Back at the desk, fishing for information, I mentioned to Chen that Eddie Alfanta was alone in the bar.
"His wife's upstairs," Chen said. "I gave them 802. They checked in a few hours ago. One night."
That was unusual, the Honolulu couple staying in a Honolulu hjtel for one night. Maybe it meant that their house was being tented and fumigated, but if so, they would have had the work done on a weekend or else spent the time on a neighbor island.
"These flowers just came for Mrs. Alfanta."
The bouquet was on the desktop. The greeting card read, Happy birthday, my darling. All my love, Eddie.
A romantic birthday interlude — it explained everything. I went through the month's occupancy record in my office, and afterward, in search of a drink, I saw Eddie alone in the bar, nursing a beer, looking reflective. There was no sign of the surfer, and I remembered what the fleeing man had said about Eddie earlier in the evening: He's out of his mind.
But Eddie was the picture of serenity. Somewhat quieter than usual, perhaps; alone but content. Had the gambling made him thoughtful? Anyway, the game was at an end.
Had he been rebuffed by the water rat? The last time I had seen him, he was pushing against the young man as the dice clattered onto the bar, shouting for drinks, tapping the young man's tattooed arm. I resisted
drawing any conclusions, but it had certainly seemed to me a playful courtship, the two men jostling at the rail in a rough mating dance, laughing over the game of dice.
I said, "Who's winning?" because Eddie was still absentmindedly shaking the cup.
"We're spending the night," he said, and his chuckle was like the sound of the dice.
"So I see," I said, and to test him, because I already knew, I asked, "A celebration?"
"Cheryl's birthday." He tossed the dice, frowned at the combination, and gathered them quickly. "This is a big one. Her fortieth. Last year we went to Vegas. Cheryl's lucky. She won five hundred dollars at the crap table. Guy came up to her and humped her for luck. 'You're on a roll,' they said. You should have seen it."
He stopped and saw the half-smile of concentration on my face. I was thinking, Humped her for luck? He understood the unspoken question in my mind.
"I loved it," he said.
Small, pale Cheryl in her tiny shoes surrounded by big, hopeful gamblers, and Eddie gloating like the winner in a dog show.
"Birthday before that, we spent the weekend learning to scubadive. Getting certified. I was terrible. I figured it was a gamble. I almost
panicked and drowned. The guys on the course were amazed that Cheryl had picked it up so quickly. They were all over her. You should have seen her — what a knockout in a wetsuit. Skintight."
Pleased with the recollection, he touched his thighs as though tracing a wetsuit, and he gathered the dice again. Another chuckle and toss.
"For her thirty-fifth we had a real blast. My buddy and I took her to Disneyland. She was like a kid." He smiled, remembering, and wheezed with satisfaction. "She wore him out!"
Wagging the dice cup, he rolled again.
"Where is she now?"
"I got her a surfer. They're upstairs." He looked happy. He was still rolling the dice.
"Who won?"
"Who do you think?"
The young man in the torn shirt entering the room, his bruised toes on the carpet, the lamp low, Cheryl in her birthday lingerie, no bigger than a tall child but game for this, and the whole business more or less wordless — this was how I imagined it. The pair of them tossing on the bed with Eddie downstairs. And at the end of it all a certain apprehension, because no one knew what would happen when it was over. That was the sadness of games.
"I have no idea," I said.
Eddie just smiled. He had forgotten the question.
I sent Keola and Kawika up to monitor the corridor near the Alfantas' room in case of trouble. Later, they told me how they had seen the surfer leaving, "looking futless," and heard Cheryl sternly saying, "Don't kiss me." Still later, I saw Cheryl and Eddie very loveydovey in the lounge, Eddie still tossing the dice. Perhaps he was the only one who had gotten what he wanted.
11 Love Letters in the Pending
My career as a writer had not trained me for anything practical. I thought of describing this in a despairing book of exile I would title Who I Was. Writing had made me unemployable, had isolated me and given me the absurd delusion that I could perform tasks that were beyond me. Even my typing was poor, so I wrote with a pencil, but in this scribble I had put up buildings, designed cities, fixed cars, robbed banks, settled arguments, wooed beautiful women, given eloquent speeches, managed businesses, committed perfect crimes. And I had always had the last word. I had even run hotels, and in one book ran a highly successful brothel in Singapore. All this while ardently fantasizing at a little table in an upstairs room.
I had no marketable skills. I had done nothing except try to turn words into deeds: just dreams. I was useless at managing money. I had never had any employees, not even a secretary. I could not imagine being able to deal with workers' moods and temperaments. So, as a hotel manager in Hawaii — the job was a gift — I was grateful to my employees for their work. They ran the hotel and they knew it, knew they were in charge of the place, and of me. I understood fantasy — it was what writing
had taught me.
Still new to the job, I spent hours in my office, the one Buddy had vacated when he made me manager. I was looking for clues as to how to run the hotel properly. I found unpaid bills and faded Polaroids of blurred bodies. I found foreign coins, postage stamps, plastic bags of "killer buds," scraps of paper with women's names and telephone numbers scrawled on them in Buddy's writing, and cartoons torn from the newspaper that Buddy must have thought funny. I found, neatly typed, a description of Buddy's death, which was unexpected, because he was alive, enjoying his early retirement on the North Shore. Buddy Hunter Hamstra, Rest in Peace. It was Buddy's obituary, but who had written it? It looked genuine, two typed sheets, the letters pounded into the paper, most of the punctuation punched right through to show daylight, in the manner of big old typewriters. This had been written some time ago.
"From the outside [it began] he seemed a clown, a fool, an incompetent, but deep down he was very serious, often weeping on the inside. He was proud of his ability to fix anything that was broken. He was proudest of being able to mend a broken heart. In his youth he had been handsome and women had fallen for him. He was unable to resist, but he was gallant and they never forgot him, and he never forgot them. He served his country in the field of military intelligence, finding his way in secret from one Pacific Island to another, befriending the natives, who praised him in song and story. It is said that he left many a token of love behind on those islands and on his return he was greeted with cries of
'Darling!' and 'Daddy!' which brought a smile to his lips. 'I will pass this way but once,' he used to say. ."
I read on. The grammar faltered, the spelling was childish ("risist," "gallent," "milatery"), but it was earnest. I did not recognize this deceased person until I got to the end, where the paragraph about friendship and what it meant to him was described.
"Friendship was everything to him. He never turned away a friend.
He was generous to a fault. . the ultimate in kindness. No one was a stranger to him, which was why his name was so apt: Buddy."
The sensitive, sweet-natured man in this obituary was unknown to me. Buddy was a rascal, he was explosive, and he took pleasure in tricking his friends. And he was alive.
Yet I was fascinated. Whether this obituary represented the man he believed himself to be, or the one he wished he were, did not matter. What mattered was that in the peak of health he had sat down in his office at the Hotel Honolulu and composed this obituary, and got someone to type it. The last line read, "No flowers. Aloha attire."