Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

Buddy's children and their families started dropping in, always asking Buddy about his health. They seemed puzzled, if not disappointed, when he said, "I feel like a kid again." They had heard about Uncle Tony and Evie, and they discovered that Pinky had taken over the big downstairs bedroom (once Melveen's), where she now slept. Bula urged Buddy to get rid of them. Whatever his children wanted, Buddy suspected the opposite had to be preferable. To make his point, he crammed a twist of dog shit in Bula's hair dryer again. It stank like a rude reply when it was switched on.

Pinky ignored them. She was happier, less moody, less demanding; the arrival of her sister had changed her disposition. Pinky and Buddy had been sleeping apart for some time. "Him snore." "She farts." Neither was true. Buddy brooded over his impending surgery, hating the thought that everyone assumed the operation would be a failure. Evie's visits cheered him up. Almost every night she knocked. "No can sleep, meesta."

Buddy was always reminded of a small animal — desperate, devious, watchful, wild, pretending to be tame because the thing was so hungry — the impression he had once had of Pinky, in Manila, when Uncle Tony and Auntie Mariel had chaperoned her. Eager to please, crouching over him, Evie was smooth, ratlike in a nice way, Buddy thought, a nibbling rodent. Afterward, as Buddy lay smiling, she pleaded with him to let Uncle Tony stay. Instead of saying yes outright, he took pleasure in tormenting her with his apparent indecision.

Was Pinky aware of Evie's nighttime comings and goings?. If she knew anything, she did not show it. She was indulgent with the girl, more like an aunt than a sister.

Uncle Tony washed Buddy's car and swept the driveway. He had a love of objects he could oil or polish. He rearranged the garden tools in the garage, hanging them on hooks. He sorted screws and nails in old coffee cans. Sometimes he raked the portion of beach that fronted Buddy's house.

Buddy's children hated Uncle Tony for his tidy habits and his having become a self-appointed odd-job man whose fussing gave him access to the house that bordered on ownership. You had to ask him where anything was these days. "I get for you," the man said, as a caretaker might. A change came over the household, as when the Malanut family had moved in, over the period when Buddy had pretended to be dead. The big table was set differently: Buddy in his usual seat at the head of it, with Pinky and Evie on either side of him, so he looked like a polygamous island chieftain, rich in wives, fat and fortunate, presiding over his board, holding his belly. Uncle Tony was nearby. When they were at the house, Bula, Melveen, and

the others sat at the far end of the table, farther from Buddy than they wished to be, displaced by Pinky and her family.

Now and then, Buddy invited me to witness this spectacle.

"No can sleep, meesta," Evie murmured at Buddy's door not long after that, but instead of crawling into bed with him, she stayed fully clothed, upright in a chair, next to the narrow table.

"Want a massage? That there is my massage table." Evie said, "I want to find my father."

"Your father is dead, honey. Pinky said so."

"No. Father of Pinky dead. Same mothei different father."

Did that explain Pinky's seeming like an auntie? "Where is he?"

"In America somewhere," Evie said, and pointed vaguely with her fingei as though America were a distant fabled land. "Please, you help me."

A woman who pleaded for help could make herself useful in her desperation, but why was Evie so unwilling? They were a demanding family. And within days Pinky was asking for a ticket so her brother Bing could come from Manila.

"What if I don't give him a ticket?" Buddy asked.

"Evie den go back."

That proved Pinky knew that he was sleeping with Evie. But Buddy did not feel pressured. This was all a cynical arrangement. Just as

cynically, he gave Pinky the ticket — and Pinky was happy, and Evie more affectionate. Uncle Tony continued to be intrusively helpful.

Now there was only Evie's father to find. Buddy repeated his promise to assist Evie in her search, for now she was an eager student in bed, open to any suggestion; just a hint from Buddy and she was at work on him. No longer was Buddy anxious about Pinky's jealousy or her threats.

Although she still nagged him about finding her father, Buddy was so happy with Evie he did not wonder why. Had he wondered, he would have found the answer downstairs, where every night Uncle Tony slept with Pinky and sometimes sneaked down the hall to tutor Evie. And when the brother Bing arrived, he was accompanied by Auntie Mariel. "Uncle Tony wife" was what she claimed. But Auntie Mariel and Bing were lovers, though Bing had his eye on Evie.

Buddy had no idea. He sat at the head of the table, smiling, with the five new members of his household on his left and right. Often when he was asleep he heard the rub of muffled footsteps on the floorboards and imagined busy mice, the sort that chewed holes in the screens.

"There was once this young girl named Mahina — after the moon — about your age, who hated her stepfather," Buddy said, in just that storytelling way, after a meal one night. He was seated, as usual, at the head of the table, Pinky and her relations on either side. I was at the far end, marveling at Buddy's poise — and taking courage from him, too, for here was a man, a multimillionaire ("multi-eye"), sixty-seven years old, who recklessly surrounded himself with strangers. But, then, he had always appeared to me like a rock, a slippery rock in the sea, to which many people were trying to cling, the very embodiment of this Hawaiian island.

"Ihe stepfather gave Mahina love, but not enough," Buddy said. "He gave her money, but not enough. He gave her clothes, but not all of them fit the girl. She wanted more, and she wanted the truth — to find her real father."

The stepfather often told how he had received a pair of expensive gloves one Christmas, and how the sight of the gloves made him laugh. Here Buddy paused, waiting for someone at the table to ask, "Why did the man laugh?" When the question came, Buddy explained that the man had a hook where his right hand should have been, and only two fingers on his left hand.

"What was left of the man trembled like jelly at the sound of a lawnmower," Buddy said.

The tip of the man's hook was so sharp he called it "my nail." He gaffed fish with it; he poked holes in the wall; he sank it into an overhead beam and hung on it; he stabbed papers with it; sometimes he accidentally snagged it on a cushion, or someone's pants, and tore through the fabric with a vicious swipe. The hook replaced his hand, but it was also a weapon. Little did the girl realize the man was her dearest friend.

Mahina's natural mother, a tall watchful woman, designed her own shapeless clothes and wrote poems. She had run off with an Episcopal priest, who in marrying her had lost his congregation. He sold insurance now. Mahina had traced her, found her mother's house, and was admitted by the hunted-looking former priest. Her mother acted intruded upon. She scowled and said, "Sometimes it's better not to look," and sent Mahina a poem about a nosy little girl in which this statement was repeated.

Although she refused to reveal the name of Mahina's birth father, Mahina discovered what it was.

Her birth father was just a name, but a nice name. Her stepfather was a damaged man, and the sharp silver hook stuck on his arm stump frightened her, trapped her, and made her think her stepfather was cruel. How she hated the man's gloating over his handicap, brandishing the dangerous hook beak.

I have a real father, Mahina thought, and sometimes said it. And, My real father is just like me.