Hotel Honolulu

7 Miranda the Carpenter

Roland Miranda murmured at his workbench, his sanding like sighing, his sawing like the rocking of a bedstead. He lived and worked in room 509 and hardly ever left. He had been a secret, another of Buddy's gambles, but one Buddy had lost. Old Miranda had done some work for Buddy, who had been in one of his playful moods: the prospect of debt made him creative. The renovation work that Miranda had done was considerable. He had put four men on the job for half a year, the bill had increased dramatically, Buddy just stalled, and when the day of reckoning came, Buddy said, "I've got a proposition for you." Miranda could choose to be paid immediately or else have a room for life.

Miranda accepted without hesitation. Buddy didn't mind — he thought the deal had worked in his own favor: Miranda was elderly and settled and so busy he would hardly use the room. But Miranda sold his house and business, and he moved into the Hotel Honolulu with his tools. The alternative for someone his age would have been the retirement home near Punahou School called Arcadia, which was ripe with old folks, and in its hushed air were the mingled smells of meatloaf, Jell-O, and mortality. Miranda, who was friendless, sent out for food. No one was admitted to his room. He was a forgotten tenant, just a set of alluring noises.

Miranda at his workbench I had taken to be an amorous couple. On the same evidence, others took those noises to be restless children left by selfish parents for their day in Waikiki, or a deaf man repeatedly yanking bureau drawers. The people who knew Miranda assumed he was making improvements to his room, and they said, "Do you think he'll ever finish?" After a while it was clear that Buddy had had the worst of the bargain; Miranda had lasted longer than most of the older employees. Buddy didn't want to hear Miranda's name. In the notes of the guest ledger beside 509 I read Occupied and Resident and Do not service. Housekeeping stayed away from the room.

Four years after he moved in, Miranda was still making carpentry noises in 509. Other guests complained, but he never hammered past six or six-thirty P.M., so I could do nothing. Yet what was all the hammering?

I had taken it to be foreplay and passion — how wrong I was — but that was a better guess than many ("He's fixing something," "He's angry," "It's kids"), and it had the effect of drawing me closer to Sweetie.

I asked, "Doesn't anyone ever go into his room?"

"He won't let them in," Buddy said. And then, resentfully, "I never thought he'd last this long."

Several years before, Buddy had proposed to buy him out. He offered him the same amount of money he had owed him, the hundred thousand for the work Miranda had done. The answer was no. Miranda would not even consider it. And when he talked about this stubborn resident — which

was seldom, because the subject was so unwelcome — Buddy always ended by saying darkly, "If only I could get rid of him."

It was the noise, Buddy said. It was bad for business. "Not that it's loud — it's a strange scraping. I know it's probably him sanding, but it sounds like someone scratching dry skin."

"Or making love in a creaking bed."

"You got quite an imagination."

I realized that I had told him too much. I said, "I'm sure he's making something."

"Of course he's making something. It's covered by a cloth. I've seen the cloth — peeked at it anyway. He keeps the blinds drawn. Kawika, back when he was the window cleaner, used to think he was making a canoe. This was right in the beginning. Maybe he's been working on the same thing for years."

"How could it take so long?"

Buddy said, "I hate it when people ask me the same questions that I ask myself."

But something had been accomplished. In the room on the floor below Miranda's, under the spell of his seductive sounds, Sweetie and I had made love, and a child was conceived, and we were now living together in the hotel with our little girl, Rose. I had begun again from scratch: the shelf of books, the bank account, the credit card, a car, a

Hawaii driver's license — another life, a narrower circle, different hopes. "Are you the child's grandfather?" the nurse had asked at Queen's Medical Center when I took Rose for a vaccination.

To be the manager of a hotel in which one of the guests was invisible was not so strange, Buddy said. He had known many reclusive guests over the years. There was an old Canadian woman in 1110, Melva Jean McHorn, who arrived from Calgary just before Christmas and stayed until March, who was so seldom seen that I stopped her in the lobby one day and pointedly asked if I could help her, not realizing that she had been a guest for months. "Seasonal affective disorder," she said. Other guests only went out at night. Buddy had said, "Get used to it."

Roland Miranda was a lot less odd than some, Buddy said. It was possible that one of these resolute old men who crossed the lobby without looking left or right was Miranda. I stopped asking.

And the toc-toc-toc of a mallet tapping wood still struck me as the possible prodding of an attentive lover. From this sound alone, the physicality of it, I knew it was old-fashioned work — no power tools, no harsh noises, just the rocking and squeaking that, when I heard it from below, still had the power to excite me.

"It's some kind of Whyan chest," the new window cleaner said when I asked. I could not contain my curiosity. I kept asking for details. "It's on two sawhorses."

"In his room?"

"What's wrong with that?"

The staff were annoyed that I should question Miranda's activities. They felt he had a right to do whatever he wanted, and they took a certain satisfaction in the thought that Miranda the local man had outsmarted Buddy and the mainland haole — outsmarted everyone.

I could deal with Miranda only by staying out of the room downstairs, 409, and by not listening, not caring. When I assigned the room, the guests either complained of the noise or smiled significantly, saying nothing, having found the sounds as inspirational to passion as I had. Miranda had outsmarted me, too. There was nothing to be done. The only remedy was to leave him to his privacy and regard him as another character in the Hotel Honolulu. Though it also occurred to me that Miranda had taken a lover and that the noises were exactly what they seemed — two people making love, a young woman jump-starting Miranda's engine.

One day, a new guest said, "The honeymooners are at it again."

This was Ed Figland from Sunnyvale, California, who had occupied 409 for two weeks with his wife, Lorraine. His very weary wife: Lorraine had become the object of Ed's unexpectedly frequent advances. It was reassuring to know that I was not the only susceptible one.

I said, "Do you want to be moved?"

He said no, and laughed, but the next day he reported that the lovers had stopped. I knew this was the first time in the years I had worked there that Miranda had ceased his daytime carpentry that I associated with afternoon delight.

After the Figlands left I went to the room and listened. Nothing. I gave it a few more days, then I knocked at Miranda's. No answer.

I used my passkey and entered. I found him lying in the most elaborately carved coffin I had ever seen, with all the chips and sawdust around it, masses of shavings. He was alone, and hownah, as Pidgin had it — reeking. He had at last finished making his coffin, and so it was his moment to climb in and expire.