Hotel Honolulu

41 Mr. and Mrs. Sun

People in the hotel said, "They hold hands," and a!ways smiled because Mr. and Mrs. Sun were in their late forties and rather plain and well past the hand-holding stage of marriage. Even some of our honeymooners didn't do it. The Suns had chubby hands like gloves, which made the handholding noticeable. I liked saying, "So what?" The hugging and clasping was less interesting to me than the Irish names of their children, Kevin and Ryan, very skinny kids, a different physical type altogether. Plump parents usually had plump kids. This seemed to be breaking some fundamental family rule. The other thing was, their kids were famous brats.

The first year — my first year, their fifth or more — the Suns came without their children. After that, they brought them. While the parents were model guests, the two boys had a reputation for trouble. One was destructive, the other a thief. "Attention seeking" was one of the kinder explanations for their behavior. I liked the hand-holding Suns without in the least understanding their children. They were from San Francisco, Chinese Americans.

Soon after I arrived in Hawaii, I had reflected on how the sunlight here was so dazzling, it gave us the conceit that we were virtuous and pure and better than other people. Everywhere else on earth was worse -

people got sick and cold on the mainland and had to wear socks, Africa was poor, China was overcrowded, Europe was senile, and the rest of the world was dark. We took personal credit for our sunshine and expected gratitude from strangers for sharing it with them. This Hawaiian heresy was dangerous, for it made us complacent about the damage we did to these little crumbly islands. We were so smug about our sunshine, we were blind to everything else, as if we had been staring at the sun too long.

Nevertheless, I found Sun a lovely, bright, open-faced name. More American than Chinese, Calvin and Amelia were quiet people, and I had not paid much attention my first year because I had mistaken them for middle-aged lovers, for whom no one else existed. On their visit my second year, I still saw them as distant, inward, happy, compliant, practically magnetized lovers, but also realized they were the parents of two disruptive teenage boys.

In spite of the staff's warning the boys for a week about various infractions, one night they had thrown furniture into the hotel pool.

I was checking to see that the chairs and tables had been fished out when I found a soggy book lying on the tiles. It had been badly splashed, an early edition of Michener's Hawaii, and although the inked inscription was blotchy with water, the handwriting was so upright and enthusiastic I could easily read it: To my dear husband, to commemorate ten years of the greatest happiness I have ever known. May the future shine as brightly upon us and let our joy be endless! Your adoring wife, A. And a date.

Apart from the old-fashioned and impossible-to-mock romantic gusto, and the date — five years before — I was struck by the joyous penmanship, the exclamation mark as bold and expressive as a Chinese brushstroke.

The book was nothing special, but the inscription made it a trophy.

"That thing down there with legs is one table," Keola said to me. "Something like one occasional table."

He meant the dark object at the deep end that the young fools had thrown in with the chairs and ashtrays and cushions.

"What did you say, Keola?"

I loved hearing him repeat it, the unexpected precision of "occasional." The wooden table, now split and ruined, was from a guest room.

"Them Sun kids again," Peewee said. "I know what I'd do with them."

We had the weird vitality of spectators at a disaster, and stood marveling at the wreckage, watching the junk being hoisted, hoping there were no corpses.

"Burlap sacks," Peewee said. "Samoan women. Baseball bats." I went upstairs to the Suns' room and knocked. I heard a soft voice: "I'll get it, darling."

Mrs. Sun answered the door. Her husband was in a chair across the room, holding a book. Another chair had been drawn up next to it. It was lovers, mostly, who pushed chairs together like this, or (also like the Suns) who moved the nightstand and pushed the twin beds cheek to cheek. Lovers were habitual rearrangers of furniture.

"Yes?"

I never spoke to the Suns without feeling I was intruding on their intimacy and perfect peace.

"We've had another complaint about your boys."

Mrs. Sun looked so sorrowful I found myself apologizing and eager to get away, suddenly finding the vandalism trivial compared to my disturbing the happiness of this wonderful couple. Mr. Sun set his book down. They both looked abject. How many times had they been put in the position of having to be sorry and make amends?

Mrs. Sun said, "I'll ask my husband to speak to them. Of course we will pay for any damage."

"The patio furniture isn't a problem. There was some breakage, though," I said. "And a guest room table will have to be replaced or refinished. It ties up Maintenance when these things happen."

"I know it has happened before because of our boys," Mrs. Sun said -

— something I had planned to say.

"Are they around?"

"Across the hall."

She knocked. No answer. I knocked, then used my master key. But by then Mr. Sun had called to her with affection and concern, and she was now back in their room with the door shut.

The boys were out, but judging from the condition of the room, Maintenance and Housekeeping would have some work to do: broken mirror, broken blinds, spills on the carpet, footprints on the wall (on the wall?), and that was only what I saw from the doorway, peering in.

"That's nothing," Trey said later. "A few years ago they trashed the bar. Buddy went ballistic."

One boy was a drunk, the other smoked dope, Trey said, but admitted he did not know which was which. It didn't matter. They were a year apart, fourteen and fifteen. In the second week of their vacation the older one was caught stealing from a convenience store, and the younger one was picked up for vandalizing a public telephone. Because of their ages, no charges were filed. The boys were left in the custody of their parents, which was meaningless because I never saw the four Suns together. The children were seldom around.

One day the Suns volunteered the information that they were just returning from St. Andrew's, the church in which they had been married. Their visits to Hawaii were always planned around their wedding anniversary.

They were, as always, holding hands. Mr. Sun tugged his wife's hand with such affection that I was moved.

"I can see that the romance hasn't gone out of your marriage," Isaid.

"It never will," Mr. Sun said.

Is a marriage a family? Mr. and Mrs. Sun were inseparable, utterly devoted to each other, quiet, and kind, their love creating a magnetic field of orderly flowing energy between them. The flow neither attracted nor repelled anyone else. No one else was magnetized, no one else mattered.

They left, all of them. The following Christmas, on a sunny afternoon, one boy shot himself in a motel in Great Falls, Montana. The other boy moved to Seattle. I didn't know which boy did which.