“Do you need help with our selections?” The waiter was a healthy blond kid.

“What is all this stuff? I thought this was a Cajun place.” Paul looked past the boy at a tank of lobsters.

“Yes, sir, we have authentic dishes from the bayou state. Today’s special is blackened swordfish.”

Paul stared at him blankly. “I never seen a swordfish in my whole life.”

The waiter motioned to the man at the next table and bent close. “It’s what the gentleman next to you is eating.”

“It’s all burned,” he cried.

“Not burned, sir. Blackened. It’s the most traditional way of cooking seafood among the Cajuns.”

“Someone’s been pulling your leg, man.” Paul went back to the menu and read the descriptions of bayou lamb, Cajun barbecued liver, and escargot de Lafayette. He found the word gumbo on the back page and ordered a large bowl. A half hour later his waiter brought a small cauldron of bitter juice so hot with Tabasco that after the third spoonful, Paul broke into a sweat.

His waiter glided past and asked, “How’s the gumbo?”

“Man,” Paul said, “you people must have spilled Tabasco in this stuff. My tongue’s been killed dead.”

The waiter laughed. “It takes time to develop a true Cajun palate.”

Paul pushed away the steaming bowl. “Let me tell you, it sure don’t take much time to ruin one.” He waited patiently for the bill, thinking of a medium-brown roux Colette had made last winter as the base for a shrimp gumbo. He closed his eyes and saw her hands cutting up onions.

After a few days, he began to experiment with Mexican food. The moderate pepper content gave him solace, though most things tasted like hot cheesy mud. Memory of Colette’s food began to follow him like an aroma—creamy red beans over steaming white rice, corn soup, a chicken stew from heaven. Sometimes he would sit in his modern apartment, staring through the sliding glass door, thinking of food, wondering when Colette would call. When he got home from work at the boiler shop, he would clean up and go for a ride. After two weeks of relentless driving, he felt like a map maker or a real estate agent desperate for the feel of a big neighborhood. He went to the tourist places like Disneyland, where he rode the steam train and steamboat over and over, his face staring out of the coach window or over the steamer railing like that of an immigrant peasant examining a rich new land. He took long drives to the Sierras and short drives north of the city, where he frowned through canyons choked with rich homes hiding in expensively overgrown landscaping. Here the land pitched up or down and the houses had to be propped up in back on stilts to keep them from riding down the slopes. He drove the same road three times in one afternoon, studying the bottoms of houses. He decided that California was easy on the eyes and that it was impossible to get bored here, but for someone from Tiger Island, the place was like a movie set—too pretty, too shaped for effect. The wealthy neighborhoods got him down and the poor neighborhoods scared the hell out of him. One day he took the tour of Forest Lawn and was beside himself with disorientation. Back home, visits to the graveyard were spent praying for his or Colette’s family members, searching out the tombs of friends, looking for the love of amiable ghosts. He considered the rolling billiard-table grass of Forest Lawn and wondered why dead strangers were called on to entertain. In Tiger Island, a cemetery was the ultimate reality, where all the bullshit of life was put away in the face of a final fact, and a name of one’s bloodline on a cross formed not celebrity, but a remembrance of either love or nothing, heaven or hell.