Hotel Honolulu

75 Sand

"Why do you care about that stupid howlie?" Sweetie said.

We were talking about a man on Maui, a visitor from the mainland, who had dug a deep hole in the sand at a Wailea resort to amuse his wife and daughter, and had climbed inside. The soft walls collapsed, a wave broke, burying him alive in the sand. He was rescued (shouts, screams, panic, plastic shovels) but was now in the intensive care unit at Kahului General Hospital.

"Such a howlie thing to do," Sweetie said.

"It's not funny," Rose said. About a week before, I had taken Rose to the beach. While we sat in the sunshinejrshe saw a small purple beetle struggle to get out of a depression in the sand, a deep footprint. It scuttled back and forth, dragging sand down as it tried to ascend, falling and tipping over, kicking its legs, beginning again. "Look, Daddy." I studied it for a while, the little creature trapped in a human footprint. I said, "That's the history of Hawaii."

"These people from the mainland!" Sweetie said.

"Speaking of which, guess which person from the mainland is coming to Honolulu?"

"John Kennedy Jr.?"

I was amazed. I had learned it only a few weeks before, by way of Jackie Onassis, who had asked me to give her a blurb for a Ruth Jabhvala novel. I had done so. How could I refuse? In her thank-you fax she had mentioned her son's stopover. This was not a suggestion for me to meet him, only an offering to me of the fact that John Junior would be passing through. I believed that I was one of the few people in Hawaii who had this information.

"How do you know?"

"He's staying at the Halekulani. He's getting certified for deep diving. I know the guy who's taking him out — Nainoa." Sweetie laughed. "It's a secret. So how you know?"

"His mother told me."

"Yeah, right."

My wife hardly knew me, even after eight years of marriage. Was it the hotel? You live in a hotel and every meal is either from Room Service or the coffee shop. Sweetie didn't cook and could never remember what I had ordered. She had no idea what clothes I owned, though Pacita, in the laundry, knew. Our suite was tidied by Housekeeping — Sweetie had long since quit her job. She was clueless about me. Did it matter? Maybe not — after all, I hardly knew her. When I tried drawing her out, I often got nowhere. The subject was usually old boyfriends, the key to understanding a woman's personality, or so I thought.

"He just went away," she might say.

"But why?"

"I don't know." Or, "I don't remember."

In almost anyone else this would have seemed evasive. "I don't remember" usually meant "I don't know how to explain." In her case I felt it was the truth: she had no memory. I had never spent so much time with someone whose most frequent reply was the conversation-killing "I don't know."

Sweetie's had seemingly been a life without logical transitions. Many months — years even — were missing from the chronology, and some of it had the irrational sequence of a dream. Yet the proof that she was full of surprises was her knowing the privileged information that John Junior was passing through town.

Rose, still fastened on the man on Maui, said, "If a man gets hurt in a sand hole, it's a tragedy. It's like the history of Hawaii, or maybe the world."

Sweetie smirked at me, a wordless reproach that I had influenced Rose in her saying this, for the word "tragedy" was not in Sweetie's vocabulary — nor, strangely, was "world." The daughter was smarter than her mother, as sometimes happens, and the new word was a novelty, like a toy. Sweetie was heedless and willful; Rose, like many eight-year-olds, was pedantic and sentimental.

"Sometimes you see these people on the sidewalk with winter coats in a pile and all their suitcases and bags, waiting for the van," Rose said.

"It makes me sad the way they look, because that's a tragedy too."

"They going home," Sweetie said, "where they belong."

"Maybe they're not happy where they belong," Rose said.

Observation and memory were signs of intelligence. And I understood her point, which was vague, because she did not know the words "expulsion" and "dislocation."

My wife hardly knew me, but our daughter knew me well. Perhaps for the same reason, Rose was an enigma to Sweetie. So from her earliest years Rose and I had been confidants, spoke the same language. It was I who taught her the language, but the way she seized it and used it was a result of her intellect, which also isolated her and made her lonely.

Now and then my wife's old friends would show up. They played with Rose, who was susceptible to their careless exaggeration, their shouting, all their hollow promises. Promises were no more than penny candy, but the worst of it was that Rose believed them. Sweetie just laughed, seeing her child as a gullible stranger. But Sweetie was generous in her island way. She wearied of Rose's talkativeness, regarded the child's brightness as a kind of clowning, and in the way of a kind, unlettered, self-possessed mother, forgave her daughter for being intelligent.

I found Rose reading the Advertiser. She said, "He's still in the hospital."

"Having such a young kid at your age is like having a thirtyyear mortgage," Buddy had said. How wrong he was.

I loved Sweetie because she was strong and good-hearted and beautiful — single men in restaurants looked up at her and swallowed when she walked by. I desired her, too. But I chose more often to be with our daughter, who knew me better.

A hotel is a hothouse. We were rooted there, always on view. Now and then I would come upon Sweetie in the lobby chatting with a man. I always knew when it was an old boyfriend, and it was always a shock. The look of them — the long hair, the tattoos, the T-shirt, the earring, their extreme youth, the way they talked — made me wince. But I was usually with Rose, and if Rose liked them for their friendliness, what could I say?

"Him," Sweetie said, laughing after one young man left the lobby and mounted his Yamaha. "All he did was ride down to the beach and drink beer on the sand."

That was my second shock: after almost nine years in Hawaii, I also had tattoos and an earring, and one of my pleasures was drinking beer on the beach. I headed for the beach because no one could find me there.

The old boyfriend — his first name happened to be Ryan — knew that.

This was new to me, but appropriate. I had come to Hawaii as a refugee, building a new life on sand. But, married to a local woman, I somehow had come to resemble all her ex-boyfriends, and I wondered if I would become an ex-husband too.

Sweetie was apparently so simple, so unwilling to hold a conversation, it was impossible to know whether she had any secrets. It seemed to be true, as Buddy had said, that no one had secrets in a hotel. Sweetie was capable of great happiness. And she had learned, though I did not want to know how, that for a woman to keep a man's interest, she had to be sexually alert and willing. That counted for a great deal.

Rose said, "People are sending letters and cards to him. His daughter's name is Brittany. We had a Brittany in our class."

"What's she talking about?" Sweetie said.

At bedtime these days Rose asked me to tuck her in. We prayed for the man who had been buried in the sand.

Sweetie smiled without any interest. Rose bewildered her. She could handle the child, as a child, but whenever Rose showed a spark of intelligence or precocious insight, Sweetie laughed as though Rose had lapsed into another language.

The leaves on the lanai's poinsettias were looking crumpled, Sweetie said. They were pinched from an infestation of whitefly.

"They're suffering from rat bite," Rose said, wonderfully precise.

"Rats don't eat leaves," Sweetie said, missing the point.

What Sweetie called the banyan, Rose called the ficus, because I did.

"Ficus, ficus," Rose said, dancing. "Because I like us."

"I don't know what to do with her," Sweetie said.

That pleased me, because I knew just what to do with her. Send her early to Punahou School, make her happy with books and play, talk to her, listen to her.

Rose had an old hourglass egg timer I had bought for the pleasure of seeing her watch the sand drop into the lower half and turn it over and over.

"It's peeing sand," Rose said.

"Watch your language," Sweetie said. "The word is 'shee-shee.'"

But as with "rat bite," I loved it.

"Sand is time," Rose said.

Another day, Sweetie asked Rose, who seemed subdued and thoughtful, what was wrong.

"I'm in my blue period," Rose said, because we had been to the Academy of Arts the day before, looking at the Picasso.

Sweetie giggled. She had no idea. "Why doesn't she play in the sand like other kids?"

It seemed to me that was exactly what Rose was doing — a sort of sand, a sort of playing. Sweetie, so sure of herself, was a good example to her daughter in that respect.

I asked about John Kennedy Jr. - when was he due? Sweetie said, and in a voice of crisis, "Never mind him. What about Stephen King?"

"All these celebrities," I said.

"Was hit by a car. Was hurt real bad. He supposed to be a wreck."

These details were well known, even to me. I said, "What was that Stephen King story you were wading?"

"Listening to," she said, meaning an audio book. "I told you. Was about this supermarket. Like Foodland. Was these dinosaurs in it."

"Interesting," I said. "So, gross reality in the form of a careless driver on a country road in Maine now overwhelms his puerile and implausible fantasies."

"The fuck that supposed to mean."

Rose said, "It means his horror stories aren't as horrible as his car accident. Doesn't it, Daddy?"

We had already thrashed this out, Rose and I, over ice cream at the beach, the day we saw the beetle trapped in the footprint.

"I think you jealous of Steve," Sweetie said to me. Perhaps I was. Certainly Sweetie had never gone Rollerblading listening to tapes of anything I had written.

"I'm not jealous. His work actually depresses me. And I just think it's salutary for a writer of horror stories to be reminded of what true horror is.

It's not a dog that gets bitten by a diabolical bat and besieges a mother and son, or spooky ghosts that possess a writer in a haunted old hotel, or an arsonist who makes bonfires with psychic powers, or a creepy ten-year- old with clairvoyance who takes revenge on her schoolmates.

"You finished?"

"No," I said. "Horror is a broken leg. A real novelist could have told him that."

"Like you?"

"Like I used to be."

"So what's 'salutary' supposed to mean?"

Rose said, "It teaches you a healthy lesson."

"Hybolic," Sweetie said. She remembered Rose's tone of voice — pedantic — without remembering the word or any of the pedantry. She wasn't annoyed; she was strangely fascinated, as though transfixed by a visible handicap. Sometimes people looking gouty limped across the lobby, and Sweetie followed them from the entrance to the elevator, frankly gaping.

"It's like the man at the beach. He was playing in the sand, but he almost died. That's worse than a horror story, because it's real," Rose said.

In time the man recovered from his injuries and went home. Rose said she was relieved. But a pattern had been established, and for weeks afterward Rose insisted that I put her to bed.

Tucking in this bright child was a lengthy business. And I was so preoccupied with Rose and my duties at the hotel that I was not aware of JFK Jr.'s visit until some days after he had left the island. Buddy told me, "Guess who was in town?"

I was wary of discussing this with Sweetie, but one day I raised the subject. It wasn't an idle question. After all, I knew, even if Sweetie didn't, that she was Kennedy's half-sister. Sweetie's friend Nainoa had given Kennedy his diving lessons. Had she met him?

She smiled, and color suffused her face, reddening her lips, lighting her eyes, making her even more beautiful, the coconut princess whom I had always found irresistible.

"What was he like?"

"I don't remember," she said.