Hotel Honolulu

53 Departure gate

"Roy-Boy, where's my gal?" Buddy Hamstra was roaring into the phone. "I'll bet you'll be glad to see me!"

From the peculiar crackle Lionberg knew that he was using his cellular phone, in his car, driving up the steep hill on the switchback, where the reception was always bad.

Lionberg shook his head. Soon after that — sooner than Lionberg wanted — Buddy was at the gate in his BMW, honking in mock impatience. He kept honking gleefully even after Lionberg had opened the gate.

A stuffed animal, bigger than life size, a dog as big as a man, sat upright in the back seat, grinning foolishly.

Seeing Lionberg's glance, Buddy said, "Wile E. Coyote."

"That's right," Lionberg said, though he had no idea.

"So where is she?"

Buddy still sat in the car. He wore a gold chain around his neck with a shark's tooth and Stella's wedding ring on it, aviator sunglasses, and a T- shirt lettered Life Guard. He seemed fatter each time Lionberg saw him. He was holding his cellular phone in one hand and a Mars bar in the other. He fooled, talked into the Mars bar, pretended to bite the phone, made a face,

and shoved half the candy bar into his mouth. With his mouth full, he shouted incoherently.

"I haven't seen her this morning," Lionberg said, speaking so faintly that he heard in his own voice something worse than mere reluctance. He had been dreading this moment like an amputation.

Buddy swallowed the mouthful of chocolate and yelled, "Hurry up,

Rain!"

Howling like that was something Lionberg would never have done — he winced at the sound of it — but the girl responded with a howl of her own. "Coming!" She appeared a moment later, breathless, smiling, carrying her small bag, looking beautiful. She is twenty-six years old, Lionberg said to himself, yet that explained nothing.

"Hi, uncle."

"You've got a plane to catch, toots."

Lionberg said, "Don't be late."

"It's not till tonight, one of these redeyes," Rain said. "But I want to buy some presents."

"We're having a plate lunch in town," Buddy said. Whenever he mentioned food, he sounded hungry.

"Thanks for everything," Rain said, and got into the car.

Buddy said, "Hey, Roy-boy, don't look so relieved to be alone." He laughed and eased the car through the gate in reverse, backing onto the road.

Lionberg was dumb, too stunned to speak. He wanted to leave the girl with a thought, with a gift, with a kiss anyway — he had not imagined it happening this quickly. He smiled until the car was out of sight, then listened hard. The sound of the receding car was the last live sound of the girl, like a sigh that becomes silence, a last expiring breath.

He closed the gate, feeling faint, and sensed that all his happiness had fled. A large cloud passed overhead. As always, the sunshine seemed to follow her. He went to his small telescope and caught them as they made the turn into Waimea Bay. He was briefly revitalized by the dazzle of sunlight on the car's windshield.

He stood alone in the empty house, listening for her, and was disturbed to hear nothing. He went to the guest house and sniffed impatiently in her room, trying to discern her odor. "That's not sex," he said in her voice, and was aroused again. The bathroom was still humid with her and held her presence. He pulled back the sheets as though unwrapping a ghost. The bedclothes were warm enough to retain her smell. He followed these fugitive scraps of her from object to object — the pillow, the towels, a long strand of hair in the sink — sniffing like a dog. Then he lay on the bed where she had lain and told himself that he was a savage, that he needed a fetish from her, hair and feathers, a rag of her underwear. He wanted her back. He asked himself, Is love a girl?

That night he ate alone, turning the pages of a rare book that had always pleased him when he dipped into it, In the Sargasso Sea, by Thomas Janvier. Tonight it bored him and seemed false, and he disliked himself for having been duped by it in the past.

After dinner he fell asleep in a chair, but when he went to bed he could not sleep. He knew why. The lighted clock on his side table told him that her flight was about to leave.

He called the airline, wishing to hear anything related to her, even flight information. "That flight has been delayed," a man said, striving to sound efficient. The new flight time was after midnight.

Dressing hurriedly, Lionberg was so desperate to be on the road that he set only one burglar alarm. He grazed the hedge at the gate — there would almost certainly be a scratch on the fender of his black car, from which the insignia and the Lexus name had been removed. Never mind the scratch on the paintwork. He saw it as a sacrifice and was proud to have a visible scar.

Outside his house he always felt he was on another planet. Tonight he thought, What is happening to me? The damp shoreline, the darkness of the pineapple fields, the lights and fences at Schofield Barracks, the empty freeway, then green lighted signs saying Airport and the clock on the airport tower, which told him he had time.

The delayed flight had been a reprieve. He simply wanted to give her the kiss he had been denied in the driveway that morning, to see her

again. He wanted her to see him, too — to show her that he had driven the forty miles in the dark.

Buddy was at the gate, sitting with his feet out, his hands on his big belly. He was drinking a Diet Coke.

"What are you doing here, you crazy bastard?" he said when he saw Lionberg.

"She forgot her hat."

It was the baseball cap he had worn when she first saw him, which had once been lettered The Plaza.

"Where is she?"

"On line. She's boarding."

Rain smiled with unmistakable gratitude when she saw Lionberg approach. She stepped out of line, stumbling against the boarding passengers.

Lionberg took her hand with desperate confidence and said, "I'm going to miss you, honey."

It was what he had wanted to say this morning, what he had come forty miles to say. He badly wanted to impress her.

"I'll miss you too."

He looked for meaning in her eyes and thought he saw what he wanted.

"Why are you leaving?"

"I'm going home," she said. She touched his hand softly like a reminder. "Back to my life."

That made him sad, that she had a life he knew nothing about. He said, "This is for you, honey," and gave her the baseball cap.

She laughed and put it on. When she kissed him this time the visor poked his head.

"Gotta go," she said.

"Crazy kid," Buddy said, standing with Lionberg. They looked like an older couple seeing off their daughter — that same admiration and forgiveness, that same love. Buddy, fleshy, even bosomy in his T-shirt, was the gruff and bossy mother; Lionberg — small, leaner, forgiving, infatuated — was the tender father. They stood with the others saying goodbye at the departure gate as Rain entered the tunnel. When she was gone, Lionberg felt sick, and he wanted to get away from Buddy.

"Funny seeing you here," Buddy said, panting to keep up with him. "I haven't seen you out of your Bat Cave in ages." He poked his finger at Lionberg. "You're a very mysterious guy! You've got secrets." He called out to a man mopping the airport floor, "This is Royce Lionberg! He's got secrets!"

Lionberg drove slowly back to the North Shore on the empty roads, thinking how he had no secrets now. He wanted to be on that plane with Rain, to be going home with her. What she had said of Sweetwater had

moved him in its simple solidity. It was home in a sense that he had never known the word. He had made a home, but she had been born in one and still lived there. That was so different. It was permanent, it was safe and secure. Why would you ever leave?

Reentering his house that night, he was angry. He saw it with Rain's eyes and disliked it for being cluttered and airless. It was wrong, it was selfish. He couldn't remember a time when he had felt so dissatisfied. His collections, his treasures, seemed merely pretentious, just decorative, without significance, worthless.

The expensive humidor disgusted him. He took out a cigar and, in his reading chair, cut and lit it. A cigar always calmed him, even gave him moments of great happiness. Puffing smoke, he remembered how, long ago, in the days when he gave parties, he had been infuriated by seeing that someone had stubbed out a cigar in a carved jade saucer.

The moment enlightened him. The things people accumulated — old pictures and pewter, jade and carved ivory and ugly-faced masks and books and tapestries and large yellow sperm-whale teeth scored with scrimshaw, silver platters and spoons and sugar tongs, the incidental and ill-assorted objects that were supposed to have value — all of it was merely borrowed from the vast store of the world's artifacts and ultimately returned to it, sold, bequeathed, lost, stolen. These objects were protected, and found another home, another thief or borrower, but in any case just an overburdened custodian, until they were returned again or

destroyed. They had no meaning or use beyond their being handled or looked at.

Had he been a writer, he would have written that, and he wished he could write it, to rid himself of the sadness of its truth: nothing was owned. He was merely a watchman, a menial, with illusions, buffing things, polishing, dusting, being careful not to break them.

He had made a provision for everything as a legacy, but people did what they wanted. In time, it would all be sold or deaccessioned or snatched in spite of his wishes.

It was worth no more than a glance, which was what she had given

it.

His cigar splintered and sparked and came apart as he dug it into the white jade saucer, laughing angrily, pushing it against the fine carving. While the smoke rose like bitter incense he took down his Matisse footbridge, knifed open the taped back of the frame, and slid out the sketch. Holding it down with the flat of his left hand, he worked a cheap pencil eraser on the lines at the center of the bridge, leaving his mark, making it uncrossable. He felt savagely happy, with an intimation of insanity, desperate for his happiness to last and fearing that it would end at any moment, leaving him bereft.