Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

She sat smoking in her ridiculous dress, in stiletto heels, her stiff, dry, dull-colored bunches of hair askew and sometimes spiked like a sea urchin. People sized her up as a hooker instantly — well, that was the whole point of the dress, subtlety being another time waster in this business. And she was impolite, not to say rude, but the fact was that every minute counted, for she was rude the way an air-traffic controller might be rude. Even the way she walked in long strides was tick-tock, tick-tock, marking time.

"What if they want to touch you?" I was thinking of the other day, the Japanese man reaching for her breasts.

"I don't care what they want. I'm in charge."

A local man had been arrested for using a stun gun on hookers, and soldiers beat them up, and now and then they were murdered — invariably knifed. Jasmine was too professional to talk about any of this; she knew it, so there was nothing to discuss. Two months after arriving in Honolulu she spoke enough Japanese, a dozen words perhaps, to spend half an hour alone in a room with a naked businessman from Osaka. A dozen words were plenty, and the men were relieved to go.

Hurry hurry was the opposite of erotic, impatience and fuss confounded desire, but it seemed that Jasmine did not even know this, or if she did, she ignored it in the interest of a quick buck.

On a really good night she had six or seven men, and though I had to pay her almost as much as any one of them had, she gave me the details for the previous night, the five men.

The evening had begun with one of those irritating ones who made her walk to his car. She could not remember whether he was a white guy or where he came from, only that he was worried about the police, losing

his car, being seen. He kept going soft. She finally gave up, could not demand more money while he was soft, and he left, still soft.

A Japanese tourist, also nervous, was the second. When she said, "No, don't touch," he was startled, like a boy. She slipped the top of her dress down, exposing her breasts, sat beside him on the bed, and kept warning him to keep his hands off her. She manipulated him, and when he was finished he went out, trotting to the elevator his shirt untucked.

It was midnight. She stood before a mirror fixing her makeup, then headed to the street again, very tall in her stylish heels.

Something about the way the third man answered her told her that he was drunk. Within seconds she knew he was uselessly so — loud and boastful when she selected him from his group of friends, but quiet in the taxi. He was so subdued and dozy in the room that he fumbled with his money and she got almost two hundred in the beginning. There was no end. He could not finish. She was only afraid of his falling asleep, this big unmovable man, so she pushed him and talked sharply. She hated him for trying to kiss her.

An experienced man who knew what he wanted was helpful, though first-timers were more easily intimidated. The fourth customer knew the moves but was too explicit. He said, "I want your ass." She said, "No one gets my ass." And when he sighed, seeing her tearing open the condom wrapper, she said, "I do nothing without a condom."

He paid the extra. She lay and parted her legs and looked away, and winced when he entered her, as if she were being vaccinated.

The man had spit strings in his mouth and his eyes were glazed. Jasmine shoved hard at his groping hands. A moment later, when he seemed to be enjoying himself and taking his time, she said, "Okay, that's all," and he had to hurry to finish. "Bitch," he said as he turned to go. She was so vicious in reply, the man stepped quickly through the door.

After that, two soldiers approached her in the street. They weren't in uniform, but she knew they were military from their haircuts and the position of their tattoos — they could be concealed by a T-shirt — and their shoes, which were too heavy, too shiny. They were insistent.

"One at a time," she said.

But they both wanted to go. One yanked up his shirt and pushed his belt down. She read on his lower belly, Ball Till I Fall.

They wouldn't go separately, so she turned them down. Two men were dangerous, needing each other more than they needed her. Anyway, it was weird and they were soldiers and she was wary of watchers.

The last john of the night, this one at around four A.M., was a man of about fifty who never said a word. Probably foreign, but he made a fuss about the money by sighing and grunting. He, too, tried to kiss her. She said, "I don't kiss," and "Don't touch me there," and "That hurts."

"This is a waste of time."

She was talking to me, trying to be tough again, the way fearful people pretend. She wanted more money to go on talking. I thought: People call what she did sex, but what she did was whatever was the opposite of sex, and beyond nakedness, something skeletal, just money in a hand so bony it looks like a claw.

No one knew who she was or where she was from, nor would she tell me, except to say it was on the mainland. No name, utterly anonymous, probably not more than twenty-something, yet she stood for whatever particular fantasy was in the grateful man's mind.

Jasmine wanted nothing more than money. When she asked for more from me she became unconvincingly flirtatious. But she had already told me too much. I said, "I've never paid for sex."

"Men don't pay me for sex," she said. "They pay me to go away."

On one of the last mornings the hooker Jasmine ate breakfast in the hotel's coffee shop — soon after that, I never saw her again — Buddy Hamstra said to me, "Look at that woman. She's outrageous." I glanced at Jasmine in her white slinky dress, and Buddy said, "No, her," and nodded at a slim, delicate-featured woman, about sixty or so, moving toward a table, looking graceful and patient. The new flower man, Palama, Amo Ferretti's replacement, was doing the lobby arrangement, sorting stalks of heliconia and bird of paradise.

"Mrs. Bunny Arkle." It sounded like one word to me, Bunnyarkle, and from then on I never thought of her without imagining both names. But this woman could have had many more names. She had been married four times.

She was not local. She was from California, no one knew where. She had come to Hawaii with her first husband, a stockbroker, and decided the place was for her. They bought a house on Black Point, even then an expensive address.

"She's having her place repainted, so she's going to be with us for a few weeks," Buddy said.

"Where's the stockbroker?"

"She ditched him years ago, pretty soon after she first got here."

What I had taken to be the whole story was merely the opening detail, of hardly any consequence, except that Mrs. Bunny Arkle, the woman from nowhere, was now resident in a big house on Black Point. When I pressed him, Buddy muttered that he had heard that Mrs. Bunny Arkle had been raised somewhere in the South by her ambitious but hard- up mother, who had introduced her to the stockbroker and told her how to please a man.

"She had a pretty torrid affair with one of the Coulter heirs — lots of land on the Big Island. Divorced the stockbroker. Huge settlement. Kept the house. She sort of worked out of there, you might say. Coulter's wife got wind of the business. Killed herself and cursed them in her suicide note."

"That sounds like the end of the affair."

"In a funny kind of way it was the beginning, and it made the whole affair serious. Coulter married her after that. When they divorced — the dead wife's curse had worked — Mrs. Bunny Arkie got a chunk of property. Later on, it was rezoned for mixed use, commercial and residential. A hotel developer bought it and built a resort. Part of Mrs. Bunny Arkle's payment was in shares. Beachfront. The woman was instantly wealthy."