and Eloise Russell tittered nervously. “Come on, you don’t really expect us to believe any of this, do you?”

Brad and Lucy laughed then grinned knowingly at each other as the door swung open with the high-pitched creak of brass hinges. The white glare of the sun and the smell of the ocean washed over us as we stepped through, and I had to adjust my footing on the sand.

Coastline stretched beyond my line of sight, gentle waves curling and crashing then rippling up against the shore. I looked around and got my bearings. The beach was at a slight gradient which slowly yielded to dense and untamed jungle.

Brad and Lucy began talking, their sentences overlapping as they outlined the parameters of this place. “The jungle is impenetrable beyond a certain point, but the beach, it keeps going.”

Lucy nodded. “There are limestone caves. Wildlife. I’ve watched pelicans swoop down and pluck fish right out of the sea. Mango trees. So many mango trees. Coconuts too.”

Eloise shrieked. Jim seemed mildly annoyed, as if expecting a Candid Camera crew to jump out from behind one of the palm trees, or maybe suspicious that his post-dinner coffee had been spiked with an especially robust psilocybin.

I said nothing, scared that any words would betray me.

Cynthia the maritime insurance broker from landlocked Kansas was surprisingly calm.

“This isn’t a place,” she said. “This is someone’s memory of paradise.”

I finally spoke. “This isn’t real. It can’t be.”

She replied in koan. “Our memories are all that are real.”

_____

I spent the next week thinking of little else. New York faded into the background. The city had lost its luster. I wondered how far the beach went. Did it eventually reach an end or was it infinite? Brad and Lucy were ignoring my calls. I wondered if they had explored beyond the shoreline into the jungle yet. I thought about Cynthia and the ease at which she accepted this memory of paradise, as if she’d always known it had been there waiting for her. For us.

I knew that I would have to return.

_____

I let myself into the brownstone one afternoon with the key Brad had left me right after the divorce and was shocked to find the place empty. Everything had been stripped from the walls. Nothing but dust remained. The oversized Kandinsky prints and the holiday photos from Tajikistan—all gone.

But the door was still there.

I came through and found Cynthia on the beach. Barefoot, her skin kissed by the sun. How long had she been waiting? We stood there absorbing the condition of each other’s lives. Birth, school, work, death. Gym memberships and high protein diets. Heartbreak and financial windfalls. Shifting political allegiances and tax brackets. I saw it all in her eyes and the faint edge of a smile, just as she saw the same things in me.

We stood there for what felt like hours, long enough for the door to vanish from behind me though I didn’t notice at first or even care when I did. I kicked off my shoes as she took my hand, and we walked along the beach together, chasing the sun as it moved across a cloudless sky.

BIO: Ron Shagmatt was born in a Delaware storage facility three days after Elvis died. He is rumored to be the secret love child of Stanley Kubrick and Joy Williams. He currently works as an automotive claims adjuster in Jaipur, India. His knowledge of baseball statistics is unmatched in the known world. None of this may be true.

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