Hotel Honolulu

9 The Limping Waiters

People thinking it was remarkable whispered that two of our waiters, who were friends, had the same distinctive disability, each a foreshortened leg — Wilnice's left, Fishlow's right. They wobbled and bobbed, bumping shoulders, but it was no coincidence. They had met in a hospital ward where there were many others like them, and been roommates there in the hip unit, and become friends in rehab. Their common disability helped their friendship and formed a crude basis for mutual understanding, like a colorful ethnic trait. But that was not their bond. No one except I knew their bond was much odder, a disability of a profounder kind.

They were "seasonal hires." Our busy months at the hotel, November to March, and the Japanese frenzy of Golden Week, in late April and early May, meant we had to add more wait staff. Each year, from their home in Texas, where the slack season was winter, I hired these two men. They were in their forties, Charlie Wilnice and Ben Fishlow, who arrived as a pair rather than a couple. They came pedaling and pumping at you. They were through with the Waikiki Pearl, our neighbor hotel, and said they would tell me why, providing I never asked for references. I understood this to mean that the explanation itself would define them, as sometimes when someone wishing to express something forceful says, "Let me tell you a story."

Wilnice had been waiting on a young Japanese woman. You noticed their big floppy hats, which, with their skinny stemlike bodies, gave them the aspect of decorative flowers. This one had said, shyly but formally, like a sentence she had practiced, "Please you can deliver this to my room," and handed over a small purse. Wilnice did so after work, and she met him at the door. He was surprised to see her — what was the point of the delivery? — then he knew everything. She was dressed — undressed, rather — wearing a robe, a happi coat, which was undone, loose at the front, unbuttoned. No, the buttons were her nipples; this young woman was naked. "Like one of those pillow pictures," Wilnice said. Certain small, precise erotic Japanese prints, called shunga, depict egg-faced women improbably exposing themselves while observing the conventional horror of body hair, the love of crushed printed fabric and submission, the proper woman made wanton, the rape fantasies of Hokusai subjects incised in woodblocks. This young woman mimicked a courtesan, tempting Wilnice by seeming meek.

"Please you come in." And yet she cowered. Her bad grammar made her seem more innocent and helpless.

Wilnice stepped backward, bobbing on his bad leg, and went away, stride-hop, stride-hop.

Telling Fishlow about it later, seeing his friend smile, Wilnice had no idea that his shock, his puritanical disapproval, had made him remember every detail of the fleeting encounter — the button business, her slightly bowed legs, the pale hollows of her inner thighs, her red thick-soled clogs,

her black-painted nails and black lipstick. And he repeated it, answered questions ("It was a junior suite. . Yes, she was alone"), believing Fishlow was also shocked.

The next day, Fishlow sought out the young woman, went out of his way to serve her. She seemed to notice his leg, the way he walked, how he surged toward her, bumping people as he passed them.

She asked for tea. Fishlow brought it solemnly to her table. She offered him the purse that Wilnice had described and repeated the formula: "Please you can deliver this to my room."

Attempting a bow, Japanese fashion, Fishlow bent himself crookedly, lifting his arms for balance. At four, when he knocked off work, he went up in the service elevator to the woman's room. She answered the door. It was all as Wilnice had described, like a promise kept: the loose happi coat, the nakedness, skin like silk, hairless, smooth, without a mark, pigeon-toed in the red clogs. She invited him inside.

"You sit here?" she said tentatively, patting the sofa next to her.

Fishlow obliged. Without any preliminaries — Wilnice had supplied those — he kissed her. She clung to him, groped him through his clothes, but thoughtfully, as if she were squeezing a fruit, testing it for ripeness.

Her small, almost pressureless chafing gestures roused him.

She suddenly got up, went to the window, and peered through the blinds, turning her back on him. If she heard the drawer open and shut she did not show it.

Holding the Gideons Bible, Fishlow came bobbing and swaying behind her, hiked up her happi coat, moved her feet wider apart, and as she canted forward to receive him, Fishlow chucked the Bible to the floor, placed his foot on it to brace his short leg, and thus braced, he entered, lifting her. Then she reacted, as though lifted onto a peg.

"No! No!" she cried out, which terrified him. He stopped, fearing that her plea might carry even through the closed window. But in a softer voice she implored him to continue. All the while, she remained turned away from him, said nothing more, did not appear to see him balancing on one leg to hoist his pants before pedaling out of the room, stride-hop, stride- hop.

Recklessly, against all hotel rules, he met her again. He could not help himself. It was a feature of their lovemaking that Fishlow never saw her face, that somehow she always contrived to hide it; and they were always upright, so the Gideons Bible was another feature. And "No! No!" And her reaching behind and clawing him like a cat. Like lovers on Sundays who sleepwalk through museums as a break from bed, they went to a movie and once to a sushi bar — perfunctory, almost meaningless, she had practically no English. But her body spoke. Her body said: For the sake of my modesty, I must pretend that it is rape, but don't be fooled — look closely and you will see it is rapture.

"Rapture?" Wilnice asked, and looked so wounded Fishlow said nothing more.

Still they worked, waiting on tables. Fishlow's intensity bordered on obsession. He had no words to describe it; he was possessed. What he wanted to say was insane: I understand cannibalism. What was that supposed to mean? Then, six days from the day he had met her, the woman left, her holiday at an end, Golden Week over.

Sneaking her name from the hotel register, Fishlow wrote to her. Her address was a whole incomprehensible paragraph of short words and long numbers. There was no reply. Fishlow called her telephone number. Now he could not remember whether she had ever spoken to him in English. He got someone shrieking in Japanese, a sexless squawk box, in answer to his pleading questions.

Wilnice did not know what to do with Fishlow during his crying jags. He wasn't sure how the doll woman had swept over his friend, nearly destroying him. Fishlow had been so happy, so hungry. She had made him into a willing dog, and now she was gone and he was still a dog, but a desperate whimpering mutt with his scummy tongue hanging out. That was the worst of love.

His only solution was to seek help from his limping friend Wilnice, who had seen the woman first. So he told him one day when they were out walking — bobbing and bumping, as usual.

Fishlow was so sorrowful that his story had the precision of regret, of guilt and blame, every incriminating detail noted: the back of her head and her neck as she turned away, the manner in which he had snatched the Bible and thrown it down, his mounting her from behind, her body full of

chicken bones, the way she had pretended to resist. He was specific and self-mocking because he was wounded.

"What do you mean 'at the window'?" Wilnice asked, his mouth agape.

Guessing that he could have been the man she wanted, that the young Japanese woman could not tell them apart — how their staggering and limping made them equal in her eyes — Wilnice was envious, and the envy soured his guts, making him sick with sorrow for having retreated from the woman's door. He took a ghastly delight in Fishlow's descriptions of the woman's hunger. Like a cat! From behind! Like squeezing a fruit! Tottering on her clogs! Wilnice moaned to himself, I have always lacked conviction.

But Fishlow envied Wilnice's self-possession, the way in which Wilnice had simply backed off from the woman, this woman who burdened Fishlow's memory — more than that, infected him with regret, a humiliation, a casual demon. As Wilnice could not rid his mind of the details Fishlow had related, Fishlow continually saw Wilnice in their little apartment, taking his shoes off, one shoe thicker-soled than the other, microwaving some chili and eating it with a plastic spoon, all this innocent economy, sitting like a child in front of the television set, while he stood lopsided in spite of the Bible, his pants around his ankles, naked in the naked woman's room, the woman crying out "No! No!" and averting her face. Fishlow envied him and thought, I have always been too impulsive — it will shorten my life. And Wilnice thinking, I am afraid. I don't know how to live.

Each man was consumed by regret, the one from having rejected the woman, the other from having made love to her. Each man believed he had failed, and the way they walked was like emphasis, as though trying to trample on the memory of the woman.