Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

The suddenness of her fingers reaching him where he was most tender made him sigh, but she drew back, startled by its bigness, as though it were an accident. He took her hand and clutched it, pleading, hand to hand.

He leaned forward to beg her, and kissed her instead in a begging way. Her lips tasted grapy, from the flavored water.

"No," she was saying into his mouth.

She moved away from him on the bed, so that there was now a shadow between them.

"Not now," she said.

There was desire in her voice. Lionberg knew that she wanted it as much as he did, but that she was being wise, because there was something all wrong about this, the timing especially, and he loved her for that.

She touched him where he was hard and raw and said, "I can't let you go like that."

Twisting herself in an unhesitating motion, she moved her head down his chest while gripping the raw stick of his penis with her hand. When she licked it and put her mouth on it, it was as if she were medicating it, coating it with warm ointment, a kind of salve she was administering with her tongue and lips, soothing it softly as she moved her head, her long hair tumbled over Lionberg's thighs. She seemed to concentrate more and held him harder as he let out a small cry, and then she used her hands, pumping the last of him into her mouth.

"I've dreamed of sex like that," he said in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.

From the way she moved against him, he could tell she was laughing. She said, "That's not sex."

He drew her up, kissed her smeared lips, and said, "I like you, honey," and left the room, striding into the darkness without looking back.

"Roy-Boy, where's my gal?" Buddy Hamstra was roaring into the phone. "I'll bet you'll be glad to see me!"

From the peculiar crackle Lionberg knew that he was using his cellular phone, in his car, driving up the steep hill on the switchback, where the reception was always bad.

Lionberg shook his head. Soon after that — sooner than Lionberg wanted — Buddy was at the gate in his BMW, honking in mock impatience. He kept honking gleefully even after Lionberg had opened the gate.

A stuffed animal, bigger than life size, a dog as big as a man, sat upright in the back seat, grinning foolishly.

Seeing Lionberg's glance, Buddy said, "Wile E. Coyote."

"That's right," Lionberg said, though he had no idea.

"So where is she?"

Buddy still sat in the car. He wore a gold chain around his neck with a shark's tooth and Stella's wedding ring on it, aviator sunglasses, and a T- shirt lettered Life Guard. He seemed fatter each time Lionberg saw him. He was holding his cellular phone in one hand and a Mars bar in the other. He fooled, talked into the Mars bar, pretended to bite the phone, made a face,

and shoved half the candy bar into his mouth. With his mouth full, he shouted incoherently.

"I haven't seen her this morning," Lionberg said, speaking so faintly that he heard in his own voice something worse than mere reluctance. He had been dreading this moment like an amputation.

Buddy swallowed the mouthful of chocolate and yelled, "Hurry up,

Rain!"

Howling like that was something Lionberg would never have done — he winced at the sound of it — but the girl responded with a howl of her own. "Coming!" She appeared a moment later, breathless, smiling, carrying her small bag, looking beautiful. She is twenty-six years old, Lionberg said to himself, yet that explained nothing.

"Hi, uncle."

"You've got a plane to catch, toots."

Lionberg said, "Don't be late."

"It's not till tonight, one of these redeyes," Rain said. "But I want to buy some presents."

"We're having a plate lunch in town," Buddy said. Whenever he mentioned food, he sounded hungry.

"Thanks for everything," Rain said, and got into the car.

Buddy said, "Hey, Roy-boy, don't look so relieved to be alone." He laughed and eased the car through the gate in reverse, backing onto the road.

Lionberg was dumb, too stunned to speak. He wanted to leave the girl with a thought, with a gift, with a kiss anyway — he had not imagined it happening this quickly. He smiled until the car was out of sight, then listened hard. The sound of the receding car was the last live sound of the girl, like a sigh that becomes silence, a last expiring breath.

He closed the gate, feeling faint, and sensed that all his happiness had fled. A large cloud passed overhead. As always, the sunshine seemed to follow her. He went to his small telescope and caught them as they made the turn into Waimea Bay. He was briefly revitalized by the dazzle of sunlight on the car's windshield.

He stood alone in the empty house, listening for her, and was disturbed to hear nothing. He went to the guest house and sniffed impatiently in her room, trying to discern her odor. "That's not sex," he said in her voice, and was aroused again. The bathroom was still humid with her and held her presence. He pulled back the sheets as though unwrapping a ghost. The bedclothes were warm enough to retain her smell. He followed these fugitive scraps of her from object to object — the pillow, the towels, a long strand of hair in the sink — sniffing like a dog. Then he lay on the bed where she had lain and told himself that he was a savage, that he needed a fetish from her, hair and feathers, a rag of her underwear. He wanted her back. He asked himself, Is love a girl?

That night he ate alone, turning the pages of a rare book that had always pleased him when he dipped into it, In the Sargasso Sea, by Thomas Janvier. Tonight it bored him and seemed false, and he disliked himself for having been duped by it in the past.

After dinner he fell asleep in a chair, but when he went to bed he could not sleep. He knew why. The lighted clock on his side table told him that her flight was about to leave.

He called the airline, wishing to hear anything related to her, even flight information. "That flight has been delayed," a man said, striving to sound efficient. The new flight time was after midnight.

Dressing hurriedly, Lionberg was so desperate to be on the road that he set only one burglar alarm. He grazed the hedge at the gate — there would almost certainly be a scratch on the fender of his black car, from which the insignia and the Lexus name had been removed. Never mind the scratch on the paintwork. He saw it as a sacrifice and was proud to have a visible scar.

Outside his house he always felt he was on another planet. Tonight he thought, What is happening to me? The damp shoreline, the darkness of the pineapple fields, the lights and fences at Schofield Barracks, the empty freeway, then green lighted signs saying Airport and the clock on the airport tower, which told him he had time.

The delayed flight had been a reprieve. He simply wanted to give her the kiss he had been denied in the driveway that morning, to see her

again. He wanted her to see him, too — to show her that he had driven the forty miles in the dark.

Buddy was at the gate, sitting with his feet out, his hands on his big belly. He was drinking a Diet Coke.

"What are you doing here, you crazy bastard?" he said when he saw Lionberg.

"She forgot her hat."

It was the baseball cap he had worn when she first saw him, which had once been lettered The Plaza.

"Where is she?"

"On line. She's boarding."

Rain smiled with unmistakable gratitude when she saw Lionberg approach. She stepped out of line, stumbling against the boarding passengers.

Lionberg took her hand with desperate confidence and said, "I'm going to miss you, honey."

It was what he had wanted to say this morning, what he had come forty miles to say. He badly wanted to impress her.

"I'll miss you too."

He looked for meaning in her eyes and thought he saw what he wanted.