Sleeping Beauties (18 page)

Claire smiled. “I certainly didn’t want him in Waimea. He thinks we’re rich. Nando sees the lovely allowance he gives me as a kind of investment against future returns. Christ, could you imagine Nando in Waimea?”

“No,” said Emma.

Claire stood and stretched her pretty arms above her head. “Ciao, angel. Ciao, Emma. Don’t get up.”

But Emma was already standing. She was so eager for Claire to leave that Clio was sure that Claire would be offended, but Claire didn’t seem to notice.

As if she were fearful that Claire might change her mind and stay, Emma waited in the driveway until Claire’s black Cadillac limousine disappeared down the road. She walked back to the lanai and took a long drink of beer.

“Do you think if Señor Nando were able to achieve orgasm a little faster,” Clio asked, “Claire would have to give up Chanel? Really, she’s wrong to complain.” She frowned as she pretended to solve it mathematically. “If Claire were clever, she could save the plantation. An acre for every twelve acts of fellatio.”

“I don’t think it works that way,” Emma said as she finished her beer. “Not for Claire. She likes things she can hold in her hand.”

Clio agreed to meet her brother, Dix, for drinks on the terrace at the Outrigger with the understanding that he pay the check. He had been in Thailand for three weeks working on possible imports—or was it exports? He always confused the two. There was an extremely high restaurant and bar bill on Clio’s account, dating back many months. Someone had been using her membership number.

Dix denied it.

“I was in Phuket,” he said.

“Before that.”

“Bali.”

“You’re lying, Dix. You use my charge and you lie. You used to tell me the truth.”

“I never told you the truth,” he said, looking around to see who was on the terrace.

Now and then a wave broke with a loud crack against the coral seawall, spraying them with water. The sun was falling and the people on the terrace and the swimmers coming in from the beach were stained the color of amber. The canoes were out, training for the races, and the paddlers were silhouetted against the sky. Beyond the big hotels, stretching out to sea, was the long black flank of mountain called Waianae.

“I have some great ideas,” Dix said. His arms fell loosely over the sides of his chair. He put his feet on the edge of the wall, and his clean, strong toes curled over the edge. He was wearing a silk aloha shirt that Emma had given him. Clio noticed that the hair on his arms was bleached white by the sun and the salt. He watched a catamaran coming into the beach. “But I need to talk to Tommy.”

“Well, call him,” Clio said.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

She hesitated. “I mind, but you’d do it, anyway.”

“Making up for lost time,” he said, patting her arm. “You know, there are people in Bangkok who will kill someone for ten dollars. You can buy a whole family for twelve dollars. A whole family! For the night, that is.”

“Who would want a whole family, Dix?”

“Not me. I don’t want anything to do with families, mine or theirs.” He waved to Ching See for another beer. A man wearing swimming goggles came out of the water
and Dix excused himself and went out onto the beach to talk to him.

He came back to the table. “I owe him money,” he said, and Clio stopped admiring him.

“I’ve written this really great screenplay. That’s why I need to talk to Tommy. He could get it set up. That’s all I need. Someone to fucking read it. I need an in.” He became excited just thinking about it. He asked Ching See for a double order of meat sticks and some sashimi.

“Tommy’s bad,” she said.

“Clio. Bad is better. Haven’t you figured that out? I know he’s a shit sometimes. But bad gets things done. Look at Dad. I really need this to work, you know? There was a bit of business I could’ve picked up in Bangkok, but it was risky, a little too vague, a little dangerous. I could’ve made millions, but I said no, I’ll go home and I’ll talk to Clio. She’ll know what to do.” He waved to a friend. “All Tommy needs to do is read it.”

“Well, that’s just it.” She did not like his presumption, or his implication that he’d given up a fortune running guns or drugs or children in order to consult her about his future. It was cynical and it was dishonest.

“Okay, have someone else read it then! Do you think I give a shit whether he really reads it or not? Just so he makes it happen.” He took some chopsticks from a paper wrapper and rubbed them together.

A pretty girl stopped at their table. “Hi, Dix,” she said. There were comb lines in her wet hair. She smelled like sandalwood. Clio knew she was from the mainland because she wore low mules. Local girls went barefoot or wore cheap rubber slippers they bought at the supermarket. Clio smiled at her and moved her chair to make room at the table.

“Jana’s father works for the Marines at Kaneohe,” Dix said.

Clio had known girls at school whose fathers were officers in the service. The girls were flirtatious and bossy, accustomed to being around men conveniently designated their inferior. They were almost always blond, Clio remembered. They wore Dr. Scholl’s sandals to school, but that wasn’t why they were never quite accepted. It was island snobbery, Clio had realized with surprise. The disdain of the clerisy.

“I’d ask you to sit down,” Dix said, grinning, “but my sister’s making me pick up the check.”

“That’s okay, Dix,” the girl said sweetly. She wandered away, flicking water from the ends of her hair.

“You’re inspiring,” Clio said in admiration. “Do you always get away with it?”

“Away with what?” He looked at the girl’s legs as she sat down at another table. “Listen, I may be cute, but you’re the hotshot.”

Clio stared at him.

“You were the one who always stood up to Burta and Dad while I was under the house trying to blow up her dogs with cherry bombs.” Ching See brought the food and Dix ate hungrily. He remembered, a little late, to offer some to Clio, but she did not want any. “Remember how starved we always were?” he asked. It was the first time in the conversation, Clio realized, that he had spoken straightforwardly to her.

“One of the delights of Wisteria House was the food,” she said. “It was there that I developed my extreme fondness for canned Le Sueur peas.”

Their mother, Kitty, had insisted on reviewing the week’s menu with the cook because she believed it was the way a woman of refinement ran her household, but she had had no interest in food. It was the Filipino cook who had determined what the children would eat, and Dix and Clio had eaten rice at every meal, including breakfast. Their
idea of dessert was sour pickled fruit or egg sushi. They ate rice every day at school, too, often with a big slice of Spam. They had no complaint, they loved rice, but it was not until Clio went to Wisteria House that she had what she called her first white food. Her first
haole
food. Food like artichokes and wiener schnitzel.

Dix and Clio had been brought up like plants, although not very rare ones. They’d been given water and food and sunlight, but not much else. When Burta married their father, she dismissed the Filipino cook, who was fond of the children, and brought in servants of her own who only spoke Japanese. There was certainly enough money for food, but Burta announced cheerfully that the old days were over for good: there were going to be economies. She replaced the fresh milk with powdered milk, the rice with Rice-A-Roni, the fresh pineapple with canned pineapple chunks. The children were allowed a glass of powdered milk full of undissolved lumps of soybean at each meal. They were made sick by the smell and the texture of the milk. Clio could not drink it without gagging. Because they were no longer allowed pocket money, they could not buy food. Burta confiscated their lunch cards, telling them to find a way to pay for their lunches at school. Since she had no money to buy lunch, Clio just stopped eating, but Dix convinced the school dietician to give him a job scrubbing pots in the cafeteria, a chore customarily available only to those students who had scholarships. Clio would sit with her girlfriends at lunch, proudly refusing their offers of food, pretending that she was not hungry. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of Dix at the food line, dragging away a stainless steel cauldron to wash, and she would admire him.

Fresh orange juice was kept in the refrigerator—Dix said it was for Burta’s hangovers—and the children were forbidden to drink it. It was very tempting, just the idea
of it sitting there in the cold and the dark. One very hot day, Clio could not resist sneaking into the kitchen to take a long drink of juice straight from the pitcher. She was reading Greek myths at the time and it seemed to her that she had just tasted nectar. She went back once or twice more. On her last visit, she was shocked to find that the pitcher was almost empty. She had not taken that much: someone else was drinking nectar, too.

The children had dinner in the playroom every evening at six o’clock. If they were late, the housekeeper, following Burta’s orders, took bits of food from their plates for each minute that they were late. Sometimes they were late on purpose, but their very hunger kept them prompt. That evening, Clio looked closely at Dix and Steamy for any sign of complicity—flecks of orange on their lips, a smell of citrus—but there was nothing.

Lynott came into the playroom, a martini in his hand.

“There is a thief in this room,” he said. He sounded excited and Clio wondered for a moment if he were drunk.

Dix looked at him boldly.

“Someone has drunk Burta’s orange juice,” Lynott said, coming to the table. “Was it you, Dix?”

Clio noticed that Dix’s hairline was damp with sweat. “Dix didn’t do it,” she said.

But it was too late. Lynott took Dix into the next room and beat him with his belt. At the end, Lynott was grunting with the effort, but Dix did not make a sound.

Dix came back to the table. He did not look at Clio or Steamy. Clio felt light-headed. She wanted to touch him, but she knew that he would not allow it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he said.

“I’ll eat your Velveeta.” They bartered their food every night, trading ruthlessly with each other. She knew that he hated Velveeta. She hated it, too.

“Okay,” he had said reasonably, giving her the chance to forgive herself and getting rid of the cheese at the same time.

She watched Dix eat the sashimi. “It’s not Velveeta, is it?”

He looked up at her. “It’s not what?”

“Velveeta.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about. He ate the last piece of tuna and wiped his hands. She saw that he was worried. His expression had changed. It is because we’ve been talking about Burta and our father, Clio thought. She suddenly felt sorry for Dix, and sorry for herself. She wanted to comfort him as she had wanted to do when they were children together in the damp, dangerous house, when he used to explain that Burta and their father were evil. Clio had insisted that evil required intention. It had been impossible for her to admit that their father’s cruelty was merely carelessness. She was making a useless distinction, Dix said. The effect of evil was the same. “I could even argue,” he’d said, “that careless evil is worse.”

“Do you really think I can send the screenplay to Tommy?” he asked, anxiously tapping a chopstick on the side of his plate.

“Yes, I do.”

He jumped up, relieved and happy. “I’ll be right back.”

Clio watched the lights go on in the big hotels curving along Waikiki Beach. The green and red lights of the channel markers moved with the tide, and there were lights in the houses built on the hills behind the city. When she was a girl, sitting on the same terrace, trying to talk Ching See into giving her a cocktail, there had not been many lights back in the hills. It was not until she noticed people getting up to go into the dining room and the waiters
lighting the torches on the beach that she realized that Dix had left her to pay the bill.

Clio was late to Burta’s dinner party for Claire. Honolulu, even so far into the twentieth century, was a very provincial place. You were asked for dinner at seven o’clock, and you were expected promptly at seven.

Clio moved along the edge of the lanai, nodding discreetly to the figures painted on the wall. She saw Burta on the lawn in one of the silk mandarin coats she had made in Hong Kong. She was talking to Dix. The Duchess de Corilhã was nowhere in sight.

Patsy Yasunabe, the senator, was talking to Johnny Klein, who owned a hotel on the windward side of O‘ahu that was so unsuccessful he gave weekend rates to the rice farmers and construction workers who lived nearby. The hotel was full from Friday to Sunday with local families who brought hibachis and cooked on the stained cement balconies. Senator Yasunabe had made sure that Mr. Klein was awarded the contract for the new sports center.

Desiree Humphreys, who kept kangaroos and other unhappy animals at her house at Niu, waved gaily to Clio. She was with Buzz Chun, the movie critic and gossip columnist who had so much influence through his weekly column, “What’s Happenin’, Brah,” that no movie director or beauty-contest winner left town without taking Mr. Chun to his favorite Algerian restaurant in the Kahala Mall. Buzz spun around to see who had attracted Desiree’s attention. He blew Clio a kiss as he turned deftly to Mrs. Yung, the Taiwanese secretary of trade. The minister mysteriously held up her plump forearm for him to smell.

Steamy was on the lawn. Behind him, a grove of silver-leaved
kukui
trees glittered amidst the dark
koa
trees, and Clio thought of the Hawaiian proverb “The gum sticks to
the
kukui
tree.” It referred to a child clinging to its mother. It is not a proverb that applies to me, she thought as she crossed the lawn to him.

“I’ve something to tell you,” Steamy said as she kissed him.

“I’m just going to drink tonight,” she said. “That way, when it all falls apart, I won’t remember any of it.”

A waiter came out to them with a plate of deviled eggs. Steamy took two and put one in his pocket. The head of Asian Studies at the university, a scholarly gentleman who was said to be one of Chiang Kai-shek’s illegitimate children, smiled and bowed his head at them.