The Last Good Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

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(Ann’s first), he invited them both to come back to his place, provided they could drive him since his license had been revoked courtesy of a DUI.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