Hotel Honolulu

73 Hearsay

I was alone and at first glad of it, because I had secretly started to make notes for stories in these late-night hours: tentative, feeling foolish, even a bit shy, like a man reacquainting himself with an old love, fearing he might be rebuffed. The hotel was still, the bar shut at last, the music turned off, the pool closed, its greeny-blue blades of light sliding over the nearby walls. As soon as the last drunks had left the bar, I had sent Tran home. But afterward, I was sorry I was alone and had no witness to the persecution that then ensued.

The first voices I heard issued from the empty elevator. They were indistinct, probably mutterings of guests, but I heard my full name and mirthless, monotonous laughter like goose honks — nothing is less infectious. What was most irritating was that the remark preceding the laughter was inaudible.

Then, clearly, Supposed to be a writer!

Had I said something to a hotel guest? Had someone recognized my name?

Making a complete fool of himself, I heard in a different voice, though it was smothered by more laughter, a whole roomful of people. And he thinks no one's looking!

Perhaps it was not me at all. But then I heard a more particular accusation.

If it weren't for Buddy, he would never have gotten the job. And if he left, he'd never be missed.

Not only did this almost certainly refer to me, it was something I felt myself.

Another middle-aged howlie married to a local girl. The kid looks like his granddaughter.

At that I heard high-spirited giggling in the frantically hiccupping and unstoppable way of children. This mockery hurt most, because it was my worst fear.

I got into the elevator and pressed the button for the eighth floor, but when I was nearing six I heard the laughter, louder, so I stabbed at that button and got off there. It was impossible to find the precise source of the sound. It seemed to carry from one room, but when I went near, it echoed from another room. Finally I traced the laughter to an alcove, the end of a hallway where there was a cluster of three rooms, three differently numbered doors.

I heard the shouted remark, It's easy to call yourself a writer when you're among people who don't read. Causing the greatest giggling was the fragment of a remark: That ridiculous bald spot he hides with a baseball cap!

How could I intrude? What if it happened to be the wrong room? It might have been any of the three. I went into the emergency stairwell and climbed two floors, furious and ashamed, hearing muffled laughter from the concrete walls all the way back to my suite, where Sweetie and Rose lay sleeping.

The next day I tapped into the computer to get the names of the people in those three rooms: no one. The rooms were empty. What gave?

My complaint with the Hotel Honolulu had been that it was predictable and tedious, that the guests were intrusive and demanding. Paradise Lost was now dominated by Buddy and his boys' club. I had wanted security, a place to live, an easy job, sunshine, solitude. The price I paid was boredom of a kind I had never known before, something akin to being buried alive. Now I found the hotel so rich in piercing nighttime voices that I feared being alone, for it was only when I was alone that I heard them.

He's put on weight.

You can tell he doesn't belong here.

He is not a happy camper.

Oh, yes, he once wrote books!

Seeing how gloomy I was on waking up, Sweetie asked me what was wrong. I told her truthfully about these auditory hallucinations — or was it one of Buddy's bad jokes? She said I was making a fuss, that I was a big baby and a bad role model for Rose.

"But what if they're not real?"

"What they saying is true," Sweetie said, "so it don't matter whether they real."

Intimidated into silence by this logic, I simply stared at my literal- minded wife.

"You just sit and read books," she said. "Get a life."

I had not thought that anyone would notice something I was scarcely aware of myself: reading for me was like breathing.

"Like you could home in on your hotel skills," she said. "Get some expertise."

Fleeing to the beach did me no good. I had a book with me — Sweetie was right, that was all I did these days. I sat with the other idle people in the sun: the deeply tanned women and leathery men; the strippers — for young women with such bodies were usually free until early afternoon, and they nearly always had long hair; the little clustered families playing with food and toys. And the homeless man, the bum and his supermarket shopping cart, who actually looked at home on the beach — only there, with his back to a palm tree, for in his bulging plastic bags he had everything he needed.

For reassurance, to make myself feel better, I sought out Leon Edel. He invited me for lunch at the Outrigger Canoe Club. He listened carefully to my story of the disembodied voices.

"More M. R. James than Henry James," he said. "There's a splendid Edith Wharton story in which ghostly voices figure. And there's always Gilbert Pinfold, but his voices are almost comic."

I liked Leon for using books and writers to evaluate real life. It was what I had always done, what was never done in poor bookless Hawaii.

The printed word was a source of energy to me, giving me hope and verifying what I felt. In fact, for long periods on this island over the past years I had felt that there was much more dreamed in literature than ever contemplated in heaven and earth.

"Ghastly comedy, the darkest kind," I said. "Waugh was having a breakdown."

I told Leon I wanted to write something. What had bothered me most as a preoccupied hotel manager was that, not writing, I lived an unsorted life. The disorder had begun to pain me, keep me from thinking clearly, make the time pass quickly, and leave me no clear impressions.

Not writing gave me a bad memory and made me uncomprehending. I knew I would not understand the place, or the way I felt lost in it, until I wrote about it.

"You're a writer. Among other things, that's a pathological condition," Leon said. And then softly, turning aside, as though speaking to an invisible third person, "When the right moment comes, you'll do it well, precisely because of the difficulties you're describing."

"Short stories are hard. These are hearsay."

"Nothing is hearsay. What you're talking about will come straight out of your heart."

"Dozens of them, fifty or sixty, maybe more."

"All the better," Leon said. "That shouldn't worry you. You're lucky to have something to write. You have a loaf on the shelf, something new."

"I don't know whether I'm still in the writing business."

"You're in the lap of the actual!" And his laughter encouraged me. The man who knew James knew me. I felt lucky to have Leon as a friend, yet still I was oppressed by Hawaii, the tropical islands, their ghostliness, the way the beaches seemed just born, the mountains — those volcanoes -

— so ancient, the crags so spectral.

"We have celebrities here, both incipient and predominant," Leon used to say. Perhaps. But these were islands with no architecture, few ruins, fragments from the past, kitsch of the present, little worth preserving. That did not make it modern, only ghostlier. Being in such a sunny place did not make me afraid of shadows or darkness, but just convinced me that London fogs and shadows were predictable — you were forewarned, you expected accusatory murmurs and mocking voices. There was something much more frightening about such weirdness in broad daylight, and it could be absolutely spooky in sunshine.

Even at the beach I heard them, thin voices rising from the empty

sand.

Who does he thi nk he is?

He's supposed to be at work!

He'll probably be sitting here the rest of his life!

There's nothing left for him except death. He's waiting to die.

Should never have come here.

No one knows him but us!

They hurt me most, the way terrifying ghost stories did, because they were my own fears. Wherever I went I heard them. They came through the walls and closed doors of the hotel; I was never out of earshot. I understood how it was that people were driven mad: "The voices made me do it." And sometimes I could put names to the voices: Buddy's, my wife's, Madam Ma's, her imprisoned son, Chip, from years ago — even Rose's.

I don't want Daddy to come to the school play! He's too old.

Years before, Buddy had assured me that the hotel could run itself. My staff would do all the work. I was embarrassed by how little I knew of the hospitality business. I didn't like many of the guests, didn't feel particularly hospitable. My job seemed to lie in concealing my ignorance. Everyone was more experienced than I, who had no skills.

The day's figures, the week's figures, the projections for the month; occupancy, cancellations, maintenance, bar receipts, breakage, pilferage, the gross, the net — it all confused and angered me. When Keola said,

"See this? Is one flange," I wanted to hit him for implying that I might not know this technical term.

More to my taste were the night staff's log books. I wanted them to be better than they were. Now and then I examined them.

1:22 A.M. Kawika hear a noise in kitchen pantry.

1:40 A.M. Was a rat. Catch with a sticky trap.

2:20 A.M. Drunk man refuse to leave Paradise Lost bar. He say, "You know who I am?"

2:35 A.M. Still explaining to Kawika. Was a former city councilor.

2:38 A.M. Man escorted off property by Security (Kawika). Bar and pool area secured.

I wanted to read, "Voices from elevator, voices from walls, voices from empty rooms," but all I found were leaks, smells, floods, tripped circuit breakers, strangers, rowdy drunks, diners bolting from their tables to avoid paying the tab. The staff usually ran the place; sometimes the guests ran it; seldom did I.

After all his big plans, look where he's ended up.

I know exactly who he is. I just don't want to embarrass him by saying hello.

Something happens to people who come here, men especially.

They dress down, they pretend they're younger. The world has passed them by. All they have are fantasies.

"This island is not the world," I said to Leon Edel one day. Leon was my only witness.

"Not the world, no. But maybe it's your world."

"It appalls me to think that all I need in life is sunny days at the Hotel Honolulu."

He said, "At a certain time of your life you have less to write and you need sunshine. Every day is precious. You're taking James's advice to live all you can. And you strike me as someone on whom nothing is wasted."

Leon was amused and fascinated by Buddy Hamstra, "that poor peccable great man," he called him. And so we talked — about Edmund Wilson's diaries, and Bloomsbury, and Henry David Thoreau's narcissism, and Henry James. I could not rid myself of doubts about my choice of career as a hotel manager, but I still had Leon, my fellow rocketman from our distant planet.

Occasionally I had a message from that planet, in the form of letters forwarded by my former publishers, from readers: "There is a rumor that you are not dead but that you have just stopped writing and live in another country under a different name, like B. Traven."

One parcel I almost didn't open, because it was from a New York publisher. It contained the proof copy of a novel. The letter asked whether I would read the book, and if I liked it, would I kindly share my comments? At the bottom of this note, thanking me in advance, was a handwritten message and the overlarge signature of Jacqueline Onassis.

"That's Jackie Kennedy," I said to Sweetie.

"Right," she said.

"She wants me to read this book — she wants a favor, get it?"

"Jackie Kennedy wants a favor from you. Right."

"So she said."

Sweetie made a familiar face meaning, You got a problem. But Leon didn't laugh. He said, "She's a serious editor. She's very well thought of."

"So first it's voices and now it's famous people," Sweetie said. "Yeah, right."

I read the book and faxed my favorable comment. When she replied, Mrs. Onassis said how lucky I was to be living in Hawaii. She mentioned that her son would be stopping off in Honolulu within a few weeks on his way to Palau, in the western Pacific, where he would be scuba diving.

The voices did not stop. To a nonreader, writing is a form of magic — unreliable, misleading; to an islander, everything beyond the shores of the island is unreal, dark, threatening, no matter how sunny the horizon looks. There is no memory of anything outside the island. What cannot be seen

does not exist. And so I was alone with the voices, but that was not the only muttering. There were rumors that I might be crazy — not dangerous, but afflicted with island fever — rock happy. But that, too, was hearsay.