Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"This guy I knew in the Philippines with the harem. Ever see a naked woman cooking? A naked woman ironing clothes? A naked woman scrubbing the floor?"

"A naked woman polishing a big mirror. That would be nice," Buddy said. "That's not in the book."

"The thing about Tahiti," Peewee said, "was that there were always girls available. They loved going off with older men. She looked after you, and you looked after her whole family."

"Samoa's the same," Buddy said.

"I once had a mother and daughter," Willis said. "Not at the same time, though."

"There'll never be anything like Japan after the war," Sandford said. "Look at the time," Buddy said. "Pinky's probably going nuts. Tough

luck."

At that moment, Rose entered the bar in her pajamas, carrying her teddy bear.

Buddy hid his face in the Malinowski book. Willis looked ashamed. The others slouched like bad boys, as they had when the older woman, Mrs. Bailey Nevins, had walked past. But this was worse.

Rose ignored them and came to me, and when Willis cleared his throat she looked at him in annoyance.

Willis's wife had left him years before and now lived in Nevada. Sandford's third wife had recently left him and was living in his Manoa house with a younger man. Peewee's wife had run off with another woman. Lemmo was a diabetic who had not enjoyed a functional erection

for ten years. Buddy and Pinky slept apart. She claimed he snored. Buddy had found a method for divorcing her that would not cost him much money, but she wouldn't sign the paper. As for me, Sweetie was bowling.

Rose said, "I can't sleep, Daddy."

Buddy and his friends looked ruined and old, like drunks who glimpse their faces in a mirror and are shocked by the corpse staring back — mirrors late at night are like a reminder of death. Just then, with a shout of vitality Buddy said that instead of going home we should head right then to Gussie L'Amour's out by the airport to watch women mud wrestle. On the way, he told us again about the island of Kaytalugi, and the women of his dreams.

"It must be true," he said. "It's in the book."

One night, without warning, Pinky crept into Buddy's bed fully clothed, moving against him so hard he could feel her sharp bones poking him like the edges of a broken basket. She smelled of onions, and gleaming on her teeth was a sourness, probably chewed fruit. Ihe very pressure of her body was an imploring question.

"So what do you want?" Buddy said, gasping because only one lung was working well.

Her breath was damp, and her tongue teased his ear. "lake my cloves off, Daddy."

Buddy loved smutty innuendo in her gluey accent. He knew her so well. It aroused him to pluck off her warm clothes, though he insisted she wear her high-heeled shoes. Then she did the rest, crawling over him. He listened with delight to the sighing sounds she made, a greedy woman at a great meal — he told himself — though perhaps overdoing the noise in order to impress him or to prove something.

When she was finished and wiping her sticky lips, making a smeary snail trail across her cheek with the back of her hand, she said, "I miss my sister."

So that was what she wanted. All along, the understanding had been that she would see him through his forthcoming operation — crank up his bed, bring him donuts, push his wheelchair. "I trust her because she's afraid of me," he had told me. He was convinced of that when she stopped mentioning her crazy murdersuicide plan for the perfect crime. She must have been afraid. She had slept on her own until the night of her sexual invitation when she said she missed her sister.

Buddy stalled until he saw a recent picture of her sister, quite a different face from the one in the picture-bride video two years before. She had been a gaunt doll-like girl with staring eyes. She was fuller-faced now, smiling, twinkly-eyed, about twenty or so, plump-breasted, with delicate fingers propping up her chin. Her name was Evie.

"I miss her night and day," Pinky said.

Song lyrics often accounted for her way of speaking.

Buddy laughed. "Hey, I want you to be happy. If you want to see your sister, get naked." He encouraged Pinky in this taunting way for several days, using her eagerness, liking the fact that he had something she wanted, the means to fly her sister to Hawaii. In the past she had been stoical and self-denying, and that irritated him. At last he said, "Okay, I'll send her a ticket."

But he said to me, "All air tickets are like lottery tickets. Anything can happen. I need hope — my surgery is coming up. And I'm jazzed by the idea of two pretty sisters in the house. Maybe nail them both."

I wondered politely whether Pinky would go along with something like that.

"She's so kinky she doesn't even know she's kinky."

How kinky was it that she was keeping Buddy at arm's length most of the time? She knew he was depending on her to get him through his operation. But his plan was to pension her off afterward — give her some money and send her back to Manila. "Then I'll have Evie," he told me.

Evie showed up a month later at the airport, Buddy and Pinky watching from among the families and tour greeters holding leis and signs.

"Who's that man with her?"

"Uncle Tony. He very nice man. Can wash you car."

Then Buddy remembered him from the ridiculous wedding, but the man had somehow grown much older and uglier. The long plane journey had turned him into a tramp, with a broken suitcase, a cardboard box, and two days' growth of beard. He saw Buddy and held his mouth open. Uncle Tony had paid his own fare, which made him freer and less controllable. Buddy reasoned that a man was much worse than a woman, for a man was naturally suspicious. This one seemed in just one toothy glance to know Buddy well. A woman, an auntie, would have been greedier, dependent, and so more pliable. On the way to the North Shore, Buddy sized the man up as incurious, stupid, selfish, hungry.

"You got any plans?" Buddy asked Uncle Tony.

"Maybe I wash you car." After that, speeding through Helemano, Uncle Tony squinted at the fields and said, "Fine-apples. Fine-apples. Fine- apples."

Seeing Buddy's house made Uncle Tony hungrier. He touched the furniture, he tapped the walls, he sniffed Buddy's leather armchair. Evie was plainly fearful, but she was joyful, seeing Pinky, and she brought out a new Pinky, the one Buddy had first met and married — smiling, girlish, bright-faced, willing. Evie, being younger, was more active, worked hard, talked less. She was so shy she ate with her head down — the sort of timidity that roused Buddy, filling him with desire.

Half promising, half threatening, Buddy managed to get Evie into his bedroom alone with surprising smoothness. And he understood her: for her, silence meant yes. He gave her money, told her he loved her. She was his. After Pinky had persuaded Buddy to pay for Evie's ticket, she stayed away from his bed, so Evie was all the more necessary. But there wasn't much to it, and anyway the sex was brief, and then she was back in her own room. She seemed invisible to Pinky and Uncle Tony.

Uncle Tony was small, knobby-faced, incomprehensible, furtive. He smiled far too much, but he was helpful, absurdly so, not to the others but to Buddy — opened doors for him, fetched the newspaper, brought him the ice bucket and tongs, even had a way of saluting, as though he might once have been a civilian worker at a military base in the Philippines. After meals, he carried Buddy's plate to the sink, but no one else's. Buddy was

uncomfortable with this attention, and at last became suspicious and wanted him to go. He suggested the man might leave.

"Evie like it here, but if you want we go, okay," Uncle Tony said.

It was a small price to pay for Evie, who now made regular visits to Buddy's room. She lost all her shyness and became nimble and sniffly and pliant when Buddy turned off the light. He soon stopped hinting at Tony's return.