Paul Theroux: Hotel Honolulu

"The man who wrote this book thought the same thing, funnily enough."

"Howlie guy."

"I think you could say Tolstoy was a howlie. Anyway, he found Jesus, like you."

"It more better if you born again. Get baptize, like this." He flicked water on my face. "Take da plunge."

Seeing Kawika passing by with a five-gallon bucket of sticky rice in each hand, Keola winked and flexed his arms body-builder fashion and called out, "Hey, Rambo!"

When Rimbaud was in Harar, he wrote home: I'm weary and bored.

. Isn't it wretched this life I lead, without family, without friends, without intellectual companionship, lost in the midst of these people whose lot one would like to improve, and who try, for their part, only to exploit me. . Obliged to chatter their gibberish, to eat their filthy messes, to endure their treachery and stupidity! But that isn't the worst. The worst is my fear of becoming a slob myself, isolated as I am, and cut off from any intellectual companionship.

But I liked Keola's euphemism for baptism — da plunge.

Trey the bartender said, "You think Samoans are tough? Only when they're in a gang. One on one, Solies are cowards. They're big but they're not tough. Remember that."

He squirted soda water from the bar dispenser into my drink and it soaked my chin.

Peewee the chef said, "Popolos sink in the pool," using the local word for black. "Ask any lifeguard. Something about popolos — they don't float."

"Brothers don't surf," Trey said.

Such talk made me wonder why I had picked this job, and it sent me back to my novel and a denser, subtler world: Vronsky contemplating, in a poignant and painful moment, Anna's jealousy. He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had picked, in which he found it difficult to discover the beauty that made him pick and destroy it. And yet he felt that though when his love was stronger, he could, had he wanted it badly, have torn the love out of his heart, now when, as at this moment, it seemed to her that he felt no love for her, he knew that the bond between them could not be broken.

"That hybolic book keeping you real busy," Keola said.

I needed the novel as sustenance. Such paradoxes as I was reading calmed me here, especially when Buddy was restless and needed company. He would demand that we go to his favorite strip club, the Rat Room, where he sat drinking rum at the edge of the mirrored stage and encouraged women to squat in front of us. He slipped five-dollar bills into their garters and gaped between their legs, nudging me.

"Look. Abe Lincoln without his teeth."

Back in my room I read Levin's reflection: If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has consequences, or reward, it is not goodness either.

The novel continued to be my oxygen, and while I worked up the courage to make love to Sweetie, I usually fled to the beach, where I could hide in a folding chair, reading in the sunshine as waves broke on the sand, feeling I was fulfilling Lytton Strachey's dream of reading between the paws of the Sphinx. Now and then I would look up and see the brown bums of beach sleepers turned upward, the women — but only the skinny ones — forever tugging and adjusting their bathing suits, smoothing lotion onto their arms, sitting cross-legged or walking with that odd climbing gait in the sand and looking duck-butted. The waves laying the shore, the sparkle of sun in the distance, a whole sea surface of glitter. On the beach everyone is a body, no more or less than flesh, indistinguishable one from another, like a great pale tribe of hairless monkeys. I found myself staring at the small tidy panel between the women's legs, staring in fact at nothing but space, for there was nothing to see, nothing specific, just a wrinkle, a labial smile in the smoothness, for a bikini bottom was both a vortex and a vanishing point.

Sometimes, staring this way, I found myself yearning for love. And yearning, I dozed. I lay sleeping on the hot sand, snoring on my back.

Bliss.

I always woke drooling and sweating, my back coated with sand grains, like a castaway, someone actually washed up on the beach, feeling distant. Yet I was more rested and alert than if I had been in bed: the heat was like a cure. The world was far away. I was a new man here in this simple, incomplete place, just an old green volcano in the middle of the sea. I was trying to make a life, but there was something so melancholy and unreal about solitude in the sunshine that it made me feel fictional.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way. Levin would not have believed it possible three months earlier that he could go quietly to sleep in the circumstances he now found himself.

Thus Levin, rusticated on his farm.

I was on the beach reading Anna Karenina one day and heard singing, a vigorous hymn, and I looked up and saw a procession making its way among the Japanese sunning themselves, and the children playing, and the men selling ice cream. Keola led the procession, singing loudly, with a woman in a white dress wearing a lei and flowers in her hair. Others followed, some people I knew from the hotel: Puamana, Sweetie, Kawika, Peewee, Trey and the rest of Sub-Dude, Marlene and Pacita from Housekeeping, Wilnice and Fishlow from the dining room, and Amo Ferretti, who did the flowers. There were others I did not yet know -

Godbolt the painter from the Big Island, Madam Ma holding hands with her son, Chip, and Buddy's grown kids, Bula and Melveen — each of them recording this event in his own way.

Keola walked into the surf, taking the woman in the white dress by the arm, and he bent her backward and immersed her, all the while shouting a prayer. The woman was soaked and joyful, spouting water and raising her arms.

I watched, transfixed. This baptism gave the whole island a meaning. Now it seemed like a real place, a natural font in the middle of the ocean, built for baptisms. Although I did not in the least believe in any feature of this ritual, I was moved, because they believed. I beheld a powerful expression of faith. I walked nearer, my forefinger in my book, marking my place. A sudden muscular wave knocked me down hard and battered me, snatched my book, and rolled me into the surf. I struggled for air, tried to right myself, plunged in after Tolstoy, but I was tipped unsparingly again by a new wave, was rolled again, and my power to save myself was taken from me. More waves moved my whole body up and down before pushing me onto the sand. All this happened in the seconds it took to baptize that woman. My plump ruined book, more buoyant than me, danced in the foam of the shore break.

In the beginning, when I had asked Sweetie, "Do you want to make love?" and she had said, "Part of me does," I took this for delicacy, not humor. I was patient until all of her wanted it. Later I would beckon her to room 409, and we would make love with the sexual suddenness she gaspingly called a hurricane fuck. She had a beautiful laugh, full of desire and willingness. That we might be caught in the act was part of the excitement for her, and her excitement took hold of me. We did have neighbors, for the hotel's compartments were dense and busy.

The faded green plantation-style bungalow the height of a coconut tree that you saw from the street, with a sign saying Hotel Honolulu, was an optical illusion. The original building that Babe Ruth had stayed in he would still recognize. But Buddy Hamstra had built a squat eighty-room tower above and behind it. So what looked like a charming island inn with a swinging sign and a monkeypod tree in front was in fact a fairly ugly thirty-five-yearold hotel, twelve stories high, with a roof garden (potted palms, patio furniture, cork tiles) where guests seldom went, because it was the thirteenth floor. You understood the Hotel Honolulu only when you got inside.