Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"Got a minute? Meet me upstairs. I want to show you something."

A little while later, I found him in his large bedroom, lying in his carved four-poster in front of a big-screen television set. He had a small, heart-shaped object in one hand and the remote-control switch in the other.

"Watch," he said, and worked the remote with his thumb.

Over the sound of romantic music came the title, Great Expectations.

"Is this by Charles Dickens?"

"The hell's that supposed to mean?" Buddy said. He had no idea.

On the screen, a young toothy Filipino woman, her shiny shoulders showing above her summer dress, was sitting in a large wicker chair.

My name is Isis Rubaga, but my friends call me Pinky. I like music, dancing, and reading. I love God and my family. Two sisters, four brothers. Mother. Father is passed on.

Offscreen, a whispery prompting voice said, And what sort of man would you like to meet?

A kind man. Age is not important. He can be thirty or even sixty, it does not matter. But a good heart, that is the most important thing.

The girl named Pinky smiled shyly as she talked, and she laughed each time she was asked a question. Though she was never at a loss for words, she was clearly nervous, but her nervousness and her laughter seemed to reveal a distinct innocence. She had big dark doe eyes, full lips, slightly protruding teeth, and rich black hair that tumbled onto her shoulders.

"Twenty-three years old," Buddy said. "She's a real coconut girl."

He was still in his big bed but had raised himself up a bit, and now he had a drink in his hand instead of the remote. Almost without an education, he preened himself on his ignorance the way others preened themselves on their erudition, believing that it licensed him in his recklessness. Without any knowledge of history, he was somehow able through his natural ruttishness to reinvent the complex and indulgent habits of an Eastern potentate, one of those Ottoman pashas, right down to holding court halfnaked in his sumptuous bedroom.

"I'm seeing her in Manila," he said. "And Stella approves, don't you, Mama?"

With that, he shook the heart-shaped object in his left hand.

"Her ashes," he explained, smiling, seeming to respond to words of encouragement to which I was deaf. "Reason being, coffin's empty."

The videotape was still playing — other girls, in frilly dresses, interviewed in the same wicker chair. They all looked pretty, but none was as young or as winsome as Isis "Pinky" Rubaga.

A few days before he flew to Manila, Buddy called me and said, "I'm giving a party. I want to borrow Peewee. You come too. It's just guys."

Underlying Buddy's boisterous sense of occasion was his innocent superstition that a loud sendoff with great food was a guarantee his trip would be a success. We closed the hotel kitchen early and I drove Peewee to the North Shore, where he set to work making Buddy's favorite meal: Peewee's signature Serious Flu Symptoms Chili, garlic bread, and Caesar salad. Dessert was haupia cake with fresh Big Island strawberries and hot fudge sundaes. Buddy's cronies were there — Sam Sandford, Willis, Sparky Lemmo, Royce Lionberg, and some others. Peewee spent most of the time serving the meal, while Buddy, uncharacteristically, made himself useful with the pepper mill.

"Fresh-ground pepper? Fresh-ground pepper?"

He suggested pepper on the chili, pepper on the salad, and be said that nothing was better on fresh strawberries than ground pepper. To please him — and it seemed we were always trying to please Buddy — we accepted his offers of fresh-ground pepper.

"That pepper is special," he said at the end of the meal. "You all know what peppercorns look like." He screwed the cap off the pepper mill and tapped a gray dusty substance onto the table. "Go ahead, taste it."

Peewee wet his finger, poked it, and put it on his tongue. He said, "Ashes."

"It's Stella!" Buddy said, and laughing — his laughter proved he was drunk — he showed us the heart-shaped container that had held her ashes. Empty.

A badge lettered Trainee was pinned to Pinky's dark green hotel uniform when she met Buddy for the interview in Manila. Interview? The idea was that she would spend a few days with him, including sleep with him. She was one of six possibles. If they hit it off, he would marry her and bring her back to Hawaii. "Pinky had the face of an angel," Buddy told me. "An angel."

"A friend of mine once said that your whole life is in your face," I had told him.

Looking at Buddy's face, you believed it. It was puffy and piratical, too big from food, lopsided with booze, blotchy with broken veins and grog blossoms, leathery from too much sun. He had wet, doggy eyes. His nose was a pickle. His joker's smile showed expensive crowns. He was only sixty-six but you knew when you saw him that he had gotten that face from overdoing it. He had tried everything. He had somehow survived the generation that drank and smoked too much. He had money and young friends. He was reckless enough to experiment with drugs, progressing from reefer to acid. For a while he took cocaine. But he was easily bored, even by drugs, and in the end he showed his age by overeating and drinking too much vodka. He was old at sixty, when I first met him. "I'm

not going to last forever," he said, meaning he felt he had only a few more good years left.

He was still recovering from the death of Stella. He missed her so badly he could deal with the pain only by joking about her, telling himself she was still alive, writing letters to her, or, as at his sendoff dinner, pretending that he had put her ashes in the pepper mill.

"I liked hearing her call my name," he said. "I wouldn't reply. I would just listen to her calling, 'Buddy! Buddy!"

Doubt and then alarm would enter her voice, which would falter when, getting no response, she realized that she was alone. Buddy would wait, in silence, then leave when he knew he was missed.

"Is that childish?" he asked.

"No, I don't think so." It was a lie, but it helped me understand the power he had over his friends. We wished him well, but also, knowing him was a spectator sport. What would he do next?

"I want to get married again," he said.

The video dating service had given him his first glimpse of Pinky. She was young. He feared older women. He mocked the idea of marrying a woman his own age, the way they walked, the way they looked. "Imagine me with a sixty-six-year-old woman!" Yet I felt such a woman would be just the sensible and kindly person he needed. But, "I want a doll," he said.

He wanted someone who had not yet begun to live, who had never left her island, much less left the Philippines. He wanted an entirely innocent girl, whom he intended to teach.

"All I want to do is fuck her and feed her fish heads."

Of the five other girls, he talked with three of them. Two were obviously unsuitable — they had children — and one was too old, at forty. The two remaining women he slept with. One said, "I am a nurse. I can help you." He was tempted by this, but she was rather plain. The other one bit him and scratched him when he made love to her. He objected. She said, "Men always like it." He wondered about her saying this and also thought she might be crazy.

Pinky showed up at his Manila hotel with her uncle and aunt. Uncle Tony ceremoniously unpinned her Trainee badge. "You won't need this, Pinky," he said. Auntie Marie! ostentatiously plumped Buddy's pillows. They said they would sleep on the floor of Buddy's hotel room, and after chatting for a while they actually bunked down, using sofa cushions. At midnight Pinky asked Buddy for some pesos. She gave her uncle and aunt the money.

"I tell them go buy Coca-Cola."

She made love shyly, but it was clear that she knew how to give pleasure. Afterward she said she'd had lovers before. But that was not so strange. Buddy did not expect miracles.