Hotel Honolulu

51 Dinnertime

"Here I am again," Rain Conroy said, sounding so willing, though he knew she was there because he had insisted. Yet she seemed convincingly enthusiastic, and as always her voice sounded cheery. There was something wholehearted and uncomplaining about her, and even the way she looked tonight reassured him. She wore a simple black dress that showed off her long legs, which were beautiful. The dress was so small and insubstantial Lionberg imagined plucking it off her by its spaghetti straps and cramming it into his pocket.

The skirt was riding up her thigh — she was leaning, peering into the side room, Lionberg's study. "Calla lilies," she said eagerly, and looking closer, she walked into the room.

Who had ever before entered Lionberg's study? The maid, a carpet layer, a cable installer. They had no idea where they were. It was a source of pride to Lionberg that no one other than a handful of employees or laborers had ever seen the room in which he worked, had ever seen the place in which he used his mind, had ever seen his desk, his scattered papers, the books that mattered most to him, his favorite paintings, everything he regarded as revelation. Even his handwriting, which he was sensitive, even a bit vain, about — he wanted no one to see it, no one to know him through it, did not want to hear any comments about it. He

sensed that if someone saw it, he would be exposed and would lose something of himself.

And here was Rain Conroy with her hands on his desk, smiling at the painting.

"Georgia O'Keeffe. An amazingly introspective image, I always think."

"I used to grow them," she said. She wasn't listening.

"I can't tell you the number of museums that have pestered me for it. I wouldn't part with it. I never get tired of looking at it."

"They love fish fertilizer, nitrogen especially," she said. "You can tell when they're happy. They get very white. And when they're not looked after, they get all limp and sort of rot."

"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds," Lionberg said.

"That's really true, you know."

"Shakespeare. Sonnet Ninety-four." She didn't hear that, either.

Lionberg turned some papers over. Not that the girl was looking at them, but seeing his handwriting made him self-conscious.

"This is my study," he said. "I do my work here."

"What kind of thing do you do?"

"I am a man of leisure," Lionberg said. "A little writing. Some gardening. Some beekeeping."

She was in his room; he had revealed what he did there. She could see his papers, the pictures — not just the O'Keeffe but the Matisse sketch of a footbridge and the photograph of himself at age ten, posed on the porch of his parents' house. Anyone could see that he had been a deeply unhappy child; he had sorrowful eyes. Lionberg pitied the child when he looked at it. She was unimpressed by everything except the flower — not the painting but the species.

"Isn't this sketch incredible?" He decided not to say it was Matisse. "Pencil."

"Anyone could erase it," she said.

He decided to surprise her by switching on the old jukebox, which had been in shadow in a corner of the room. She laughed at the red and blue and yellow lights, the flashing lights inside its fishbowl top, where the black plastic records shimmered. The light was on her face.

"We've got one just like that at the diner where I work," she said.

Lion berg switched off the lights.

Rain was still smiling, moving forward. The study led to a lanai, which was attached to his bedroom. She commented on the palms in the colorful Sicilian vases, the plants — strawberries in terra-cotta pots, herbs in a planter. At the edge of the lanai sat several large Chinese water jars, glazed red, that held fish and water lilies and greens mats of hyacinth.

"Those are nice."

"When I can't sleep, which is often, I come out here and shine a flashlight in and look at the fish."

"I have the opposite problem. I have trouble waking up."

He realized that she had seen nearly everything on this floor of the house. Walking back to the dining room, she glanced to the side and said, "That's the second-biggest TV screen I've ever seen."

She meant the television set in his bedroom, which she had glimpsed through the lanai window. It was his secret that he often lay in bed and watched old movies on the screen that took up most of one wall. No one had seen it because no one had been on his private lanai, which was accessible only from his study.

Lionberg asked, "I'm curious. Which TV screen was the biggest?"

"Pigskin Lounge in Sweetwater," she said. "It's a sports bar. Buddy's cousin owns it. You never want to go there alone if you're a woman, my father used to say."

Lionberg's only thought was that he had never been in such a place.

"This is great," Rain said, seating herself at the elaborately set table -

— all the silver, four glasses each, the stacked plates, the napkin rings. "My father was always so big on mealtimes."

"And you're not?"

"I don't think about it much."

"One of the pleasures of life."

"I usually eat standing up," Rain said.

Lionberg said, "If I had a daughter, I would never say, 'Don't go there, don't do this or that.' I'd tell her to go anywhere she wanted. Complete freedom."

"Excuse me, but if you lived in Sweetwater, you sure as heck wouldn't. You'd be warning her and worrying, just like my daddy did."

Lionberg realized that in trying to please her by seeming openminded, he had made himself look naive. He even wondered whether he believed what he had just said to her. But then, what did it matter? He had never been in such a bar. He was bored by sports, by the noise and the frantic spectacle. The sight of big men competing seemed to him gladiatorial and frightening and sometimes sissified.

"Bars like that are dangerous," she was saying, sure of herself, seeming to know how ignorant he was of such places. "If a single woman goes in, the men figure she's looking for trouble. And she usually is, or why else would she be there? It's a man's place."

He was smiling, as though she were not being logical.

"Just a joint," she said.

"Did your father tell you that?"

"He didn't need to," she said.

Then she fell silent and began on the soup, eating slowly, using her spoon a bit too carefully, as if this were not a meal but a sort of laboratory procedure. She looked uncomfortable while Lionberg watched.

"My daddy died two years ago," she said.

"I'm so sorry," Lionberg said.

"It was very — " She didn't finish the sentence. She had stopped eating, too. Her silence and immobility gave this unfinished sentence a significance that was obscure but suggestive — a pause hanging over them, the thought of the dead man, bereavement, sorrow.

Lionberg said, "When my father passed away the world looked different."

"Smaller," Rain said. "And old people look so fragile. I see them and I just want to protect them." She was staring at the tablecloth. "I'm so happy when they let me help them. When they sort of admit they're frail and accept the attention."

"Do you get much chance to help old people?" Lionberg asked. "I would have thought they weren't your speed."

Put on the defensive, she framed her answer as earnest questions, saying, "That diner I told you about? Where I work? In Sweetwater? There's always these little guys there, looking like kids, and helpless and all bowlegged?"

Her eyes were shining as though she wished she could be bolder, because those old people sometimes made her fiercely maternal. But she was a guest here and had to be grateful to this man who, so far, had only listened in a silence that seemed reproachful.

"When they leave the diner they wobble on their crooked legs like they're going to fall over and break," she said, and twisted her mouth in regret.

"The world is full of little old guys," Lionberg said.

"But they're all different," Rain said. "Like some of them have osteoporosis."

The word made Lionberg smile again. Simple afflicted folks who couldn't spell knew such terms as "carpal tunnel syndrome," "peripheral vascular disease," and "angioplasty," not because they could read but because they suffered.

"They make me think of my father," Rain said.

She had not noticed Lionberg's silence, she seemed hardly to notice anything, and when she commented on one of his treasures it was the most trivial aspect of it — ignoring Georgia O'Keeffe and chattering about the flower. She had no attachment to anything here, and that would have made her seem frivolous except that she was still talking, still going on about her father.

"He had a heart condition," Rain said. "He was sixty-two."

"God, that's not old!"

Seeing he had startled the girl, Lionberg then touched his face with his napkin in a self-conscious gesture, cramming it against his mouth as though dabbing it. He wondered what he had revealed in having protested so strongly.

"I was kind of an afterthought," she said. "I'm twenty-six."

And that's not so young, he told himself. It was the same age his wife had been when he had met her. But he did not see his exwife's face on Rain's — he saw someone else, different features, other details, another sensibility. Rain, who came from somewhere else, was another shape and size, leading another life, one he had not led. Just the fleeting thought of it gave him the sort of pang he felt when he saw something that was out of his reach, not fame but peculiar forms of contentment — the solitary explorer or single-handed yachtsman, the expatriate in a hammock attended by his islander wife, the prospector who had staked all his savings on a risky claim and found gold.

"Time heals everything," she said.

"My ex-wife and I are the best of friends," Lionberg said.

Rain looked up, querying this unexpected statement. What had she said to provoke it? She frowned, thinking of lapsed time and her dead father.

"Only it doesn't," she said.

"Of course not," Lionberg said.

"It all happens for the best," she said.

Lionberg stared at her. She was still talking, but in quotation marks, in another person's voice, being ironic.

"Everything works out in the end," she said. Now concentrating, she was holding her knife and fork like weapons, their handles jammed against the white tablecloth, and she wasn't eating. "You get what you pay for."

"It sounds as though you don't agree," Lionberg said.

"They're all lies. Time heals nothing. Nothing happens for the best. Nothing works out. I just shut my eyes and miss my father more. And it's harder for me. My mom started dating."

"'Dating' is a word I have never really understood," Lionberg said. "I suppose that dates me."

"Dating is what me and my boyfriend do."

She had not heard his play on words. The girl was grim, gripping the knife and fork in her fists. Now she put them down and frowned at them.

"All this, urn, flatware," she said.

"It's nothing special," he said insincerely. "People say you should never own anything you can't afford to lose."

"People say," Rain said, and just repeating it she ridiculed it.

Lionberg smirked to mask what he felt. He had not thought it would be this hard. He was unprepared, on the verge of exasperation.

"I don't own anything," Rain said.

He surrendered to that, and it ended the meal.

On the moonlit lanai Lionberg offered her a drink, suggested sauterne, and she accepted. He took the lens caps off the telescope, intending to show her the Pleiades for their exquisite drama and their lovely name in Hawaiian, Mak'a'li'i, the Eyes of the King. It was the sort of thing that would please her.

He saw that she was still holding the full glass of wine and that she had apparently agreed to accept it only to please him. Positioning the telescope, twisting knobs to adjust it to the correct azimuth, he heard her cough and begin to speak.

"I'm really tired," she said.

Her tallness now made her seem gauche rather than graceful. She put her glass down, and wine slopped onto the tabletop. She hesitated, did not know how to excuse herself and say good night.

He helped her with those few words, just the sort of formula that she had made such an issue of over dinner.

"See you in the morning."

He could not say whether he liked her or disliked her. No, he told himself, I don't resent her for being young. The oddity was that in spite of his wide experience, she was new to him, but perhaps her whole generation was the same. What did he know? He had no children, no grandchildren. Rain was a child.