Hotel Honolulu

47 The Dream House in Kahala

Overhearing a request for monthly rates, I knew it was either a Canadian escaping the winter or a local man who had been thrown out of his house, his marriage gone bad. The man, Alex Holt, who was local, winced at the rate, but after I heard his story, I lowered it and was tempted to give him a free room. It was that sad. In his soft voice, he had an oblique and apologetic way of describing the reverses in his life: "I'm pretty much broke," and "She kind of destroyed me," and "It was pretty much kind of a disaster-type thing."

"My wife's quite a bit older than me," he had said.

Why did that sort of admission always sharpen my curiosity?

"Ex-wife, I mean," he added, and I thought, Of course.

Becky, the ex-wife, had a troubled ten-year-old girl, Kristen. The child had liked Alex Holt, and the promise of a bond had been part of the reason Becky had married him. She wanted security for the child, she wanted to stay in Hawaii, and she wanted a house in Kahala. She was a dental hygienist.

"Becky kind of dreamed of living in Kahala," Alex said.

Of the high-priced Honolulu suburb of Kahala, Buddy always said, "Kahala is a pig farm. I know it's full of millionaires, but as far as I'm concerned it's still a pig farm. It's flat and uninteresting."

Alex Holt was in advertising at a time when the agencies in Hawaii were going broke, the 1980s slump. And yet by getting some mainland clients, he had managed to find the money for a corner lot, three streets off Kahala Avenue. Becky was successful in her work, and she had contributed to the down payment. The idea was that they would knock down the existing house and build a new one in stages — prepare the lot, draw up the plans, complete the building. It might take five years or more. As Becky said, "That's what marriage is all about, building for the future. Having a time line that's also a dream."

Alex felt that way about the child, too. Kristen needed a good education. He enrolled her in Iolani and paid half her fees. Kristen joined the volleyball team and the drama club — one year she had a small part in Our Town. She said she wanted to write poetry, and wrote a poem that Alex printed, making it into a greeting card with the office copier. It was called "A Love Letter to My New Dad." Alex legally adopted her and took full responsibility for her tuition. He sometimes drove her and Becky to Kahala and parked near the teardown house on the corner lot. Together they tried to imagine how their dream house might look.

An architect was found. He was one of Becky's patients. She asked Alex, "Are you comfortable with that?" This was the way she talked. Alex

said he needed to meet with the architect first to see if he was right for them.

When Alex was satisfied, he hired the man. The architect entered completely into the spirit of the dream house. He said, "You can save money by getting generic windows, but remember, you're near the ocean. If this were my house, I would get Wadsworth's Weatherproofs — they're vinyl-clad, double-glazed, hurricane-proof. ." The tile roof with a wide hip for the rain and sun, the screened lanai, the extra bedroom, the track lighting, the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the Viking range and dishwasher, the Mission furniture — all of it, he said, was the sort he would buy if it were his home.

"Home" was the word he always used, never "house."

"Don't think of this home in terms of time," the architect said. "Just think quality. Think permanence. A home has a soul."

Such quality implied the high six figures. More clients had to be found on the mainland. Alex was away a great deal, traveling constantly. He saw himself as a modern version of a hunter-gatherer. The value of his sacrifice was apparent each time he returned home: the sketches became plans, the plans became blueprints, and soon they were deep into what the architect referred to as the "permitting process."

"He's good," Alex said. He did not comment on the architect's youth -

— how he was uneasy hiring someone younger than he was.

Becky said, "A person's teeth say an awful lot. I've worked on his teeth for years."

Alex was also delighted by the eagerness Kristen showed on his return. Kristen's reaction wasn't faked: Becky had the whole family she had always sought. He had shown Becky that in becoming a faithful husband, attentive to Kristen, he had become the girl's father. What worried him were Kristen's early-teen spasms of rebellion, like a child sticking a finger in a flame. Kristen tried smoking, stole a book from school, put up lurid posters of tongue-wagging men in evil makeup in her room. "It's a rock group, Alex!" Kristen loved horseplay, especially liked to wrestle on the floor with Alex, or sometimes at the beach he would fling her onto the sand and she shrieked as though she were being tickled. And sometimes she sneaked a cigarette.

Alex was happiest when they all sat around the kitchen table in the rented apartment in Kaimuki studying the floor plans of the dream house. They mentally moved into the flat white spaces.

The architect said, "Let's work through this," and praised their vision — the contours of the double-pitched roof, the proportions of the lanai, the privacy fences, the way each room was selfcontained, the kitchen as a family focal point. Alex had an office; Becky had the dressing room and closet space she had always wanted; Kristen's room was to be soundproof.

"I got the big family room idea from the Dillingham House in Mokuleia," Becky said. "That's where we had our wedding reception."

"Your house will have your look," the architect said. "Very Unique."

Hearing the architect say "very unique," Alex wanted to correct him, as when he said "home." But Alex knew that as an advertising man he was more word-conscious than the architect, who thought in pictures, using the left side of his brain.

To save them money, the architect said that he would supervise the construction, and he hired his own subcontractors. Often, calling from the mainland, Alex was surprised when the architect picked up the telephone, or Kristen did and handed it to the architect. He told the man he was grateful for his close attention and long hours. As for Kristen, the man said, "She likes being on-site. She's getting involved." Alex heard the girl giggle.

"When they saw the wood it smells like popcorn!" he heard Kristen

say.

"Isn't that special! It's what I would want if someone were designing a home for me," the architect said. "I know the pitfalls — you don't. And even if you did, you'd probably be risk averse."

Instead of commenting on "risk averse," another turn of speech that drew his attention, Alex asked the architect where he was from. The man's answer, "The Bay Area," told him nothing.

Alex returned one weekend to find four enormous Tongans building a wall of lava rock in front: the architect's idea, Kristen's design — she'd sketched it herself — which Becky approved. The man also urged them to get their furniture custom made in Hawaii: "No veneer. Solid koa. Why not?

The koa forests in Hawaii are nearly depleted. The wood will be unobtainable in a few years."

Agreeing to this meant more visits to the mainland, and setting up a mainland office, just a fax machine and a telephone in a small rented cubicle in Los Angeles, which Alex hated yet endured: the dream house was taking shape.

"I notice you usually relax like me in a chair after work," the architect said, tapping his head in a knowing way and then sketching on his pad. He had decided to design the furniture that would be custom made. Scraping with his pencil, he said, "I'm going to rough out a chair with a real high back and lumbar support." Scrape, scrape. "Nice wide arms. Tiny little details matter the most."

There was no point in letting a harmless expression like "tiny little details" bother you, and yet it did bother Alex. He made the mistake of mentioning it to Becky that evening in the stifling apartment in Kaimuki, and she turned on him.

"You're never satisfied! Here he is, designing a chair for your own butt, and you criticize the way he talks."

She was angry because he had also mentioned the architect's harping on "home" and repeating "very unique." Under this onslaught Alex was embarrassed ever to have thought of himself as a hunter-gatherer.

Not long after that, he was in Los Angeles and eager for news of the house, which was nearly finished. He called Becky. She surprised him by saying, in a telephone voice she kept for strangers, "Yes, what is it?"

He had heard her say that into a phone to telemarketers.

"It's me," Alex said, hoping that she was speaking this way because the line was bad.

"I know it's you."

Then he knew something was wrong.

"What is it?" he said. "Is Kristen smoking again?"

Becky said, "We have to talk," and hung up.

The headwinds that impede a plane flying from Los Angeles to Honolulu most winter days can add as much as an hour to the normal five- hour flight. That happened the morning in January Alex Holt flew home, knowing that something was seriously wrong but not sure what. He was heartsick. Becky met him at the gate at Honolulu Airport among the people offering leis and shouting in glee and carrying signs saying Paradise Tours Meeting Point, or uniformed drivers with placards reading Dr. Kawabata or Mr. Dickstein. And when he greeted her, he found himself too weepy and inarticulate to speak. Becky hurried on ahead while Alex found a skycap to help him with his bag. Driving from the airport down the H-1 Freeway, she glanced at him in the passenger seat, saw his tears, and said, "Listen carefully. I have something to tell you. I've been seeing Ray." Ray, of course, was the architect, whom Alex had never thought of as having a

name you needed to know, any more than the skycap who had jogged his bag on the luggage cart.

"Seeing Ray" was supposed to mean everything. In the silence that followed Becky's saying this, Alex imagined some of the implications.

Seeing the man naked was mainly what he imagined. Seeing him laugh, seeing him talk, seeing him make promises, not seeing anyone else.

At the Kaimuki apartment, also in silence, he said, "Where's Kristen?"

"She's staying with friends. She doesn't want to see you."

The apartment seemed more spacious, but that was because it had been emptied of most of the furniture.

Becky said, "I've moved my things."

"Where to?"

She seemed genuinely amused. "Where to!"

"Kahala?" He saw the house in his mind as Becky began to leave. He said, "You said we needed to talk."

"We just talked." Again she turned to go.

Alex said in a pleading voice, "Can't we talk about our marriage?"

"Don't do that to me," Becky said. "You're trying to bring me down."

"What was wrong?" Alex was in tears again.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "I've already processed it."

"Processed" was one of his words — had to be.

Becky filed for divorce. She asked for child support. Kristen stayed with her. "She needs a stable home." They were by then living in the house in Kahala, and Alex suspected but could not prove that the child support was going toward the mortgage. Alex challenged her on this, lawyers were hired, a suit filed, and in her deposition Becky said that Alex had been neglectful, constantly away on the mainland, and verbally abusive. She said that she suspected him of child abuse, "inappropriate touching and fondling" and spending much more time than was normal with her teenage daughter.

"She hit me with a pretty good lawsuit," Alex told me.

Without money for a lawyer to contest her claims, Alex dropped the suit. At that point he checked into the Hotel Honolulu and, after telling me his story, got very depressed. "Kind of suicidal, but it wore off." Then, some months later, he heard that Becky, calling it "tough love," had thrown Kristen out of the house for smoking pakalolo, and that Kristen was living with her Samoan boyfriend somewhere in Nanakuli. Alex said he was sorry about it, but "I pretty much try not to let it bother me."

I said, "I want to know a bit more about Kristen."

But he wouldn't tell me more. He said that talking about this whole thing, and especially about her, had only made him feel kind of worse.