Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

It inspired me. A person had to be bold to write his own obituary, and even if it was a joke, it was a good joke. I thought I would do the same, as a parody, writing the obituary I feared I would get, with wrong dates, erroneous inclusions, deliberate omissions, just an illiterate's version of my life.

In my head I began to envision my own inaccurate obituary. I was the grumpy traveler in a book that had been a bestseller in the 1970s. I had lived overseas. Movies had been made of some of my books — the movie stars' names were given. I had abandoned my family and run off. Of the thirty-odd books I had written, two were mentioned by name, and one of my worst reviews was quoted, along with the bitter remarks of one of my enemies who claimed to be my friend. A woman who had stalked me for years accused me of having taken advantage of her: "He groped me." I had come and gone. I had vanished in the Pacific where, in total obscurity, written out and written off, I had been running a small hotel.

This balance sheet made me so melancholy I spent a day writing more versions of my obituary, then tearing them up, writing epitaphs (Here lies. .) and destroying them. Sweetie interrupted me while I was writing and asked me what I meant in a room report when I wrote, "feety smell.

cheesy sheets," and what was I doing?

"Nothing," I said. "By the way, when I die just scatter my ashes off the North Shore."

"Then can I find another husband?"

"Of course."

"You reading Buddy's stuff," she said, peering over my shoulder.

What I had been doing was more intrusive even than Sweetie imagined, for bundled with the obituary was a stack of love letters, written over a long period to Momi, Buddy's ex-wife, the earliest a few years ago, the most recent ones dated just before Buddy hired me. They were passionate appeals, they were descriptions of daily activity, much of it improbable, they were requests for help and advice, they were promises, and they were also the most tender declarations of love I had ever read, the more so for their heartfelt artlessness, all of them handwritten in Buddy's imploring blue scribble. The more clumsy a piece of writing, the greater its capacity to move, and these love letters of Buddy's in the Pending file seemed to prove what the poet said, that imperfection is the language of art.

"Does Momi ever come to the hotel?" I asked.

Sweetie said, "She mucky."

Dead, for ten years, which explained why Buddy had never sent the letters, why they had accumulated in the Pending file.

Buddy had seemed to me to be borderline literate. I was wrong. He had no gift, but he had a complex motive. In his heartache he had discovered the impulses that lay behind all good writing: ignoring everything that had ever been written, taking control of time, and most of all, inventing the truth.

Writing his own obituary was a wonderful conceit, even if the writing itself was cliche-ridden and mawkish. The love letters were classics, the better and more convincing for their crudeness. Buddy already knew what it had taken me years to discover — that fiction can be an epistle to the

living, but more often the things we write, believing they matter, are letters to the dead.

Sneaking looks at other people's mail, I told myself, was part of my job, my exploratory life as a writer. Yet after I abandoned writing in Hawaii I felt an even greater need to poke into people's mail. There were treasures in my boss's files — his own mendacious obituary, and years after his first wife had died, he still wrote love letters to her. Was he just lonely, or was this a bizarre form of atonement? The only qualm I had — it was my perennial qualm — was that I would be found out in my snooping and seen living my life thirdhand, the writer's maddening distance from the real world.

So as not to embarrass him, or myself, I took Buddy's entire filing cabinet, containing the personal papers I had read and the business documents I had shuffled, and hand delivered it to him at his house on the North Shore. I was directed by his bulky son, Bula, to the lanai.

Buddy lay face down, regal, on a massage table and was being scrubbed with what looked like fine white gravel by an island girl wearing a wet bikini and dripping mittens. She walked barefoot, on tiptoe, in decorous silence, and even the tiny bows on her bikini looked delicate to me, asking to be tugged. Buddy looked baked and iced, like an enormous sugar-coated pastry.

"This is Mariko. She's half Japanese and half popolo," Buddy said. "Every seventh of December she has an uncontrollable urge to bomb Pearl Bailey."

"Not true," said Mariko in the squeaky, grinning voice of local girls that still set my teeth on edge.

"Salt scrub," he explained. "She's another tool of my lust."

She just laughed and went on coating him with salt.

"Recognize this table? It sure has seen plenty of action."

He showed no interest in the papers I had brought.

"If I cared about that stuff, would I have left it at the hotel for everyone to read?"

This seemed to be his way of saying that he knew what I had done. Now I was sorry I had not read the whole lot and studied it for its fantasy and invention.

"Just toss it."

Had he forgotten the self-serving fictions he had placed in the Pending file? Only a writer like me could be so concerned, and I was perhaps the more obsessive for being unable to write myself. So I had become a more intense listener and snooper — niele, as the Hawaiians said. Nosy.

Now the girl stood aside and a young man hosed off the clinging salt slush, spraying it from Buddy's skin. Sludge and coarse salt and water splashed to the blue-tiled floor of the lanai.

"That's the old me," Buddy said, sitting up, looking pink and peeled. "I'm exfoliated."

"Finish," the girl said. "Time for massage."

"This is the part I like best," Buddy said. "Hula hands."

At that moment I had a vivid glimpse of a man his age in a soaked raincoat hurrying in wet shoes down the Strand on a winter-dark afternoon to join a mass of sodden people jamming themselves into the entrance of a tube station smelling of damp newspapers to begin the stifling trip back to a clammy house. Then the vision passed. It made me more attentive to Buddy, who had tucked his towel together like a pareu and was entering his house, followed by the pretty girl.

The young man with the hose said, "Buddy mentioned the hotel. You connected with the Hotel Honolulu?" He smiled. Something was happening behind his eyes, a memory surfacing and glazing them.

Most of the people I knew at the hotel, both locals and visitors, were essentially undomesticated. They hated questions, because a question required an answer that forced them to think; usually the process of thought convulsed them and produced nothing more than a grunt. I became used to silences as replies, or talk so slow as to have no meaning. This man surprised me by saying something more.

"Because I hear some amazing things about that place, man."

"I work there." I didn't want to encourage him by seeming too interested, though I was struck by his using the word "amazing." "But nothing ever happens at the Hotel Honolulu."

Glancing around, the instinctive head-swivel of a cautious bird just before it pecks, he said, "Want to burn a fat one?"

"I'll pass."

Dropping the sprayer he had used to wash the salt off Buddy, he approached me and lit a chubby joint. He sucked and gasped and said, "That place rocks."

I smiled again. Amazing? Rocks? I wondered what he knew of the old seedy hotel on the back street in Waikiki where I worked. The doubt on my face must have been obvious. It made him energetic.

"There's this surfer, Cody, a real gnarly dude. He rides the big waves out at Waimea, came eighth in the Eddie Aikau. Like, he was drinking at the bar, the Paradise Bar — "