"I like it here, but I don't write much," I said to Leon on one of those Outrigger days.
"As you get older you write less. Look at me. I write an hour a day. Sometimes half an hour."
"I don't write at all," I said, breathless from the sudden confession, and at once felt like someone disclosing the symptom of an illness.
He smiled at me like a doctor with a patient who was ill but not seriously so. And in the manner of a doctor suggesting exercise and a change of diet, Leon prescribed for me a regimen of James stories: "The Altar of the Dead," "The Lesson of the Master," "The Middle Years," "The Death of the Lion," "The Figure in the Carpet," "The Real Thing."
"Read the work that James wrote when he was your age, a hundred years ago."
Locked in my office in the Hotel Honolulu, hidden from my staff, I read the stories. They helped, but still I didn't write. Maybe once you stopped, you dried up and there was nothing more.
We still met regularly for lunch, Leon and I, above the hot beach, under the blue sky that made the sea so blue, for the pleasure of speaking in our own language of the beauty of this island.
"For years I thought about James's stories," Leon said. "Then one day it came to me. His stories were his fantasies. Each of them a separate one. Read them all and you have the man's inner life. Perhaps all short stories are fantasies."
"I used to write them," I said.
Under a sky of Mediterranean azure, shot through with the shafts of dusty gold you see in Renaissance paintings, everything imaginable in the huge sky, even cherubic clouds, everything but a risen Savior; within earshot of the lisp of the sea, the slosh of little waves brimming at the beach, we sat in the watery light, in the velvet air, feasting on grapefruits and oranges. With Leon I was happier than I had ever been, but away from him I felt a new sadness, and now my nonwriting life at the hotel was almost unbearable.
44 The Real Thing
She had descended upon us and made us conscious of our frailty, I wrote, but before I could put a title over this first line of my story, I was called to Reception for the awkward ritual of a celebrity check-in: Jesse Shavers, the actor, very tall, very bald, very black, his monosyllabic responses giving him a dignified hauteur.
Presiding over this time-wasting ceremony, I remembered how the day before, facing just this way, I had seen a woman — the subject of my proposed story — plodding through the lobby with her head down. This woman, who had sadly turned to Rose and snatched her up, was perfect. "Your daughter's got conjunctivitis!" she had said, a sudden and precise diagnosis. I had gotten used to hotel guests making demands, but here was one who offered some shrewd medical advice. She said she knew what she was talking about. Her name was Monica Thrall, and she looked unwell herself. Under the influence of a Henry James story I had just read, I decided to write a short story based on her and, I suppose, the fear of my daughter's falling ill. After the Jesse Shavers interruption I returned to my office and wrote "The Real Thing" in block letters at the top of the page.
Monica Thrall had been furious with me. "How can you treat your daughter this way? If she thinks you don't care about her health, she might do something really terrible. Don't you see that?"
She was so passionate and sad, and her abuse of me so urgent and emotional, I ordered flowers for her. But her anger was the point. The woman with the Jamesian name had descended upon us and made us conscious of our frailty. And she had been right. I got the eye drops and soon Rose stopped rubbing her eyes and smiled more.
"I try deliver the flowers again?" Marlene asked — no knock. I looked up from my blank pad. "Could not deliver yesterday. Was a Do Not Disturb sign on her door."
I nodded for her to complete the errand and thought how I should have just such a warning sign on my door, so I could write my short story about a middle-aged woman from Gary, Indiana, who casually diagnoses a rare illness in another hotel guest and thus saves his life. Had these two strangers not been in the same hotel, the man would have died. Never mind the Do Not Disturb sign — I couldn't even close my office door. I was on duty. Someone might need me.
One of the contradictions of writing a short story in Hawaii — something I had never before attempted — was that I could do it only when I was working. Writing was impossible in the cramped two-room suite I shared upstairs with my wife and child. It annoyed me that while my six-year-old daughter had a desk there, I did not.
The nurse in my story needed a new name and a new hometown. I was so out of practice in writing stories that I could not imagine improving on her reality. There was no better name for her than Monica Thrall, no better hometown than Gary, Indiana. The alternatives I thought of sounded false and fabricated. So I began writing, describing the woman who had seen Rose's eye problem, but in this story I imagined that she would be sitting by the pool and watching a woman in a bikini, and from years of observation would detect on the woman's almost naked body the symptoms of a rare form of melanoma. Or was she in an elevator, diagnosing the other riders?
Seeing Trey approach my office door, looking grim, I slid a sheet of paper over the first sentence of "The Real Thing," as though concealing a love letter to my mistress.
"Boss, we got a problem poolside," Trey said, walking into my office without any hesitation. "A guest upstairs just phoned down that he could see there's some people balling in the pool. They seen his peepee."
"Tell the fornicators in question to stop it."
"I did. They just give me stink-eye."
Sometimes at night there were such complaints, but this was a first for me — a couple screwing in the hotel swimming pool at five-thirty in the afternoon, in broad daylight, in full view of the Happy Hour customers, who seemed to be enjoying the wet spectacle from the Paradise Lost lanai. I recognized the couple, because at check-in they had asked about renting a motorcycle in Honolulu. While Chen made the phone call, the man had shown me some snapshots of his Harley, the way other people flashed pictures of their children. The woman seemed equally proud of the bike. One of those couples, with unimaginative tattoos, eager for attention, now locked together at the deep end, the woman's back against the far corner of the pool, her white legs encircling him in an animal grip, her heels pressing his hairy back. The man's submerged and rotating buttocks glowed plum blue in the cloud-filled water like a monkey's bum.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to go inside," I said.
"You got a problem, pal?" The man was obviously drunk. "Stink-eye" said it all.
"Not me. Blame the Board of Health. You're not in compliance with the guidelines. I have to cite you for health code violations." And before he could interrupt me, I said, "Glass beverage containers are forbidden poolside" — a dozen scattered bottles of Corona beer, most of them empty — "and you're not suitably attired. You need bathing suits."
Disconcerted by my obliqueness, the man said, "How can I do this in a bathing suit?"
"Try it upstairs in your room."
My standing there whistling, fully clothed, with my back turned, supervising Trey as he collected the clinking beer bottles, seemed to make the couple self-conscious. They swore and splashed and went away, wrapped in towels, as the Happy Hour customers hooted and whistled.
Back in my office, I resumed my story. The woman, Monica Thrall, came from Gary, where — maybe she was a nurse? — on buses and commuter trains she had developed the habit of diagnosing the other passengers — observing their eyes, the texture of their skin, their tremulous fingers. As this paragraph took shape, the phone rang.