Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"I am getting on with my life," she said whenever I asked her how she was. As for Chip: "I feel great compassion for him." She also said, "I know where my son is every minute. That's a mother's prayer."

Was I imagining that this tone, which bordered on comedy, suggested that she was relieved by the outcome? She surely didn't seem like a woman whose lover had been murdered by her son, who was doing twenty years for the crime. There was a liberated look in Madam Ma's eyes, and even the way she walked and dressed showed definite confidence. This was not the demeanor of a woman whose son had been jailed unfairly.

I saw her every day, crossing the lobby, eating on the lanai, drinking in Paradise Lost. We fed her, we cleaned her room, we looked after her. No, I was not imagining it: Madam Ma was more relaxed, like someone for whom a problem has been solved, whose life has become simpler and less stressful.

My daughter reflected this change. Rose, too, was calmer. She no longer contradicted Madam Ma, or competed with her, or cried after they quarreled. There were no more quarrels. Instead of offering friendship, they made a wiser and more prudent offering: they gave each other space.

Though I doubted there was any such thing as closure, Madam Ma called it that. I didn't ask why. I was grateful for the peace that had descended on the hotel. But in that serenity I began to reflect on what had happened, and to wonder at the paradoxes — the death that had not been a death, the gay murder that had nothing to do with gayness, the rape

that wasn't a rape, and now the imprisonment that seemed to satisfy everyone, even the prisoner's mother.

Madam Ma was such an enigma, so calculating and insincere, I knew she would not tell me anything truthful. There was nothing new in her column, but there was news from prison. As the months passed, another story came out, for Chip had a succession of cellmates, and Halawa Prison was a revolving door for villains, and the whispers reached the Hotel Honolulu. A sense of grievance makes a person talkative, and Chip was aggrieved. The kitchen staff were the first to hear it, for the lower a person was on the payroll, the closer they were to the ground, and the more they heard. At the lowest level — Keola manhandling the dumpster — such people had access to the most detailed information. Smoke was just smoke to me, but my workers knew whether it was a fire set by rivals or Teamster arson, and they could whisper every turn of the plot. They knew the truth about Chip.

"What is it?" I asked.

Keola said, "Insecticide."

What a dark and beautiful way of summing it up.

From an early age, Madam Ma had dressed Chip as a girl. Her husband, Harry Ma, had objected — it was one of the reasons for their divorce, but of course it was just what Madam Ma had wanted. Chip was born in the sixties, and long hair was in fashion. Madam Ma put him in sundresses. She brushed his hair and used cosmetics on his face. Chip was her dolly.

This is what Chip told his cellmates, pleading for understanding.

Early on, the Ma family had an apartment in Makiki, but Madam Ma could not cook and would not clean. She hired people, but she was too demanding. They never stayed, and because she frightened them with her bullying they left abruptly, without giving notice, meaning to be stealthy and also causing the greatest inconvenience. When Madam Ma became established on the Advertiser, she made a deal with Buddy and got a cheap rate for room 504. In return she would mention the hotel in her column whenever possible and entertain travel writers from the mainland in our bar and dining room.

Chip was still in school when they lived in the squalid seclusion of the apartment in Makiki. At night, Madam Ma had dressed her son as a little girl — overdressed him, that is, for crossdressing is never subtle or understated. There was no man in the house — Harry Ma was a Filipino Chinese for whom Hawaii was a steppingstone. He was now in Las Vegas. In Makiki, in bed, chain-smoking and sipping her vodka tonic, Madam Ma had made little Chip practice curtseying and asking nicely for his food. The plate of food, his dinner, lay on Madam Ma's lap.

All the repulsive details had the ring of truth: food in the bedroom, Madam Ma in bed, cigarette ash on the pillow, smoke in the air, crumbs and stains on the sheets, Madam Ma's bare thighs propping up the dinner

plate, the little boy dressed as a girl having to ask for his meal in a certain way, using a specific formula. This lasted years. For periods Chip stopped eating altogether, or was bulimic, sticking a finger down his throat and barfing in the toilet.

They moved into the hotel. The androgyny of the late sixties and early seventies still served them — unconventional son, hippie mother. Buddy Hamstra teased the boy but loved him. He seemed to understand the boy was damaged. At the age of fifteen, when he was in Punahou School, he was still sleeping with his mother — actually sleeping. Buddy knew that from Housekeeping. In the Hotel Honolulu we knocked and turned the knob at the same time, and Madam Ma was as careless about locking the door as she was about keeping the room tidy. Because Madam Ma and Chip had so accepted their oddness, they did little to hide it. Many times the staff glimpsed them together, just snuggling.

The rest of it — that his mother dressed him in panties and put a ribbon around his neck and made a ponytail of his long hair and told him to massage her feet and paint her toenails — all that came out in prison. In that role he was aroused. "What are we going to do with that?" Madam Ma said, slipping on a pair of silk gloves. "I can't leave you that way." In the beginning Chip was just confused and looked away, but later Madam Ma learned to say, "I know what you want," and Chip went to her for relief. It had never stopped, even after he had taken a lover, even — though he didn't know it — after his mother had taken a lover. So Chip told his ceilmates. He was not complaining. What he could not understand, and what infuriated him, was that Amo Ferretti had taken his place.

Madam Ma was forbidden to visit the prison, but on Family Day he was sometimes visited by Ferretti's widow. Had Chip also been conducting an affair with her all along? If so, it explained everything.

The coconut wireless dispersed these details to the island at large, and soon Madam Ma's column was canceled. I did not have the heart to kick her out of the hotel. What interested me was that she stopped writing just as (you would have thought) she had something to write about. I saw her in Paradise Lost, sipping a pisco sour, and I thought: Who will tell her story? And how? And, Is there more?

"It's like that delightful evening you spend with your best friend and his wife in their cozy house, eating a home-cooked meal, and you think, Isn't it great to have a marriage like this!" Benno Nevermann, a visitor from Naples, Florida, said to me. "And then your friend, whom you took to be a wise old man, takes you aside and starts whispering about a girl he has fallen in love with."

I said, "And you're disillusioned and you think, What a fool."

"You're a fool and he's a bigger fool, and the whole bottomless world seems absurd and disloyal."

Nevermann was a good listener, which made him a more interesting talker. He had the irony of a true cynic, and a humorous way of expressing it. He traveled alone. He was a reader who usually took a book to the beach. Never a novel — he liked reading history, "delving into the past."

But when I inquired, he said he was not a war buff, and all he said of Pearl Harbor was "We trusted the Japanese!" and that he had no intention of visiting the Arizona Memorial: "It's too sad."

Nevermann's candor made me forthcoming. I said, "My version of your marriage story is that at the end of my visit, when I'm thinking, What a happy couple, the wife tells me pointedly how long it's been since her husband made love to her."