Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

There had always been some shouting and banging in the house, but now the place seemed violent and disorderly. Buddy shouted back, to assert himself over the nine adults, five small children, and their many pets. The worst sort of illness was the one that made a man visibly a spectacle, helplessly suffocating. Often the oxygen bottle did no good, and Buddy was left snorting at the plastic tube or blow-sucking into the face mask. All the relatives, his and Pinky's, stood by, watching with their mouths open as he fought for air.

When we were alone Buddy said to me, "They're waiting for me to

die."

Desperate to be included in his will because he looked doomed, they lacked the subtlety that might have strengthened their case. They were worse than obvious and kept appealing to him, demanding that he referee their grievances. When Bing put a nick in one of the doors of Bula's pickup truck, Buddy had to rule on the liability. When Uncle Tony left dirty dishes in the sink, Melveen said, "If you no talk to him, then I talk, and he no like it."

"They're my dishes!" Buddy said. "It's my kitchen!"

"What I say?" Melveen said, squinting, her tongue clamped in her

teeth.

Evie played loud music, but it wasn't the noise that was objectionable but the reason for it — to cover the sound of her lovemaking with Bing. The music was silenced. Evie said, "He not my brother." Before, when Evie had been discovered in bed with Uncle Tony, she had said, "He not really my uncle." And for all this sexual rotation, Pinky's family showed scabby symptoms of herpes and spoke, as Buddy did, of "flare-ups."

Buddy was asked to calm Pinky's family, but instead of sorting them out, he saw that he could promote greater uncertainty by doing nothing.

He allowed the chaos to continue, and it gave him more power.

For her supposedly wayward behavior, Buddy's family sniped at Pinky. "She after his money." "She bite him again." "She cuckaroach Stella jewelry." "She try kill herself." "She one lolo."

"Tony drank all the beer from the cooler, Dad," Bula said.

"It's my beer," Buddy said. He was annoyed that Tony drank it, but when had Bula bought any? Reflecting on this, Buddy concluded that he hated them both.

Finding Evie alone on the lanai one night, Buddy said, "How about you and me going upstairs?"

"Pinky you wife, not me."

"Pinky's in town tonight. You got no aloha for me?"

The sister refused. Buddy guessed that he seemed so feeble to her that she didn't feel she needed even to attempt the pretense of pleasing him. As was the case with many sick men he had known, he was already dead, as far as his household was concerned.

"We out for rice," Melveen said. Or it might be flour, sugar, cream crackers, potato chips, soda, Spam, corned beef, cookies, macaroni, tubs of poi, bundles of laulau — the staples. In the past, when Buddy had been well, and with a robust man's appetite, he had kept the kitchen well stocked. Now he ceased to care.

The quarrels continued, all of them petty, over sheets that were washed but not dried, leaky pipes, loud radios, mouse holes in the screens, sand tracked in from the beach, gecko turds which had the look of two- toned exclamation marks. "Someone stole my Boogie board." Bula's kids claimed that Uncle Tony swore at them. Aunt Mariel borrowed Melveen's house key and lost it. The house needed painting. There were never enough towels. "Who use all the t.p.?"

Uncle Tony said, "What we gonna do about the revetment?"

The rocks on the beach below the house had been tumbled apart by recent storms, and the house was in danger of being undermined by the tides. It was worth my driving the forty miles from Waikiki to hear the man utter that word.

Receiving no reply, Uncle Tony said, "How about the TV?"

Apparently the TV in the family room was broken, or perhaps the cable bill had not been paid.

"This Evie, she a slut like her sister Pinky," Melveen said.

"Pinky's your mother," Buddy said, to annoy her. Sometimes he stood in the doorway and watched them eating at the long dining table, gobbling their plates, their snouts in the trough, and he thought, Porkers!

Buddy realized that he had the answer to all this. He didn't bother to make an announcement or post one of his usual notices, signed "Da Boss." He just roused Pinky and his driver, Chubby, packed a bag and his oxygen tank.

One of Bula's children was playing in the driveway the day Buddy

left.

"Where you going, Gampy?"

"Into town."

"When you coming back, Gampy?"

"Never."

You had a problem, you disappeared. So did the problem. It was perfect, really. His whole life he had lived that way.

On the way to Honolulu, after abandoning his North Shore house, ditching his family like a crab shucking its shell and all its barnacles, Buddy had an explosive urge to push Pinky out of the car. "Or else swerve and heave my okole into the breakdown lane." On long rides he found Pinky unbearable for her silences and her sniffing. Was it a deviated septum that made her snuffle and blink like a rat?

"Does your wife ever just go quiet and not answer your questions?" he asked me.

"All the time," I said. I had never met anyone so antagonized by talk as Sweetie. "Hey, I'm just making conversation," I'd say, making me sound stupid. My questions annoyed her. My saying nothing soothed her. Was this her upbringing? Hawaii was a culture of grunts and mutters. Perhaps she didn't have the answers. Her manner of conversing was to turn away from me and read signs out of the side window: "Zippy's. Office Max. Taco Bell. Big Burger. Dragon Tattoo. Absolutely No Parking."

"What's the longest you've gone without talking?" Buddy asked.

"Couple of days."

"Would you believe two weeks for me and Pinky? And she's sitting in the same house the whole time."

Sitting in that enormous house was different from her sitting next to him in the car. She had her own room, her own bathroom; she often ate alone, hunched over her plate with her face down and her elbows sticking out. Riding in the car with her was tor ture, Buddy said. He wanted to scream at her. He knew she wanted to bite him again.

And so they moved into the Owner's Suite of the Hotel Honolulu, and it was worse than the car. Buddy wondered whether he had made a tactical mistake in abandoning the house to his quarreling family. Even though it was large for a hotel suite — bedroom, sitting room, kitchenette, foyer, double lanai — it seemed to Buddy like a cage. After a few days he said, "I have never spent so much time with Pinky."

"How does it feel?"

"Like I was ate by a dog and shit off a cliff."

He had been sick and supine in his big house. His operation had failed — made him weak and dependent, impatient and pompous. He had fled the house, and now, in the Owner's Suite, he felt that he would die unless he got away from Pinky. He could see in the dark iridescence of her eyes, could hear in her cold disgusted silence that she wanted him dead.

"Find me a single room with a sea view," he said to me.

I put him in 509, the room Miranda the carpenter had occupied and decorated, where the noise of his carpentry, the care he took in making his

own coffin, had sounded like lovemaking in the room below it. That memory was now a hotel legend. The room had a glimpse of the sea.

Buddy was in the room less than an hour when he phoned me.

"Tell Pinky to bring down my oxygen."

He sounded as though someone had him by the throat, thumbs pressed against his neck. Pinky joined him, lugging the tank. Buddy sent her away when he was breathing better.

"I can't stand to be in the same room with her."

In his whole life, he told me, he had never lived in so small a space. On the North Shore he was renowned for the length of his dining table, the breadth of his bedroom, his king-size bed, his wide-screen television, his big armchair. His favorite glass held a pint of vodka tonic; his ashtray was a Fijian kava bowl. He said that he had not realized the Hotel Honolulu was so small.