Paul Theroux: Hotel Honolulu

"You never told me that."

"It was too crazy." She remembered something else. "He say he have a bad back."

That one detail, the so-called "White House position," everyone knew about Kennedy, if you knew about Kennedy at all. Though Puamana was innocent in an island way when she met him, and was an attentive mother, that one-night stand seemed to corrupt her. When she drifted into prostitution, Buddy took a greater interest in the little girl, Sweetie, and for a time she became his hanai daughter under the loose adoption system of the islands.

Buddy told me this story nearly thirty years later, after I had fallen in love with Sweetie and we'd had a child of our own. Sweetie wanted to call her Taylor, Brittany, or Logan. Logan? But I suggested Rose, and Sweetie agreed, though she didn't know it was the name of the child's paternal great-grandmother.

The book of mine the Hawaiian staff called "hybolic" for its pretentious size — all them big words — was the Penguin edition of Anna Karenina, which I kept near me my first months at the Hotel Honolulu so I could stick my nose in its pages for oxygen. Hawaii was a sunny, lovely place, but for an alien like me it was no more than an empty blaze of sunburn until I found love.

The problem with my plump Penguin was its unconcealable bulk, and it was much plumper for having swelled up in the damp air. All books fatten by the sea.

I sat and studied those big kindly waves rolling toward Waikiki, slowly rising from the smooth sea, dividing themselves into ranks, gathering shape near the shore to whiten in peaks before sloping and softening, just spilling and dying, declining in a falling off of bubble soup and draining into the drenched sand. It was as though the whole event of each separate wave had started when a great unseen hand far from shore had cuffed the ocean, shoving the water into motion, creating waves, a study of beautiful endings.

My Tolstoy was regarded as a handicap and an obvious nuisance crying out for bantering mockery. "What you gonna do with that thing?"

"That gonna keep you real busy." "More bigger than the Bible," Keola said one day before setting down a lawn sprinkler so casually that its spray slashed the walls of my office and wet me through the window. The book, too, was doused, and swelled some more, and with acute curvature of the spine stayed fatter even after its pages had dried.

I said to Keola, who was watering the clusters of torch ginger by the pool wall, "A man goes to the doctor for a verdict about his illness. 'How sick am I?' he asks. The doctor says, 'Let me put it this way. Don't start any long books."

In grinning querying confusion and saying "Eh?" Keola turned to face me, playing the hose, wetting me and my book. He was a simple soul who sometimes yanked the hooked stinger out of a centipede's tail, and with the centipede in his mouth, he would smile at a stranger, parting his lips to allow the centipede to slip out and creep along his dusky cheek. "Dis what the devil look like." Keola had found Jesus.

The hot days passed in Waikiki and already I was sick of hearing "Pearly Shells" and "Tiny Bubbles" and "Lovely Hula Hands." I was still single and celibate in those early days, and still believed that I was starting anew, at an age when nothing seemed new. I was Rimbaud, clerking and sweating in Abyssinia. I had rejected the writing life. Writers who had abandoned writing to busy themselves in other affairs were my patron saints: Melville, Rimbaud, T. E. Lawrence, Salinger, Tolstoy himself. Now and then, Buddy showed up to discuss a hotel matter. One day it was to find a way of getting the old TV actor Jack Lord into the hotel once a week

("free food and beverage") so that Madam Ma, our resident journalist, could mention this fact in her newspaper column. People might visit just to be in the same room with the former star of Hawaii Five-O. But Lord, a reclusive sort, refused to show. Buddy said, "Tom Selleck has an interest in the Black Orchid, but George Harrison lives on Maui. That's a dynamite column item. 'Beatle Dines at Hotel Honolulu."

"What have we got to offer him?"

We were eating purple gluey poi and fatty kalua pig and scoops of cold macaroni. Buddy was chewing and smiling. Like Vronsky, he had a tightly packed row of white teeth, but he had Oblonsky's problems.

"I was thinking of an all-you-can-eat buffet," Buddy said, licking poi from his fingers, and without taking a breath added, "Don't you get a headache reading books like that?"

"I'd get a headache if I didn't."

At that time, in the early days, I was still lusting for Sweetie, waiting for an opportunity to take her on a date — I did not want to be obvious and felt awkward wooing an employee. To be oblique I asked Buddy about her mother.

"Puamana is the original 'Ukelele Lady," he said. "She started out as a coconut princess."

"I take it she's not too bright."

"You sound like you think that's a bad thing."

"She's probably illiterate."

"Books aren't everything. She's got mana, like her name. Spiritual energy." Buddy sniffed and said, "The longer you live here in Whyee, the more you'll see that a woman's low IQ can be part of her beauty."

"But your wife is smart."

"Stella's not my wife, she's my wahine. My fuck-buddy. In fact, I got woman trouble. Stella's going to kill me. I still think she's an amazing woman."

I wanted to tell him how he was a version of Oblonsky, just to see what he would say. But after lunch, walking from the dining room to the lobby, Buddy said, "Come here for a minute. I want you to look at something." He knelt by the pool and so did I, beside him. He said, "Do you see that dark thing on the bottom, near the drain?"

I leaned over and looked, and seeing nothing, leaned over more. As I did so, overbalancing, Buddy pushed me into the pool.

"You walked straight into that one!" Buddy said as I surfaced, thrashing in my heavy sodden clothes.

"Joker man," Lester Chen said as I passed by Reception, dripping

wet.

After that, whenever Buddy saw me he seemed to recall this incident at the pool. The memory was a wistful glaze in his eyes, and I could not help noticing a certain peculiarity of expression, a sort of suppressed radiance on his face and in his whole person. That was Oblonsky in Anna, when he was at lunch with Levin, eating oysters and talking about love and marriage and not divulging his woman trouble, the fact that he was having an affair with the French governess.

Around this time Keola said, "Jesus is Lord. I woulda been in big pilikia without Jesus." I read Levin's expression of faith: What should I have been and how should I have lived my life had I not had those beliefs, had I not known that one had to live for God and not for the satisfaction of one's needs. I should have robbed, lied and murdered.

Like Levin, Keola had found Jesus, and I was so moved by his faith that one day, checking his repair of the water fountain near the restrooms, I found myself inquiring into the nature of his belief and wondering at his passion.

"Jesus same like food. If you no eat, you go die," Keola said, giving the chrome nut on the fountain one last twist. "Marry for men and women. In Whyee we no want gay marry. Hey, I no mind gays. I forgive them, if they repent. Some people so stupid. Like, it one child, not one choice. It one human, not one monkey. I no tell these school what for teach. But that bull lie that we come from monkeys just another way of getting God out for you life. Try drink, boss."

I did, and the fountain's stream splashed my face and went up my

nose.

"That so good for you," Keola said.

Was I saved? Keola wanted to know. I said I had been baptized. Wasn't that enough?

He just laughed the mirthless pitying laughter of the born-again Christian. "You never save! You one sinner! Just reading book all the day, wicked book like that one."