Hotel Honolulu

79 New Management

Pinky even had me — at least she thought she did. She believed that I came with the hotel. The day after Buddy died, she installed Uncle Tony on the North Shore with Evie and Bing and Auntie Mariel. And she took charge of the Hotel Honolulu, which meant she had charge of me.

"Peek thee rebbish," she said, snapping her skinny fingers. She meant the flowers, the leis and garlands and bouquets that had been strewn in the hotel lobby in Buddy's memory.

The finger-snapping was new to me. I hated it. She also rapped her knuckles on my desk. That was worse. The only pleasure I had these days was in hearing her call herself "Mrs. Hamster."

She ordered me to get the locks changed on the North Shore house. She demanded that I hand over all the keys. She opened a bank account in her own name, bought new clothes and shoes. She appointed Keola her driver, and since driving was easier than being a janitor, he transferred his loyalty from me to Pinky.

"She want see all the accounts," Keola said. He was her messenger, too. Her patronage gave him power.

"I see you got a promotion."

"I been kick upstairs. Next stop, Guess Services Associate."

She made me wait in the corridor outside her suite when I was summoned to discuss the accounts. And she received me seated, like an empress. Her orders were that I was to stop distributing the tips indicated on credit card receipts.

"There'll be trouble," I said.

"I give Christmas bonus."

The "I" was interesting. Overnight, she became the hotel, the house, the business, the bank account, everything Buddy had left. There was no "we."

Of course there was trouble. The waiters raged. Trey resigned, so did Wilnice and Fishlow. Before he left, Trey said to me, "Any time you need some stories to write, I could tell you billions, from the times I dropped acid." Tran threatened to go; as a poorly paid Vietnamese barman, he depended on his tips more than the others. But he hung on.

Pinky did not respond to any of the complaints. She said very little. I began to understand the nature of silence in the use of power. Instead of arguments and shouting there were various manifestations of silence, and a sort of subtle sulking, which had to be analyzed and interpreted, like the snapping of her fingers, or even the manner in which she walked away.

Sensing that I was being uncooperative, she sent for me again. She was propped on her bed, pillows at her back, stiffly dressed and imperious. She demanded that I rearrange her closet — all her newly bought shoes.

"Put them over here, all them."

I went to the closet, not to survey her footwear, but to reflect on my role here. This was not right. My lips were forming the words "I quit" when, behind me, I heard Pinky sob in her sinuses, like the whinnying of a little child.

"I no know what for do," she said, her eyes glistening.

This new American, a small, skinny, inarticulate woman, hardly thirty, with hairy arms and big teeth protruding in her narrow face, had the whole hotel in her bony fingers. Yet here she was, a millionairess looking like a waif, trembling at the edge of her big bed, her shoulders up around her ears.

"Please, you help me."

She looked so helpless I went over and, against all the rules, sat on her bed and tried to comfort her. Her hand was hard and scaly, like a chicken foot.

"Daddy," she said, beseeching me.

"What's wrong?"

She whispered, "I bad girl," sounding insane.

"I think you're unhappy because you miss Buddy," I said. "We all miss Buddy. He was a friend."

"He like spank me. He make me kneel down and eat him. Then he lock me in dark closet."

The look of shock on my face made her smile. She became playful and babyish again.

"I like too much," she said, curling her lips so I could see her purple

gums.

I wasn't pure, yet I did not have it in me to engage in this game, which I could clearly envision, from the charade of my mistreating her and sexually abusing her, to locking her up somewhere in the Owner's Suite. If I treated her the way she demanded to be treated, however badly, it would be an enactment of her perverse power over me. She used her chicken- foot fingers to tug an answer from me.

"Sorry. You got the wrong guy," I said, standing up.

Her face tightened. Her eyes were scummy with hatred. "Get out for my suite."

She said shweet. The poor little thing was crazy. I knew my days were numbered. And after that she became an unambiguous tyrant. Tran resigned. Chen was miserable and so was Peewee. In their misery they became incompetent. The women in Housekeeping just wept. For the first time since being hired, I found the hotel impossible to manage, for I needed these people. I wanted to explain this to Pinky, but she kept to her room, the scene of her rejection. She was frightened, enigmatic, rude. Her new wealth had given her a sort of doom-laden quality, like a lottery winner trapped by the windfall and slowly self-destructing. And I was taken by surprise, too. Why had I not seen that all Buddy's foolery, his flatulence,

his stumbles, his bad memory, and his popeyed look of suffocation signified that he had only days left?

One night around eleven, as I was locking my office, I saw Pinky in the lobby. She looked disheveled, uncertain, uncomfortable, limping in her new shoes, as though she had wandered in off the street. Yet I had also noticed a new Jaguar pulling out from under the monkeypod tree at the front door — Mrs. Bunny Arkle. The wealthy widow had begun to cultivate Pinky. This was in the nature of things. I was sure that, in time, Pinky would join the Outrigger Canoe Club, the Honolulu Women's Outdoor Circle, the Hawaii Opera Theater. She would attend the posh Annual Heart Ball, buy a table at the French Festival at the Hilton and the Christmas Silent Auction at the Honolulu Academy of Arts benefiting "at-risk teens" — would become a pillar of Honolulu society.

"What for you go home so early?" Pinky asked.

"This is my home," I said.

"What for you stop work?"

"I never stop. Say, is there something wrong with your fingers? They keep snapping for some reason," I said. "Why did you cancel the flowers?"

"I get cheaper in Waipahu."

Palama had been doing the flowers for five years, since Amo Ferretti's murder. And Palama was ill. He needed the money, and we were one of his last clients. I said, "Buddy liked him."

"Buddy dead." She walked away.

Small, dark-eyed, haunted-looking employees began to appear, scuttling: waiters, room girls, clerks, kitchen staff, moppers, scrubbers, mostly women — the Filipinos she had hired. They worked hard, they were answerable to her, and the hotel ran much as before. And as before, I had almost nothing to do with it. Pinky was impatient, mean with money, cruel to these newcomers, but the place was cleanei better tended, more efficient. She had seemed a simple bewildered soul, yet she had a shrewd eye for cost cutting. Now there was a small vase of flowers in the lobby, but no flowers in the restaurant, none in the rooms. No one got a plumeria lei on arrival, or any lei. Bathroom amenities were discontinued — no shampoo, no bath gel, no plastic shower cap. Paradise Lost Happy Hour pupus were canceled, so were the bowls of mixed nuts. Buddy had insisted on bottles of Heinz ketchup and Tabasco sauce and a jar of honey at every table. The Tabasco was canceled, the ketchup was generic and, like the honey, it now came in a plastic squirt bottle.

Even though I had rebuffed her advances, Pinky kept at me. She insisted that I accompany her shopping, to carry her bags. She made me wait in the car with Keola, who took an uncouth pleasure in gawking at me as she gave me orders. In the stores at Ala Moana I would sometimes see her glaring at me, as though inviting me to turn on her.

"Put my shoes on."

I squatted and did so, marveling at the yellow bunions on her feet.

"You no like me," she said.

"I find you absolutely amazing."

My saying that just confused her, but it was true, she fascinated me, for the way she had worked her way up the food chain. The pathology of her story was the history of America — the twisted, tenacious little immigrant taking over from where the big, complacent Americans had left off. Pinky could not be faulted in her opportunism. She had saved herself and her family, while Buddy had allowed himself to degenerate and his family to slide into anarchy.

I had done little better with my own family. I had made no provisions, assuming, like an idiot, that I would continue to muddle along successfully. But my position was dire. I was fifty-seven. I had a small daughter and a poorly paying job. Living in the hotel, I had no need to buy a house. Now I could not afford one. I had come to Hawaii believing that I was in deep trouble; years later, it was much deeper.

Sweetie said, "Why you no say nothing?"

"Pinky's my boss. It's my job."

"So get a new job."

But since this hotel work had always been so easy, Buddy's favor to me, I was not qualified for any other job. As a young man I had always innocently believed that aging was progress. You lived and quietly flourished, as my father had done, and having reached late middle age you were settled and secure — comfortable, with your own chair and reading lamp and workshop, your own bed and books, your children bringing you news of the world. And you had no fear except the final one, of extinction. Yet I owned nothing. I was nowhere, living on a rock in the ocean.

"Why you no peek thee rebbish?"

My only satisfaction lay in smirking at her and pretending I could not understand what she was saying.

Within a month of Pinky's taking charge, the hotel, though it looked barer and more cheerless than ever, ran more efficiently than it ever had. I still checked the accounts before I passed them on to her, and I was astonished at our profits. Her cost cutting had worked. The new, smaller staff was mute — I hardly knew their names — yet they were desperately productive. Their motto seemed to be: Walk Fast and Look Worried. They scuttled from task to task. Their salaries were so low that we were making much more money. Without knowing the term "downsizing," but with a good grasp of the concept — probably from having been exploited herself — Pinky had streamlined the labor force and made the hotel cost-effective, running it along the lines of a sweatshop or a strip club. I knew that she would succeed — already Mrs. Bunny Arkie was her bosom friend. The time had come for me to leave, so I sent her my one-line note of resignation.

She didn't make me wait this time. She wore a white Chanel T-shirt with gold piping on the seams, gold slippers, and blue panties, looking like a spoiled child among all the pillows in Buddy's king-size bed. She was so small, so angular. She looked so unhappy.

Without my saying a word, she said, "I no want you leave."

"You don't need me."

"I need," she said. "Sit down — here," and she patted the edge of the bed. She pulled up her T-shirt, put her thumb in her mouth, parted her legs, and slipped her other hand into her blue panties.

"This isn't working," I said.

She went coy again, pulled out her thumb, yanked down her Tshirt. She said, "I need you listen, Daddy."

"Please don't call me Daddy."

She pouted, and then — perhaps to stir my sympathy, perhaps to shock me or impress me — she told me her story. Her childhood, the hut in Cebu City, Uncle Tony, the Japanese man, her trip to Guam, the visit to Hawaii as a dancer in a Korean bar, her flight to the mainland with Skip the motorcycle man, her days as a motel truck whore, her escape — all of it. It was a weird, upsetting tale, full of close calls, and it frightened me more than anything she had ever said or done before.

"Did Buddy know this?"

She shook her head sadly. "So now you know my story."

Not everything, but enough. Life is a series of decisions, people say. But it had not been that way with me. At crucial points in my life it was never a question of choosing but rather of having no choice except the obvious one, the only one. What looked like a radical decision was pure panic flight, when I had no choice but to jump.

"I no know what for do," she said. She plucked her T-shirt from the buds of her nipples. She looked hopefully at me again, her tongue against her teeth, as though mouthing the word "Daddy," and then her face fell. "What for you smiling?"

"Because I do."