"Tell me you love me," I said fiercely.
57 Waterspout
The suggestion was that we would have dinner, my wife, my mother- in-law, and this stranger — stranger to me, not to them, which was why I had put it off. Who was he? What I had seen of him so far had not convinced me that I should spend an evening with him. I couldn't refuse to be pleasant to him, or any other hotel guest, but sitting down at the same table was another matter. A big meal was a contract in which you agreed to get along. I had come to understand that a whole lifetime could be squandered like that.
To prevent such waste, to preserve my happiness, I had a mental list (perhaps everyone has one) of people I would never eat with again. In any new place, and especially in the hotel business, it was an ever-lengthening list. In fact, with these thoughts in mind, the people I was speaking to right now were on it: Floyd and Claudine Zinda, and Ed and Pearl Gerbig, bridge-club friends from Michigan who, late in life, discovered (so they had told me) that they suffered from seasonal affective disorder. Hawaii was the preferred destination for many such victims of winter darkness: there was no cure but our sunshine.
But that was not the topic today. On their way back from a Thai restaurant in Aina Haina, they had seen a waterspout.
"We also saw Debbie Reynolds — at the restaurant."
"I will always think of her as Tammy," Pearl Gerbig said, and began to sing the lilting song in a small girl's voice.
"It came right off the ocean," Floyd Zinda said, referring to the waterspout, "and whipped around and tore the blame roof off of a little shack by the beach. There were people inside!"
"Laughing — because what else could they do?" Claudine Zinda said.
"Ed said they were naked."
"They looked naked to me. They were sopping wet."
I said, "How did you know it was a waterspout?"
"Driver said so. He slowed down for it. He told us the Whyan word for it."
"What did it look like?" I asked.
"Real amazing."
"Like nothing you ever seen in your life."
This vagueness made me impatient. I saw Rose sucking her thumb and said, "You haven't met my daughter."
As I introduced her, Rose said, "Can I have a motorcycle?"
"Little girls don't ride motorcycles," Claudine said.
"It's a dirt bike. Anyone can ride them. You don't even need a license."
"We'll see," I said.
"I'm stoked," Rose said.
"But you've got a three-wheeler and a skateboard."
"They suck," Rose said, and flounced off.
"That was my daughter."
"Kids today want everything," Ed said.
Upstairs, Sweetie was dressing for dinner — her red dress, her Tahitian necklace, her heels. The necklace she had tightened around her neck like an elegant dog collar.
"What's that?"
"It's a choker."
"For dinner at the Pearl?"
"I want to look nice." She smoothed her dress. She angled her body and looked critically at her legs. Women dressing up seem to scrutinize themselves with other people's eyes, with new expressions. I had never seen this expression on my wife's face before, these eyes.
"Where were you this afternoon?"
"Took Rose to the zoo."
Downstairs, Puamana was at the bar with Kalani. She, too, was dressed up. I had seldom seen her so fashionable, the dress and high heels
that made her look like Sweetie's sister, a yellow silk scarf flung around her neck. Mother and daughter looked at each other with a sort of incestuous approval.
Kalani wore an aloha shirt patterned with pineapples. "I just bought it," he said. He fingered Puamana's scarf. "Like that movie Basic Instinct, where the guy gets tied to the bed with it. Like, don't get any ideas, yah."
"Like, you just gave me one," Puamana said.
From this exchange and their laughter I concluded that they had been in the bar a while. We walked to the Waikiki Pearl. The manager, Kaniela Dickstein, owed me.
"I'm stoked," Kalani said.
Sweetie said, "That movie was awesome."
I glanced away so I wouldn't see my wife saying this.
"You still sit there eating mochi crunch with popcorn and a big root beer?" Kalani asked.
That was an accurate depiction of my wife at a movie.
"And you with a six-pack."
"You see that Titanic?" Puamana said.
"They didn't show it where I was," Kalani said.
I said — my first offering — "They showed it everywhere on the planet."
Puamana glanced sourly at me and Sweetie frowned.
"I know some places they didn't show it," Kalani said. "Anyway, I heard it sucked."
There was silence after this, and it continued after we were seated at the Pearl's restaurant.
"I'm Shayna. I'll be your server. Can I get any of you guys a cocktail?" She was a young, sturdy mainlander with a mainlander's direct gaze.
However marginal my hotel was in the world of hospitality, however thin my managerial experience, still "Aloha" was our greeting — on Buddy's instructions — and no one on my wait staff would ever have introduced himself in this way. Only I seemed to notice.
Kalani said, "Like, I've already had about ten!"
Sweetie ordered a margarita. Puamana giggled with Kalani, who ordered a vodka tonic. I studied the menu.
Kalani said, "I love seeing people eat — just grinding. And laughing. The louder the better. And fighting, that's great. Especially women fighting. That's awesome. Like those women mud wrestlers at Gussie L'Amour's over on Nimitz. The place still there?"
Reflecting on how I disliked seeing people stuffing their mouths, and laughing, and fighting, seeing only open mouths and rows of teeth, I heard Puamana say, "Oh yeah, Gussie still over there."
"When they quarrel, most people turn into monkeys," I said. Kalani clawed his hair. "That's what I like about it." That set Puamana laughing again, and my wife too. "Now what can I get you?" Shayna the waitress said, setting down the drinks and wagging her pad and pencil.
"I would like for lick you leg, starting down here and ending up here," Kalani said, and then indicated those places with his scummy tongue.
I feared legal action — Dickstein would blame me — and was surprised to see Shayna laugh. She said, "You're terrible!"
"That what Buddy's always saying," Puamana said. Kalani was still showing his tongue. "Like Buddy say, 'If you tongue ain't green, you gal ain't clean."
I said to Shayna, "Please ignore him."
"He's kind of cute," Shayna said.
"I'm a real bad influence," Kalani said. "Ask them."
I alone did not find anything humorous in this.
We ordered our meal, and after Shayna had gone, to fill the silence, I said, "There was apparently a waterspout off Aina Haina today. Some guests reported seeing it."
"That's, like, real exciting," Kalani said. It was impossible to tell from anything he said whether he was mocking me.
"What's the Hawaiian word for waterspout?"
Puamana shook her head. "I'm too drunk to remember." Until the food was served there was silence at the table. They started talking as soon as they began to eat, mumbling with their mouths fulclass="underline" movies, meals, the deaths of mutual friends — some of them extremely violent. One had burned to death in a car, another was found with his throat slashed in a cane field, a third had been thrown from his motorcycle into the path of an oncoming dump truck in Nanakuli.
"He was, like, in a million pieces," my wife said as she chewed her meat. It was as if she were chewing one of them.
I stared at her.
"That sucks," Kalani said. "But we been on that road a few times,
yah?"
I stared at him.
"I seen some scars on people you wouldn't believe already,"
Puamana said.
I stared at her and concluded that it was not them. It was me. They belonged; they were content. I was the freak. Knowing Leon Edel had reminded me of how out of place I had felt here, but I had never imagined that I could be so ignorant.