Sleeping Beauties (20 page)

Her skin was wet, but she was not cold. She listened to the
kahuli
, the land shells, scratching in the trees, celebrating the rain, and she listened to the birds rocking deep into their ground nests, birds so innocent they did not know to build their nests in trees. For a moment, she thought
that she heard the whine of the brindled spirit dog, Pa‘e, who guarded Kapena Falls deep in the valley.

She put on her clothes. He did not look away. She lay back again and the white dress opened around her like a flower.

“Do you know Prince Lunalilo’s poem to the princess?” She could feel the cloth of her dress drawing the wetness from her skin.

“No,” he said.

When she was silent, he said, “Are you going to tell me?”

“I’m not sure that I remember it all.”

“I’m going to Moloka‘i in the morning,” he said. “We have until then.”

She smiled in the darkness. She realized that he could not see that she was smiling. “I’m smiling,” she whispered as she rose onto her knees under the wet pine branches and settled herself again on the dry ground, as if the poem had been written for her.

They listened to the night birds and the restless blundering insects, and sometime in the night she recited the poem to him:

C
lio was awakened by a rattling at the screen door, as if someone were trying not just to waken her, but to force his way into the cottage. She put on a summer
yukata
and went cautiously into the front room. She was not cautious out of habit. Anyone who knew the cottage and had reason to be there, even at six o’clock in the morning, would have known to come inside, even if she were still in bed. So whoever was troubling the door was a stranger who did not know that the cottage door was never locked, only warped from rain and salt.

She thought at first that he had feathers in his hair. The branches of the palm trees seemed to spring from the top of his head. His hands curled around his eyes as he tried to peer through the screen. She went to the door and opened it with a hitch, holding her robe tightly across her chest.

“You didn’t say goodbye last night, babe.” He rubbed his hands up and down his chest. He was wearing an orange and white University of Texas sweat suit, and running shoes.

Clio held herself flat against the door as he brushed past her. She knotted the sash of her kimono tightly around her waist. She went into the kitchen and got a bottle of
mineral water from the refrigerator, and glasses, and put them on a table.

“I don’t remember ever saying hello,” she said.

He rolled the bottle of water across his flushed forehead.

She sat cross-legged on a
hikie‘e
and pulled the pillows into her lap, making a little battlement on which to rest her hands. As she unfolded a quilt across her legs and feet, she realized that she did not want him to see any part of her.

“You certainly made a scene, babe.” He took off his cap and skimmed it across the room, trying to hook it onto a pair of antlers, the antlers of a deer she had killed when she was sixteen, but the cap fell to the floor.

“Did I?”

“Claire and Steamboat took me to Lombo’s Club Polynesia after dinner. It was sort of great. Lots of fags in drag. Hawaiian fags! And Japanese. It was weird. I didn’t know there were Hawaiian fags.”

She leaned forward to pour water into a glass.

“So why did you do that?” he asked. “Walk out like that.” He stood before her, restlessly swinging an arm.

She looked at him.

“Were you sick or something? Giving you the benefit of the doubt.” He bent his leg at the knee and grabbed his foot with his hand, stretching his thigh muscles. He could not stand still.

“No, I wasn’t sick.”

He hesitated. “Well, what’s your excuse then?” He stretched the other leg. “You’re always making these crisises and the rest of us worry. I’m not sure you deserve the present I got you.” He let his foot drop to the floor. He was angry, but trying not to show it. “Claire says you used to leave parties all the time.” He moved his head in a circle, loosening his neck.

“No, I used to give parties all the time.”

“She thinks you’re her best friend. She really likes you. She likes you better than her sister.”

“She would.”

“What do you mean?” He went into the kitchen and came back with a bag of banana chips. “It’s a compliment.”

“No, it’s not.”

“What’s not?”

“It’s not true that she likes me, and it’s not a compliment.”

“You don’t understand her,” he said, eating the chips noisily.

Clio looked out at the garden.

“You make it hard for people,” he said. “You’re too proud.”

She realized then that he had been talking to someone about her. She didn’t think that she was too proud. Perhaps she was wrong, but she couldn’t imagine that he thought she was proud, either. He had never thought about her at all.

“You have this idea that wanting something entitles you to something in return,” she said. “Love, for instance. It’s a sentimental idea, Tommy. I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

He sat on the edge of the
hikie‘e
, his legs extended stiffly over the side. “Look,” he said, “I know you haven’t had such a great time. They told me about your mother running off and taking all the money and all about your stepmother, who Claire says was always real nice to her, but supposedly not too great to you.”

“Claire has certainly been a help to you. Local history, I mean.”

“I didn’t think she was that bad, personally.”

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

“My stepmother.”

“Whatever.”

“No.”

“What?”

“Not whatever.”

“Look, babe, this isn’t what I came by for.”

“I’m not very interested in your impartiality. I like subjectivity. And conviction. I admire people who take sides. I sometimes even like intolerance. That’s why you can’t say ‘Whatever.’ Oh, I know that you can say anything that you want, you, Tommy, but I don’t have to like it.”

He looked confused. Confusion, especially his own, made him petulant. “I came to take you back, not to piss you off.” He jumped up and walked over to pick up his cap.

“Take me back?”

“I’m not leaving without you.” He smiled and looked at his watch, tucking the cap into his waistband.

Clio rose, knocking the pillows to the floor.

“I don’t mean now,” he said hastily. “Christ, babe.” He took three guavas from an old ceramic bowl and began to juggle them. “I have a television interview this afternoon. Meet me at the Outrigger later.” He raised his eyebrows in invitation and tossed the guavas, one by one, back into the delicate bowl. Clio winced involuntarily as each guava landed heavily in the dish. “Just us. No one else. Margaritas and teriyaki-burgers. We’ll talk. It will be like old times. I’ll make the crew sit at another table.”

“We don’t have old times.”

“What?”

“I’m not meeting you.”

He wiped his palms on the back of his sweat pants. He looked around for the first time. “Nice place,” he said, nodding his head as if the room needed assurance. He walked across the room and opened the door to her bedroom.

“Do I get to meet the crazy grandmother?”

“Not at six-thirty in the morning.”

He was eager for some sign from her, some gesture of affection, so when she darted under his arm and stood blocking the way to the bedroom, close to him for a moment, he thought that she was pleased with him.

Clio did not want him to go into her room. She did not want him ever again to see how she lived—the lingerie on the chair, the strewn bed linen, the tapes and books and damp bath towels and tubes of sun block, the blue box of tampons, the pot of cold tea on the floor. She so did not want him in her room that she allowed him to touch her, an intimacy that should have been more upsetting, she suddenly thought, than his seeing her unmade bed. Clio did not want him to see her bed because she did not want him to desire her.

“Show me where you sleep,” he whispered.

As Clio looked at him, she realized that she had forgotten that he was Tommy Haywood, the movie star. There was a small pimple on the side of his nose. His eyelids were pink. It seemed impossible that she had ever slept with him, and impossible that she ever would again. This is the materialist view of love, she thought; the Marxist view of romance. If towns prospered because of good rivers, and fine weather that ensured rich grain harvests, not because of the actions of statesmen or kings, then it might be possible to say that my husband’s visit is not going well because of a pimple. He needs to wash his face.

He put his arm around her waist and drew her to him. “You miss me? Come on, babe,” he said into her neck. “It’s me.”

“That’s just it.”

He glanced over her shoulder into the bedroom. She slept in a carved opium bed that Mabel had bought in 1975 from a Vietnamese general passing through town on his
way to Cannes. A smell of old incense came from the brocade bed hangings. He tried to back her into the room, pushing her with his legs.

She was astonished by her own perversity. She would never live with him again, she knew, but it was stubborn, and even dangerous, to provoke him by refusing to let him into her room. She was determined that he should not know one more thing about her—whether she was menstruating, what books she was reading, what kind of tea she drank.

He grabbed her by the arm. “There’s someone in there, right? There’s a guy in there, right?”

“Yes, that’s it,” she said, relieved. “There’s a man in there. Naked. In the closet.” She laughed. “Actually, he’s under the bed. With an enormous erection. That’s why he can’t come out. He’s stuck. Because if he could, he would!”

He shoved her against the door and went into the room, arms held away from his sides in readiness, and arousal. He reached down to lift the bed skirt to look under the bed. She came after him, close to him, daring him to humiliate himself further, and he was confused by her presence.

He slowly straightened, dusting his hands, and looked at the closed bathroom door. He looked at Clio, then again at the door. He hesitated for a moment, then pushed past her and walked out of the room, calmly and deliberately kicking the teapot across the floor. It broke in two and cold tea splashed over her bare feet.

She walked slowly into the front room, the hem of her robe stained with tea, and watched him struggle angrily with the swollen door. It was he who felt misused.

She opened the door with a brisk jerk, the knob rattling in her hand. She was trembling.

He put a hand on her shoulder and she jumped onto the wet grass like a grasshopper.

“So. We’ll sit on the Hau Terrace and wait for the green flash when the sun goes down. You can swim before dinner. Steamy told me you’re really only happy in the water, anyway. You should have let me know. I could have drowned you!” He grinned and put on his dark glasses. They were fastened with a fluorescent elastic band around the back of his head.

There was the loud click of a gecko and he looked around, startled by the sound. He winked at her in embarrassment as he put on his cap, working it down over his brow with two hands, the bill in back. “You won’t be sorry, babe. Trust me. Was there anyone more devoted?”

He trotted across the garden. His limousine was waiting at the end of the driveway. “No one more devoted,” he shouted over his shoulder, but Clio did not hear him. She was already inside, packing her bag.

When Clio asked Emma if she would mind if she went that afternoon to the island of Moloka‘i, Emma took her into her bedroom and pulled a small silk bag from under the
koa
bed and emptied the bag onto the quilt. Black pearls, Emma’s jade hairpins, three jagged teeth, and three small emeralds tumbled onto the bed. Clio had to spread her arms to keep them from rolling off the bed.

Emma picked up one of the pearls. “Take this and go to Hoon tomorrow.”

Clio stared at her. “Is this what you’ve been doing? Taking things to Mr. Hoon?”

Emma put the pearl in her hand. “You must see Auntie Rowe when you’re on Moloka‘i.”

“Why don’t you come with me?”

Emma shook her head.

“Tommy was here this morning,” Clio said.

“I saw you on the lawn.”

“He is going to make it very hard. I don’t understand why, but he is going to make it hard.”

“You will need to understand. Otherwise, he is too dangerous.”

“Women do want the things that men have simply because they are men,” Clio said. “Anatomy is fate. Or is it faith? I suppose it is possible that women really do want an actual penis, but, Emma, here is what I think is so very interesting: men want penises, too. I mean that, like women, they don’t have them.”

“What a funny thing you are,” Emma said, smiling at her. “You always have been, you know. Do you remember the day you came to Wisteria House? All cut up by the branches at the gate, and so ungainly. I know that I was meant to be the teacher, but I have thought all along that I was the pupil. I have learned so much from you.”

“Have you ever held a man in your hand, perhaps after making love, when he is no longer aroused, and thought what a difficult thing it must be to be a man? The penis, like a bird in a nest, so fragile and delicate.”

“You make me think of Johnny Fitzroy,” Emma said. “The most beautiful women in the world are the Tahitians.”

“Is that why you didn’t go with him? You thought that you weren’t beautiful enough?” Clio was surprised. “Surely not,” she said, outraged.

Emma waved her arm, taking in the treasure, and the room, and the house itself. “It was all of this. I believed that without our work, without our belief in the past, all of this would disappear.”

“It will disappear whether we believe in the past or not.”

Emma nodded her head. “Some people turn away from the future because they fear they cannot master it. They fear they have no place in it. But that is not why I have been a ghost. I have always felt that the past is a mirror
that persuades us, that compels us, to behave well. That is why I studied it and why I taught you, so that we would know how to live.” She suddenly looked tired. She rose from the bed with a sigh.