Dressing hurriedly, Lionberg was so desperate to be on the road that he set only one burglar alarm. He grazed the hedge at the gate — there would almost certainly be a scratch on the fender of his black car, from which the insignia and the Lexus name had been removed. Never mind the scratch on the paintwork. He saw it as a sacrifice and was proud to have a visible scar.
Outside his house he always felt he was on another planet. Tonight he thought, What is happening to me? The damp shoreline, the darkness of the pineapple fields, the lights and fences at Schofield Barracks, the empty freeway, then green lighted signs saying Airport and the clock on the airport tower, which told him he had time.
The delayed flight had been a reprieve. He simply wanted to give her the kiss he had been denied in the driveway that morning, to see her
again. He wanted her to see him, too — to show her that he had driven the forty miles in the dark.
Buddy was at the gate, sitting with his feet out, his hands on his big belly. He was drinking a Diet Coke.
"What are you doing here, you crazy bastard?" he said when he saw Lionberg.
"She forgot her hat."
It was the baseball cap he had worn when she first saw him, which had once been lettered The Plaza.
"Where is she?"
"On line. She's boarding."
Rain smiled with unmistakable gratitude when she saw Lionberg approach. She stepped out of line, stumbling against the boarding passengers.
Lionberg took her hand with desperate confidence and said, "I'm going to miss you, honey."
It was what he had wanted to say this morning, what he had come forty miles to say. He badly wanted to impress her.
"I'll miss you too."
He looked for meaning in her eyes and thought he saw what he wanted.
"Why are you leaving?"
"I'm going home," she said. She touched his hand softly like a reminder. "Back to my life."
That made him sad, that she had a life he knew nothing about. He said, "This is for you, honey," and gave her the baseball cap.
She laughed and put it on. When she kissed him this time the visor poked his head.
"Gotta go," she said.
"Crazy kid," Buddy said, standing with Lionberg. They looked like an older couple seeing off their daughter — that same admiration and forgiveness, that same love. Buddy, fleshy, even bosomy in his T-shirt, was the gruff and bossy mother; Lionberg — small, leaner, forgiving, infatuated — was the tender father. They stood with the others saying goodbye at the departure gate as Rain entered the tunnel. When she was gone, Lionberg felt sick, and he wanted to get away from Buddy.
"Funny seeing you here," Buddy said, panting to keep up with him. "I haven't seen you out of your Bat Cave in ages." He poked his finger at Lionberg. "You're a very mysterious guy! You've got secrets." He called out to a man mopping the airport floor, "This is Royce Lionberg! He's got secrets!"
Lionberg drove slowly back to the North Shore on the empty roads, thinking how he had no secrets now. He wanted to be on that plane with Rain, to be going home with her. What she had said of Sweetwater had
moved him in its simple solidity. It was home in a sense that he had never known the word. He had made a home, but she had been born in one and still lived there. That was so different. It was permanent, it was safe and secure. Why would you ever leave?
Reentering his house that night, he was angry. He saw it with Rain's eyes and disliked it for being cluttered and airless. It was wrong, it was selfish. He couldn't remember a time when he had felt so dissatisfied. His collections, his treasures, seemed merely pretentious, just decorative, without significance, worthless.
The expensive humidor disgusted him. He took out a cigar and, in his reading chair, cut and lit it. A cigar always calmed him, even gave him moments of great happiness. Puffing smoke, he remembered how, long ago, in the days when he gave parties, he had been infuriated by seeing that someone had stubbed out a cigar in a carved jade saucer.
The moment enlightened him. The things people accumulated — old pictures and pewter, jade and carved ivory and ugly-faced masks and books and tapestries and large yellow sperm-whale teeth scored with scrimshaw, silver platters and spoons and sugar tongs, the incidental and ill-assorted objects that were supposed to have value — all of it was merely borrowed from the vast store of the world's artifacts and ultimately returned to it, sold, bequeathed, lost, stolen. These objects were protected, and found another home, another thief or borrower, but in any case just an overburdened custodian, until they were returned again or
destroyed. They had no meaning or use beyond their being handled or looked at.
Had he been a writer, he would have written that, and he wished he could write it, to rid himself of the sadness of its truth: nothing was owned. He was merely a watchman, a menial, with illusions, buffing things, polishing, dusting, being careful not to break them.
He had made a provision for everything as a legacy, but people did what they wanted. In time, it would all be sold or deaccessioned or snatched in spite of his wishes.
It was worth no more than a glance, which was what she had given
it.
His cigar splintered and sparked and came apart as he dug it into the white jade saucer, laughing angrily, pushing it against the fine carving. While the smoke rose like bitter incense he took down his Matisse footbridge, knifed open the taped back of the frame, and slid out the sketch. Holding it down with the flat of his left hand, he worked a cheap pencil eraser on the lines at the center of the bridge, leaving his mark, making it uncrossable. He felt savagely happy, with an intimation of insanity, desperate for his happiness to last and fearing that it would end at any moment, leaving him bereft.
54 Triple Word Score
His head lowered in reverence, the dark islander put out a set of fetish objects, like a shaman engrossed in a ritual for telling the future or interpreting the past. He crouched beneath the ragged wind-shredded fronds of the leaning palms, in the mossy corner of the shadiest part of the property, an islander at a jungle pool, the water's reflection spangling his belly and making it gleam. His face was close to a painted square that was blocked with the sort of mystical patterns you find in the boldest mandalas of Oceania.
I went nearer, feeling intrusive and awkward, until I saw it was Keola with his shirt off, bent over a board game. Peewee hurried behind me and said, "You want to play?"
It was Scrabble. They had started playing it between shifts at the far corner of the hotel swimming pool, after it closed for the evening. Everywhere I had lived, Scrabble was played differently, the game adapted to the culture and the lingo, certain words allowed and not others, challenges restricted, one society making a noisy free-for-all of it, another an intellectual exercise. The game of Scrabble reflected the people who played it, as when Trobriand Islanders made the game of cricket into something riotous, a reconciling adaptation known to anthropologists as syncretism, as valid with Scrabble as with cricket or Christianity.
"Only problem — Peewee take hours to choose a word," Keola said, which alarmed me, because Keola was the slowest worker in the hotel.
While he was talking, Marlene joined us, shaking her head. She had heard Keola and obviously agreed with him.
"Let's do rapid transit," I said. I explained how each player would have just two minutes to choose a word; if time ran out, the player's turn was forfeited. This way the game would be shorter and more exciting.
They liked this idea. They passed me the sock that served as a bag for the letters and told me to choose one, to determine who would start. I got an "M," which I was sure was no good, and handed the sock to Peewee, and smiled at the thought they were letting me join them. They knew that in a former life I had been a writer, Buddy Hamstra still introduced me by saying, "He wrote a book!" but they were not in the least put off by the prospect of my playing.