Dinner with Penioni

Is reading in a hammock suspended between coconut trees a wise thing? Photo by David Lansing.

Penioni, a heavy-set, balding manager at Tokoriki Island Resort, claps his hands and a young woman in a fuchsia pink sulu brings me a tall glass of island punch made from a blend of pineapple, papaya, and mango juice with a dash of grenadine. I pull out an airline-sized plastic bottle of lemon vodka from my camera bag and add it to the fruit juice. After several hours of transport aboard first a catamaran and then a speedboat, I have arrived at this, the only resort on Tokoriki, just in time for dinner.

Penioni directs me to a table near the edge of the infinity pool beneath—I swear to god—swaying coconut trees. So here I am, looking out at the fantastically blue water, wondering how often a coconut actually drops down on one of the dining tables by the pool. Just to make small talk, which I’m not very good at, I ask Penioni, who seems a little bit bored, what I should do tomorrow. He brings his hands up under his chin like a professor waiting for an unruly class to settle down, and says, wistfully, “There’s nothing to do here.” And then he shrugs the way Italians do when there’s simply nothing to be done about the situation. I don’t believe him, of course, but even if it turns out he is right, that would be just fine with me. A little bit of nothing sounds fairly enchanting at the moment.