Hotel Honolulu

55 Love is a Girl

Weeks after Rain Conroy's visit, Buddy called, apologizing to Lionberg for imposing the girl on him and inviting him for a drink.

"I've got my hands full at the moment," Lionberg said.

That was pride and humiliation. He was paralyzed, could not move, hated his thoughts. Superstition kept him around the house, trying to complete just one task in the routines he had set for himself. But he was stuck in a chair, frowning at the lawn. He did not want to develop new habits — meeting Buddy down on the beach or going into Honolulu to eat one of Peewee's hamburgers at the hotel. He had never been idle before, but now he was worse than idle. He seemed to be suffering massive trauma to his brain, the words doctors used to describe a serious head injury. He had heartache, too, for which any thought on his part would cause him more pain.

He hesitated to ask the question in his mind, but he risked it anyway. He said, "What do you hear from Rain?"

"Oh, she's back in her box," Buddy said. "Probably at the diner, and doing her volunteer work."

"Is she still working at the diner?"

Lionberg had said too much. Buddy didn't know anything. He was careless, he was free.

Never before had Lionberg been restless in his house. He was not miserable but discontented. The feeling helped him recall times when, very young, promises were made but were not kept. His uncle saying, "We'll have to get you over on the boat some- time," but it never happened. His mother saying, "If you're good, maybe you'll get binoculars for your birthday." But there were no binoculars. Times of impatience, of being kept waiting, of longing — most of all knowing that no one would give him anything, that he would have to make his own life and fend for himself in this vast, mobbed, indifferent world.

This affair was out of his hands. So he took another look at his possessions and was consoled by them once more. He resented Rain for making him doubt their value. They were his achievement. The Matisse could be restored.

For some days he disliked Rain for making him feel vulnerable and full of doubt. He saw her as shallow, casual, breezy, presumptuous — just young. She had stayed and patronized him. And she was the worst kind of coquette — teasing him, arousing him, putting her mouth on him, sucking him off, saying, "That's not sex," then going away.

Yet he never reflected this way without concluding that she was a perfect flower, that there was nothing to dislike, that all the flaws were his. She was innocent and, even out of her depth, she was buoyant. He longed to see her again. He thought, Yes, love is a girl.

It must have been about this time that he called me. His calling me was such a rare event that I suspected a problem. When he suggested meeting at the hotel bar for a drink, I was sure that something was wrong.

He was early that night at Paradise Lost. He looked as conspicuous to me as he probably had at the airport when Buddy saw him.

"You left a house and a wife and a whole life in London," he said. Not waiting for me to say anything, he went on, "And you started all over again here."

"That's the short version," I said.

"All I mean to say is, it can be done."

"Didn't you know that?"

"I've had a bit of a shock," Lionberg said.

"What kind?"

"I've discovered I'm human."

"Good for you."

He didn't smile. He said, "I mean, I'm not happy."

I wondered then whether this was his way of expressing despair, yet I laughed at him without realizing how wounded he was. But how was I to know?

Lionberg said, "In the months before I left my wife, we still slept together. I mean that — slept, body to body. I would wake up in the middle of the night and think, I am leaving you, and I would feel her body against mine."

There was no possible reply to this. I wanted him to get off this sorrowful subject.

"Flesh can feel so sad, so mute and helpless. It is so fragile. Flesh can feel like clay. You can sense death in it."

"But Royce, that was years ago."

It was as though I were talking someone suicidal off a high ledge.

"Those nights were unbearably sad," he said.

Feeling sad now, he looked back and saw his past as a succession of failures.

I said, "This isn't like you."

"When someone says, 'If I had my life to live over again,' people laugh. It sounds ridiculous. But I've just realized that I want to live my life over. That's what love is. The vital force that gives you the strength and optimism to do it over again."

"So you've found someone," I said.

"I hate writers," he said.

"Is that your way of saying yes?"

"I saw a very plain couple last night on television," he said. "They were holding hands, two chubby people who probably had nothing but debts. They were so happy I started to cry. I envied them."

"So why don't you get it together?"

"Maybe I will."

Touched by a transforming power, he looked haunted and hopeless. He wanted to believe that he had touched her, whoever it was (I was new to this story), and that it meant something.

I was no help to him, and I was uncomfortable with the painful way he enjoyed his irrationality. He was very specific, like a man hurting himself with a fetish. I said I could not bear to see the Matisse sketch he had partly erased. He abandoned me for a While. He called Buddy and paid him a visit at the big disorderly house on the beach. Pinky was sulking, thinner and stranger than ever. She reminded Lionberg of a feral cat, forever twitchy and watchful, possessed by hunger, with feverish eyes.

"Look what she did to my arm," Buddy said. "Bit me again!"

Lionberg instinctively glanced over at Pinky's teeth, which she flashed, reacting to his glance. The teeth seemed large and blunt in her thin face. Then he stared at Buddy's discolored flesh and saw a crescent row of bite marks in the mottled patch.

"Difference of opinion," Buddy said.

They went out to the lanai and sat, watching the sunset. Pinky retreated to her room, somehow squatting in the shadows, still sulking. Sunset was the occasion for Buddy's ritual, a drink in one hand, the heartshaped container of Stella's ashes in the other.

Buddy took off his sunglasses and squinted at the setting sun.

Pinky began to howl softly from her room.

Lionberg wanted to talk about Rain. He began by saying, "What sort of — ?"

"Wait," Buddy said. He raised his arm, and without removing his gaze from the setting sun, he took a drink.

The distant ocean shimmered, the water's surface glazed with fiery light. The sun grew small, it was halved, then it was a dropping dome, and at last it winked and was gone.

"Yes!" Buddy cried out. "A green flash! Did you see it?"

Lionberg said yes, though he had seen nothing.

"That's Stella," he said. "She's talking to me."

Was he drunk? He had finished that glass, whatever was in it. He clutched the container of ashes.

Lionberg said, "Time for me to go."

"Did you want something?"

"No," Lionberg said. He had felt that being near Buddy would bring the thought of Rain near. But it hadn't, and she was even more distant. He left envying Buddy.

After another day of futility, he called her in Sweetwater.

"Hello," she said brightly, and then she told someone — who was it? — "I'll take it upstairs."

A moment later, upstairs, her voice was different.

"Who were you talking to, honey?"

"My mother," she said.

Why did this simple detail cheer him up?

"I'm so glad you called."

"I've been resisting," he said. He had interrupted her. He was confused — wanting to hear her voice, wanting to talk.

"I was going to call you, to thank you," she said.

He said, "I miss you, honey."

"I've been missing you," she said. "It seems crazy. I've been so unhappy. I'm not needy. I'm a strong person. I've never been this way."

Hearing her say that was a consolation, because it was how he felt.

In gratitude he wanted to tell her his secret, that he loved her.

He stammered and finally said, "I really like you, honey."

"I really like you, too."

A tremulous silence swelled in the wire that connected them.

"You once mentioned that you had a boyfriend."

"I still have one," she said. "He thinks I should see a shrink."

"I'd like to be your shrink."

"I'd like you for something else."

That meant so much to him that he didn't say anything more. He only wished to hold that thought.

"He wants to marry me," she said. "He gave me an ultimatum."

Lionberg sighed and looked around his room and was reproached by every object he saw.

"Hey, I have to go to work," she said. "I'm on nights. Gotta go."

"I love you, honey," he said in a terrified voice, but there was no reply. She had not heard it.

In bed that night, after the first brief wave of sleep had curled over him and he woke again, he thought: Marriage? She has her whole life ahead of her. That was part of his desire, that she had so much life in her. It also appalled him — the very thought of her setting off down the long road. Love is a girl.

Lionberg's sense of peace, formerly unshakable, standing like a bronze on a plinth, had been whipped from him, and the world that had seemed so manageable before was now vast and shadowy and without symmetry. He was lost in his house amid the jumble of everything he owned. He thought of going to Nevada. It was not a long trip from Hawaii; planes left for Las Vegas all the time. He devised an itinerary, he went through each stage of the journey, but he could not get beyond seeing her. And what of the boyfriend?

The damage was done. Lionberg had never been discontented before. She had created that — or had he? She had touched him and unwittingly made a promise that could never be kept. She had shown him what he would never again see. Though she had been innocent the whole time, she had destroyed him.

He called his ex-wife in Mexico at an ungodly hour, waking her, confusing her. The line was bad, adding to the confusion, for everything he said had to be repeated. And he frightened her by begging her, saying "Please forgive me" in a voice of such sad atonement the poor woman began to cry.

He knew he would see Rain, but what was in his heart would probably horrify her and speak to him of death, for she was no cure for his sickness. There was no cure at all, but only a ruinous knowledge of what he wanted, and that it was impossible, and the denial that he would taste for the rest of his life. What appalled him was not the thought that he would never possess her but that he would have to live with what she had rearranged in his past, for what was worse than the uncertain future was the realization that his previous life was blighted. He had once believed that he had been happy, but he had lost even the memory of his happiness. Though it seemed that nothing had changed, that his life was sweeter than ever, he was drowning in misery — suffocating, so he told me.