Hotel Honolulu

58 First Love

Sometimes this woman, my wife, surprised me with flashes of intelligence, appraising me like an unsentimental stranger, reminding me that I had to be careful of what I said. It made being married to her difficult at times, as though she weren't deaf but just hard of hearing, not blind but nearsighted. In other places I had lived, people had just enough language to make demands on me but not enough to comprehend when I told them why their demands were unreasonable.

Sweetie and Puamana said I had offended Kalani, so they were hosting a makeup meal. Their suspicion that I disliked him made them think I disliked them, too. Their identification with this oaf made me uneasy. I could not make them understand my objections to him, and so I was in the wrong. I had to appease them, pay for the meal as a sort of ho'o ponopono, a peacemaking ritual.

"Kalani was poor. We was stay poor." Sweetie said. "If you poor, with clothes all broke, sometimes you don't know what happening to youself in the world. And you go make mistakes."

What was this goddamned woman talking about?

"How you know — you never went poor."

"That's crap. I've been in hell. Have you ever been in hell?" I told her that I had known hard times in strange countries that would have terrified her. The worst fate was that of being miserable and distant, and not just distant but out of the known world, which was like being buried alive. She had never left home, where there was always someone to help.

"I don't mean helpless, I mean misunderstood."

This fine distinction, in her uneducated voice, threw me, like the sight of a dog walking on its hind legs. But she could not explain further.

"Or maybe I could talk story."

There was a young girl in Honolulu who wanted to look older,

Sweetie said. She thought she might succeed at it by dressing up. All she had was the little money her mother gave her, so she went to thrift shops and picked through clothes racks, looking for stylish clothes that had been expensive when new. Some places sold secondhand designer clothes — wealthy women in Honolulu brought their dresses and shoes for the store to sell on consignment, at a fraction of what they had originally cost.

From this scavenging the young girl put together a lovely combination: a short skirt, a silk blouse and patent leather shoes with chunky heels and a buckle. It had taken weeks to find the right clothes at these prices. The shoes alone would have cost several hundred dollars. They made her taller, and she looked much older than she was.

"How old was she?"

"Say, fifteen."

Dressed this way and wishing to be seen, she sat at a bus stop one afternoon near Ward Warehouse, legs crossed, kicking her foot up and down, listening to her Walkman. She realized that the man next to her was talking to her. He touched her shoe to get her attention. She plucked off her earphones and smoothed her skirt.

He was about twenty-two or a little more, a "howlie." He worked at a car dealership, Hoku Honda, on Ala Moana. She was flattered when he said that he wasn't waiting for a bus but had stopped because he had seen her and wanted to talk to her. She hadn't been waiting for a bus either, but she didn't tell him that. He invited her to the Starbuck's around the corner, where — she didn't drink coffee but had a guava-honey smoothie — the man suggested they go to a movie the next day.

There was nothing safer than a movie — all those other people around. She even told her mother that she was going "with a friend."

Friend meant boy, though she didn't mention his age.

She wore her special outfit. In the theater, the Cinerama on King Street, across from Gas N Go (the movie was Seven, starring Brad Pitt), the haole guy did a nice thing. He said, "Put your feet here." He lifted them to his lap, making her squirm sideways, and he clasped her shoes. He didn't kiss her, or touch her in any private places. All he did was hold her shoes, his fingers around them, stroking the shiny patent leather. He did not touch her feet. They sat that way through the scary movie for two hours. She was happy; it was a real date. She liked this man and he seemed to like her. Most of all, she thought, He's a gentleman.

Walking her back to the bus stop where they had met — she didn't want to tell him where she lived — he asked whether he could see her again. She said yes. I got a friend, this howlie guy, she said to herself, smiling in the darkness of her bedroom just before she went to sleep.

The next time, he picked her up in a car he had borrowed from the dealership. "I told my boss I'm taking it to Lex Brodie's for a wheel alignment." But even saying this, something plaintive in his voice expressed disappointment.

"You're wearing slippers," he said, frowning at her rubber sandals. She was also wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

"I thought maybe we go to the beach, yah?"

He wasn't huhu, angry; he seemed frustrated and moody. So she hurried home and dressed up, and because she wasn't able to run in them, she put on the shoes in his car. The man was happy — more than happy.

He agreed to take her to Hanauma Bay. She agreed to stop at Zippy's for a shake on the way. "You look nicer like that," he said in a grateful voice.

She felt for the first time in her girlhood that she could ask anything of him, that she had power over him.

They sat on the grassy edge of the bay, under the palms, and he held her feet in his lap. She wanted to take off her shoes to walk on the sand.

"Don't bother. We'll be going soon."

He drove her to a place that sold shave ice. When they finished eating the ices he seemed surprised, saying he lived right nearby.

"Want to see my place?"

She knew there was no greater risk than going alone with a man to his room. But older women did it, and she had started to love him. He was older than any boy she knew, and because of that she trusted him.

Besides, she knew where he worked, Hoku Honda. She had begun to understand, from something as ordinary as the pressure of his hands on her feet, that she was his secret friend.

"Promise not to hurt me?"

"I would never hurt you."

The room was on the ground floor of a house just off Kapahulu, behind the shave ice place and across the street from an elementary school. She could hear the small children playing. So recently she had been that age and playing! She thought, But I am not a schoolgirl anymore.

The haole guy was happy again. He sat across the room so that she would not be frightened. Then he rolled up the narrow carpet and asked her to walk up and down the wood floor as hard as she could, stamping her heels. In his chair, moving his lips, he seemed to be praying.

That day, leaving the house, he said, "I want to buy you something nice. What do you want?"

She said, "I'm saving up for something special."

He folded a twenty-dollar bill in half and put it into her hand. He did the same the next time, after the movie (Lethal Weapon), where he had held her feet again; and after the beach, where he had taken pleasure in gripping her feet and hoisting her to a tree branch in the park; and after parking awhile to watch the Honolulu lights from the road on Tantalus. It was not always a twenty he gave her; sometimes it was a ten or a five.

The only request he made was "Please wear your shoes."

Those secondhand shoes! She was self-conscious about them; she wanted to tell him where she had bought them. She was worried he might have minded, because wearing someone else's shoes was like a trick. Sometimes she wished he would kiss her lips instead of her shoes, stroke her nipples the way he stroked the shoe buckles. And she wanted to touch him. She had feared that he would want more; now it was she who wanted more.

He was still her secret friend, but there wasn't much to keep secret: his mouth on her shoes and the Polaroids he took of them, and the time he said, "Step on my face," but playfully, in Kapiolani Park, lots of people around, many flying kites. Once he cleaned the shoes, "my secret way," by licking them.

It was not enough. She thought that he might please her more if she pleased him more. She took all the money he had given her, borrowed some, stole a little from her mother's purse, and bought the best pair of shoes she could find at a consignment shop, swapping her own for ten dollars (she had paid twenty-five for them, but it had been worth it).

"Manolo Blahnik. Killer spikes," the salesgirl said. And then she called him at Hoku Honda, something she had never done before. But she was confident now. His helpless staring and his secrets had made her feel powerful.

The shoes were red, sexy, with steeper heels than the old pair.

"Manolo Blahnik. Killer spikes, yah?"

The haole guy was polite. He smiled. But he closed his eyes and murmured when she said she had swapped the other shoes. He did not touch her, did not even touch her new shoes. He said he had to meet a customer about a leasing agreement. She never saw him again.

"First love," the girl said, though she felt that way only after it was over. And that was how my wife became worldly.