Hotel Honolulu

5 Baptism

The book of mine the Hawaiian staff called "hybolic" for its pretentious size — all them big words — was the Penguin edition of Anna Karenina, which I kept near me my first months at the Hotel Honolulu so I could stick my nose in its pages for oxygen. Hawaii was a sunny, lovely place, but for an alien like me it was no more than an empty blaze of sunburn until I found love.

The problem with my plump Penguin was its unconcealable bulk, and it was much plumper for having swelled up in the damp air. All books fatten by the sea.

I sat and studied those big kindly waves rolling toward Waikiki, slowly rising from the smooth sea, dividing themselves into ranks, gathering shape near the shore to whiten in peaks before sloping and softening, just spilling and dying, declining in a falling off of bubble soup and draining into the drenched sand. It was as though the whole event of each separate wave had started when a great unseen hand far from shore had cuffed the ocean, shoving the water into motion, creating waves, a study of beautiful endings.

My Tolstoy was regarded as a handicap and an obvious nuisance crying out for bantering mockery. "What you gonna do with that thing?"

"That gonna keep you real busy." "More bigger than the Bible," Keola said one day before setting down a lawn sprinkler so casually that its spray slashed the walls of my office and wet me through the window. The book, too, was doused, and swelled some more, and with acute curvature of the spine stayed fatter even after its pages had dried.

I said to Keola, who was watering the clusters of torch ginger by the pool wall, "A man goes to the doctor for a verdict about his illness. 'How sick am I?' he asks. The doctor says, 'Let me put it this way. Don't start any long books."

In grinning querying confusion and saying "Eh?" Keola turned to face me, playing the hose, wetting me and my book. He was a simple soul who sometimes yanked the hooked stinger out of a centipede's tail, and with the centipede in his mouth, he would smile at a stranger, parting his lips to allow the centipede to slip out and creep along his dusky cheek. "Dis what the devil look like." Keola had found Jesus.

The hot days passed in Waikiki and already I was sick of hearing "Pearly Shells" and "Tiny Bubbles" and "Lovely Hula Hands." I was still single and celibate in those early days, and still believed that I was starting anew, at an age when nothing seemed new. I was Rimbaud, clerking and sweating in Abyssinia. I had rejected the writing life. Writers who had abandoned writing to busy themselves in other affairs were my patron saints: Melville, Rimbaud, T. E. Lawrence, Salinger, Tolstoy himself. Now and then, Buddy showed up to discuss a hotel matter. One day it was to find a way of getting the old TV actor Jack Lord into the hotel once a week

("free food and beverage") so that Madam Ma, our resident journalist, could mention this fact in her newspaper column. People might visit just to be in the same room with the former star of Hawaii Five-O. But Lord, a reclusive sort, refused to show. Buddy said, "Tom Selleck has an interest in the Black Orchid, but George Harrison lives on Maui. That's a dynamite column item. 'Beatle Dines at Hotel Honolulu."

"What have we got to offer him?"

We were eating purple gluey poi and fatty kalua pig and scoops of cold macaroni. Buddy was chewing and smiling. Like Vronsky, he had a tightly packed row of white teeth, but he had Oblonsky's problems.

"I was thinking of an all-you-can-eat buffet," Buddy said, licking poi from his fingers, and without taking a breath added, "Don't you get a headache reading books like that?"

"I'd get a headache if I didn't."

At that time, in the early days, I was still lusting for Sweetie, waiting for an opportunity to take her on a date — I did not want to be obvious and felt awkward wooing an employee. To be oblique I asked Buddy about her mother.

"Puamana is the original 'Ukelele Lady," he said. "She started out as a coconut princess."

"I take it she's not too bright."

"You sound like you think that's a bad thing."

"She's probably illiterate."

"Books aren't everything. She's got mana, like her name. Spiritual energy." Buddy sniffed and said, "The longer you live here in Whyee, the more you'll see that a woman's low IQ can be part of her beauty."

"But your wife is smart."

"Stella's not my wife, she's my wahine. My fuck-buddy. In fact, I got woman trouble. Stella's going to kill me. I still think she's an amazing woman."

I wanted to tell him how he was a version of Oblonsky, just to see what he would say. But after lunch, walking from the dining room to the lobby, Buddy said, "Come here for a minute. I want you to look at something." He knelt by the pool and so did I, beside him. He said, "Do you see that dark thing on the bottom, near the drain?"

I leaned over and looked, and seeing nothing, leaned over more. As I did so, overbalancing, Buddy pushed me into the pool.

"You walked straight into that one!" Buddy said as I surfaced, thrashing in my heavy sodden clothes.

"Joker man," Lester Chen said as I passed by Reception, dripping

wet.

After that, whenever Buddy saw me he seemed to recall this incident at the pool. The memory was a wistful glaze in his eyes, and I could not help noticing a certain peculiarity of expression, a sort of suppressed radiance on his face and in his whole person. That was Oblonsky in Anna, when he was at lunch with Levin, eating oysters and talking about love and marriage and not divulging his woman trouble, the fact that he was having an affair with the French governess.

Around this time Keola said, "Jesus is Lord. I woulda been in big pilikia without Jesus." I read Levin's expression of faith: What should I have been and how should I have lived my life had I not had those beliefs, had I not known that one had to live for God and not for the satisfaction of one's needs. I should have robbed, lied and murdered.

Like Levin, Keola had found Jesus, and I was so moved by his faith that one day, checking his repair of the water fountain near the restrooms, I found myself inquiring into the nature of his belief and wondering at his passion.

"Jesus same like food. If you no eat, you go die," Keola said, giving the chrome nut on the fountain one last twist. "Marry for men and women. In Whyee we no want gay marry. Hey, I no mind gays. I forgive them, if they repent. Some people so stupid. Like, it one child, not one choice. It one human, not one monkey. I no tell these school what for teach. But that bull lie that we come from monkeys just another way of getting God out for you life. Try drink, boss."

I did, and the fountain's stream splashed my face and went up my

nose.

"That so good for you," Keola said.

Was I saved? Keola wanted to know. I said I had been baptized. Wasn't that enough?

He just laughed the mirthless pitying laughter of the born-again Christian. "You never save! You one sinner! Just reading book all the day, wicked book like that one."

"The man who wrote this book thought the same thing, funnily enough."

"Howlie guy."

"I think you could say Tolstoy was a howlie. Anyway, he found Jesus, like you."

"It more better if you born again. Get baptize, like this." He flicked water on my face. "Take da plunge."

Seeing Kawika passing by with a five-gallon bucket of sticky rice in each hand, Keola winked and flexed his arms body-builder fashion and called out, "Hey, Rambo!"

When Rimbaud was in Harar, he wrote home: I'm weary and bored.

. Isn't it wretched this life I lead, without family, without friends, without intellectual companionship, lost in the midst of these people whose lot one would like to improve, and who try, for their part, only to exploit me. . Obliged to chatter their gibberish, to eat their filthy messes, to endure their treachery and stupidity! But that isn't the worst. The worst is my fear of becoming a slob myself, isolated as I am, and cut off from any intellectual companionship.

But I liked Keola's euphemism for baptism — da plunge.

Trey the bartender said, "You think Samoans are tough? Only when they're in a gang. One on one, Solies are cowards. They're big but they're not tough. Remember that."

He squirted soda water from the bar dispenser into my drink and it soaked my chin.

Peewee the chef said, "Popolos sink in the pool," using the local word for black. "Ask any lifeguard. Something about popolos — they don't float."

"Brothers don't surf," Trey said.

Such talk made me wonder why I had picked this job, and it sent me back to my novel and a denser, subtler world: Vronsky contemplating, in a poignant and painful moment, Anna's jealousy. He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had picked, in which he found it difficult to discover the beauty that made him pick and destroy it. And yet he felt that though when his love was stronger, he could, had he wanted it badly, have torn the love out of his heart, now when, as at this moment, it seemed to her that he felt no love for her, he knew that the bond between them could not be broken.

"That hybolic book keeping you real busy," Keola said.

I needed the novel as sustenance. Such paradoxes as I was reading calmed me here, especially when Buddy was restless and needed company. He would demand that we go to his favorite strip club, the Rat Room, where he sat drinking rum at the edge of the mirrored stage and encouraged women to squat in front of us. He slipped five-dollar bills into their garters and gaped between their legs, nudging me.

"Look. Abe Lincoln without his teeth."

Back in my room I read Levin's reflection: If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has consequences, or reward, it is not goodness either.

The novel continued to be my oxygen, and while I worked up the courage to make love to Sweetie, I usually fled to the beach, where I could hide in a folding chair, reading in the sunshine as waves broke on the sand, feeling I was fulfilling Lytton Strachey's dream of reading between the paws of the Sphinx. Now and then I would look up and see the brown bums of beach sleepers turned upward, the women — but only the skinny ones — forever tugging and adjusting their bathing suits, smoothing lotion onto their arms, sitting cross-legged or walking with that odd climbing gait in the sand and looking duck-butted. The waves laying the shore, the sparkle of sun in the distance, a whole sea surface of glitter. On the beach everyone is a body, no more or less than flesh, indistinguishable one from another, like a great pale tribe of hairless monkeys. I found myself staring at the small tidy panel between the women's legs, staring in fact at nothing but space, for there was nothing to see, nothing specific, just a wrinkle, a labial smile in the smoothness, for a bikini bottom was both a vortex and a vanishing point.

Sometimes, staring this way, I found myself yearning for love. And yearning, I dozed. I lay sleeping on the hot sand, snoring on my back.

Bliss.

I always woke drooling and sweating, my back coated with sand grains, like a castaway, someone actually washed up on the beach, feeling distant. Yet I was more rested and alert than if I had been in bed: the heat was like a cure. The world was far away. I was a new man here in this simple, incomplete place, just an old green volcano in the middle of the sea. I was trying to make a life, but there was something so melancholy and unreal about solitude in the sunshine that it made me feel fictional.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way. Levin would not have believed it possible three months earlier that he could go quietly to sleep in the circumstances he now found himself.

Thus Levin, rusticated on his farm.

I was on the beach reading Anna Karenina one day and heard singing, a vigorous hymn, and I looked up and saw a procession making its way among the Japanese sunning themselves, and the children playing, and the men selling ice cream. Keola led the procession, singing loudly, with a woman in a white dress wearing a lei and flowers in her hair. Others followed, some people I knew from the hotel: Puamana, Sweetie, Kawika, Peewee, Trey and the rest of Sub-Dude, Marlene and Pacita from Housekeeping, Wilnice and Fishlow from the dining room, and Amo Ferretti, who did the flowers. There were others I did not yet know -

Godbolt the painter from the Big Island, Madam Ma holding hands with her son, Chip, and Buddy's grown kids, Bula and Melveen — each of them recording this event in his own way.

Keola walked into the surf, taking the woman in the white dress by the arm, and he bent her backward and immersed her, all the while shouting a prayer. The woman was soaked and joyful, spouting water and raising her arms.

I watched, transfixed. This baptism gave the whole island a meaning. Now it seemed like a real place, a natural font in the middle of the ocean, built for baptisms. Although I did not in the least believe in any feature of this ritual, I was moved, because they believed. I beheld a powerful expression of faith. I walked nearer, my forefinger in my book, marking my place. A sudden muscular wave knocked me down hard and battered me, snatched my book, and rolled me into the surf. I struggled for air, tried to right myself, plunged in after Tolstoy, but I was tipped unsparingly again by a new wave, was rolled again, and my power to save myself was taken from me. More waves moved my whole body up and down before pushing me onto the sand. All this happened in the seconds it took to baptize that woman. My plump ruined book, more buoyant than me, danced in the foam of the shore break.