Hotel Honolulu

43 Rocket Men

"I had no idea you were here too," Leon Edel said. That "too" was nice and made me feel I mattered. I volunteered that I was here as a hotel manager. He was tactful enough not to inquire further, and when he pointedly asked whether I happened to be working on anything, I just smiled. Not wishing to talk about writing is easy for another writer to understand, and a writer's not writing is more natural to another writer than writingis.

"I'm thinking of a book, titled Who I Was," I said.

"Yes, yes, yes."

I met him at the Outrigger for lunch, so as to keep our friendship secret from my hotel people. Even his calling this meal "luncheon" would have made them squint in suspicion.

"Call it work in stoppage."

Because we met as two people who felt a little strange and hidden here, we found it natural to confide in each other. We sat by the sea, eating salad, sipping iced tea. Leon was eighty-seven, my father's age, though my father was gone. One of those rare men who could be a stand- in for my father, Leon Was precious for his age and his kindness. He was

also wise. And it was a pleasure just to sit with him and talk about our wonderful old planet.

"Your wife is lovely," Leon said, interrupting himself.

"Yes, a coconut princess. Maybe a little provincial."

"She's a provincial of genius. She's life itself," Leon said. "She's for the bright rich world of bribes and rewards."

After that, we changed the subject to Hawaii, but in effect it was the same subject, for Hawaii, like Sweetie, was beautiful and healthy and fresh. You could be so happy in Hawaii's embrace you did not notice what was missing.

"James once spoke of a void furnished with 'velvet air.'"

"Did he know anything of the tropics?"

"Florida," Leon said. He raised a finger to make a Jamesian point. "You could live in Florida with an idea, he said, 'if you are content that your idea shall consist of grapefruits and oranges." Leon let this sink in. I could see the named fruit in a cut-glass bowl. "Also he was in San Diego. Coronado Beach. That's where 'lisp of the Pacific' comes from."

"Would he like it here?"

"We like it here," Leon said with assurance, a perfect way of saying yes: Henry James would love Hawaii, because we did.

"He'd dine out more than we do."

"Probably every night. He would see into every corner. He would use the pulses of the air. He would know people we don't. Doris Duke, the Hawaiian royalty, the way Stevenson did. Stevenson drank champagne with King Kalakaua. James would have found his way. Hobnobbed a little, cultivated the right people, and perhaps some of the wrong people too."

Henry James in a billowing aloha shirt approached us as Leon spoke, seeming to conspire, speculating about another inhabitant of our world. I listened closely because I wondered how much of this description fitted me and my living here. James with plump sunburned jowls, in island attire, his stout Johnsonian shape, short pale legs, round belly, big busy bum and fluttering hands, breathlessly stammering one of his inimitable voice-overs in Waikiki, indicating the throngs of tourists and the effulgent clouds, followed by his panting dog, Tosca.

That day I went back to the Hotel Honolulu and found Keola on the front steps, stabbing an ice pick into a block of blue ice.

I said, "Shouldn't you be doing that in the kitchen?"

"Bull-liar bitches talk stink about me."

"Do it later, then."

"Later I go for lawnmower da grass."

The next time I saw Leon I said, "What would James have made of the locals?"

"He would have been attentive to them, as he was attentive to everyone. Some of them he would have called 'ragged and rudimentary.' Maybe he would have mentioned their 'robust odor. . thick and resisting."

He might have said that of many of my employees. So, strange as it was, I began to see my life in this way, as an alien in an aloha shirt, looking at Hawaii through dark glasses, measuring my impressions against James's. Leon helped me understand it. Worthy of James in every way, he had immersed himself in the master's life like a monk in the steps of a lama on the path to enlightenment.

Once a week, "luncheon" in our old language, we talked about our former lives. We mused without regret, knowing that we really belonged back there but had succeeded in slipping away. Leon was a whole happy person, with a power to evoke our old home. I got sentimental being with him, discussing things the hotel knew nothing of.

He said, "New York was so busy, so crowded."

I said, "I love looking at the empty sea. The echolalia of the waves."

He didn't wince at the word. He said, "This is a fresh little Eden. Rather new and enigmatic, perhaps, but that's the price."

He might have been describing Sweetie.

"I came to see London as clammy and ugly. All those bomb sites. Budget-conscious buildings. Twice-breathed air. I hated having to wait a whole year for spring to return."

"I used to go back to New York several times a year," Leon said. "Then it was once a year. Now I've stopped going. I don't envision ever going back."

His saying that encouraged me to think that we could stay for good on this green island. Hawaii was at the center of our friendship, and Henry James in it — Henry in a hibiscus-print shirt from Hilo Hattie's. Hawaii was beautiful, and its genius lay in its look, like a new flower opening, like a starfish cluster of fragile fluttering petals, whose bright primary colors gave it an air of unselfconsciousness and false innocence.

We admitted that New York and London, ugly and crowded and clammy as they might be, were full of life. They were home, they were human, everyone spoke our language there.

"Nudda drink, uncle?"

"I believe I have had a sufficiency," Leon said.

"Nuh?"

One luncheon day Buddy Hamstra saw us. He was with Pinky, who had become famous for always biting him on the forearm while he drove to town. The scars were as purple and permanent as tattoos. Now he called attention to them and used them as a boast to introduce his wife. See this? he'd say.

"Getting any mud for your turtle?" Buddy tapped me on the shoulder and shouted at Leon, "He wrote a book!"

"He wrote a book too," I said, indicating Leon.

"Two of them!" Buddy said to Pinky, who giggled into her cupped hand. "Two whole books!"

After they left, I said, "Maybe Hawaii is now what London and Paris were for Americans in the late nineteenth century. A place to vanish in and become corrupted."

"Not here — not corrupted here."

"Become idle, maybe. Eating grapefruits and oranges."

He laughed and quoted Thoreau, another of his biographical subjects. The reach of Leon's knowledge amazed me — the books he had read, the writers he had known, snaking deep into the past. Many of those writers lived at the height of the nineteenth century and were acquaintances of James, including Edith Wharton, whom Leon had known a little, and her lover Morton Fullerton, whom he had known well. He had been a student in Paris in the late twenties. He had returned as a soldier in newly liberated Paris, had met Hemingway, whom he had not liked, and had been on the best of terms with Edmund Wilson, whose diaries he'd edited. He knew Bloomsbury and had written about it. With all this erudition there was a sweetness in the man, and even at his most intellectually severe you could see his sentiment and the depth of his love -

— loved his wife, loved books, loved Hawaii, loved life. Leon was the happy man I hoped to be at his age, sitting in the sunshine at the Outrigger Canoe Club.

Familial rivalry was a constant subject with us, because he had a twin and I had many siblings, and Henry had William. "My younger and shallower and vainer brother," William had written confidentially to the secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, declining to be a member.

James was the third person at our table or on the lanai, but he was not always a whole, round, upright man, smiling between puffs on a cigarette. He was kindly and wounded. Sometimes he was supine, a patient undergoing an operation, half his skull drilled out and removed, his belly cut open, the contents of his stomach — all those rich dinners — in a big enamel hospital bowl, his "obscure hurt" visible as a scrotal bruise, his mouth gaping. His bowels were a wreck. He was now and then on a couch, as Leon recalled his breakdowns, his sadness, his panic attacks, how he could not bear to be alone.

Leon could quote the sad paragraph James had written to Morton Fullerton, who had asked blandly, in the French manner, how he had begun — from what port.

"The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life — and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course again finally directs itself!"

And Leon could go on to the end, in the piteous description of the man from our homeland.

"He knew what it was like to feel unwanted," Leon said.

James's story "The Beast in the Jungle" — Leon had quoted the sunset sentence from the beginning of it the evening we met on the beach — said almost everything about his disappointment and the way he had yearned for a great passion. Yet passion had eluded him. He had mistimed it, as Marcher does in the story. His advice to "live all you can" Leon and I had heeded. Leon, in a sense Henry James's valet — forever sorting and seeing to his things — was a man without regret. He had fallen in love in Hawaii, married a woman he loved, found happiness here. I had done the same. Hadn't we lived all we could? Being in Hawaii had so far taken me from my writing, yet I was living in a way I never had, in a green world, far from home.

"I like it here, but I don't write much," I said to Leon on one of those Outrigger days.

"As you get older you write less. Look at me. I write an hour a day. Sometimes half an hour."

"I don't write at all," I said, breathless from the sudden confession, and at once felt like someone disclosing the symptom of an illness.

He smiled at me like a doctor with a patient who was ill but not seriously so. And in the manner of a doctor suggesting exercise and a change of diet, Leon prescribed for me a regimen of James stories: "The Altar of the Dead," "The Lesson of the Master," "The Middle Years," "The Death of the Lion," "The Figure in the Carpet," "The Real Thing."

"Read the work that James wrote when he was your age, a hundred years ago."

Locked in my office in the Hotel Honolulu, hidden from my staff, I read the stories. They helped, but still I didn't write. Maybe once you stopped, you dried up and there was nothing more.

We still met regularly for lunch, Leon and I, above the hot beach, under the blue sky that made the sea so blue, for the pleasure of speaking in our own language of the beauty of this island.

"For years I thought about James's stories," Leon said. "Then one day it came to me. His stories were his fantasies. Each of them a separate one. Read them all and you have the man's inner life. Perhaps all short stories are fantasies."

"I used to write them," I said.

Under a sky of Mediterranean azure, shot through with the shafts of dusty gold you see in Renaissance paintings, everything imaginable in the huge sky, even cherubic clouds, everything but a risen Savior; within earshot of the lisp of the sea, the slosh of little waves brimming at the beach, we sat in the watery light, in the velvet air, feasting on grapefruits and oranges. With Leon I was happier than I had ever been, but away from him I felt a new sadness, and now my nonwriting life at the hotel was almost unbearable.