Hotel Honolulu

69 Human Remains

For years, Royce Lionberg had driven from the North Shore once or twice a month to the Hotel Honolulu to dine on one of Peewee's Buddy Burgers. Then he began to visit almost every night, to drink instead of to eat, so it was obvious that something had changed. He always asked to see me. The man who had been so secretive and subtle was now expansive and blunt. He would turn to a woman wearing heavy mascara at the bar and say, "You look like a raccoon!" And not in jest but angrily, as if — even if it were true — she had no right.

In the way a domineering drinker at a bar becomes chairman of the board, Lionberg engaged in lengthy monologues instead of conversing — monologues that with modest elaboration could have been worked into short stories. I was tempted but had abandoned the business, and anyway, I liked the bare bones of his stories and the telegraphic way he told them: "The Shutter sisters. Famous twins. All sorts of celebrity as a double act. Merle died, and so Beryl could not be famous anymore. She kills herself."

In another, a man named Cyril Dunklin — they always had names — indulged himself in sexual fantasies on the phone with his high school sweetheart, Lamia, whom he had not seen for years. It went beyond phone sex. It was a phone relationship, which included the wildest sex. Unable to stand it any longer, they met, had a solemn, awkward cup of coffee, and parted. After that, there were no more calls. The relationship was over; they had met.

"Andy Vukovitch was a very good friend of mine," Lionberg said.

Whenever a speaker prefaces a story by mentioning how close the friend is, you prepare yourself for the worst.

This Andy loved his wife, Lynette, but was at his most passionate and demonstrative when he was being unfaithful to her and feeling guilty. In the course of a long affair with his mistress, Nina, he was glimpsed by her being tender toward his wife. Nina dumped him and, without a secret life, Andy became demanding and hypercritical. He seldom went out — why should he? He was doggedly faithful to Lynette, who eventually could not stand his constant scrutiny, and left him.

"Maybe it was doomed to happen," Lionberg said. "There's a point in life, if you live long enough, when everything that happens is just repetition. You have done this before in precisely the same way. You have met this person already. You already own one of these contraptions.

You've seen it, you've heard it. It's the nightmare of the eternal return — nothing is new. You are not hungry. You don't want any more of anything. You see in life's repetition that your life is over — nothing to look forward to. You are able to anticipate what the man or woman will say, and you want to yawn or scream, because you know how everything ends."

Lionberg himself was full of plans. "I bought myself a treadmill," he

said.

I said, "A treadmill is somehow not a declaration that you are going places."

He didn't laugh. He probably hadn't even heard me Anyway, humor for a monologuist is an unwelcome interruption. He was smaller, paler, more persuasive and talkative as a drinker than he had been as an eater, with the face and posture of a compact burrowing animal. He announced his plans: cruising the inside passage off the Alaskan coast, his great seats at the Elton John Millennium Concert in Honolulu one year hence, a slot in a timeshare in St. Barts, a backroads trip in a limited-edition battery- operated electric car. All his plans involved considerable expense.

The socialite Mrs. Bunny Arkle stopped at the hotel one night asking for Buddy.

Lionberg said, "She's a fine woman. I knew two of her husbands. I should marry her, I really should."

Mrs. Bunny Arkle heard this through Buddy and began showing up when Lionberg was around, the smiling suggestion of appetite on her lips.

Lionberg ignored her, yet he said to me, "We'd make a great couple. What does it matter that I have no sex drive? She's probably past it too, though women of sixty think of nothing but sex."

Finally Mrs. Bunny Arkle gave up on him, saying that the worst of Lionberg was that these days she couldn't tell whether he was drunk or sober. Lionberg just shrugged. Out of the blue, he asked me whether I got

sick of doing the same thing every goddamned day. I said I was too insulted to give him a reply, and I meant it.

"No more composing," he said. He knew that I had been a writer.

"Now I'm decomposing."

"Don't say that!" he said with his chairman's anger.

The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it's a joke, because of course it is never a joke.

"I want to see the Taj Mahal. The pyramids. The Panama Canal. The Shwe Dagon Pagoda." He was off again, not listening, not even looking. "Make a great trip around the world, see everything at once. They have these tours. Cruise the southern ocean — Roaring Forties."

Even when Lionberg was not around he was in the hotel talk.

"You've been to Africa, right?" Buddy asked me.

"Yes. Lived there."

"Lionberg's going over there."

Keola told me that Lionberg had asked him to build an orchid house -

— very elaborate, with a triple-pitched roof, sprinklers, and its own climate control.

"I heard about your orchid house," I said the next time I saw Lionberg.

He didn't hear me. He stared, lifted his drink, and said, "You get these rich Japanese who kill themselves by slamming the door of their Mercedes on their silk Hermes tie and strangling by the side of the road."

I said nothing. His eyes stayed on me for a long time, as though to assess my reaction to this bizarre method of self-destruction. At last I shrugged and said quietly, "That's very sad."

It was odd and exhausting that he showed up so much, after his quiet occasional visits of the past. "Kekua's doing the honey now," he would say, rambling on. He had the energy and that air of exclusion of a man possessed with plans. He was moving back to the mainland, buying a winery in Napa, investing in Intel processors, living on a yacht in Marina del Rey, ranching in Montana.

Maybe these were empty dreams, but his spending was a reality. He was so preoccupied with it that he could not do it on foot. He sat at his desk, and sometimes at the Paradise Lost bar, phoning his mail orders: Armani suits, Ferragamo shoes, shiny gizmos and trinkets from the Sharper Image. He developed a commitment to anything made of titanium. "It'll survive a nuclear winter. They use it on jet fighters." He bought a titanium Omega watch, titanium sunglasses, titanium golf clubs, a titanium bicycle. "They're indestructible."

Why tell me?

Perhaps he could read the question on my face, because as I was thinking this, Lionberg said, "I want to write a book. What's it like?"

"Awful when you're doing it. Worse when you're not."

"I'd do it in Mexico. Get a little place in San Miguel de Allende. Learn Spanish at the same time. Do some painting. Take my bike for exercise."

A gourmet cooking course in Italy was also on his agenda. A visit to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Learning to tapdance and play the piano. Taking an astronomy course at Cal Tech. All these plans, and he always spoke with a smack.

"Do you see love in your future?" I asked.

He heard that. "I've known so many beautiful women. All my wives have been beautiful," he said. "But no one is uglier than a beautiful woman after she's hurt you or done something bad. Yes, she still has the right bones and contours, but there's a definite stink. Did you know that girl Rain?"

"Buddy mentioned her."

"She's getting married. I'm delighted. She's going to have a child."

He sounded pleased and paternal. "I have a wonderful present for her."

Another plan, the wonderful wedding present, along with doing some skydiving, collecting Sepik River masks, adding to his collection of netsuke. Or learning to windsurf: "I'm not too old. Go to the Columbia River gorge — world's best windsurfing. Find a female partner."

"Sure, look at me," Buddy said. "Pinky's twenty-four. Best sex I've ever had. She's sick!"

Lionberg laughed at that, because Buddy was drunker than he was. It was tiring to be around Lionberg in his expansive mood, because of all the promises — the details required me to be attentive, to visualize him in Mexico riding a bike and learning Spanish, to imagine him harvesting grapes or hot-air ballooning. He gave the governor money for his next campaign and then prevailed on him to listen to his plans, some of which involved the state of Hawaii. He was at the bar almost every night, and we watched him closely, as you do someone who is mapping out a future and making predictions.

Then his chair was empty for two days straight. That seemed strange. We waited one more day, then reported him missing, as undoubtedly he suspected we would. He was found on a steep side road, off the Pali Highway, next to his expensive car. He had slammed the passenger-side door on his tie and strangled himself. No note.