Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

Both young women (nineteen and twenty-four) had been injured in minor mishaps at their camp, Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri. On leave because of the injuries, they had left the camp, gone AWOL, flown to Honolulu using one-way tickets, and checked into the Islander, a double room on the fourteenth floor. Here they became tourists, rented motor scooters, then a car, circled the island, took a helicopter tour, the submarine out of the harbor, and had visited most of the hotels in Waikiki, eating and drinking. They were remembered in several places for their boisterous good humor and their spending. Within two weeks they had run up bills of eight thousand dollars on their credit cards.

I looked up their names on the credit card slips from our bar and restaurant but could not find Brandy Rogers or Renate White among them.

One evening at a nightclub, Renate, the older of the two, met a Marine, a lance corporal from the Kaneohe base, and a week later they became engaged. They exchanged rings, got Oriental love tattoos, and made plans to marry soon — within a few weeks. Still, the two women remained at the Islander. They bought swimsuits, cosmetics, and a portable CD player.

Their families knew nothing of this, did not even know they were in Hawaii. Both women had boyfriends on the mainland; they too had no idea.

About three weeks after they arrived in Honolulu, Renate's fiance had visited as usual, but had left around one-thirty in the morning. Back at the base, he had called Renate at five to tell her he loved her. She said, "I love you." At seven-thirty the two women were heard laughing and talking so loudly in their hotel room that other guests on the floor complained. Hotel security men knocked on their door and warned them to keep their laughter down.

Ten minutes later, they both jumped out the balcony, and four blocks away at the Hotel Honolulu, Keola paused in his sweeping, gripped his broom, and said, "Something happen. Something bad."

I asked him what.

"Someone mucky-die-dead."

At lunch, Leon said, "What details did you notice in the newspaper story?"

"That they each had slash marks on their wrists. They had tried to do it that way."

"Superficial cuts," Leon said. "I believe that. What else?"

"The credit card bills — eight grand. Is that what you mean?"

Leon said, "What about their size? James would have noticed how diminutive they were. One was just five feet, the other only an inch taller, and both were young. Though the older one seemed to be paying most of the bills."

"It's still a mystery," I said.

"Of course, but that's not the point. The poignancy is that they did it together. In all the suicides that are committed on earth, it is hard to imagine that any are two women like this, jumping together into the morning sunshine off a hotel balcony. It was conjectured that they were holding hands when they did it. That's the detail you want."

"Such a sad story."

"Now it is our story. They dropped into our lives," Leon said.

"You remember more than I do."

"I had a lot of time to kill at the doctor's office — my weekly appointment. Normally I don't read the Advertiser, but there was one in the waiting room."

"It would make a great short story."

"Would it?" Leon looked doubtful. "An impossible story. We know too much. The art of fiction is all in the not knowing."

"Right. We don't know why they did it."

He smiled. "There's no art in guessing. Certainly no story."

Our meal was served — Leon's Cobb salad, my blackened ahi sandwich. We said nothing more about the suicides. Leon interrogated Fishlow, one of our seasonal hires: no salt, no dairy — they didn't agree with Leon's medication.

"Love," Leon said at last, after Fishlow had gone. "Why else do two people have the courage to do anything so rash — and not just the suicide but everything that came before."

"What about the Marine?"

"He has his own story to tell, but his story isn't theirs." Leon was too short of breath to continue. He coughed laboriously, apologizing by flapping his hand. When he recovered, he said, "Someone would be telling James a story and he'd say, 'No more. Don't tell me the rest."

"Because he needed to invent it."

"Yes. Look, 'The Author of Beltraffio' comes from one chance remark, that A. J. Symond's wife disliked his writing. And there's nothing to invent with those poor soldiers," Leon said. "There's more of a story in our talking here, now, in your hotel — more unspoken, more ambiguity, more layers of interest — than in that dramatic double suicide."

His laughter brought on another coughing spasm. I sat helplessly until it ended, and then, as always, we talked about how lucky we were to be here in such a balmy place.

As we left the dining room, I saw Marjorie was in the lobby waiting for us. She had never done that before — waited without telling us. I was touched by this patient expression of her love. I didn't realize that Marjorie had come, feeling protective, concerned because Leon was seriously ill.

"We can't pierce futurity," he had once said to me in a Jamesian way. He had deliberately not mentioned his condition. He canceled our next lunch, and the next. He died soon after that. He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in a ceremony attended by many Honolulu people, some of them well known.

Buddy saw me leaving for the funeral. He could not possibly have understood my grief. He said, "Try to come back with a column item."

"Why do you care about that stupid howlie?" Sweetie said.

We were talking about a man on Maui, a visitor from the mainland, who had dug a deep hole in the sand at a Wailea resort to amuse his wife and daughter, and had climbed inside. The soft walls collapsed, a wave broke, burying him alive in the sand. He was rescued (shouts, screams, panic, plastic shovels) but was now in the intensive care unit at Kahului General Hospital.

"Such a howlie thing to do," Sweetie said.

"It's not funny," Rose said. About a week before, I had taken Rose to the beach. While we sat in the sunshinejrshe saw a small purple beetle struggle to get out of a depression in the sand, a deep footprint. It scuttled back and forth, dragging sand down as it tried to ascend, falling and tipping over, kicking its legs, beginning again. "Look, Daddy." I studied it for a while, the little creature trapped in a human footprint. I said, "That's the history of Hawaii."

"These people from the mainland!" Sweetie said.

"Speaking of which, guess which person from the mainland is coming to Honolulu?"

"John Kennedy Jr.?"

I was amazed. I had learned it only a few weeks before, by way of Jackie Onassis, who had asked me to give her a blurb for a Ruth Jabhvala novel. I had done so. How could I refuse? In her thank-you fax she had mentioned her son's stopover. This was not a suggestion for me to meet him, only an offering to me of the fact that John Junior would be passing through. I believed that I was one of the few people in Hawaii who had this information.

"How do you know?"

"He's staying at the Halekulani. He's getting certified for deep diving. I know the guy who's taking him out — Nainoa." Sweetie laughed. "It's a secret. So how you know?"

"His mother told me."

"Yeah, right."

My wife hardly knew me, even after eight years of marriage. Was it the hotel? You live in a hotel and every meal is either from Room Service or the coffee shop. Sweetie didn't cook and could never remember what I had ordered. She had no idea what clothes I owned, though Pacita, in the laundry, knew. Our suite was tidied by Housekeeping — Sweetie had long since quit her job. She was clueless about me. Did it matter? Maybe not — after all, I hardly knew her. When I tried drawing her out, I often got nowhere. The subject was usually old boyfriends, the key to understanding a woman's personality, or so I thought.