Hotel Honolulu

26 Puamana's Cat

She had known all along what the man across the hall, the stranger Charlie Hopecraft, had wanted: a woman just like her. He had been friendly and respectful. But he had too much time on his hands. He had limited money. He was lost in the Hotel Honolulu. Puamana said it wasn't worth losing a week's privacy for a hundred dollars. "I would never get rid of him."

At first I let her stay at the hotel because Buddy had told me to. He seemed to like having this loose woman somewhat in his debt. Or was it a favor he owed her? Buddy had told me her secret: that as a twenty-year- old in 1962 this coconut princess had made love to a VIP at the Kahala Hilton, and the child of that casual encounter was Ku'uipo, Sweetie, who became my wife. Puamana still did not know the deeper secret, that the VIP was President Kennedy. As Sweetie had grown older, Puamana ranged more widely. But I suspected that for many years she had been Buddy's mistress and that he still felt an obscure loyalty to her, in spite of the way she lived.

There was also something catlike about her. I imagined that certain dependent people served as pets for big patronizing hearties like Buddy, who liked them for their wildness as well as their domestication. When I married Sweetie I became the patron, and I sometimes wondered whether

Puamana had contrived the whole plot to make herself my mother-in-law. Now and then, like Buddy, she would introduce me by saying, "He wrote a book!" and she laughed at the absurdity of such a thing.

"She's careful. She's clean," Buddy said. "She was born here, but her mother sent her away. She was educated in California."

Puamana was loving toward Rose. If someone is kind to your child, you can forgive a great deal in her. And Puamana's residence at the hotel meant that other hookers, the most territorial of souls, tended to stay away. She had a seat at Paradise Lost bar, but she averaged just a few men a week. It was not odd that she had not serviced Hopecraft; he was needy and not a spender. He seemed to be looking for a friend. Friendship took time and strength, and Puamana did not have enough of either. Other johns were richer and swifter. Puamana hated chitchat on the job, anything that wasted time. She liked the nervous types, the rabbits, the fumblers, the apologizers, the ones plagued with hairtrigger problems.

Untypically for an islander, Puamana was time-conscious. Punctuality made her seem prim. She was polite and somewhat fastidious in the way she dressed, which was why I had no objection to her sitting alone in the bar. Nor was she ever sitting alone for very long. Buddy said, "The hooker- as-a-librarian is much more of a sex magnet than the in-your-face bimbo." Puamana wore expensive eyeglasses some nights.

"Men are less threatened by me — they've kind of vouchsafed that," she said.

I stared, not at her but at the word.

She would sit meditatively but always alert, like a long-legged bird on a riverbank, one of those herons that is motionless until it swipes suddenly with its sharp beak when a fish swims by.

The clothes she wore in the evening were almost severe, hiding rather than revealing, and there were too many layers for such warm nights. You would not notice her unless you were looking for her, but she would see you first. Then she would empty her glass and look you in the eye and give you an opportunity to say, "Want another one?"

"That would be very nice," she said, improving her English but speaking sharply, to keep you in your place.

The rest of the moves were all hers.

"Shall we go out for a meal?" the stranger would say.

"A meal at any restaurant near here cost you a hundred dollars, a lot more with a bottle of wine. After that you'll want to do me. Why not give me the hundred and do me now?"

She could say that in such a reasonable tone of voice that the stranger was disarmed, too startled to laugh.

"You're worse than I am," the stranger would say.

Upstairs, all business, she took off her glasses and said, "No Greek. No oral. No pain. Use a condom. I don't kiss. I need the money up front."

If the man hesitated, she said, "You cross my palm with silver first, and then you get action."

Men in such circumstances were notoriously hoarse, or even mute. They needed guidance. They were shocked by the bareness of her room, a stark little cell dominated by a bed. Popoki took up most of the sofa.

"I hate that cat," Sweetie told me.

Popoki was a shapeless bag of fur with a flat face that was always scowling, a huge fussy appetite, and a bad temper. He seldom moved except to raise his head and hiss. He slept on the sofa, did little but sleep, hogging two cushions out of three, and he complained, yowling, if anyone used the third cushion.

The men sat compactly in the narrow armchair instead, watchful of the cat, fearing he might spring, paws splayed, claws out. I could just imagine a cat like that hooking its claws into a man's scalp, smothering his face and gagging him with its big rank body of fur-covered guts.

The cat was slovenly, Puamana excessively neat. She took endless showers. She was quiet — no music, no TV. She did not read, which was why "My son-in-law, he wrote a book!" sounded so absurd to her. When she was in her room she sat very still, in a yoga posture. She was a heavy smoker but only smoked on the lanai. "I heard of cats catching lung cancer from their owners' cigarettes."

Puamana was superstitious, solitary, vain about her looks, never late, indeed fanatical in matters of punctuality, a brisk walker, not a loiterer or a

lingerer. Even sitting at the bar she was heron-still, yet she could seem busy, sometimes murmuring urgently into her cellular phone.

Up at eleven, breakfast at noon, exercise on the roof, and then she prepared for the evening. She never went to the beach. "Sunshine turns skin to leather." She ate carefully, never gossiped, seldom conversed, and when she did, it was about skin care products or health food. She could be boring on those subjects be- cause, as she wasn't a reader, everything she said she had heard somewhere secondhand. She was a dieter, she was a self-denier, she was cheap, she hardly ever shopped.

When she was not exercising, or preparing for the evening ahead, or turning a trick, she was sleeping. For a while she saw a psychiatrist. That was after the incident with the priest. The priest bad first come to me. "I am offering counseling." He knew Buddy. I said that was fine and told him to keep to the public areas and out of the guest rooms. Soon after, he burst into my office with a grievance and a story. Puamana had attacked him — scratched him and sent him away. But when I asked her, Puamana denied it. The priest had pushed her onto the sofa, pulled out his penis, stood over her, and said, "You know what to do." It wasn't the sex, though she hated that sort; it was that he refused to pay up front. There was a quarrel. Puamana protected herself with her cat, lifted the heavy creature like a weapon and let him rake the priest's face with his claws.

I said to the priest, "A cat did that. Anyone can tell a cat's scratch from a woman's. You'd better get a jab or you'll have a problem."

The priest vanished into Oahu for a while, but later I saw him again, "counseling" in Waikiki. He always looked as though, on the pretext of saving souls, he was prowling for women's bodies.

"I know the type," Puamana said. "You get those."

"He might be back."

"No," she said. "He was mortified."

It was another unexpected word, like "vouchsafed." That and the way she lived should have told me a lot, but she was my mother-in-law and I did not want to look too deeply, for fear of what I might find. Already I knew more than I wanted to. I knew, most of all, her melancholy.

"No one misses me," she said.

"Speaking as a man, I know that's not true."

"When I die, who will go to my funeral?"

"I will," I said.

That touched her. She said, "I want a Catholic funeral. A high mass, worthy of a bride of Christ."

The expression on her soulful face kept my smile from surfacing.

"I was going to be a nun."