Hotel Honolulu

10 A Game of Dice

Leaving our Paradise Lost bar, shouldering his way through the hotel lobby, the young man caught my eye and said, "Now I've heard everything!" in a provocative way, too loudly, to get my attention. I was hoping my silence and my bland smile would calm him.

"Can I help you?" I said. "I'm the manager."

In his early thirties and handsome — all that springy hair — he wore a dark shirt that set off his pink impatient face. Breathless and a bit flustered, he looked like someone who had just been disarmed by an insult. The way a man looks when he's slapped by a woman.

"See that guy? He's out of his mind!"

He was gone before I could tell him that the man he had pointed out, Eddie Alfanta, was a regular at the bar, always came with his wife, Cheryl, whom he adored, and was a well-known accountant downtown — overserious but successful, with an office on Bishop Street. What I liked most about him was his passion for gambling. Eddie was not the first accountant I had known who gambled, though the risks of the crap table and the solemnity of the ledger made him seem paradoxical and confident. His wagers were modest. He usually won. He said he had a system.

So intent was Eddie on peering around the bar that he did not see me. Where was his wife? Cheryl was a small woman, elfin almost — short hair, delicate bones, tiny hands and feet, very tidy, always neatly dressed, and pale, especially in contrast to big, dark Eddie Alfanta, who boasted of his hairiness. That Eddie was also proud of Cheryl, his haole trophy, was plain to see, and he had the slightly fussy henpecked demeanor that characterized the ethnic partner in many Hawaiian interracial marriages. He was self-conscious, eager to do the right thing but not sure what the right thing was, and had the uneasy notion that people were watching. And they were.

The next time I checked the bar, I saw Eddie with the dice cup in his hand, shaking it, making it chuckle. Buddy Hamstra had brought the leather cup and the pair of dice from Bangkok, where men in bars tossed dice to determine who would pay for the next round of drinks. I often studied the fixed attentive faces and bared teeth of the men going at it and thought how we are at our most aggressive and competitive, most animalistic, in our games.

What I noticed tonight was not the game but Eddie's opponent. We seldom saw surfers in Paradise Lost. The better class of surfer, one of Trey's buddies, out for a week of catching waves, yes, but never a local full-season hard-core dude like this one — barefoot, broad-shouldered, bandy-legged, tattoos on the small of his back and another between his shoulder blades, with the name CODY, all the tattoos visible through his torn shirt. His cap on backward, his long hair was sunned, the color and texture of straw, his eyes pale and vacant, his skin burned, his masses of freckles, big and small, adding to his look of recklessness. He was young, probably not more than twenty-two or — three. Eddie Alfanta was over forty, so it looked funny, the two of them struggling with the dice cup: the swarthy accountant with his shirt tucked in and two pens in his breast pocket, the youth in ragged shirt and shorts — Stussy cap, Quiksilver shorts, Local Motion shirt. He had dirty feet, bruised toes.

"A water rat," Trey said.

The two men hovered over the tumbled dice on the bar, and I also thought how sad games are for their rules and rituals, for making us absurdly hopeful, for being predictable, for their pathetic purpose, which was to divert us for the length of time it took to play them. All players looked to me like desperate losers; games were the pastimes of people — always men — who could not bear to be alone, who did not read. There was a brutal pathos in the game of dice, the little chuckle, the toss, the click, the overwhelming significance of the dots.

Or was it just harmless fun that defied interpretation? There was something wrong in my caring about it, or even noticing it, so I turned away and concentrated on what was much more obvious: for the first time Eddie's wife was not with him in the bar. His laughter made that emphatic, and he crowded the surfer, maneuvering the dice cup, making the dice chatter, his mouth open a bit too wide, his laughter a bit too shrill, touching the surfer's arm when he won. Eddie was dark and baked, the boy fair and burned — I sensed attraction. But I was glad they were laughing there; I liked thinking of my hotel as a refuge.

Back at the desk, fishing for information, I mentioned to Chen that Eddie Alfanta was alone in the bar.

"His wife's upstairs," Chen said. "I gave them 802. They checked in a few hours ago. One night."

That was unusual, the Honolulu couple staying in a Honolulu hjtel for one night. Maybe it meant that their house was being tented and fumigated, but if so, they would have had the work done on a weekend or else spent the time on a neighbor island.

"These flowers just came for Mrs. Alfanta."

The bouquet was on the desktop. The greeting card read, Happy birthday, my darling. All my love, Eddie.

A romantic birthday interlude — it explained everything. I went through the month's occupancy record in my office, and afterward, in search of a drink, I saw Eddie alone in the bar, nursing a beer, looking reflective. There was no sign of the surfer, and I remembered what the fleeing man had said about Eddie earlier in the evening: He's out of his mind.

But Eddie was the picture of serenity. Somewhat quieter than usual, perhaps; alone but content. Had the gambling made him thoughtful? Anyway, the game was at an end.

Had he been rebuffed by the water rat? The last time I had seen him, he was pushing against the young man as the dice clattered onto the bar, shouting for drinks, tapping the young man's tattooed arm. I resisted

drawing any conclusions, but it had certainly seemed to me a playful courtship, the two men jostling at the rail in a rough mating dance, laughing over the game of dice.

I said, "Who's winning?" because Eddie was still absentmindedly shaking the cup.

"We're spending the night," he said, and his chuckle was like the sound of the dice.

"So I see," I said, and to test him, because I already knew, I asked, "A celebration?"

"Cheryl's birthday." He tossed the dice, frowned at the combination, and gathered them quickly. "This is a big one. Her fortieth. Last year we went to Vegas. Cheryl's lucky. She won five hundred dollars at the crap table. Guy came up to her and humped her for luck. 'You're on a roll,' they said. You should have seen it."

He stopped and saw the half-smile of concentration on my face. I was thinking, Humped her for luck? He understood the unspoken question in my mind.

"I loved it," he said.

Small, pale Cheryl in her tiny shoes surrounded by big, hopeful gamblers, and Eddie gloating like the winner in a dog show.

"Birthday before that, we spent the weekend learning to scubadive. Getting certified. I was terrible. I figured it was a gamble. I almost

panicked and drowned. The guys on the course were amazed that Cheryl had picked it up so quickly. They were all over her. You should have seen her — what a knockout in a wetsuit. Skintight."

Pleased with the recollection, he touched his thighs as though tracing a wetsuit, and he gathered the dice again. Another chuckle and toss.

"For her thirty-fifth we had a real blast. My buddy and I took her to Disneyland. She was like a kid." He smiled, remembering, and wheezed with satisfaction. "She wore him out!"

Wagging the dice cup, he rolled again.

"Where is she now?"

"I got her a surfer. They're upstairs." He looked happy. He was still rolling the dice.

"Who won?"

"Who do you think?"

The young man in the torn shirt entering the room, his bruised toes on the carpet, the lamp low, Cheryl in her birthday lingerie, no bigger than a tall child but game for this, and the whole business more or less wordless — this was how I imagined it. The pair of them tossing on the bed with Eddie downstairs. And at the end of it all a certain apprehension, because no one knew what would happen when it was over. That was the sadness of games.

"I have no idea," I said.

Eddie just smiled. He had forgotten the question.

I sent Keola and Kawika up to monitor the corridor near the Alfantas' room in case of trouble. Later, they told me how they had seen the surfer leaving, "looking futless," and heard Cheryl sternly saying, "Don't kiss me." Still later, I saw Cheryl and Eddie very loveydovey in the lounge, Eddie still tossing the dice. Perhaps he was the only one who had gotten what he wanted.