Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

Even though I had rebuffed her advances, Pinky kept at me. She insisted that I accompany her shopping, to carry her bags. She made me wait in the car with Keola, who took an uncouth pleasure in gawking at me as she gave me orders. In the stores at Ala Moana I would sometimes see her glaring at me, as though inviting me to turn on her.

"Put my shoes on."

I squatted and did so, marveling at the yellow bunions on her feet.

"You no like me," she said.

"I find you absolutely amazing."

My saying that just confused her, but it was true, she fascinated me, for the way she had worked her way up the food chain. The pathology of her story was the history of America — the twisted, tenacious little immigrant taking over from where the big, complacent Americans had left off. Pinky could not be faulted in her opportunism. She had saved herself and her family, while Buddy had allowed himself to degenerate and his family to slide into anarchy.

I had done little better with my own family. I had made no provisions, assuming, like an idiot, that I would continue to muddle along successfully. But my position was dire. I was fifty-seven. I had a small daughter and a poorly paying job. Living in the hotel, I had no need to buy a house. Now I could not afford one. I had come to Hawaii believing that I was in deep trouble; years later, it was much deeper.

Sweetie said, "Why you no say nothing?"

"Pinky's my boss. It's my job."

"So get a new job."

But since this hotel work had always been so easy, Buddy's favor to me, I was not qualified for any other job. As a young man I had always innocently believed that aging was progress. You lived and quietly flourished, as my father had done, and having reached late middle age you were settled and secure — comfortable, with your own chair and reading lamp and workshop, your own bed and books, your children bringing you news of the world. And you had no fear except the final one, of extinction. Yet I owned nothing. I was nowhere, living on a rock in the ocean.

"Why you no peek thee rebbish?"

My only satisfaction lay in smirking at her and pretending I could not understand what she was saying.

Within a month of Pinky's taking charge, the hotel, though it looked barer and more cheerless than ever, ran more efficiently than it ever had. I still checked the accounts before I passed them on to her, and I was astonished at our profits. Her cost cutting had worked. The new, smaller staff was mute — I hardly knew their names — yet they were desperately productive. Their motto seemed to be: Walk Fast and Look Worried. They scuttled from task to task. Their salaries were so low that we were making much more money. Without knowing the term "downsizing," but with a good grasp of the concept — probably from having been exploited herself — Pinky had streamlined the labor force and made the hotel cost-effective, running it along the lines of a sweatshop or a strip club. I knew that she would succeed — already Mrs. Bunny Arkie was her bosom friend. The time had come for me to leave, so I sent her my one-line note of resignation.

She didn't make me wait this time. She wore a white Chanel T-shirt with gold piping on the seams, gold slippers, and blue panties, looking like a spoiled child among all the pillows in Buddy's king-size bed. She was so small, so angular. She looked so unhappy.

Without my saying a word, she said, "I no want you leave."

"You don't need me."

"I need," she said. "Sit down — here," and she patted the edge of the bed. She pulled up her T-shirt, put her thumb in her mouth, parted her legs, and slipped her other hand into her blue panties.

"This isn't working," I said.

She went coy again, pulled out her thumb, yanked down her Tshirt. She said, "I need you listen, Daddy."

"Please don't call me Daddy."

She pouted, and then — perhaps to stir my sympathy, perhaps to shock me or impress me — she told me her story. Her childhood, the hut in Cebu City, Uncle Tony, the Japanese man, her trip to Guam, the visit to Hawaii as a dancer in a Korean bar, her flight to the mainland with Skip the motorcycle man, her days as a motel truck whore, her escape — all of it. It was a weird, upsetting tale, full of close calls, and it frightened me more than anything she had ever said or done before.

"Did Buddy know this?"

She shook her head sadly. "So now you know my story."

Not everything, but enough. Life is a series of decisions, people say. But it had not been that way with me. At crucial points in my life it was never a question of choosing but rather of having no choice except the obvious one, the only one. What looked like a radical decision was pure panic flight, when I had no choice but to jump.

"I no know what for do," she said. She plucked her T-shirt from the buds of her nipples. She looked hopefully at me again, her tongue against her teeth, as though mouthing the word "Daddy," and then her face fell. "What for you smiling?"

"Because I do."

The clusters of torch ginger, the heliconia and protea, and all the other flowers were gone from the lobby. Gone were Palama, Pacita and Marlene from Housekeeping, and Tran, who got a job at a Vietnamese restaurant and spoke of starting his own place, Apocalypse Now. Puamana fled to Puna District on the Big Island, where she had a calabash cousin. Buddy's topless hula posters, the freebies for Buddy's kids, the loaner l4ach umbrellas, the Nutty Nine-Grain Granola at the breakfast buffet — all of it was gone, and I was going, too.

At breakfast by the pool on one of our last days at the Hotel Honolulu, Rose said, "I want the other kind. This is yuck."

She dropped her piece of toast with sticky fingers, and instead of licking them, she wiped them on her napkin.

"What's wrong, baby?" Peewee asked. He was also on his way out, about to head for Maui to help at his son's bakery.

"I hate that honey."

When I tasted it I knew why. It had been another of Pinky's cost- cutting measures, her replacing the local honey with the Chinese honey that came in five-gallon pails and was poured into squirt bottles. This stuff

was vile, with the dusty oversweet industrial taste of the Chinese corn syrup that had been used to adulterate it.

Peewee said, "We don't get Kekua honey no more."

Where had I heard that name?

"Lionberg's gardener," Peewee said. "Kekua's caretaker now. He took over the hives after Lionberg passed away."

So, even after Lionberg's suicide, we had still been buying his fragrant honey, which tasted of the North Shore, of eucalyptus and puakenikeni and ilima and gardenia, of red earth and big surf — Lionberg's bees toiling long after he had hanged himself. His name had not been on the label, so how was I to know?

The honey led me to visit Lionberg's house and Kekua. A drop in property prices meant that Lionberg's multimillion-dollar estate was unsalable in the late-nineties market. Kekua had stayed on as caretaker at the big rambling villa, with the impluvium, the lap pool, the orchid house, the rows of beehives, the Georgia O'Keeffe and the vandalized Matisse, the Fijian war clubs, Gilbertese daggers, Solomon Islands paddles, Hawaiian koa bowls, and dog-tooth leg rattles. Kekua did the dusting; the profit from the honey was extra.

The house and its contents had been kept intact, still in probate because of Lionberg's complex will and his contending children and several ex-wives. The rooms were full of his art collection, his gourmet kitchen gleamed, but the place was locked, empty of people, and looked forbidding in its neatness.

Was it a melancholy house, or was I projecting onto it my own yearning, for I owned nothing. But here, like a monument to irrelevance, was the Lionberg world of supreme luxury: Lionberg was dead. I knew more than I wanted to know of Lionberg's last year, his suffering over Rain Conroy, the young woman who was unattainable — too far, too young, too innocent, unwilling to be the captive wife of a man in his sixties on a remote hillside in the Pacific. The bees still buzzed, the predominant sound today in the late owner's garden.