Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"Open up this room," he said, and gave me orders to have a contractor knock down a wall and make an Owner's Floor, so he could spread out and isolate himself from Pinky. The builder's estimate was fifty thousand dollars. Furnishing the space and decorating it would be another twenty. He authorized me to supervise the work, which would be a drain on my time as well as a downsizing of the fifth floor. It meant deleting three of the best rooms in the hotel.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" "What's the alternative?" he asked.

"Sending Pinky home? Hiring a nurse? Hanging out."

"Why didn't I think of that?"

He delegated his lawyer, Jimmerson, to talk to Pinky. Jimmerson appeared, big and busy, and closeted himself with Pinky in the suite she had ceased to share with Buddy. The papers had already been drawn up.

"I want for take care my husband," she said. In defiance, her head jammed against her shoulders, grinding her teeth, she became smaller, more compact.

"He wants a divorce," Jimmerson said.

"Never."

"He's willing to offer you a cash settlement."

"How much?"

"Ten thousand dollars."

Pinky made no reply. The amount was more than she had expected, and convinced her that she had no idea of Buddy's wealth. She had lived in a hut, had worked in a bar — until she had met Buddy, her life had been unlucky and dangerous. She had so much to hide from him that she could never remember what she had told him and what she had concealed — and much of what she had told him was untrue. She had imagined a future here, but it was sometimes simpler to take the money and go.

"I want for be American."

"That can be arranged."

"And twenty," she said.

"Ten here, ten when you get back to Manila."

She closed and opened her eyes in agreement.

Buddy was elated when Jimmerson gave him the news. The money was less than he had expected, and much less than it would have cost him to renovate the fifth floor.

Whether she was soothed because of the finality of the agreement or calmed by another of her many moods, Pinky was quieted. She sat so peaceably in the Owner's Suite that Buddy moved back in. He said that most of the time he was hardly aware she was there. Without being summoned, she could tell from the tiny variation in the sound of his breathing when his oxygen was needed. Buddy would be laboring to inhale and on the point of blacking out, so stifled he was unable to speak, when he would see Pinky at his side holding the oxygen, which was life to him.

Helpless in his wheelchaii which he preferred to his bed, he raised his face to her. She sat by him and held the rubber face mask to his nose and mouth and watched him blow-suck and recover. He swelled a little and his face lost its pallor. When he could speak he batted the face mask away and said, "Get me a drink."

Ihe doctor had told him: no alcohol. His children had nagged and warned him. Even I questioned his drinking. But Pinky got up without a

sound, went to the wet bar in the suite, mixed a large vodka tonic, filled the glass with ice, and brought it to him, saying, "For Daddy."

"Don't go away," Buddy said. He was stronger with air in his lungs and booze in his veins. He shoved at his wheels, going closer to her.

Watching him, Pinky stood in her shorts and a T-shirt that said Local Motion Hawaii, like a small girl, his daughter, with her skinny face, buck teeth and big dark eyes, and bony feet.

"lake your clothes off," Buddy said.

Pinky did as she was told, but slowly.

"All of them," Buddy said.

She picked up her panties with her toes and dropped them onto the chair with her shorts.

This little woman was his wife. He had gotten her to agree to go away for twenty grand. When she was gone he would be alone, womanless in the Owner's Suite.

"Dance for Daddy."

She did so, flexing her arms and legs, a stick figure, all hollows in the half-light of the afternoon, until Buddy was asthmatic with lust. She saw this clearly and, still dancing, brought him his oxygen.

And so she danced naked as he watched, and watching made him breathless. She danced forward with his oxygen again.

"We're back to basics," he told me, blow-sucking like an aquatic mammal. "This is my. ."

"Marriage?"

"For want of a better word."

For years, Royce Lionberg had driven from the North Shore once or twice a month to the Hotel Honolulu to dine on one of Peewee's Buddy Burgers. Then he began to visit almost every night, to drink instead of to eat, so it was obvious that something had changed. He always asked to see me. The man who had been so secretive and subtle was now expansive and blunt. He would turn to a woman wearing heavy mascara at the bar and say, "You look like a raccoon!" And not in jest but angrily, as if — even if it were true — she had no right.

In the way a domineering drinker at a bar becomes chairman of the board, Lionberg engaged in lengthy monologues instead of conversing — monologues that with modest elaboration could have been worked into short stories. I was tempted but had abandoned the business, and anyway, I liked the bare bones of his stories and the telegraphic way he told them: "The Shutter sisters. Famous twins. All sorts of celebrity as a double act. Merle died, and so Beryl could not be famous anymore. She kills herself."

In another, a man named Cyril Dunklin — they always had names — indulged himself in sexual fantasies on the phone with his high school sweetheart, Lamia, whom he had not seen for years. It went beyond phone sex. It was a phone relationship, which included the wildest sex. Unable to stand it any longer, they met, had a solemn, awkward cup of coffee, and parted. After that, there were no more calls. The relationship was over; they had met.

"Andy Vukovitch was a very good friend of mine," Lionberg said.

Whenever a speaker prefaces a story by mentioning how close the friend is, you prepare yourself for the worst.

This Andy loved his wife, Lynette, but was at his most passionate and demonstrative when he was being unfaithful to her and feeling guilty. In the course of a long affair with his mistress, Nina, he was glimpsed by her being tender toward his wife. Nina dumped him and, without a secret life, Andy became demanding and hypercritical. He seldom went out — why should he? He was doggedly faithful to Lynette, who eventually could not stand his constant scrutiny, and left him.

"Maybe it was doomed to happen," Lionberg said. "There's a point in life, if you live long enough, when everything that happens is just repetition. You have done this before in precisely the same way. You have met this person already. You already own one of these contraptions.

You've seen it, you've heard it. It's the nightmare of the eternal return — nothing is new. You are not hungry. You don't want any more of anything. You see in life's repetition that your life is over — nothing to look forward to. You are able to anticipate what the man or woman will say, and you want to yawn or scream, because you know how everything ends."

Lionberg himself was full of plans. "I bought myself a treadmill," he

said.

I said, "A treadmill is somehow not a declaration that you are going places."

He didn't laugh. He probably hadn't even heard me Anyway, humor for a monologuist is an unwelcome interruption. He was smaller, paler, more persuasive and talkative as a drinker than he had been as an eater, with the face and posture of a compact burrowing animal. He announced his plans: cruising the inside passage off the Alaskan coast, his great seats at the Elton John Millennium Concert in Honolulu one year hence, a slot in a timeshare in St. Barts, a backroads trip in a limited-edition battery- operated electric car. All his plans involved considerable expense.