Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"Rapture?" Wilnice asked, and looked so wounded Fishlow said nothing more.

Still they worked, waiting on tables. Fishlow's intensity bordered on obsession. He had no words to describe it; he was possessed. What he wanted to say was insane: I understand cannibalism. What was that supposed to mean? Then, six days from the day he had met her, the woman left, her holiday at an end, Golden Week over.

Sneaking her name from the hotel register, Fishlow wrote to her. Her address was a whole incomprehensible paragraph of short words and long numbers. There was no reply. Fishlow called her telephone number. Now he could not remember whether she had ever spoken to him in English. He got someone shrieking in Japanese, a sexless squawk box, in answer to his pleading questions.

Wilnice did not know what to do with Fishlow during his crying jags. He wasn't sure how the doll woman had swept over his friend, nearly destroying him. Fishlow had been so happy, so hungry. She had made him into a willing dog, and now she was gone and he was still a dog, but a desperate whimpering mutt with his scummy tongue hanging out. That was the worst of love.

His only solution was to seek help from his limping friend Wilnice, who had seen the woman first. So he told him one day when they were out walking — bobbing and bumping, as usual.

Fishlow was so sorrowful that his story had the precision of regret, of guilt and blame, every incriminating detail noted: the back of her head and her neck as she turned away, the manner in which he had snatched the Bible and thrown it down, his mounting her from behind, her body full of

chicken bones, the way she had pretended to resist. He was specific and self-mocking because he was wounded.

"What do you mean 'at the window'?" Wilnice asked, his mouth agape.

Guessing that he could have been the man she wanted, that the young Japanese woman could not tell them apart — how their staggering and limping made them equal in her eyes — Wilnice was envious, and the envy soured his guts, making him sick with sorrow for having retreated from the woman's door. He took a ghastly delight in Fishlow's descriptions of the woman's hunger. Like a cat! From behind! Like squeezing a fruit! Tottering on her clogs! Wilnice moaned to himself, I have always lacked conviction.

But Fishlow envied Wilnice's self-possession, the way in which Wilnice had simply backed off from the woman, this woman who burdened Fishlow's memory — more than that, infected him with regret, a humiliation, a casual demon. As Wilnice could not rid his mind of the details Fishlow had related, Fishlow continually saw Wilnice in their little apartment, taking his shoes off, one shoe thicker-soled than the other, microwaving some chili and eating it with a plastic spoon, all this innocent economy, sitting like a child in front of the television set, while he stood lopsided in spite of the Bible, his pants around his ankles, naked in the naked woman's room, the woman crying out "No! No!" and averting her face. Fishlow envied him and thought, I have always been too impulsive — it will shorten my life. And Wilnice thinking, I am afraid. I don't know how to live.

Each man was consumed by regret, the one from having rejected the woman, the other from having made love to her. Each man believed he had failed, and the way they walked was like emphasis, as though trying to trample on the memory of the woman.

Leaving our Paradise Lost bar, shouldering his way through the hotel lobby, the young man caught my eye and said, "Now I've heard everything!" in a provocative way, too loudly, to get my attention. I was hoping my silence and my bland smile would calm him.

"Can I help you?" I said. "I'm the manager."

In his early thirties and handsome — all that springy hair — he wore a dark shirt that set off his pink impatient face. Breathless and a bit flustered, he looked like someone who had just been disarmed by an insult. The way a man looks when he's slapped by a woman.

"See that guy? He's out of his mind!"

He was gone before I could tell him that the man he had pointed out, Eddie Alfanta, was a regular at the bar, always came with his wife, Cheryl, whom he adored, and was a well-known accountant downtown — overserious but successful, with an office on Bishop Street. What I liked most about him was his passion for gambling. Eddie was not the first accountant I had known who gambled, though the risks of the crap table and the solemnity of the ledger made him seem paradoxical and confident. His wagers were modest. He usually won. He said he had a system.

So intent was Eddie on peering around the bar that he did not see me. Where was his wife? Cheryl was a small woman, elfin almost — short hair, delicate bones, tiny hands and feet, very tidy, always neatly dressed, and pale, especially in contrast to big, dark Eddie Alfanta, who boasted of his hairiness. That Eddie was also proud of Cheryl, his haole trophy, was plain to see, and he had the slightly fussy henpecked demeanor that characterized the ethnic partner in many Hawaiian interracial marriages. He was self-conscious, eager to do the right thing but not sure what the right thing was, and had the uneasy notion that people were watching. And they were.

The next time I checked the bar, I saw Eddie with the dice cup in his hand, shaking it, making it chuckle. Buddy Hamstra had brought the leather cup and the pair of dice from Bangkok, where men in bars tossed dice to determine who would pay for the next round of drinks. I often studied the fixed attentive faces and bared teeth of the men going at it and thought how we are at our most aggressive and competitive, most animalistic, in our games.

What I noticed tonight was not the game but Eddie's opponent. We seldom saw surfers in Paradise Lost. The better class of surfer, one of Trey's buddies, out for a week of catching waves, yes, but never a local full-season hard-core dude like this one — barefoot, broad-shouldered, bandy-legged, tattoos on the small of his back and another between his shoulder blades, with the name CODY, all the tattoos visible through his torn shirt. His cap on backward, his long hair was sunned, the color and texture of straw, his eyes pale and vacant, his skin burned, his masses of freckles, big and small, adding to his look of recklessness. He was young, probably not more than twenty-two or — three. Eddie Alfanta was over forty, so it looked funny, the two of them struggling with the dice cup: the swarthy accountant with his shirt tucked in and two pens in his breast pocket, the youth in ragged shirt and shorts — Stussy cap, Quiksilver shorts, Local Motion shirt. He had dirty feet, bruised toes.

"A water rat," Trey said.

The two men hovered over the tumbled dice on the bar, and I also thought how sad games are for their rules and rituals, for making us absurdly hopeful, for being predictable, for their pathetic purpose, which was to divert us for the length of time it took to play them. All players looked to me like desperate losers; games were the pastimes of people — always men — who could not bear to be alone, who did not read. There was a brutal pathos in the game of dice, the little chuckle, the toss, the click, the overwhelming significance of the dots.

Or was it just harmless fun that defied interpretation? There was something wrong in my caring about it, or even noticing it, so I turned away and concentrated on what was much more obvious: for the first time Eddie's wife was not with him in the bar. His laughter made that emphatic, and he crowded the surfer, maneuvering the dice cup, making the dice chatter, his mouth open a bit too wide, his laughter a bit too shrill, touching the surfer's arm when he won. Eddie was dark and baked, the boy fair and burned — I sensed attraction. But I was glad they were laughing there; I liked thinking of my hotel as a refuge.