Hotel Honolulu

49 aloha.net

They had agreed that he would be in the Hotel Honolulu lobby holding a copy of Honolulu Weekly, and so would she, but coming up behind the man reading the personals and chewing his knuckles, she hoped he was the wrong one. Her eyes racing, she took him in all at once in desperate scrutiny, looking for something positive, any feature, as if she were trapped in a strange room and searching for an exit. He had not noticed her yet, still he was reading, and she was short of breath seeing the page headed Women Seeking Women.

Perhaps he seemed uglier than he really was because she was so afraid of him. Certainly the instant she saw him sitting there, gnawing the back of his hand, she forgot that she had ever spoken to him. He might well have been a reasonable-looking person, but the moment made him hideous and she could not recapture any of the innocence of her first glimpse. Had her mood, her distorting memory, made him into a monster?

He might have looked like a nice guy — she would not have approached him otherwise — but later, all she could remember was that she had feared him from the first — his size most of all, for he was big, sacklike, with small shoulders, sprawling pillowy hips, weighty legs that seemed even wider because of his baggy shorts, the sort of tightly laced

sneakers that made your feet sweat. His head was tiny and two-sided, exaggerated by a cheap haircut.

His earrings worried her more than almost anything else: he wore one in each ear. Two earrings — what's the deal? was a question she tried to improvise. She wanted him to be the wrong man, not "larc22" from aloha.net but just a fat guy with the Weekly where "larc22" should have been.

His narrow shoulders twitched in premonition, then twisted, and he squinted at her and smiled. Had he just eaten a candy bar? He had parentheses of chocolate scum at the corners of his mouth.

"Aloha, Saddy."

Her heart pinched. She said, "Sadie."

The e-mail name was "Saidy," but she could not blame him for getting it wrong — she had never spoken the word before.

"Daisy, actually," she said. "Are you 'larc twenty-two'?" Only now did she remember his mentioning the Milky Way candy bar he usually ate when watching The Tonight Show. Yet he had also claimed to like scuba diving and said something about riding around the island on his motorcycle. It was easier to imagine him in his room, eating candy and watching TV, and on his shelf the first catcher's mitt he had ever owned and the scattered parts of a turntable he was fixing so that he could listen to his collection of old Hawaiian 78s. She knew everything about him.

"Or should I call you Carl?"

As he had come toward her, walking flatfooted as though tramping through sand, she had stepped backward. She registered that he was heavy but not tall and that he had a hungry smile.

"I spend so much time online, I don't even think of myself as Carl anymore."

Another scary factoid, she thought, that he regarded himself as "larczz," like one of those bulgy-faced robots on Star Trek, the reruns of a show he never missed. He had warned her, I'm a Trekkie.

So that he would not come any closer, she sat down, and he sat too, heaving himself into a nearby chair, seeming like an obstacle.

"Did you come here on your motorcycle?" she asked.

One of his habits — in this minute or so she had established this, had seen him do it twice — was knuckle-chewing. He did it again.

"Sold it," he said. His gnawing made him scowl. "So you want to go somewhere?"

She wanted to go home. But she was fearful of upsetting him by rejecting him so fast. She was already afraid of him and wishing to placate him, so that she could leave and never see him again.

"How about right here?" she said. "There's a bar and a lanai."

Something in his manner made her want to stay in the open with him. She went ahead into Paradise Lost, imagining she could feel his

breath on her neck. She hurried past the booths and made for the outside tables, sitting quickly so he would not touch her.

"I know you don't drink," she said. "But this is a nice place."

"I'm a cheap date." He had made that comment every time he mentioned how he didn't drink alcohol. "But go ahead, have your frozen margarita."

She almost did not order one, to spite him, but the waiter was hovering and listening, and she thought the drink might help her get through this. After a sip of it — he was drinking Diet Pepsi — she said, "Isn't there anything you can do? I mean, is your liver permanently damaged?"

"Stays fried," he said, and explained his hepatitis once more, how he had contracted it on Maui one New Year's.

I cannot believe I'm having a conversation with this strange man about his liver, she thought. In her mind she saw a purplish piece of raw liver on a white dish.

"So are you still getting those dizzy spells?"

"I just told you I am," he said.

She hadn't been listening. He had been describing his ailments while she had been abstracted thinking of them. To hide her face, she lifted the wide margarita glass and sipped.

"I really hate him."

"Who?"

"Jimmy Buffett."

She knew that. She just hadn't made the connection. He hated the Grateful Dead, too. He liked Hawaiian music and Philip Glass. So did she.

He liked scuba diving. She was certified. And motorcycles. She had imagined herself a passenger on his. But I hate these macho bikers, he had once said to her. From that remark she took him to be small, perhaps delicate, slender anyway, and saw him somehow in light slacks and sandals and a fluttery aloha shirt. But no, you could hate machismo and still be a big soft spud with two earrings.

"So how's the diving?"

"I haven't been lately. We usually go to the North Shore."

She knew that, too — Haleiwa Beach Park, with his friend Mickey.

"Wetsuit's shredded. Have to get them specially made. Credit card's maxed out."

His manner of speaking was so like one of his e-mails that she smiled and absent-mindedly touched her forearm.

"You got this habit of touching your arm," he said, which made her look at his bitten knuckles. "So that must be from the accident, huh?"

Before he could touch her arm, she pulled it away and sat back in her chair. He knew all about her scooter crash on Beretania Street. As he

lowered his head to see the burn scar on her calf from the exhaust pipe, she turned aside.

She could have done the same to him, talked about the finger he had smashed in a door. He said it "twinged" when he typed too long.

Sometimes it was his sign-off. Finger's throbbing. Or his feet — the "cookies" he put in his shoes for arch support. She understood his bad feet now. He was allergic to shellfish, too. He complained of carpal tunnel.

"So how's your mother?" he asked.

This was painful, such a question from a stranger.

"She's okay."

"I go past there almost every day."

Why had she told him about Arcadia, where her mother lived among old folks because of her stroke? As the youngest of the four children, but the only one still on the island, Daisy had been unable to care for her mother, and so Arcadia was the expensive answer — they all chipped in. He knew about that, this big strange man who went down Punahou Street and thought of her mother. It was a terrible mistake to log on late at night and lonely.

"I have to go," she said.

"We just got here!"

She had suspected that it would be hard to get away. He had hope. She had none.

"Hey, my father's not doing too good," he said.

Months before, on one of those late nights, when she had mentioned how badly she missed her father, he had commiserated, had quoted a poem he'd learned at school to her: my father moved through dooms of love. How could she cut him short now?

"It's the chemo," he said, making it into a Hawaiian name.

She didn't want to know more. She said, "They have these online support groups. I really have to go."

"There's about two hours before the news," he said.

Saying that was like a chess move. He was a chess player: he played against his computer and sometimes won. He knew how to be obstructive with a single move. He was reminding her that she watched the ten o'clock news every night.

"I figured we could watch the news together at my place."

The very idea of his thinking that terrified her so much she could not reply to it.

"What about your workout?" Hand weights, he had said. Treadmill. The Cardio Club.

"I'm taking a night off."

That was a lie. He had pretended to care about fitness, because she had. She had not expected muscles, but how about health? She didn't believe he scuba-dived at all.

He noisily suck-vacuumed the bottom of his glass with his straw and then tipped an ice cube into his mouth, cracking it like a nut, working it around his teeth.

She could not dislike him. He reminded her that messages were typed by people who had fat fingers, who were big and clumsy and hungry and lonely. She felt sorry for his failed first marriage, how he had caught his wife in bed with his best friend; sorry for the death of his brother, for his father's prostate cancer, the chemo. He treasured a memory of fishing with his father. His mother had sold advertising. She was German, sensitive about the war, but she had been a little kid then. Whenever I think about her death I can't stop crying. And more, much more. She knew everything about him.

All this was for someone else to care about, not her, and she regretted everything she had ever said to him. When he touched her with the hand he had been gnawing, she almost screamed. She wanted to leave before he touched her again with his bitten hand. Just his staring at her made her feel naked.

Not speaking — she couldn't — she got up and stiffly tried to go. But he stuck out his leg to block her.

"I know you think I'm a loser, but you're wrong. And you'll never get away."

She had started to cry. His voice caused it, the way he spoke. She had never imagined that his voice would sound like that, human and horrible. She thought, I know nothing about him. She was afraid.

"I'll find you." His knee against her made this emphatic, and all the chewing of his knuckles made the threat much worse. "I can find anyone on the Net."

When she finally got free of him she hurried to my office so I could sneak her out and make sure she was not followed. She told me the whole story, but that was only the beginning. He found her, found out where she worked, her telephone numbers. He called repeatedly. A temporary restraining order did no good.

He stalked her single-mindedly, as though she were the only woman in the world, and he loomed larger and uglier than any other man on earth.

A threat of legal action made him threaten to countersue for defamation. He harassed her for a full year, until she went to the mainland. Even then, with a new e-mail address, selecting Get Mail, she saw his ridiculous name attached to shrill disgusting messages to her, which she was obliged to download for the police, who did nothing about these foul things because she was on the mainland.

He attended her mother's funeral; she did not. But I was there, at her request, and saw him for the first time. He was tall and muscular and quite young, one of the handsomest men I had ever seen in my life.