Hotel Honolulu

63 Family Affairs

One night, without warning, Pinky crept into Buddy's bed fully clothed, moving against him so hard he could feel her sharp bones poking him like the edges of a broken basket. She smelled of onions, and gleaming on her teeth was a sourness, probably chewed fruit. Ihe very pressure of her body was an imploring question.

"So what do you want?" Buddy said, gasping because only one lung was working well.

Her breath was damp, and her tongue teased his ear. "lake my cloves off, Daddy."

Buddy loved smutty innuendo in her gluey accent. He knew her so well. It aroused him to pluck off her warm clothes, though he insisted she wear her high-heeled shoes. Then she did the rest, crawling over him. He listened with delight to the sighing sounds she made, a greedy woman at a great meal — he told himself — though perhaps overdoing the noise in order to impress him or to prove something.

When she was finished and wiping her sticky lips, making a smeary snail trail across her cheek with the back of her hand, she said, "I miss my sister."

So that was what she wanted. All along, the understanding had been that she would see him through his forthcoming operation — crank up his bed, bring him donuts, push his wheelchair. "I trust her because she's afraid of me," he had told me. He was convinced of that when she stopped mentioning her crazy murdersuicide plan for the perfect crime. She must have been afraid. She had slept on her own until the night of her sexual invitation when she said she missed her sister.

Buddy stalled until he saw a recent picture of her sister, quite a different face from the one in the picture-bride video two years before. She had been a gaunt doll-like girl with staring eyes. She was fuller-faced now, smiling, twinkly-eyed, about twenty or so, plump-breasted, with delicate fingers propping up her chin. Her name was Evie.

"I miss her night and day," Pinky said.

Song lyrics often accounted for her way of speaking.

Buddy laughed. "Hey, I want you to be happy. If you want to see your sister, get naked." He encouraged Pinky in this taunting way for several days, using her eagerness, liking the fact that he had something she wanted, the means to fly her sister to Hawaii. In the past she had been stoical and self-denying, and that irritated him. At last he said, "Okay, I'll send her a ticket."

But he said to me, "All air tickets are like lottery tickets. Anything can happen. I need hope — my surgery is coming up. And I'm jazzed by the idea of two pretty sisters in the house. Maybe nail them both."

I wondered politely whether Pinky would go along with something like that.

"She's so kinky she doesn't even know she's kinky."

How kinky was it that she was keeping Buddy at arm's length most of the time? She knew he was depending on her to get him through his operation. But his plan was to pension her off afterward — give her some money and send her back to Manila. "Then I'll have Evie," he told me.

Evie showed up a month later at the airport, Buddy and Pinky watching from among the families and tour greeters holding leis and signs.

"Who's that man with her?"

"Uncle Tony. He very nice man. Can wash you car."

Then Buddy remembered him from the ridiculous wedding, but the man had somehow grown much older and uglier. The long plane journey had turned him into a tramp, with a broken suitcase, a cardboard box, and two days' growth of beard. He saw Buddy and held his mouth open. Uncle Tony had paid his own fare, which made him freer and less controllable. Buddy reasoned that a man was much worse than a woman, for a man was naturally suspicious. This one seemed in just one toothy glance to know Buddy well. A woman, an auntie, would have been greedier, dependent, and so more pliable. On the way to the North Shore, Buddy sized the man up as incurious, stupid, selfish, hungry.

"You got any plans?" Buddy asked Uncle Tony.

"Maybe I wash you car." After that, speeding through Helemano, Uncle Tony squinted at the fields and said, "Fine-apples. Fine-apples. Fine- apples."

Seeing Buddy's house made Uncle Tony hungrier. He touched the furniture, he tapped the walls, he sniffed Buddy's leather armchair. Evie was plainly fearful, but she was joyful, seeing Pinky, and she brought out a new Pinky, the one Buddy had first met and married — smiling, girlish, bright-faced, willing. Evie, being younger, was more active, worked hard, talked less. She was so shy she ate with her head down — the sort of timidity that roused Buddy, filling him with desire.

Half promising, half threatening, Buddy managed to get Evie into his bedroom alone with surprising smoothness. And he understood her: for her, silence meant yes. He gave her money, told her he loved her. She was his. After Pinky had persuaded Buddy to pay for Evie's ticket, she stayed away from his bed, so Evie was all the more necessary. But there wasn't much to it, and anyway the sex was brief, and then she was back in her own room. She seemed invisible to Pinky and Uncle Tony.

Uncle Tony was small, knobby-faced, incomprehensible, furtive. He smiled far too much, but he was helpful, absurdly so, not to the others but to Buddy — opened doors for him, fetched the newspaper, brought him the ice bucket and tongs, even had a way of saluting, as though he might once have been a civilian worker at a military base in the Philippines. After meals, he carried Buddy's plate to the sink, but no one else's. Buddy was

uncomfortable with this attention, and at last became suspicious and wanted him to go. He suggested the man might leave.

"Evie like it here, but if you want we go, okay," Uncle Tony said.

It was a small price to pay for Evie, who now made regular visits to Buddy's room. She lost all her shyness and became nimble and sniffly and pliant when Buddy turned off the light. He soon stopped hinting at Tony's return.

Buddy's children and their families started dropping in, always asking Buddy about his health. They seemed puzzled, if not disappointed, when he said, "I feel like a kid again." They had heard about Uncle Tony and Evie, and they discovered that Pinky had taken over the big downstairs bedroom (once Melveen's), where she now slept. Bula urged Buddy to get rid of them. Whatever his children wanted, Buddy suspected the opposite had to be preferable. To make his point, he crammed a twist of dog shit in Bula's hair dryer again. It stank like a rude reply when it was switched on.

Pinky ignored them. She was happier, less moody, less demanding; the arrival of her sister had changed her disposition. Pinky and Buddy had been sleeping apart for some time. "Him snore." "She farts." Neither was true. Buddy brooded over his impending surgery, hating the thought that everyone assumed the operation would be a failure. Evie's visits cheered him up. Almost every night she knocked. "No can sleep, meesta."

Buddy was always reminded of a small animal — desperate, devious, watchful, wild, pretending to be tame because the thing was so hungry — the impression he had once had of Pinky, in Manila, when Uncle Tony and Auntie Mariel had chaperoned her. Eager to please, crouching over him, Evie was smooth, ratlike in a nice way, Buddy thought, a nibbling rodent. Afterward, as Buddy lay smiling, she pleaded with him to let Uncle Tony stay. Instead of saying yes outright, he took pleasure in tormenting her with his apparent indecision.

Was Pinky aware of Evie's nighttime comings and goings?. If she knew anything, she did not show it. She was indulgent with the girl, more like an aunt than a sister.

Uncle Tony washed Buddy's car and swept the driveway. He had a love of objects he could oil or polish. He rearranged the garden tools in the garage, hanging them on hooks. He sorted screws and nails in old coffee cans. Sometimes he raked the portion of beach that fronted Buddy's house.

Buddy's children hated Uncle Tony for his tidy habits and his having become a self-appointed odd-job man whose fussing gave him access to the house that bordered on ownership. You had to ask him where anything was these days. "I get for you," the man said, as a caretaker might. A change came over the household, as when the Malanut family had moved in, over the period when Buddy had pretended to be dead. The big table was set differently: Buddy in his usual seat at the head of it, with Pinky and Evie on either side of him, so he looked like a polygamous island chieftain, rich in wives, fat and fortunate, presiding over his board, holding his belly. Uncle Tony was nearby. When they were at the house, Bula, Melveen, and

the others sat at the far end of the table, farther from Buddy than they wished to be, displaced by Pinky and her family.

Now and then, Buddy invited me to witness this spectacle.

"No can sleep, meesta," Evie murmured at Buddy's door not long after that, but instead of crawling into bed with him, she stayed fully clothed, upright in a chair, next to the narrow table.

"Want a massage? That there is my massage table." Evie said, "I want to find my father."

"Your father is dead, honey. Pinky said so."

"No. Father of Pinky dead. Same mothei different father."

Did that explain Pinky's seeming like an auntie? "Where is he?"

"In America somewhere," Evie said, and pointed vaguely with her fingei as though America were a distant fabled land. "Please, you help me."

A woman who pleaded for help could make herself useful in her desperation, but why was Evie so unwilling? They were a demanding family. And within days Pinky was asking for a ticket so her brother Bing could come from Manila.

"What if I don't give him a ticket?" Buddy asked.

"Evie den go back."

That proved Pinky knew that he was sleeping with Evie. But Buddy did not feel pressured. This was all a cynical arrangement. Just as

cynically, he gave Pinky the ticket — and Pinky was happy, and Evie more affectionate. Uncle Tony continued to be intrusively helpful.

Now there was only Evie's father to find. Buddy repeated his promise to assist Evie in her search, for now she was an eager student in bed, open to any suggestion; just a hint from Buddy and she was at work on him. No longer was Buddy anxious about Pinky's jealousy or her threats.

Although she still nagged him about finding her father, Buddy was so happy with Evie he did not wonder why. Had he wondered, he would have found the answer downstairs, where every night Uncle Tony slept with Pinky and sometimes sneaked down the hall to tutor Evie. And when the brother Bing arrived, he was accompanied by Auntie Mariel. "Uncle Tony wife" was what she claimed. But Auntie Mariel and Bing were lovers, though Bing had his eye on Evie.

Buddy had no idea. He sat at the head of the table, smiling, with the five new members of his household on his left and right. Often when he was asleep he heard the rub of muffled footsteps on the floorboards and imagined busy mice, the sort that chewed holes in the screens.