"Doesn't anyone speak English in this hotel?"
"Thanks for your inquiry. I'll have someone in Hospitality help you."
"Hey, I just got a hand job from them and now I'm getting a hand job from you."
The guest, a Mr. Gordie Steen from Orange County, California, was elderly, cranky, and like many other complainers merely wanted a listener to his grievances, which I took to be racist. The ignorant obsession with foreign accents is nearly always racist.
Miss Thrall swept into the hotel elevator and swiftly assessed the other occupants, all of them wearing bathing suits. Because people in elevators do not look each other in the eye, she was able to size them up. One had conjunctivitis, another arthritic hands and deep facial creases from years of smoking. This one panted — terrible circulation. One man's eyes had gone yellow.
"Man want to see you," Marlene said, waving a bouquet of flowers. Before she could finish, the man barged past her, gabbling in fury.
"My fiancee's just been abducted," he said. He was stout, about forty, big and pale, but misshapen, almost lopsided, in a way that suggested weakness in spite of his large size.
"The sign's still up," Marlene said. My head was so full it took me a moment to understand that they were Miss Thrall's flowers, the real Miss T. in the hotel, and the Do Not Disturb sign was still on her doorknob.
Filling my doorway, the big agitated man said, "We're in the bar and she starts talking to this black guy. He's an actor. She's seen him on Oprah. Very articulate. Next thing I know she's gone, and so is he."
"How is that possible?"
"I didn't see them. I was looking at those two bozos fucking in the pool." He chewed his lips, suddenly embarrassed by this crass admission.
"I thought you handled the situation very well. Now will you please get my fiancee out of this guy's room?"
"You could knock."
"There's a sign. Do Not Disturb."
The man was afraid, and who wouldn't be? Jesse Shavers was known for his violent roles. "I'll pinch your fucking head off" was one of his better- known lines. If the man had truly thought his wife was in danger, he would have knocked or called the police. His fear was, of course, that his fiancee was enjoying herself.
"I can't help you," I said. "Marlene here will tell you that we never enter a room where there's a sign up. She's been trying to deliver some flowers for two days to just such a room."
"I gave her a ten-thousand-dollar engagement ring! Tell her I want it back!"
"I'll put Mr. Shavers's message light on," I said. "We can't intrude unless it's an emergency."
"What do you call this?"
"Your fiancee is in another guest's room, probably in bed, probably naked. What do you suppose we call it?"
Perhaps I had gone too far. Squinting with his grief-swollen eyes was the man's way of stopping his tears. He left my office as lopsidedly as he had entered.
Marlene said, "So, what about the flowers?"
"Try again later."
I resumed my story. I wrote four lines: Miss Thrall was still in the elevator, peering at the strange color of the guest's eyes, seeing jaundice, perhaps kidney failure. How I hated to invent.
I got no further. The stink-eye couple I had banished from the pool were now making so much noise in their room that guests down the hall from them were complaining. I put my story away — the two paragraphs, the borrowed title; hardly a story — and went upstairs. There was no sign
on the doorknob of the noisy motorcyclists' room, but something else caught my eye. They were next door to Miss Thrall's room. She had not complained of the noise. Her sign was still hung as Marlene had said, but there was a more telling sign of trouble: two newspapers lay stacked in front of the door. That meant she had not left the room for two days. This, in sunny Honolulu, was unthinkable.
I used my master key and saw her motionless in bed as soon as I entered. She was dead, already ripe. There seemed to be drug paraphernalia on her bedside table. There was no note. Dr. Miyazawa, Buddy's doctor, said she had given herself an overdose of insulin. It was the most efficient way of taking your life. She had to have been a doctor or nurse herself, Doctor Kim was saying in my office, as I put my tiny fragment of a story aside and Wrote my shocking statement for the police.
45 Camera Obscura
The only portrait of Wayne Godbolt that was ever painted by his brother, Will, hung in the Honolulu Academy of Arts for a week before it was removed one morning without explanation. At about the same time, Will flew to Honolulu from his Big Island home and quietly checked into my hotel under an assumed name — strangely enough, his brother's name. I had no idea who these brothers were, but Buddy happened to see Will, and it was he who told me all about them. Their family history was part of the oral tradition of Hawaii.
The sighting of Will at the hotel made me want to see the painting, and it was on that visit to the museum that I discovered it had been removed. A security guard told me that it was being held in a dark room somewhere downtown. "That's appropriate," I said. This man, with the name Balabag on his ID badge, opened his mouth wide, just dropped his jaw, his way of showing incomprehension, something Buddy did all the time. The portrait was called Camera Obscura.
What made the removal shocking was that Wayne had died so recently, and that he and his brother, the photographer and the painter, were so loving toward each other, like twins on a mission. Will's paintings had a fanatical exactitude that was photographic; Wayne's photographs were impressionistic — cloudy, airbrushed, meddled with in the darkroom, with a ghostly and abstract liquefaction.
The painting that had been on view in Honolulu showed Wayne in a darkroom holding his old-fashioned camera. The composition had a scumbled background of glossy maroon-dark paint that was so blistered it made you think of dead beetles and brittle wings. Wayne's eye, just a brush stroke, stared like a camera's lens. An unmade bed, stark as a sacrificial altar, was part of the foreground, but the glossy blistered color dominated. On the Academy wall one day, gone the next. What had happened?
"I'm a vegetarian, he's a cannibal," Will had said of Wayne, the painter brother of the photographer brother. "It's why we're able to love each other."
Will was known on the mainland, and his work sold there; Wayne was not, so his work didn't. That was Hawaii's test of artistic talent and success, though the distance was mercifuclass="underline" because we were in the middle of the ocean, we were unaware of the further fortunes of anyone enjoying celebrity on the mainland. Local people seemed to disappear when they went there, even when they were enjoying great success. Hawaii residents with great reputations on the mainland — W. S. Merwin, Leon Edel — were mostly faceless and unspoken of here. Will Godbolt's paintings were better known in New York than in Honolulu.
The wordy label stuck to the Academy wall explained that a camera was a room as well as a photographer's instrument, and a camera obscura was a simple device for viewing. The label also mentioned the closeness of the two artistic brothers, how they had been raised by their mother in the most fertile part of the Big Island, the slopes of Kamuela. The Godbolts were an old kama'aina missionary family. The mother, Lydia, was a Daughter of Hawaii; the father, Simon, had been killed in the Solomon Islands during World War Two.
The rest I knew. Lydia Godbolt had not remarried. She had raised her children and they had remained her children, had not married, saw her all the time, did portraits of her. Each son's portrait of her was distinctly different, two women entirely. Will used Lydia's own cosmetics on the canvas, lipstick and powder to heighten the facial features, making the portrait an amazing likeness. Wayne's photograph would have been shocking except that the image was almost indistinguishable as a woman and looked like a shattered meringue — just as well, for it depicted his mother in the nude.