Hotel Honolulu

34 Courtship in Manila

A badge lettered Trainee was pinned to Pinky's dark green hotel uniform when she met Buddy for the interview in Manila. Interview? The idea was that she would spend a few days with him, including sleep with him. She was one of six possibles. If they hit it off, he would marry her and bring her back to Hawaii. "Pinky had the face of an angel," Buddy told me. "An angel."

"A friend of mine once said that your whole life is in your face," I had told him.

Looking at Buddy's face, you believed it. It was puffy and piratical, too big from food, lopsided with booze, blotchy with broken veins and grog blossoms, leathery from too much sun. He had wet, doggy eyes. His nose was a pickle. His joker's smile showed expensive crowns. He was only sixty-six but you knew when you saw him that he had gotten that face from overdoing it. He had tried everything. He had somehow survived the generation that drank and smoked too much. He had money and young friends. He was reckless enough to experiment with drugs, progressing from reefer to acid. For a while he took cocaine. But he was easily bored, even by drugs, and in the end he showed his age by overeating and drinking too much vodka. He was old at sixty, when I first met him. "I'm

not going to last forever," he said, meaning he felt he had only a few more good years left.

He was still recovering from the death of Stella. He missed her so badly he could deal with the pain only by joking about her, telling himself she was still alive, writing letters to her, or, as at his sendoff dinner, pretending that he had put her ashes in the pepper mill.

"I liked hearing her call my name," he said. "I wouldn't reply. I would just listen to her calling, 'Buddy! Buddy!"

Doubt and then alarm would enter her voice, which would falter when, getting no response, she realized that she was alone. Buddy would wait, in silence, then leave when he knew he was missed.

"Is that childish?" he asked.

"No, I don't think so." It was a lie, but it helped me understand the power he had over his friends. We wished him well, but also, knowing him was a spectator sport. What would he do next?

"I want to get married again," he said.

The video dating service had given him his first glimpse of Pinky. She was young. He feared older women. He mocked the idea of marrying a woman his own age, the way they walked, the way they looked. "Imagine me with a sixty-six-year-old woman!" Yet I felt such a woman would be just the sensible and kindly person he needed. But, "I want a doll," he said.

He wanted someone who had not yet begun to live, who had never left her island, much less left the Philippines. He wanted an entirely innocent girl, whom he intended to teach.

"All I want to do is fuck her and feed her fish heads."

Of the five other girls, he talked with three of them. Two were obviously unsuitable — they had children — and one was too old, at forty. The two remaining women he slept with. One said, "I am a nurse. I can help you." He was tempted by this, but she was rather plain. The other one bit him and scratched him when he made love to her. He objected. She said, "Men always like it." He wondered about her saying this and also thought she might be crazy.

Pinky showed up at his Manila hotel with her uncle and aunt. Uncle Tony ceremoniously unpinned her Trainee badge. "You won't need this, Pinky," he said. Auntie Marie! ostentatiously plumped Buddy's pillows. They said they would sleep on the floor of Buddy's hotel room, and after chatting for a while they actually bunked down, using sofa cushions. At midnight Pinky asked Buddy for some pesos. She gave her uncle and aunt the money.

"I tell them go buy Coca-Cola."

She made love shyly, but it was clear that she knew how to give pleasure. Afterward she said she'd had lovers before. But that was not so strange. Buddy did not expect miracles.

In the morning she sat up naked, so near him her nipples grazed his skin. She said, "When you are leaving Manila?"

"Thursday."

"Please marry me before you go, Buddy."

He brayed loudly at the recklessness of her bold demand. Then he watched this young naked girl get out of bed and go to the bathroom. He heard water music. She returned to bed, a small, thin sprite moving across the room like a bird flying to a nest, not going directly but at first obliquely, to a nearby branch, as though to distract attention, and only then flitting to the nest. She went to the window and looked out — daylight on her body. She had a bird's twitch and instincts, habit and caution. She moved sideways.

"Now I gotta go."

In the bathroom mirror Buddy examined his face and saw the whole of his life, a dog's life.

Back in bed he said, "Okay, it's a deal," and they kissed. She climbed on him and hugged him with all her bones, clinging like a little gecko on a big crumbling tree trunk.

When her uncle and aunt returned later that morning to resume chaperoning her, she gabbled in her own language, Visayan, and they hugged him, and laughed. Buddy knew he had done a good thing.

Pinky's aunt said that she could arrange everything, but because it was such short notice she would need some money, and she specified two thousand dollars.

"Let's see what one thousand will get us," Buddy said, squinting defiantly at the woman.

The wedding was held in the Hello Hospitality Suite on the fourth floor of the Hotel Rizal. The elevators were out of order. Exhausted by the stairs and half drunk, Buddy could scarcely speak. The ceremony was conducted by a little old man wearing judge's robes, except the robes were bright blue. Pinky wore a frilly white dress. Uncle Tony, in a crunchy Filipino shirt, gave her away. He sobbed, and so did Aunt Mariel. The fifty or so relatives and friends seemed shy until the food was served. Buddy just watched, thinking that it was like one of those dreams when you feel like a stranger. "Or else are hog-whimpering drunk."