Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

Buddy's ashes were scattered offshore, within sight of his beachfront estate. That same afternoon Pinky ordered everyone out of the house, for the day she became an American citizen, she had also become, as Buddy's widow, his heiress. In his fury, months before, when he moved into the Owner's Suite to escape his quarreling family, Buddy had cut everyone out of his will, leaving Pinky as his sole beneficiary. The sorry document was something even Jimmerson could not mend. Buddy had intended to rectify that, but he died before he could banish Pinky and make a new will. So Pinky had his millions; she had the Hotel Honolulu and the North Shore house; she had everything.

Pinky even had me — at least she thought she did. She believed that I came with the hotel. The day after Buddy died, she installed Uncle Tony on the North Shore with Evie and Bing and Auntie Mariel. And she took charge of the Hotel Honolulu, which meant she had charge of me.

"Peek thee rebbish," she said, snapping her skinny fingers. She meant the flowers, the leis and garlands and bouquets that had been strewn in the hotel lobby in Buddy's memory.

The finger-snapping was new to me. I hated it. She also rapped her knuckles on my desk. That was worse. The only pleasure I had these days was in hearing her call herself "Mrs. Hamster."

She ordered me to get the locks changed on the North Shore house. She demanded that I hand over all the keys. She opened a bank account in her own name, bought new clothes and shoes. She appointed Keola her driver, and since driving was easier than being a janitor, he transferred his loyalty from me to Pinky.

"She want see all the accounts," Keola said. He was her messenger, too. Her patronage gave him power.

"I see you got a promotion."

"I been kick upstairs. Next stop, Guess Services Associate."

She made me wait in the corridor outside her suite when I was summoned to discuss the accounts. And she received me seated, like an empress. Her orders were that I was to stop distributing the tips indicated on credit card receipts.

"There'll be trouble," I said.

"I give Christmas bonus."

The "I" was interesting. Overnight, she became the hotel, the house, the business, the bank account, everything Buddy had left. There was no "we."

Of course there was trouble. The waiters raged. Trey resigned, so did Wilnice and Fishlow. Before he left, Trey said to me, "Any time you need some stories to write, I could tell you billions, from the times I dropped acid." Tran threatened to go; as a poorly paid Vietnamese barman, he depended on his tips more than the others. But he hung on.

Pinky did not respond to any of the complaints. She said very little. I began to understand the nature of silence in the use of power. Instead of arguments and shouting there were various manifestations of silence, and a sort of subtle sulking, which had to be analyzed and interpreted, like the snapping of her fingers, or even the manner in which she walked away.

Sensing that I was being uncooperative, she sent for me again. She was propped on her bed, pillows at her back, stiffly dressed and imperious. She demanded that I rearrange her closet — all her newly bought shoes.

"Put them over here, all them."

I went to the closet, not to survey her footwear, but to reflect on my role here. This was not right. My lips were forming the words "I quit" when, behind me, I heard Pinky sob in her sinuses, like the whinnying of a little child.

"I no know what for do," she said, her eyes glistening.

This new American, a small, skinny, inarticulate woman, hardly thirty, with hairy arms and big teeth protruding in her narrow face, had the whole hotel in her bony fingers. Yet here she was, a millionairess looking like a waif, trembling at the edge of her big bed, her shoulders up around her ears.

"Please, you help me."

She looked so helpless I went over and, against all the rules, sat on her bed and tried to comfort her. Her hand was hard and scaly, like a chicken foot.

"Daddy," she said, beseeching me.

"What's wrong?"

She whispered, "I bad girl," sounding insane.

"I think you're unhappy because you miss Buddy," I said. "We all miss Buddy. He was a friend."

"He like spank me. He make me kneel down and eat him. Then he lock me in dark closet."

The look of shock on my face made her smile. She became playful and babyish again.

"I like too much," she said, curling her lips so I could see her purple

gums.

I wasn't pure, yet I did not have it in me to engage in this game, which I could clearly envision, from the charade of my mistreating her and sexually abusing her, to locking her up somewhere in the Owner's Suite. If I treated her the way she demanded to be treated, however badly, it would be an enactment of her perverse power over me. She used her chicken- foot fingers to tug an answer from me.

"Sorry. You got the wrong guy," I said, standing up.

Her face tightened. Her eyes were scummy with hatred. "Get out for my suite."

She said shweet. The poor little thing was crazy. I knew my days were numbered. And after that she became an unambiguous tyrant. Tran resigned. Chen was miserable and so was Peewee. In their misery they became incompetent. The women in Housekeeping just wept. For the first time since being hired, I found the hotel impossible to manage, for I needed these people. I wanted to explain this to Pinky, but she kept to her room, the scene of her rejection. She was frightened, enigmatic, rude. Her new wealth had given her a sort of doom-laden quality, like a lottery winner trapped by the windfall and slowly self-destructing. And I was taken by surprise, too. Why had I not seen that all Buddy's foolery, his flatulence,

his stumbles, his bad memory, and his popeyed look of suffocation signified that he had only days left?

One night around eleven, as I was locking my office, I saw Pinky in the lobby. She looked disheveled, uncertain, uncomfortable, limping in her new shoes, as though she had wandered in off the street. Yet I had also noticed a new Jaguar pulling out from under the monkeypod tree at the front door — Mrs. Bunny Arkle. The wealthy widow had begun to cultivate Pinky. This was in the nature of things. I was sure that, in time, Pinky would join the Outrigger Canoe Club, the Honolulu Women's Outdoor Circle, the Hawaii Opera Theater. She would attend the posh Annual Heart Ball, buy a table at the French Festival at the Hilton and the Christmas Silent Auction at the Honolulu Academy of Arts benefiting "at-risk teens" — would become a pillar of Honolulu society.

"What for you go home so early?" Pinky asked.

"This is my home," I said.

"What for you stop work?"

"I never stop. Say, is there something wrong with your fingers? They keep snapping for some reason," I said. "Why did you cancel the flowers?"

"I get cheaper in Waipahu."

Palama had been doing the flowers for five years, since Amo Ferretti's murder. And Palama was ill. He needed the money, and we were one of his last clients. I said, "Buddy liked him."

"Buddy dead." She walked away.

Small, dark-eyed, haunted-looking employees began to appear, scuttling: waiters, room girls, clerks, kitchen staff, moppers, scrubbers, mostly women — the Filipinos she had hired. They worked hard, they were answerable to her, and the hotel ran much as before. And as before, I had almost nothing to do with it. Pinky was impatient, mean with money, cruel to these newcomers, but the place was cleanei better tended, more efficient. She had seemed a simple bewildered soul, yet she had a shrewd eye for cost cutting. Now there was a small vase of flowers in the lobby, but no flowers in the restaurant, none in the rooms. No one got a plumeria lei on arrival, or any lei. Bathroom amenities were discontinued — no shampoo, no bath gel, no plastic shower cap. Paradise Lost Happy Hour pupus were canceled, so were the bowls of mixed nuts. Buddy had insisted on bottles of Heinz ketchup and Tabasco sauce and a jar of honey at every table. The Tabasco was canceled, the ketchup was generic and, like the honey, it now came in a plastic squirt bottle.