Hotel Honolulu

11 Love Letters in the Pending

My career as a writer had not trained me for anything practical. I thought of describing this in a despairing book of exile I would title Who I Was. Writing had made me unemployable, had isolated me and given me the absurd delusion that I could perform tasks that were beyond me. Even my typing was poor, so I wrote with a pencil, but in this scribble I had put up buildings, designed cities, fixed cars, robbed banks, settled arguments, wooed beautiful women, given eloquent speeches, managed businesses, committed perfect crimes. And I had always had the last word. I had even run hotels, and in one book ran a highly successful brothel in Singapore. All this while ardently fantasizing at a little table in an upstairs room.

I had no marketable skills. I had done nothing except try to turn words into deeds: just dreams. I was useless at managing money. I had never had any employees, not even a secretary. I could not imagine being able to deal with workers' moods and temperaments. So, as a hotel manager in Hawaii — the job was a gift — I was grateful to my employees for their work. They ran the hotel and they knew it, knew they were in charge of the place, and of me. I understood fantasy — it was what writing

had taught me.

Still new to the job, I spent hours in my office, the one Buddy had vacated when he made me manager. I was looking for clues as to how to run the hotel properly. I found unpaid bills and faded Polaroids of blurred bodies. I found foreign coins, postage stamps, plastic bags of "killer buds," scraps of paper with women's names and telephone numbers scrawled on them in Buddy's writing, and cartoons torn from the newspaper that Buddy must have thought funny. I found, neatly typed, a description of Buddy's death, which was unexpected, because he was alive, enjoying his early retirement on the North Shore. Buddy Hunter Hamstra, Rest in Peace. It was Buddy's obituary, but who had written it? It looked genuine, two typed sheets, the letters pounded into the paper, most of the punctuation punched right through to show daylight, in the manner of big old typewriters. This had been written some time ago.

"From the outside [it began] he seemed a clown, a fool, an incompetent, but deep down he was very serious, often weeping on the inside. He was proud of his ability to fix anything that was broken. He was proudest of being able to mend a broken heart. In his youth he had been handsome and women had fallen for him. He was unable to resist, but he was gallant and they never forgot him, and he never forgot them. He served his country in the field of military intelligence, finding his way in secret from one Pacific Island to another, befriending the natives, who praised him in song and story. It is said that he left many a token of love behind on those islands and on his return he was greeted with cries of

'Darling!' and 'Daddy!' which brought a smile to his lips. 'I will pass this way but once,' he used to say. ."

I read on. The grammar faltered, the spelling was childish ("risist," "gallent," "milatery"), but it was earnest. I did not recognize this deceased person until I got to the end, where the paragraph about friendship and what it meant to him was described.

"Friendship was everything to him. He never turned away a friend.

He was generous to a fault. . the ultimate in kindness. No one was a stranger to him, which was why his name was so apt: Buddy."

The sensitive, sweet-natured man in this obituary was unknown to me. Buddy was a rascal, he was explosive, and he took pleasure in tricking his friends. And he was alive.

Yet I was fascinated. Whether this obituary represented the man he believed himself to be, or the one he wished he were, did not matter. What mattered was that in the peak of health he had sat down in his office at the Hotel Honolulu and composed this obituary, and got someone to type it. The last line read, "No flowers. Aloha attire."

It inspired me. A person had to be bold to write his own obituary, and even if it was a joke, it was a good joke. I thought I would do the same, as a parody, writing the obituary I feared I would get, with wrong dates, erroneous inclusions, deliberate omissions, just an illiterate's version of my life.

In my head I began to envision my own inaccurate obituary. I was the grumpy traveler in a book that had been a bestseller in the 1970s. I had lived overseas. Movies had been made of some of my books — the movie stars' names were given. I had abandoned my family and run off. Of the thirty-odd books I had written, two were mentioned by name, and one of my worst reviews was quoted, along with the bitter remarks of one of my enemies who claimed to be my friend. A woman who had stalked me for years accused me of having taken advantage of her: "He groped me." I had come and gone. I had vanished in the Pacific where, in total obscurity, written out and written off, I had been running a small hotel.

This balance sheet made me so melancholy I spent a day writing more versions of my obituary, then tearing them up, writing epitaphs (Here lies. .) and destroying them. Sweetie interrupted me while I was writing and asked me what I meant in a room report when I wrote, "feety smell.

cheesy sheets," and what was I doing?

"Nothing," I said. "By the way, when I die just scatter my ashes off the North Shore."

"Then can I find another husband?"

"Of course."

"You reading Buddy's stuff," she said, peering over my shoulder.

What I had been doing was more intrusive even than Sweetie imagined, for bundled with the obituary was a stack of love letters, written over a long period to Momi, Buddy's ex-wife, the earliest a few years ago, the most recent ones dated just before Buddy hired me. They were passionate appeals, they were descriptions of daily activity, much of it improbable, they were requests for help and advice, they were promises, and they were also the most tender declarations of love I had ever read, the more so for their heartfelt artlessness, all of them handwritten in Buddy's imploring blue scribble. The more clumsy a piece of writing, the greater its capacity to move, and these love letters of Buddy's in the Pending file seemed to prove what the poet said, that imperfection is the language of art.

"Does Momi ever come to the hotel?" I asked.

Sweetie said, "She mucky."

Dead, for ten years, which explained why Buddy had never sent the letters, why they had accumulated in the Pending file.

Buddy had seemed to me to be borderline literate. I was wrong. He had no gift, but he had a complex motive. In his heartache he had discovered the impulses that lay behind all good writing: ignoring everything that had ever been written, taking control of time, and most of all, inventing the truth.

Writing his own obituary was a wonderful conceit, even if the writing itself was cliche-ridden and mawkish. The love letters were classics, the better and more convincing for their crudeness. Buddy already knew what it had taken me years to discover — that fiction can be an epistle to the

living, but more often the things we write, believing they matter, are letters to the dead.