Hotel Honolulu

23 Infidel

"While I was making my fortune I was very happy," Nevermann said. "I was alone. It was like being in the wilderness." He said that nothing in his life had compared with the long period of frantic solitude in which he had invented the vinyl-coating process that made him rich. I had complimented Nevermann on his tenacity in searching the past. "It's just a hobby," he said. "But there is very little I don't know about lamination and polymers."

He liked to reminisce about his solitary struggle: the late nights, the shortage of money, the patenting process, the building of his business, Wadsworth's Weatherproof Windows — a long period of reflection and work.

"Probably like writing a novel," he said.

"Inventing the perfect window?" I said. "Yes. A writer once said that the house of fiction has a million windows, and writers are looking out, watching the same show but seeing different things. One sees black where another sees white, one sees big where another sees small. Paradise out one window looks like the human comedy out another window."

"Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, the introduction," Nevermann said. "Surprised I know that? She gave me lessons in Henry James."

Yes, I was surprised. "Who gave you lessons?"

"Tell you later," he said. "The window that made the most money was the cellophane window on the envelope, invented by Joseph Regenstein," Nevermann said. "I know that, as a Chicagoan. Regenstein made a fortune and gave it to the University of Chicago."

I was reflecting on the envelope window as Nevermann told me the inventions he wished he had thought of, the simple breakthroughs: the snap-on lid of the Tupperware container, the notion of Velcro, the science behind Gore-Tex and Teflon.

"I envy the man who first thought of the snap-up opener on soda cans. I knew the tear-off loop was environmentally unfriendly." He liked the snap-up opener because it was nondetachable: the perfect solution, no waste. "It was probably too idealistic of me to want to make edible packaging, but soluble plastic is within our grasp. I like simplicity. One of your Hawaii residents invented the supermarket shopping cart."

"Goldman," I said, a name spoken in Honolulu in a whisper, for it was associated with drugs, bad luck, and suicide. "His fortune was the ruination of the family."

"I wanted to avoid that," Nevermann said. "All the time I was struggling I didn't have a woman."

Nevermann was so preoccupied with making his fortune that he remained single and celibate. His work made him happy. This combination of solitude and happiness gave him an aura of innocence, and when he became wealthy he was pursued by women, sought out not only for his money but also for the serenity that had become part of his character. Yet Nevermann had become almost monastic. He did not need a woman, he hardly needed companionship; he needed nothing. He had everything. But he knew he had neglected the cultural side of his life. He had little formal education, no time for books. He was musically illiterate. He wanted to catch up. This was after he moved to Florida. He found a college professor in Fort Myers who agreed to design a reading list of great books. It was important for a man of his wealth to know the classics and to understand the expensive objects that he had bought. "Avoir sans savoir est impardonable," the Frenchspeaking professor had told him, and translated it for him.

The professor's name was Vera Shihab — Lebanese father, Irish mother. She was thirty-five, unmarried, specialized in women's studies, but had a Ph.D. in comparative literature, which she always called comp. lit. She made the list for Nevermann: some Greek drama, Shakespeare's "problem plays" including Hamlet and Pericles, Don Quixote, Turgenev and Chekhov rather than Dostoyevsky. Anna Karenina. Great Expectations. Flaubert. Diary of a Nobody. Mark Twain. Portrait of a Lady. Death in Venice. Heart of Darkness. Stephen Crane's The Monster. Also Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Walters Olgivie, and more. Racism and oppression were themes on the list, and consequently so was liberation. Nevermann was impressed by the list, its reach and its seriousness. Vera was like someone with a vocation; she had that intensity.

Small, blond, talkative, she was pale and rather thin, all nerves and alertness — he guessed from her working hard. Her physical type appealed to Nevermann much more than if she had been the embodiment of big buttocky health, which he would have found intimidating for being too hearty. Vera's eyes were vivid green: contact lenses, but oddly attractive and catlike. She lived alone and hardly ate. She had had, she said, two or three lovers. "Sex partners" was her term. A previous marriage had ended swiftly: "I'm sure he was gay, but I don't think he knew it."

"I love your smile," she said to Nevermann. She also said she was fascinated by his name, Benno.

"It's German, you know."

Seminars — their informal discussions of the books — at her small, untidy apartment often ended late, Nevermann feeling pleasurably stimulated by the talk. One night Vera excused herself for about ten minutes and then reentered the room in a beautiful silk kimono, carrying a bottle of champagne, and said, "Do you think you could open this for me?" Nevermann did so, and they clinked glasses, but his thirst remained and made him attentive. As he drank, Vera said, "I want you in my mouth," and knelt before him. She did something to his body that he had sometimes fantasized about, and she murmured hungrily, holding him in her mouth. He lost control, he cried out, he sat down, he fell asleep, and then he stirred. She was not through. She said, "Turn over, darling." He slept again, and woke up bewitched.

They were married a few months later. Time seemed to mean everything, and then it meant nothing. He became unhappy. It was a new feeling. He had never been unhappy that way before. Uncertain, yes, and anxious, but not unhappy. With her next to him, he felt intensely lonely.

Vera had told Nevermann how her husband and those lovers had become cold and remote with her, and hypercritical; how they simply disliked being with her. They had begun reading bad novels. They watched television. They took vacations on their own. They lost their temper with her, shouted at her, cheated on her.

As though assuming the lead role in the sort of melodrama he hated, Nevermann saw that he had taken on the characteristics of his wife's exhusband and former lovers. He, who had hardly ever raised his voice, began shouting at her. "Keith used to read by the pool, to ignore me," she had told him. Nevermann started doing that! He avoided her, because the closer he came, the greater the chance of conflict. She had changed him, but she was fundamentally the same, except that she was no longer the coquette. No champagne. No "Turn over, darling." No books either.

She had what she wanted. In a weary, self-righteous, persistent way she was a nag. He knew the marriage was a mistake, that she was wrong for him. Yet she looked the same as when she had fascinated him with "Avoir sans savoir est impardonable" and the startling "I want you in my mouth."

People said to him, "You've changed."

Nevermann, who had been happy alone and had never needed anyone, now was deeply unhappy and sought the companionship of prostitutes. He told them what he wanted: it was what Vera had once offered him. He talked to people in bars, anyone who complimented him on his work. He was an easy mark for praise, and became needy, hated being alone. He had lost the solitude that had stimulated his imagination. He had never been lonely then. He had merely been alone. He badly missed his old single problem-solving self.

There seemed no solution to his dilemma. Looking into the future, he saw images of himself as a sorry middle-aged man. He gave people money! Handed it to them on trips he took!

In this fearful mood of low spirits he could not invent or create. He was dissolving inside. But the fear Vera had induced in him prevented him from leaving her. Castration was a terrible word, but that was the plainest way of saying what she had done to him, and she had managed it without touching him. So he stayed married to Vera. All that was required for him to stay married to her was for him to ask nothing of her.

He needed strength. He found it in the past, because he had no future. He found it in other people, because he himself was dying. It was, he admitted, partly sexual. There was nothing better than to find a woman he had once known and to discover that he desired her. And sex was easy — everything that followed it was impossible.

Yet his real passion lay in looking people up, everyone he had known or seen in his past, great and small, teachers, schoolmates, janitors, hotel workers, people who were memorable for having been kind, or rude — simply to see what had become of them. All were older, of course; most were sadder, fatter, sorrier, less secretive, facing death. Some were sick, many were dead. Nevermann did not feel superior. He said, "I am now like them."