Paradise Lost bar was unusual in Waikiki for being popular with locals, especially when Buddy was introducing his favorite shows on the poolside lanai: Tahitian dancers, topless hula, or the enormous Samoan in a muumuu who husked coconuts with his teeth. The lanai doubled as the Island Coffee Shop (thatched roof, scowling constipated-looking tikis, glass net-floats). Just inside, sharing Peewee's kitchen, was the Terrace dining room, unofficially known as Buddy's.
The hotel pool was picturesque but dangerous, from the loose tiles and slippery edges to the rusty ladder and the poor drainage. The water itself was either algal and germ-laden or else so strongly chlorinated as to seem toxic. Fortunately, most guests used the beach, two streets away.
The Executive Office — my cubbyhole — opened onto the lobby, where Lester Chen sat at Reception, his hands braced on the counter as though steering it. Everyone got a plumeria lei at check-in, a kiss from Marlene, and a coupon for a free Happy Hour drink at Paradise Lost.
The man arranging the centerpiece of torch ginger in the big lobby vase was Amo Ferretti, our flower man; the young man saying "Stop fussing, pumpkin!" his lover, Chip. The Hawaiian with the mop and bucket was Keola, and the cat taking up most of the lobby sofa, Popoki, belonged to my mother-in-law,
Puamana. Slack-key guitar music, mainly Gabby Pahinui tapes, was played all day. Most of the decor belonged to Buddy: cruise ship posters, framed feather leis, fish traps that had been converted into lamps, bric-a-brac such as the gaily painted signs saying, Duke Kahanamoku's and Boat Day, and the small bubbling aquarium of island fish.
The woman entering the lobby on Rollerblades was my wife, Sweetie, and the reason she did not ever hear you was that she was wearing a Walkman and listening to a Stephen King audio book. The odors in the lobby: Peewee's fresh bread, Amo Ferretti's homegrown gardenias, and the guests' pungent sunblock. The laughter from Paradise Lost was that of Buddy and his friends Sam Sandford, Sparky Lemmo, Earl Willis, and the chef, Peewee Moffat.
The elevator was so unreliable we routinely put guests on the lower floors, in case they had to use the fire stairs. Older Americans, being fireconscious, preferred this arrangement anyway.
A plaque screwed to the lobby wall boasted that the hotel stood on the site of the beach hut where Robert Louis Stevenson stayed in 1889, writing The Master of Ballantrae, when Waikiki was swampland.
Some guests I hardly saw — they were just slammed doors or ambiguous sounds — but the people right upstairs, in 509, were not
ambiguous at all. They made the most explicit noises I had ever heard, and I became aware of them my first night in the hotel.
It was more than sound. It was physical motion, the walls spoke, the room was jolted. I was well acquainted with these noises. Once, in college, I had lived off campus, downstairs from a newly married couple — young woman, middle-aged man — and for one whole year I learned the rhythm and progress of such sounds: the repetitive rising voices, the clinking glasses and laughter, the rumbling floorboards and popping corks, the shrill teasing woman, the throatier man, a sort of dissolving chaos — footsteps representing whole bodies, silences standing for signals, and a shift from human murmurs to snorts of strained furniture fittings, the squawk of seat springs, the jingle of bed springs, the seesaw of the bed itself, the frenzy of caged parrots in a pet shop.
To these sounds I added the man and woman. It all appealed to my imagination. He was a grunting lover, she was a pleader — whimpering, shifting, her cries not quite smothered by the creaking bedstead. The lonely cries of the young woman were like a table saw slicing through splintering plywood.
I had a girlfriend then. Unable to endure this sexual fury upstairs, I would wake and startle her with my desire. She would laugh softly, lean back, make a cradle of her legs, and rock me until our bed was a squawking workshop too.
Sweetie and I had met on my first day on the job. And that room, 409, was one of the first she showed me. I heard the urgent murmurs, the yearning voices, the odd honks of the man, and the sudden sawing of the bed in which the lovers upstairs were rocking.
Sweetie pretended not to hear, but when I touched her at the window — she was showing me how to adjust the louvers — she did not resist my hot hands.
I said, "Buddy would kill me if he knew what I was doing."
"Buddy would get a charge out of it," she said.
I stared at her.
"I don't mean to be facetious," she said.
I stared at that funny word, still damp on her lips, and said, "Or your mother might kill me."
Puamana lived on the third floor near the back, so her customers could come and go without passing through the lobby. Sweetie had been raised in the hotel, and Buddy was the friendly uncle in this arrangement.
Sweetie said, "My mother says you're a good conversationalist."
Since her mother's contacts with men were confined to halfhour encounters in bed, it did not take much to be regarded as a great raconteur by Puamana.
As it was my first time in the islands, I could not gauge the impression I made. The islanders seemed pleasant, but they were giggly and inarticulate. They could sit for hours and say nothing. My talk exhausted them. My questions silenced them and sometimes made them suspicious.
Talk made Sweetie anxious, so I brought her presents — she loved flowers and trinkets. I took her car to the Samoan car wash. These to her were expressions of love. Her notion of intellectual activity was Rollerblading with the joggers on the promenade at Ala Moana Beach while listening to a Stephen King horror.
But I realized that it was fatal for me to linger in room 409 with those provocative sounds rippling through the ceiling. In my first moments in the room I had been stirred, and, inspired by the sensual polyphony from upstairs, nudged by the agreeable persuasion, I had touched Sweetie for the first time.
I said, "If we don't leave here this minute you're going to be in trouble."
She just laughed. She didn't push me away. The very fact of being in a hotel room aroused me, but I was with a twenty-seven-year-old girl and the people in the room above were groaning in the act of love.
She shrugged and smiled and said nothing. That was enough encouragement to give me patience. I looked for another chance. Buddy had said that I should be watchful. I had an office, Peewee was in the kitchen, Lester Chen at Reception, Sweetie in Housekeeping, Tran at the bar, Keola in Maintenance, Kawika in the garden; the poolside lanai, the narrow lobby — Amo Ferretti arranging the flowers; the potted palms, the monkeypod tree out front, the slack-key Hawaiian music. It was September.
"Shoulder season," Buddy had warned me, the quiet time.
It seemed to me that I was risking a great deal by making a move on Sweetie, so I delicately raised the subject with Buddy one payday when he stopped by to distribute checks.
I said, "She's very pretty."
"She's not interested in me. Maybe you'll do better. She seems to like
you."
"I wouldn't want to jeopardize my job by taking advantage of the
staff."
Buddy laughed in a jeering way. "Sweetie does what she wants. If I was in your shoes, I'd just pray for sex. Anyway, if she gave you a piece, I would obviously think more of you."
After that I looked for an opportunity, and room 409 became the symbol of my desire.
One hot afternoon I went to the room alone. The sounds from upstairs roused me. With numb fingers I dialed Housekeeping. Sweetie