I went looking for paradise—and ended up at Tommy Bahama’s Marlin Bar.
H. wasn’t the first girlfriend I asked to take me to dinner at Tommy Bahama, but she was the first who said yes. From the street the restaurant looked like any storefront in downtown Palm Springs. Skinny fan palms framed a wide, curved patio. Droopy pink flowers baked in concrete pots. When H. asked where I wanted to sit, I pointed to the Marlin Bar. The high metal stool scraped the floor when I pushed it back. I plopped down with a satisfied sigh.
Buzzed from the rum, we wandered into the attached store behind the bar, weaving between racks of linen dresses and jute toes in earth tones. H. held a polo shirt to her chest and turned toward me. “Very cute,” I said. She smiled. “This old thing?” She leaned over to kiss me. After over a year together, her touch still gave me goosebumps. I strolled past more products: The Easy Breezer Long Sleeve Shirt. The Easy In Easy Out Chair.
We wrote to each other often during those first weeks in L.A. For her I constructed a fantasy of my new life: tall boys sipped in the shade of a Mexican fan palm. “Nothing but sun.” “Love waking up with sand in my hair.” I hadn’t yet set foot on a single beach, couldn’t even afford the gas to drive there. “Send me pictures of your lair,” she said. Instead, I sent a closeup of the jacaranda tree outside my bedroom window.
We time-traveled together as she talked. She told stories with enough details to make me feel like I was beside her, experiencing it all. We drank beer with her brother in a truck before W.’s prom. We ate soggy sandwiches with her father in deep woods. In these stories he was invariably aiming a bow at a turkey or a deer. “So big you could mount it,” she said, tapping the joint then relighting it. I never asked to see pictures of the taxidermied mammals in her living room.
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