Nevertheless, I found Sun a lovely, bright, open-faced name. More American than Chinese, Calvin and Amelia were quiet people, and I had not paid much attention my first year because I had mistaken them for middle-aged lovers, for whom no one else existed. On their visit my second year, I still saw them as distant, inward, happy, compliant, practically magnetized lovers, but also realized they were the parents of two disruptive teenage boys.
In spite of the staff's warning the boys for a week about various infractions, one night they had thrown furniture into the hotel pool.
I was checking to see that the chairs and tables had been fished out when I found a soggy book lying on the tiles. It had been badly splashed, an early edition of Michener's Hawaii, and although the inked inscription was blotchy with water, the handwriting was so upright and enthusiastic I could easily read it: To my dear husband, to commemorate ten years of the greatest happiness I have ever known. May the future shine as brightly upon us and let our joy be endless! Your adoring wife, A. And a date.
Apart from the old-fashioned and impossible-to-mock romantic gusto, and the date — five years before — I was struck by the joyous penmanship, the exclamation mark as bold and expressive as a Chinese brushstroke.
The book was nothing special, but the inscription made it a trophy.
"That thing down there with legs is one table," Keola said to me. "Something like one occasional table."
He meant the dark object at the deep end that the young fools had thrown in with the chairs and ashtrays and cushions.
"What did you say, Keola?"
I loved hearing him repeat it, the unexpected precision of "occasional." The wooden table, now split and ruined, was from a guest room.
"Them Sun kids again," Peewee said. "I know what I'd do with them."
We had the weird vitality of spectators at a disaster, and stood marveling at the wreckage, watching the junk being hoisted, hoping there were no corpses.
"Burlap sacks," Peewee said. "Samoan women. Baseball bats." I went upstairs to the Suns' room and knocked. I heard a soft voice: "I'll get it, darling."
Mrs. Sun answered the door. Her husband was in a chair across the room, holding a book. Another chair had been drawn up next to it. It was lovers, mostly, who pushed chairs together like this, or (also like the Suns) who moved the nightstand and pushed the twin beds cheek to cheek. Lovers were habitual rearrangers of furniture.
"Yes?"
I never spoke to the Suns without feeling I was intruding on their intimacy and perfect peace.
"We've had another complaint about your boys."
Mrs. Sun looked so sorrowful I found myself apologizing and eager to get away, suddenly finding the vandalism trivial compared to my disturbing the happiness of this wonderful couple. Mr. Sun set his book down. They both looked abject. How many times had they been put in the position of having to be sorry and make amends?
Mrs. Sun said, "I'll ask my husband to speak to them. Of course we will pay for any damage."
"The patio furniture isn't a problem. There was some breakage, though," I said. "And a guest room table will have to be replaced or refinished. It ties up Maintenance when these things happen."
"I know it has happened before because of our boys," Mrs. Sun said -
— something I had planned to say.
"Are they around?"
"Across the hall."
She knocked. No answer. I knocked, then used my master key. But by then Mr. Sun had called to her with affection and concern, and she was now back in their room with the door shut.
The boys were out, but judging from the condition of the room, Maintenance and Housekeeping would have some work to do: broken mirror, broken blinds, spills on the carpet, footprints on the wall (on the wall?), and that was only what I saw from the doorway, peering in.
"That's nothing," Trey said later. "A few years ago they trashed the bar. Buddy went ballistic."
One boy was a drunk, the other smoked dope, Trey said, but admitted he did not know which was which. It didn't matter. They were a year apart, fourteen and fifteen. In the second week of their vacation the older one was caught stealing from a convenience store, and the younger one was picked up for vandalizing a public telephone. Because of their ages, no charges were filed. The boys were left in the custody of their parents, which was meaningless because I never saw the four Suns together. The children were seldom around.
One day the Suns volunteered the information that they were just returning from St. Andrew's, the church in which they had been married. Their visits to Hawaii were always planned around their wedding anniversary.
They were, as always, holding hands. Mr. Sun tugged his wife's hand with such affection that I was moved.
"I can see that the romance hasn't gone out of your marriage," Isaid.
"It never will," Mr. Sun said.
Is a marriage a family? Mr. and Mrs. Sun were inseparable, utterly devoted to each other, quiet, and kind, their love creating a magnetic field of orderly flowing energy between them. The flow neither attracted nor repelled anyone else. No one else was magnetized, no one else mattered.
They left, all of them. The following Christmas, on a sunny afternoon, one boy shot himself in a motel in Great Falls, Montana. The other boy moved to Seattle. I didn't know which boy did which.
42 Henry James in Honolulu
It was one of the many moments in my life when I whispered to myself, "Where am I?" — in the larger sense. In the smaller sense, I knew I was smiling in impatience at my two symmetrical scoops of macaroni salad on King Kalakaua Night at the Honolulu Elks Lodge in Waikiki with my wife, Sweetie, as a guest of Lester Chen, my number-two man, and his new wife, Winona. "My kine no go shtrait," I heard. They were discussing in-line skates — were they bad for your ankles? I was also thinking how the plain truth like a sentence about this setting resembled the first line of a poem to which there is seldom a second line.
The boast of the Honolulu Elks was that they were next door to the much classier Outrigger Canoe Club. An Elk could walk out to the beach and bump into an Outrigger. There was just such an Outrigger in a blazer and a Panama hat standing on this shared margin of beach, staring at the sunset. I envied that dapper man for his belonging to this beach and not thinking, Where am I? Or so I presumed.
For myself, I was somewhere I had never been before, nor ever read about, nor knew anything of.
"There was an Elks Lodge next to the Washington School in Medford, Massachusetts, when I was growing up," I said. "I never saw a single
Homo sapiens enter or leave. Beautiful building, though, and a profound mystery to me."
One of those perplexed silences ensued, of the sort created by someone in a chatty group suddenly lapsing into echolalia or the gabble of a foreign language. The others looked away from me. Sweetie left for the buffet. Was it "Homo sapiens"?
"Everything kind of one mystery when you one keiki, yah?" Lester said. He was at his most banal when he attempted to be aphoristic in order to shut down a conversation. He had the Chinese hatred of direct questions, seeing them as a personal challenge, fearful of the conflict they might create. "This club also mysterious, okay?"
Who am I? was my next question, but also in a larger sense.
"You Sweetie husband!" Winona said to me, like someone just waking up. "I hear about you." She turned to a purple shrunken woman seated behind her. "He Sweetie husband!"
We were all badly dressed and barefoot in loose loud shirts and shorts like big misshapen children. Yet the meal was strangely formal and adult, even ceremonial, with two long speeches in the middle of it, and loyal toasts, and a strict order of courses — dinner at half past five, the setting sun glaring into my translucent macaroni salad, making it glow.