Hotel Honolulu

74 An Impossible Story

Two young women jumped to their deaths, together and apparently at the same moment, off the fourteenth floor of the Outrigger Islander, four blocks away from the Hotel Honolulu. We knew of it within thirty seconds, from the screams. There was nowhere for a jumper to fall in Waikiki without horrifying pedestrians or tying up traffic.

"Maybe you write some kine story bout it," Keola said, which irritated me, because it was just what I had been thinking. But what did this smirking janitor know about writing anything?

I said, "Never," without meaning it. I was curious.

The next day Leon Edel was due for lunch. He had said he liked Peewee's Cobb salad and complimented me on the hotel's atmosphere — "It's the Hawaii I first encountered, years ago" — meaning, perhaps, that we were seedy and old-fashioned. He was too polite ever to be negative. We had no secrets now. He knew that it was painful to me that I no longer wrote anything. He praised me for my courage.

When I told Buddy that I needed a few extra hours for lunch with Leon, he said, "Try to get a column item in the Star-Bulletin. Something upbeat."

I did not see the connection. Buddy then went into his old rant about how it was really amazing how we had all these famous people in Hawaii — George Harrison, Willie Nelson, Jim Nabors, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Chamberlain, Sylvester Statlone, Mike Love (the Beach Boy), Boris Karloff's widow. Doris Duke, too, he said, though she had died.

"Take George Harrison. If we could say that one of the Beatles stopped by, can you imagine what it would do for business?"

"But why would George Harrison come here?"

"For a drink, one of Tran's mai tais, one of Peewee's burgers, the prize-winning chili," Buddy said, as if I had asked a dumb question. "And we could have a Wall of Fame like Keo's Thai Restaurant — signed pictures of all the stars who drank in Paradise Lost."

Buddy's inability to understand that it was unlikely that such celebrities would ever set foot in the hotel was, I felt, a sign of his failing health. Another sign was his blind rage at my disagreeing with him. His bad temper was almost certainly a result of his frailty and his heavy drinking.

"You're so negative," he said.

"What has that got to do with Leon Edel?"

"You told me he's a writer, didn't you?" Buddy glared at me. "He could do something."

Now I understood. The very idea that the eighty-nine-year-old biographer of Henry James and chronicler of Bloomsbury would write a

squib for the local paper about his liking for the Hotel Honolulu was so innocent in its ignorance that I laughed out loud.

In his deteriorated state of mind, Buddy took my laughter for yes and cheered up.

"The Islander's going to be hurting for business," he said. "I'm thinking of getting that guy in, the fat Samoan guy who husks coconuts with his bare teeth."

He was trying to take advantage of the news story of the two women who had jumped from their room in the Outrigger Islander. Visitors who wished to avoid the scene of death and tragedy might be persuaded to stay with us if Leon provided a column item and placed it with one of the three-dot successors to Madam Ma in the evening paper.

Leon was dropped off by his wife, Marjorie, who withdrew, saying, "I'm having lunch with the wahine," meaning her women friends. Marjorie pronounced Hawaiian words correctly. She wrote poetry. The Edels adored each other in an admirable way, with the ageless self-sufficiency of lovers.

As a joke, I mentioned Buddy's column item idea to Leon.

"I was a journalist once, but not that kind," Leon said. "How is our poor peccable friend?"

He'd had to break two previous lunch dates, so it was good to see him. He appeared more frail, but he was so dignified that his frailty was like circumspection, another aspect of his courtesy.

"How are you feeling, Leon?"

"That depends. Some days like a weary, wasted, used-up animal. Other days, I'm tiptop." It was typical of him not to complain, though he seemed a bit flustered and unsteady until we were seated. "And you're flourishing."

After all these years I had come to see that he was the only person in Hawaii who knew me — and in the most profound and subtle way, through my books, the detailed autobiographical fantasies of my fiction. He had read a few of my books before we first met; since then, he had made a point of reading more of them. I had done the same with his books, and by now had read all his work, even Writing Lives and his pamphlet Thoreau. I reread the James biography. It was his great achievement, one of the greatest in biography.

With this knowledge and appreciation of each other's work, our friendship had deepened. His books were a postgraduate course on the man, as books often are — Leon as well as Henry James.

"Isn't the news terrible?" he said. "It must have happened right around here."

He meant the double suicide. I might scratch my head in disbelief at something I saw or heard in Honolulu, but Leon was there to verify it. How I loved these lunches, swapping stories. He was old enough to be my father, and was paternal. Yet as writers we talked as equals.

"They were military," I said.

He was sipping ice water, fastidious in his frail, elegant way. Always the Panama hat and the aloha shirt and the cane. Marjorie had been apologetic in the weeks before, calling me to say that Leon was unwell, just out of the hospital, and would not be able to make lunch. "Maybe next week." But there were more delays. I missed him, and I was glad when he turned up that day, and delighted to hear his reaction to the news story.

"I can't remember ever reading anything quite like it," he said. There were certain unambiguous news stories that possessed and unified Honolulu — the all-day standoff, the missing hikers, the hostage-taking, the child batterer's trial, the strangled transvestite in the dumpster, the local Bishop Estate trustee's sex-in-the-men's-room saga — the way dramatic happenings take hold of a city, giving it something to talk about for a few days. Then the drama passes, and the city returns to its divisive pettiness. This was one of those stories. I wasn't surprised that Leon mentioned the suicide of the women soldiers.

Both young women (nineteen and twenty-four) had been injured in minor mishaps at their camp, Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri. On leave because of the injuries, they had left the camp, gone AWOL, flown to Honolulu using one-way tickets, and checked into the Islander, a double room on the fourteenth floor. Here they became tourists, rented motor scooters, then a car, circled the island, took a helicopter tour, the submarine out of the harbor, and had visited most of the hotels in Waikiki, eating and drinking. They were remembered in several places for their boisterous good humor and their spending. Within two weeks they had run up bills of eight thousand dollars on their credit cards.

I looked up their names on the credit card slips from our bar and restaurant but could not find Brandy Rogers or Renate White among them.

One evening at a nightclub, Renate, the older of the two, met a Marine, a lance corporal from the Kaneohe base, and a week later they became engaged. They exchanged rings, got Oriental love tattoos, and made plans to marry soon — within a few weeks. Still, the two women remained at the Islander. They bought swimsuits, cosmetics, and a portable CD player.

Their families knew nothing of this, did not even know they were in Hawaii. Both women had boyfriends on the mainland; they too had no idea.

About three weeks after they arrived in Honolulu, Renate's fiance had visited as usual, but had left around one-thirty in the morning. Back at the base, he had called Renate at five to tell her he loved her. She said, "I love you." At seven-thirty the two women were heard laughing and talking so loudly in their hotel room that other guests on the floor complained. Hotel security men knocked on their door and warned them to keep their laughter down.

Ten minutes later, they both jumped out the balcony, and four blocks away at the Hotel Honolulu, Keola paused in his sweeping, gripped his broom, and said, "Something happen. Something bad."

I asked him what.

"Someone mucky-die-dead."

At lunch, Leon said, "What details did you notice in the newspaper story?"

"That they each had slash marks on their wrists. They had tried to do it that way."

"Superficial cuts," Leon said. "I believe that. What else?"

"The credit card bills — eight grand. Is that what you mean?"

Leon said, "What about their size? James would have noticed how diminutive they were. One was just five feet, the other only an inch taller, and both were young. Though the older one seemed to be paying most of the bills."

"It's still a mystery," I said.

"Of course, but that's not the point. The poignancy is that they did it together. In all the suicides that are committed on earth, it is hard to imagine that any are two women like this, jumping together into the morning sunshine off a hotel balcony. It was conjectured that they were holding hands when they did it. That's the detail you want."

"Such a sad story."

"Now it is our story. They dropped into our lives," Leon said.

"You remember more than I do."

"I had a lot of time to kill at the doctor's office — my weekly appointment. Normally I don't read the Advertiser, but there was one in the waiting room."

"It would make a great short story."

"Would it?" Leon looked doubtful. "An impossible story. We know too much. The art of fiction is all in the not knowing."

"Right. We don't know why they did it."

He smiled. "There's no art in guessing. Certainly no story."

Our meal was served — Leon's Cobb salad, my blackened ahi sandwich. We said nothing more about the suicides. Leon interrogated Fishlow, one of our seasonal hires: no salt, no dairy — they didn't agree with Leon's medication.

"Love," Leon said at last, after Fishlow had gone. "Why else do two people have the courage to do anything so rash — and not just the suicide but everything that came before."

"What about the Marine?"

"He has his own story to tell, but his story isn't theirs." Leon was too short of breath to continue. He coughed laboriously, apologizing by flapping his hand. When he recovered, he said, "Someone would be telling James a story and he'd say, 'No more. Don't tell me the rest."

"Because he needed to invent it."

"Yes. Look, 'The Author of Beltraffio' comes from one chance remark, that A. J. Symond's wife disliked his writing. And there's nothing to invent with those poor soldiers," Leon said. "There's more of a story in our talking here, now, in your hotel — more unspoken, more ambiguity, more layers of interest — than in that dramatic double suicide."

His laughter brought on another coughing spasm. I sat helplessly until it ended, and then, as always, we talked about how lucky we were to be here in such a balmy place.

As we left the dining room, I saw Marjorie was in the lobby waiting for us. She had never done that before — waited without telling us. I was touched by this patient expression of her love. I didn't realize that Marjorie had come, feeling protective, concerned because Leon was seriously ill.

"We can't pierce futurity," he had once said to me in a Jamesian way. He had deliberately not mentioned his condition. He canceled our next lunch, and the next. He died soon after that. He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in a ceremony attended by many Honolulu people, some of them well known.

Buddy saw me leaving for the funeral. He could not possibly have understood my grief. He said, "Try to come back with a column item."