Hotel Honolulu

42 Henry James in Honolulu

It was one of the many moments in my life when I whispered to myself, "Where am I?" — in the larger sense. In the smaller sense, I knew I was smiling in impatience at my two symmetrical scoops of macaroni salad on King Kalakaua Night at the Honolulu Elks Lodge in Waikiki with my wife, Sweetie, as a guest of Lester Chen, my number-two man, and his new wife, Winona. "My kine no go shtrait," I heard. They were discussing in-line skates — were they bad for your ankles? I was also thinking how the plain truth like a sentence about this setting resembled the first line of a poem to which there is seldom a second line.

The boast of the Honolulu Elks was that they were next door to the much classier Outrigger Canoe Club. An Elk could walk out to the beach and bump into an Outrigger. There was just such an Outrigger in a blazer and a Panama hat standing on this shared margin of beach, staring at the sunset. I envied that dapper man for his belonging to this beach and not thinking, Where am I? Or so I presumed.

For myself, I was somewhere I had never been before, nor ever read about, nor knew anything of.

"There was an Elks Lodge next to the Washington School in Medford, Massachusetts, when I was growing up," I said. "I never saw a single

Homo sapiens enter or leave. Beautiful building, though, and a profound mystery to me."

One of those perplexed silences ensued, of the sort created by someone in a chatty group suddenly lapsing into echolalia or the gabble of a foreign language. The others looked away from me. Sweetie left for the buffet. Was it "Homo sapiens"?

"Everything kind of one mystery when you one keiki, yah?" Lester said. He was at his most banal when he attempted to be aphoristic in order to shut down a conversation. He had the Chinese hatred of direct questions, seeing them as a personal challenge, fearful of the conflict they might create. "This club also mysterious, okay?"

Who am I? was my next question, but also in a larger sense.

"You Sweetie husband!" Winona said to me, like someone just waking up. "I hear about you." She turned to a purple shrunken woman seated behind her. "He Sweetie husband!"

We were all badly dressed and barefoot in loose loud shirts and shorts like big misshapen children. Yet the meal was strangely formal and adult, even ceremonial, with two long speeches in the middle of it, and loyal toasts, and a strict order of courses — dinner at half past five, the setting sun glaring into my translucent macaroni salad, making it glow.

The grotesque novelty of the situation baffled me and made me suspect it might be significant. What was new to me always seemed

important. If this scene had been written, I had not read it. But how could it have been written in this green illiterate world, and by whom?

In the unreality of being a solitary witness are intimations of dementia. You wonder where to begin. Maybe it is a fever? I had believed that writing hallowed a place, established the setting as solid, palpable, credible. The place bulked, it had color, you believed it. An unwritten-about place seemed invisible until it was described by someone made confident by imagination. People grew up on a little island or in a small town and felt they had to leave home to find a place to write about, a "real" place, Chicago or New York or Paris, because their little home didn't exist or wasn't visible to the naked eye. Other writers had made the great cities real.

Yet long after I left Medford, I was encouraged to believe in the existence of my hometown when I read Henry James's story "A Ghostly Rental." The haunted house was located in a part of Medford not far from the Elks Lodge. I was reminded of what Lester Chen had just said.

"This club was mysterious in what way?"

"Exclusive," Chen said. "Okay?"

"You mean expensive?"

"Not expensive but strick," he said. "We could not join, okay?"

I took the "we" to mean Chinese. He hated these questions.

"When did the Elks allow you to join?"

"Not for a long time. Okay?"

"Statehood?"

"After that." He shook his head and said peevishly to Winona, "Okay, when that old lady try get take the bus?"

"Which old lady? Which bus?" I asked.

"In Alabama," Winona said. "Yah?"

I said, "Rosa Parks?"

"Yah."

"She was already on the bus. She wouldn't change her seat." Rosa Parks helped integrate the Honolulu Elks? In the course of this halting revelation, Sweetie had come back from the buffet with a full plate — a scoop of sticky rice, two slabs of Spam looking like a pair of pink epaulettes, a dill pickle, cold clotted potato salad, a dish of gluey poi, a broken and buttered muffin, a glass of fruit punch, a bowl of Jell-O with fruit chunks suspended in it.

Winona said, "She eating ethnic."

Sweetie had heard the end of the conversation. She said, "The people in a club don't want you for join, and you want join? How that make sense, yah?"

Sick of the subject, Chen turned his back on us and said, "The sunset. Like for make a picture."

The western sky was like an amateur painting, one of those behind- the-sofa pictures on black velvet — garish and overly simple, fatuous, too much of it all at once, the sun too round, the ocean too wide, too yellow. Most clouds become two-dimensional at sunset. All this sunset lacked were dancing dolphins and a three-masted schooner, I was thinking, and just then I saw a three-masted schooner, a dinner cruise, sailing into the liquefied light of the bright brimming ocean, preceded by dolphins spinning and flopping like badly behaved kids in a pool.

Stifled by the unreality of this, too, like a florid dream brought on by indigestion, I went outside and joined the man in the Panama hat. He was mustached, small, precise, smiling slightly at this hundred-egg omelet of nature being beaten into the sea.

"The red light breaking at the close from under a low somber sky, reached out in a long shaft," the man said, seeming to quote, and gesturing at the shaft, "and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old color."

"I was thinking how the sunset is sort of liquefied on the sea and dissolving into the chop of the waves."

"Tessellated, more like," he said, nodding. "Rubious. Effulgent. And the languid lisp of the Pacific."

I stared at him as though at a brave brother voyager from our old planet. He still wore his half-smile. I liked the neatness of his appearance and imagined him wearing a monocle.

"There you are," Sweetie said, walking from the Elks' lanai, raising her knees and having to take dance steps because of the deep beach sand. "Time for the prizes, Dad."

She looked very pretty, her hair blown by the sea breeze, giggling as she balanced in the sand. Part Chinese, part Irish, and part Hawaiian, she had big dark staring eyes and the smooth chinless face of a seal pup.

"I'm like a basket case," Sweetie said, and laughed. "Ate too much!"

"It's King Kalakaua Night," I said.

The man looked seaward again. "The honest, dusky unsophisticating night."

"Good grinds," Sweetie said. "Kinda hard for me. These grinds made by my peers. They got expertise!"

"We're guests of the Chens," I said. "Lester's an Elk."

"Now he's on skateboards," Sweetie said.

"My wife, Ku'uipo," I said to the man, who gallantly touched his hat

brim.

"May I see your watch?" the man asked.

Sweetie's watch, a gift from Buddy, showed a hula dancer, her arms the watch's hands.

"One has a dilettante's interest in horology," the man said.

"Everyone says that about the hula, but it's not true — this is pono, this is righteous," Sweetie said.

The man turned to me and said, "We must meet for luncheon."

"Luncheon" clinched for me what "tessellated" and "rubious" had clinched for him: he was certainly a fellow inhabitant from our distant galaxy. Among these islander earthlings, we were two travelers who had met by accident, and in spite of looking like everyone else, we were unquestionably extraterrestrials. No one else knew this, yet instantly we recognized the nuances and were able to communicate in our old, strange multisyllabic tongue, a secret and subtle language spoken by no one under the palm trees here.

We exchanged our full names — another habit from the old planet — and I realized I was talking with Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James. Edel, whom I had heard about, had been living in relative obscurity in Hawaii for many years. He said he knew my name.

"And I know yours."

"My friends on the mainland all think I'm crazy," he said.

"Mine think I'm dead," I said. "Have no idea where I am. If they knew, they'd say I'm crazy."

"They don't know what they're talking about." He touched his hat brim in farewell.

"We're not crazy. This is the place."

I resumed my seat in the Elks and whispered my question again, for the pleasure of knowing the answer.