Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

The socialite Mrs. Bunny Arkle stopped at the hotel one night asking for Buddy.

Lionberg said, "She's a fine woman. I knew two of her husbands. I should marry her, I really should."

Mrs. Bunny Arkle heard this through Buddy and began showing up when Lionberg was around, the smiling suggestion of appetite on her lips.

Lionberg ignored her, yet he said to me, "We'd make a great couple. What does it matter that I have no sex drive? She's probably past it too, though women of sixty think of nothing but sex."

Finally Mrs. Bunny Arkle gave up on him, saying that the worst of Lionberg was that these days she couldn't tell whether he was drunk or sober. Lionberg just shrugged. Out of the blue, he asked me whether I got

sick of doing the same thing every goddamned day. I said I was too insulted to give him a reply, and I meant it.

"No more composing," he said. He knew that I had been a writer.

"Now I'm decomposing."

"Don't say that!" he said with his chairman's anger.

The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it's a joke, because of course it is never a joke.

"I want to see the Taj Mahal. The pyramids. The Panama Canal. The Shwe Dagon Pagoda." He was off again, not listening, not even looking. "Make a great trip around the world, see everything at once. They have these tours. Cruise the southern ocean — Roaring Forties."

Even when Lionberg was not around he was in the hotel talk.

"You've been to Africa, right?" Buddy asked me.

"Yes. Lived there."

"Lionberg's going over there."

Keola told me that Lionberg had asked him to build an orchid house -

— very elaborate, with a triple-pitched roof, sprinklers, and its own climate control.

"I heard about your orchid house," I said the next time I saw Lionberg.

He didn't hear me. He stared, lifted his drink, and said, "You get these rich Japanese who kill themselves by slamming the door of their Mercedes on their silk Hermes tie and strangling by the side of the road."

I said nothing. His eyes stayed on me for a long time, as though to assess my reaction to this bizarre method of self-destruction. At last I shrugged and said quietly, "That's very sad."

It was odd and exhausting that he showed up so much, after his quiet occasional visits of the past. "Kekua's doing the honey now," he would say, rambling on. He had the energy and that air of exclusion of a man possessed with plans. He was moving back to the mainland, buying a winery in Napa, investing in Intel processors, living on a yacht in Marina del Rey, ranching in Montana.

Maybe these were empty dreams, but his spending was a reality. He was so preoccupied with it that he could not do it on foot. He sat at his desk, and sometimes at the Paradise Lost bar, phoning his mail orders: Armani suits, Ferragamo shoes, shiny gizmos and trinkets from the Sharper Image. He developed a commitment to anything made of titanium. "It'll survive a nuclear winter. They use it on jet fighters." He bought a titanium Omega watch, titanium sunglasses, titanium golf clubs, a titanium bicycle. "They're indestructible."

Why tell me?

Perhaps he could read the question on my face, because as I was thinking this, Lionberg said, "I want to write a book. What's it like?"

"Awful when you're doing it. Worse when you're not."

"I'd do it in Mexico. Get a little place in San Miguel de Allende. Learn Spanish at the same time. Do some painting. Take my bike for exercise."

A gourmet cooking course in Italy was also on his agenda. A visit to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Learning to tapdance and play the piano. Taking an astronomy course at Cal Tech. All these plans, and he always spoke with a smack.

"Do you see love in your future?" I asked.

He heard that. "I've known so many beautiful women. All my wives have been beautiful," he said. "But no one is uglier than a beautiful woman after she's hurt you or done something bad. Yes, she still has the right bones and contours, but there's a definite stink. Did you know that girl Rain?"

"Buddy mentioned her."

"She's getting married. I'm delighted. She's going to have a child."

He sounded pleased and paternal. "I have a wonderful present for her."

Another plan, the wonderful wedding present, along with doing some skydiving, collecting Sepik River masks, adding to his collection of netsuke. Or learning to windsurf: "I'm not too old. Go to the Columbia River gorge — world's best windsurfing. Find a female partner."

"Sure, look at me," Buddy said. "Pinky's twenty-four. Best sex I've ever had. She's sick!"

Lionberg laughed at that, because Buddy was drunker than he was. It was tiring to be around Lionberg in his expansive mood, because of all the promises — the details required me to be attentive, to visualize him in Mexico riding a bike and learning Spanish, to imagine him harvesting grapes or hot-air ballooning. He gave the governor money for his next campaign and then prevailed on him to listen to his plans, some of which involved the state of Hawaii. He was at the bar almost every night, and we watched him closely, as you do someone who is mapping out a future and making predictions.

Then his chair was empty for two days straight. That seemed strange. We waited one more day, then reported him missing, as undoubtedly he suspected we would. He was found on a steep side road, off the Pali Highway, next to his expensive car. He had slammed the passenger-side door on his tie and strangled himself. No note.

On another boys' night (the gathering of Buddy's hui was a weekly event now that he had moved into the hotel), Buddy announced that he was cold — and not just cold but freezing. We were in Paradise Lost, Buddy and his friends. No one spoke, some of us hummed, we were so stumped for a reply. It was the hottest week of the year, Kona weather in mid- August, a humid southerly air flow without enough motion to lift the hotel's little flag. The whole of Waikiki howled with air conditioners that seemed to strain in first gear, pouring out mildew and noise. And our cooling system had blown. I was waiting for the man from Hawaiian Snow Climate Control to arrive, though I did not say so.

"My feet are like ice," Buddy said. "Go ahead, feel my hands."

No one dared. Buddy looked concussed. He had a dark, roasted- looking face; he had to be feverish. But cold? The temperature was in the nineties, the humidity just below that, giving the hot Honolulu streets the ripe stink of gasoline and garbage. The throb of overheated metal on car bodies made them look explosive. The sky was sealed, like the inside of a great sagging tent, low and gray with volcanic dust that had drifted in from the live craters of the Big Island. The air was sour with heat, the hotel door handles sticky from people clutching ice cream cones. Purple car fumes collected and thickened, as pretty as poison rising in the traffic. There was

no surf. There seldom was on such days. Waves broke at the shore in low exhausted plops and were sieved by the hot sand on which barefoot tourists danced in pain. Offshore, the "vog" of the furry sky gave the motionless sea the overboiled appearance of reheated soup, and in places the ocean was as scummy and opaque as tepid bath water. Even the nonperspiring Japanese were glowing.

"Fucking freezing," Buddy said, angry because no one had spoken, nor had anyone taken up his challenge to feel his cold hands.

Just then I noticed Tran in front of the open refrigerator, pretending to be searching for a water jug but in fact snorting the cool air for relief.

Buddy hugged himself. He had to be feverish. He was gray, his eyes colorless.

"Look, I got chicken skin!"

His forearm, and even Pinky's bite marks that looked like tattoos, had the puckered texture of a cheese grater. Perhaps it was an effect of his drinking, for these days he was drunk well before noon.