Hotel Honolulu

68 Owner's Suite

On the way to Honolulu, after abandoning his North Shore house, ditching his family like a crab shucking its shell and all its barnacles, Buddy had an explosive urge to push Pinky out of the car. "Or else swerve and heave my okole into the breakdown lane." On long rides he found Pinky unbearable for her silences and her sniffing. Was it a deviated septum that made her snuffle and blink like a rat?

"Does your wife ever just go quiet and not answer your questions?" he asked me.

"All the time," I said. I had never met anyone so antagonized by talk as Sweetie. "Hey, I'm just making conversation," I'd say, making me sound stupid. My questions annoyed her. My saying nothing soothed her. Was this her upbringing? Hawaii was a culture of grunts and mutters. Perhaps she didn't have the answers. Her manner of conversing was to turn away from me and read signs out of the side window: "Zippy's. Office Max. Taco Bell. Big Burger. Dragon Tattoo. Absolutely No Parking."

"What's the longest you've gone without talking?" Buddy asked.

"Couple of days."

"Would you believe two weeks for me and Pinky? And she's sitting in the same house the whole time."

Sitting in that enormous house was different from her sitting next to him in the car. She had her own room, her own bathroom; she often ate alone, hunched over her plate with her face down and her elbows sticking out. Riding in the car with her was tor ture, Buddy said. He wanted to scream at her. He knew she wanted to bite him again.

And so they moved into the Owner's Suite of the Hotel Honolulu, and it was worse than the car. Buddy wondered whether he had made a tactical mistake in abandoning the house to his quarreling family. Even though it was large for a hotel suite — bedroom, sitting room, kitchenette, foyer, double lanai — it seemed to Buddy like a cage. After a few days he said, "I have never spent so much time with Pinky."

"How does it feel?"

"Like I was ate by a dog and shit off a cliff."

He had been sick and supine in his big house. His operation had failed — made him weak and dependent, impatient and pompous. He had fled the house, and now, in the Owner's Suite, he felt that he would die unless he got away from Pinky. He could see in the dark iridescence of her eyes, could hear in her cold disgusted silence that she wanted him dead.

"Find me a single room with a sea view," he said to me.

I put him in 509, the room Miranda the carpenter had occupied and decorated, where the noise of his carpentry, the care he took in making his

own coffin, had sounded like lovemaking in the room below it. That memory was now a hotel legend. The room had a glimpse of the sea.

Buddy was in the room less than an hour when he phoned me.

"Tell Pinky to bring down my oxygen."

He sounded as though someone had him by the throat, thumbs pressed against his neck. Pinky joined him, lugging the tank. Buddy sent her away when he was breathing better.

"I can't stand to be in the same room with her."

In his whole life, he told me, he had never lived in so small a space. On the North Shore he was renowned for the length of his dining table, the breadth of his bedroom, his king-size bed, his wide-screen television, his big armchair. His favorite glass held a pint of vodka tonic; his ashtray was a Fijian kava bowl. He said that he had not realized the Hotel Honolulu was so small.

"Open up this room," he said, and gave me orders to have a contractor knock down a wall and make an Owner's Floor, so he could spread out and isolate himself from Pinky. The builder's estimate was fifty thousand dollars. Furnishing the space and decorating it would be another twenty. He authorized me to supervise the work, which would be a drain on my time as well as a downsizing of the fifth floor. It meant deleting three of the best rooms in the hotel.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" "What's the alternative?" he asked.

"Sending Pinky home? Hiring a nurse? Hanging out."

"Why didn't I think of that?"

He delegated his lawyer, Jimmerson, to talk to Pinky. Jimmerson appeared, big and busy, and closeted himself with Pinky in the suite she had ceased to share with Buddy. The papers had already been drawn up.

"I want for take care my husband," she said. In defiance, her head jammed against her shoulders, grinding her teeth, she became smaller, more compact.

"He wants a divorce," Jimmerson said.

"Never."

"He's willing to offer you a cash settlement."

"How much?"

"Ten thousand dollars."

Pinky made no reply. The amount was more than she had expected, and convinced her that she had no idea of Buddy's wealth. She had lived in a hut, had worked in a bar — until she had met Buddy, her life had been unlucky and dangerous. She had so much to hide from him that she could never remember what she had told him and what she had concealed — and much of what she had told him was untrue. She had imagined a future here, but it was sometimes simpler to take the money and go.

"I want for be American."

"That can be arranged."

"And twenty," she said.

"Ten here, ten when you get back to Manila."

She closed and opened her eyes in agreement.

Buddy was elated when Jimmerson gave him the news. The money was less than he had expected, and much less than it would have cost him to renovate the fifth floor.

Whether she was soothed because of the finality of the agreement or calmed by another of her many moods, Pinky was quieted. She sat so peaceably in the Owner's Suite that Buddy moved back in. He said that most of the time he was hardly aware she was there. Without being summoned, she could tell from the tiny variation in the sound of his breathing when his oxygen was needed. Buddy would be laboring to inhale and on the point of blacking out, so stifled he was unable to speak, when he would see Pinky at his side holding the oxygen, which was life to him.

Helpless in his wheelchaii which he preferred to his bed, he raised his face to her. She sat by him and held the rubber face mask to his nose and mouth and watched him blow-suck and recover. He swelled a little and his face lost its pallor. When he could speak he batted the face mask away and said, "Get me a drink."

Ihe doctor had told him: no alcohol. His children had nagged and warned him. Even I questioned his drinking. But Pinky got up without a

sound, went to the wet bar in the suite, mixed a large vodka tonic, filled the glass with ice, and brought it to him, saying, "For Daddy."

"Don't go away," Buddy said. He was stronger with air in his lungs and booze in his veins. He shoved at his wheels, going closer to her.

Watching him, Pinky stood in her shorts and a T-shirt that said Local Motion Hawaii, like a small girl, his daughter, with her skinny face, buck teeth and big dark eyes, and bony feet.

"lake your clothes off," Buddy said.

Pinky did as she was told, but slowly.

"All of them," Buddy said.

She picked up her panties with her toes and dropped them onto the chair with her shorts.

This little woman was his wife. He had gotten her to agree to go away for twenty grand. When she was gone he would be alone, womanless in the Owner's Suite.

"Dance for Daddy."

She did so, flexing her arms and legs, a stick figure, all hollows in the half-light of the afternoon, until Buddy was asthmatic with lust. She saw this clearly and, still dancing, brought him his oxygen.

And so she danced naked as he watched, and watching made him breathless. She danced forward with his oxygen again.

"We're back to basics," he told me, blow-sucking like an aquatic mammal. "This is my. ."

"Marriage?"

"For want of a better word."