Hotel Honolulu

65 Invasive Procedure

Buddy's doctor, Miyazawa, was explaining the risks, the pain, the discomfort, the infection, the trauma, and "opportunistic germs" when Buddy said (his worst jokes being the key to his personality), "Maybe you can detach this parasite from my body," and reached around to squeeze- honk Pinky's breast. "Momi was built for distance. Stella was built for comfort," he said, now gripping Pinky's skinny arm. "Pinky's built for speed."

Pinky closed her eyes and opened her mouth as if to howl, but no sound came out. What did this mean? It was seldom possible to know how much English she understood, though she claimed to speak six languages, Japanese among them, from her days as a dancer in Tokyo.

"She's sucking out my strength, doc." Was she the problem or the cure? Buddy never knew with women. He had been wrong so often.

"Being as this is an invasive procedure," Dr. Miyazawa was saying slowly. It was elective surgery, he went on, and he needed backup, so he would operate at Straub Hospital.

"I want new lungs," Buddy said to Pinky.

The doctor's office was in a second-floor suite in a strip mall off Kapiolani Boulevard, between a sushi bar and a video store. The procedure

was still somewhat experimental, the doctor said, but Buddy was willing — more than willing. He loved the idea of innovation, saying, "I'm a guinea pig!" He liked ambitious doctors who were eager to tinker with his body.

His ailments were not new, but they were, so he claimed gleefully, "state of the art." He had gummed up his lungs with a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit and too much pakalolo. He had dropped acid and tried cocaine, and though he had given up drugs he drank more than ever. He was a big, badly behaved boy with lots of money. Greed and recklessness had turned him into a breathless popeyed man who couldn't laugh without gasping for air and pleading for more time.

"Think of an old sponge — what they look like," the doctor said. "That's your lungs. You can go on, but you'll need an oxygen bottle."

"At least I've got someone to carry it," Buddy said, but turning to Pinky he thought, I need her to help me, because I need to be free of her.

Pinky had opened her eyes but had not shut her mouth. Sitting in the doctor's office with her jaw hanging, she could not have seemed more mute — nothing dumber than a gaping mouth with no sound issuing from it. Yet it was her lizardlike way of listening, something Buddy did too when he was thoughtful, as though you received vibrations on your tongue.

"He one bad man," she finally said.

"We know Buddy here," Dr. Miyazawa said.

Pinky turned to Buddy and said, "I take care for you."

That promise alarmed him. Pinky was tapping her foot. He had no one else — no one who was fearful enough. Her sister Evie was no use — too young, too simple. Pinky needed him alive, but what incentive was there for his own family to keep him alive? He was worth no more than his assets, and his living longer only diminished his wealth. His spending alarmed his children. None of them would have dared to say what they felt — that they hated Pinky and her creepy relatives.

"Invasive procedure," Buddy said, repeating it so as to remember it, for it suggested going into battle.

The next time he was at the hotel, he used the phrase on me. I could see he liked its neatness, the implication of hot lights and sharp knives. He thought of himself as a bull staring down a matador's glittering sword.

His health was a subject Buddy usually avoided, not out of superstition, but because once he had strayed onto the topic, he was unstoppable and tended to disclose more about himself than he wanted. Talk of illnesses is often confessional, greatly revealing of a person's life and bad habits. It is impossible to discuss an operation without indicating what made it necessary.

The nose job had been first. "Deviated septum" was how he referred to it, but he had hated his nose. It was his father's, and he wanted a new one. His beak was anesthetized, smashed with a mallet, softened, and reshaped into something more acceptable. After that, fat and incapable of dieting, he had an intestinal bypass, twenty feet of gut removed by an invasive procedure. As a consequence he farted more, for the remaining intestines were less efficient in dealing with food. Farting was less dire than the fate his cousin Charlie had suffered: after Buddy bullied him into getting the same operation, Charlie died of kidney failure.

Since he'd had laser surgery, Buddy no longer had to wear the horn- rims he had grown to loathe. The bags under his eyes were removed. Who would have guessed Buddy to be so vain? He liked making improvements to his body, providing they didn't require physical exercise. He would pinch his cheeks or a swag of flesh on his arm and say, "I want to get rid of this." The procedures had all been cosmetic, and there was more: hair implants — a patch of plugs; liposuction — "just a few quarts" from his thighs; and the injections he got to rid himself of crow's-feet. When he was told the syringe was full of botulism, he said, "Why didn't you say so? I could have brought my own from the hotel kitchen!"

"I'm having a flare-up," Buddy might say out of the blue, by which he meant herpes. Something that had endeared Pinky to him was her indifference to his herpes. He loved her for shrugging when he raised the subject, and then he suspected that she might have been afflicted with it too, from her years as a dancer.

Lazy and gluttonous still, Buddy ignored the doctor's advice to cut down on food and booze, and was as fat as ever. All the intestinal bypass had done was made him gaseous. He had not kept up the Botox injections, so his crow's-feet returned much deeper. Open-heart surgery wasn't far off.

His breathing was so stertorous we had a standing joke. Gasping for air and gagging on his tongue, he would say, "Don't make me laugh."

"Are you choking?"

"No, I'm serious!"

The invasive procedure proposed for Buddy's lungs, a surgical technique for which Dr. Miyazawa was becoming well known, meant a morning in the operating room: the first lung gutted like a fish and drained, the spongy material removed, the remaining sponge holes opened, the tissue renewed. After a spell in the hospital, Buddy would be discharged. If Buddy exercised and avoided alcohol, he would breathe better. In time, the second lung would be renovated.

Pinky was part of the procedure. She would accompany him to the operation, then join him as a roommate in his hospital room, where she would assist him, bring him Peewee's food from the hotel, protect him from his children, and make sure he got through. Buddy didn't trust anyone in his family. He had no one but Pinky. Still, when she said, as she did often, "I take care for you," he replied, "That's what I'm afraid of!"

In the way that medical emergencies tended to redistribute the power in relationships — made a child of the person operated on, made an authority figure of the companion, and clouded the future — Buddy's life was turned upside down. Now he was captive and helpless. Pinky became his nurse, his mother, his jailer.

Over drinks at the hotel, Buddy talked about all the things he would do with his new lungs — visit the Grand Canyon, fly to Rio for the Carnival, spend Christmas in San Francisco. Pinky wasn't part of these plans, for he intended to return to Manila and find a new wife. He needed the lung operation to free himself of Pinky. When he was back on his feet he could pension her off. He never said he hated her, only "It's not working out," as if he had made a bad choice at a pet shop.

Late on the day of the operation, I drove over to the hospital. The woman at the reception desk said, "No visitors allowed."

"It's that bad?"

She was tapping on computer keys. She said, "No. It says here he's doing fine, but family says no visits."

"I'm family."

"Family is in the room."

"Family" meant Pinky. I imagined Buddy after his experience of sedation, the surgeon's mutters, the bright lights, and Pinky bossing him as he lay strapped to his bed. Now he was the fearful one, fearing that she would fly into a rage.

I wasn't sorry to be turned away. Something about a hospital, the human smell of illness and decay, is a reminder of mortality that stays in your nostrils. I was sure that Buddy had experienced that same whiff of extinction, and that he wanted to live. I knew he could not bear the thought that Pinky might abandon him, though he longed to abandon her.

She didn't know that the invasive procedure was Buddy's way of ridding himself of her.

Dr. Miyazawa pronounced the operation a success, but before Buddy was sent home, the doctor sat with him and Pinky in the hospital room and gave them instructions.

"I must tell you that this procedure will not be a complete success until you strengthen your lungs." The doctor gave Pinky the diet Buddy had to follow and described the exercises. "Use the treadmill. Deep breathing. Get your heart rate up. And especially no drinking."

Buddy nodded solemnly, so did Pinky, and with the doctor lecturing them, they were exactly what they had seemed — children, with the same faces that children put on when they are being scolded by an adult.

Hearing "no drinking," Buddy immediately wanted to sneak a drink, and this made Pinky conspiratorial.

"Only one, to celebrate," Buddy said when he got home. Already Pinky was pouring it, because she was afraid of him, Buddy told himself.

Ihe vodka tasted as sharp and beneficial as medicine.

She was afraid — of course she was. He knew that. But he wished to be rid of her anyway, because he needed her so badly. As long as she was needed, the operation was a failure. And still she sat by him, frowning each time he said, "Give me another one, just a little one this time."