Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

One parcel I almost didn't open, because it was from a New York publisher. It contained the proof copy of a novel. The letter asked whether I would read the book, and if I liked it, would I kindly share my comments? At the bottom of this note, thanking me in advance, was a handwritten message and the overlarge signature of Jacqueline Onassis.

"That's Jackie Kennedy," I said to Sweetie.

"Right," she said.

"She wants me to read this book — she wants a favor, get it?"

"Jackie Kennedy wants a favor from you. Right."

"So she said."

Sweetie made a familiar face meaning, You got a problem. But Leon didn't laugh. He said, "She's a serious editor. She's very well thought of."

"So first it's voices and now it's famous people," Sweetie said. "Yeah, right."

I read the book and faxed my favorable comment. When she replied, Mrs. Onassis said how lucky I was to be living in Hawaii. She mentioned that her son would be stopping off in Honolulu within a few weeks on his way to Palau, in the western Pacific, where he would be scuba diving.

The voices did not stop. To a nonreader, writing is a form of magic — unreliable, misleading; to an islander, everything beyond the shores of the island is unreal, dark, threatening, no matter how sunny the horizon looks. There is no memory of anything outside the island. What cannot be seen

does not exist. And so I was alone with the voices, but that was not the only muttering. There were rumors that I might be crazy — not dangerous, but afflicted with island fever — rock happy. But that, too, was hearsay.

Two young women jumped to their deaths, together and apparently at the same moment, off the fourteenth floor of the Outrigger Islander, four blocks away from the Hotel Honolulu. We knew of it within thirty seconds, from the screams. There was nowhere for a jumper to fall in Waikiki without horrifying pedestrians or tying up traffic.

"Maybe you write some kine story bout it," Keola said, which irritated me, because it was just what I had been thinking. But what did this smirking janitor know about writing anything?

I said, "Never," without meaning it. I was curious.

The next day Leon Edel was due for lunch. He had said he liked Peewee's Cobb salad and complimented me on the hotel's atmosphere — "It's the Hawaii I first encountered, years ago" — meaning, perhaps, that we were seedy and old-fashioned. He was too polite ever to be negative. We had no secrets now. He knew that it was painful to me that I no longer wrote anything. He praised me for my courage.

When I told Buddy that I needed a few extra hours for lunch with Leon, he said, "Try to get a column item in the Star-Bulletin. Something upbeat."

I did not see the connection. Buddy then went into his old rant about how it was really amazing how we had all these famous people in Hawaii — George Harrison, Willie Nelson, Jim Nabors, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Chamberlain, Sylvester Statlone, Mike Love (the Beach Boy), Boris Karloff's widow. Doris Duke, too, he said, though she had died.

"Take George Harrison. If we could say that one of the Beatles stopped by, can you imagine what it would do for business?"

"But why would George Harrison come here?"

"For a drink, one of Tran's mai tais, one of Peewee's burgers, the prize-winning chili," Buddy said, as if I had asked a dumb question. "And we could have a Wall of Fame like Keo's Thai Restaurant — signed pictures of all the stars who drank in Paradise Lost."

Buddy's inability to understand that it was unlikely that such celebrities would ever set foot in the hotel was, I felt, a sign of his failing health. Another sign was his blind rage at my disagreeing with him. His bad temper was almost certainly a result of his frailty and his heavy drinking.

"You're so negative," he said.

"What has that got to do with Leon Edel?"

"You told me he's a writer, didn't you?" Buddy glared at me. "He could do something."

Now I understood. The very idea that the eighty-nine-year-old biographer of Henry James and chronicler of Bloomsbury would write a

squib for the local paper about his liking for the Hotel Honolulu was so innocent in its ignorance that I laughed out loud.

In his deteriorated state of mind, Buddy took my laughter for yes and cheered up.

"The Islander's going to be hurting for business," he said. "I'm thinking of getting that guy in, the fat Samoan guy who husks coconuts with his bare teeth."

He was trying to take advantage of the news story of the two women who had jumped from their room in the Outrigger Islander. Visitors who wished to avoid the scene of death and tragedy might be persuaded to stay with us if Leon provided a column item and placed it with one of the three-dot successors to Madam Ma in the evening paper.

Leon was dropped off by his wife, Marjorie, who withdrew, saying, "I'm having lunch with the wahine," meaning her women friends. Marjorie pronounced Hawaiian words correctly. She wrote poetry. The Edels adored each other in an admirable way, with the ageless self-sufficiency of lovers.

As a joke, I mentioned Buddy's column item idea to Leon.

"I was a journalist once, but not that kind," Leon said. "How is our poor peccable friend?"

He'd had to break two previous lunch dates, so it was good to see him. He appeared more frail, but he was so dignified that his frailty was like circumspection, another aspect of his courtesy.

"How are you feeling, Leon?"

"That depends. Some days like a weary, wasted, used-up animal. Other days, I'm tiptop." It was typical of him not to complain, though he seemed a bit flustered and unsteady until we were seated. "And you're flourishing."

After all these years I had come to see that he was the only person in Hawaii who knew me — and in the most profound and subtle way, through my books, the detailed autobiographical fantasies of my fiction. He had read a few of my books before we first met; since then, he had made a point of reading more of them. I had done the same with his books, and by now had read all his work, even Writing Lives and his pamphlet Thoreau. I reread the James biography. It was his great achievement, one of the greatest in biography.

With this knowledge and appreciation of each other's work, our friendship had deepened. His books were a postgraduate course on the man, as books often are — Leon as well as Henry James.

"Isn't the news terrible?" he said. "It must have happened right around here."

He meant the double suicide. I might scratch my head in disbelief at something I saw or heard in Honolulu, but Leon was there to verify it. How I loved these lunches, swapping stories. He was old enough to be my father, and was paternal. Yet as writers we talked as equals.

"They were military," I said.

He was sipping ice water, fastidious in his frail, elegant way. Always the Panama hat and the aloha shirt and the cane. Marjorie had been apologetic in the weeks before, calling me to say that Leon was unwell, just out of the hospital, and would not be able to make lunch. "Maybe next week." But there were more delays. I missed him, and I was glad when he turned up that day, and delighted to hear his reaction to the news story.

"I can't remember ever reading anything quite like it," he said. There were certain unambiguous news stories that possessed and unified Honolulu — the all-day standoff, the missing hikers, the hostage-taking, the child batterer's trial, the strangled transvestite in the dumpster, the local Bishop Estate trustee's sex-in-the-men's-room saga — the way dramatic happenings take hold of a city, giving it something to talk about for a few days. Then the drama passes, and the city returns to its divisive pettiness. This was one of those stories. I wasn't surprised that Leon mentioned the suicide of the women soldiers.