Some guests, seeing posters for the Nutcracker, said to me, "There's ballet here?"
"Indeed there is. Also opera and the Honolulu Symphony."
"We love shit like that," one guest declared.
I said, "Just because you see palm trees and barefoot residents tossing beer cans out of their car windows doesn't mean there's no cultural life."
But going to the ballet in Hawaii seemed to me ostentatious and vulgar, the height of philistinism, the very opposite of refinement. Give me barefoot beer drinkers and brainless surf bunnies any day. I hated talk of books. It embarrassed me when Buddy, who boasted of his barbarism, mentioned books in his unconvincing voice. I needed to talk to Peewee about his bread recipes. I liked hearing Buddy tell me something I didn't know about hearts of palm and how he ate his way through a half acre of them.
Sweetie considered herself an intellectual because she listened to the audio book of Cujo while she Rollerbladed.
Peewee said, "You must miss the big city."
I said no, truthfully. That I hated the foul air. That I was just one of the big mob, in my little slot, feeling tiny and hemmed in by huge buildings. That in big cities it was never dark and never silent.
"But the culture," he said. "Shows and concerts, like we only have at Christmas, and not even the real thing."
"You can carry it with you. Your recipes are culture, Peewee," I said. "And you know language is culture."
Peewee's girlfriend, Nani, said, "I got my own language. Pidgin."
Nani said, "More betta. . talfone. . bumbye. . I never wen learn English." Keola, washing windows, smiled in comprehension, as heartily as if he were hearing music. But it was a sort of fractured birdsong, a debased and highly colloquial form of English composed of moody- sounding grunts and utterances and willful approximations. Everyone called it "Pidgin," and they said it was a separate language, like Portuguese or Greek — it wasn't English, they said. But it was, just a slovenly and ungrammatical version, never written down, without the verb "to be," and mostly used in the present tense. This helped, though, for they spoke nothing else but listened all the time, and in their squinting attention were used to translating what someone said on the basis of sound alone.
Nani said, "Why howlie heah. He huhu? Assa madda you — pickin' pines. No more nuttin' fo' do. Or udda ting. Dis howlie lolo he stay kolohe. But he keiki more bettah." She gasped. "Like dat."
I said, "Would you say there are any verbs in this language?"
She looked insulted. "You fucking with me?"
"In that sentence, 'fucking' is a verb. In this one, 'is' is a verb."
"Peewee, man, this howlie fucking with me," she said. "So you pretty hybolical."
Peewee said, "Try wait, Nani."
She said, "Why he went for see you, was."
I said, "A linguist would say there is no overt verb "to be." That's a type of defocused sentence with a postposed 'was.'"
"Hybolical," Nani said again.
Peewee said, "I told some people I knew you. They were like, 'Hey, he's famous.' They want to meet you."
But I declined. So, on Christmas Eve, I was left with Buddy, Peewee, Nani, my pretty wife and daughter, and several guests at our annual party, on the second-floor lanai outside Paradise Lost.
I said, "I'm through with books. Some are just junk and I get sad when I see them."
"Books are good," Peewee said.
"It's Christmas," I said. "I'd rather talk about birds. Or turtles. Or the sea. I saw a whale last year from the roof."
Peewee said, "Nani saw some dolphins yesterday."
Nani heard her name and said, "We got so many frikken birds we no know their name. But like in Whyan a turkey no gobble gobble. He kolo- kolo. And Whyan Santa Claus is Kana Kaloka."
I smiled and told myself that an ignoramus was preferable to a pseudointellectual. Some hotel guests spent hours telling me the plots of books they liked. Others, returning overdressed from a local production of the Nutcracker, lorded it over the tourists gaping at our Happy Hour hula.
"I wanted to call her Taylor, but my husband said no," Sweetie was telling one of the Christmas party guests.
"Taylor means tailor," I said. "It seems inauspicious. Like calling her Cobbler."
"That's a kind of drink," Nani said.
"Logan is a real nice name," Sweetie said. "Or Shannon. Next kid maybe."
"Shannon is Irish," I said.
"I got some Irish in me," Buddy said. He was peeling the foil from a platter of salad. "The crazy side. Also the strong side. Go ahead, have some."
"You know what's really incredulous?" Peewee said, picking up a white disk from the salad and eating it. "The way they treat prisoners. Hey, they should put them destructive guys in mailbags and line them up in Aloha Stadium one morning and get big fat Samoan women to beat the bags with baseball bats. If a guy woulda lost his life, they'd take it more serious."
"Them trees are making him hungry and driving him nuts," Buddy
said.
"Don't laugh, you'll be joining me." Sniffing the pine boughs, Peewee burst into tears. "That's the smell of my childhood," he said. "We were real poor."
No one was listening. I was murmuring, "Shtrong. Morneen. Makeen. Driveen. Joineen. Dee-shtructive. If he woulda lost his life."
Laughing, Sweetie said, "Sometimes I see him writing. I go, 'What you doing?' He goes, 'Nothing."
She had not said this to me before in the almost seven years I had been married to her. She could only say it in front of other people; she felt protected by them. They were witnesses, and her people. Unlike our daughter, Sweetie was afraid of me.
"I never know what's going on in his head. He real high maintenance."
I was looking west, toward the beach. I said, "I bought some Christmas lights for the palm tree out front."
Buddy said, "I put that palm tree in this salad."
41 Mr. and Mrs. Sun
People in the hotel said, "They hold hands," and a!ways smiled because Mr. and Mrs. Sun were in their late forties and rather plain and well past the hand-holding stage of marriage. Even some of our honeymooners didn't do it. The Suns had chubby hands like gloves, which made the handholding noticeable. I liked saying, "So what?" The hugging and clasping was less interesting to me than the Irish names of their children, Kevin and Ryan, very skinny kids, a different physical type altogether. Plump parents usually had plump kids. This seemed to be breaking some fundamental family rule. The other thing was, their kids were famous brats.
The first year — my first year, their fifth or more — the Suns came without their children. After that, they brought them. While the parents were model guests, the two boys had a reputation for trouble. One was destructive, the other a thief. "Attention seeking" was one of the kinder explanations for their behavior. I liked the hand-holding Suns without in the least understanding their children. They were from San Francisco, Chinese Americans.
Soon after I arrived in Hawaii, I had reflected on how the sunlight here was so dazzling, it gave us the conceit that we were virtuous and pure and better than other people. Everywhere else on earth was worse -
people got sick and cold on the mainland and had to wear socks, Africa was poor, China was overcrowded, Europe was senile, and the rest of the world was dark. We took personal credit for our sunshine and expected gratitude from strangers for sharing it with them. This Hawaiian heresy was dangerous, for it made us complacent about the damage we did to these little crumbly islands. We were so smug about our sunshine, we were blind to everything else, as if we had been staring at the sun too long.