Sleeping Beauties (26 page)

Burta shook with anger. “Your mother was a bitch, too. You’re just the same! No wonder no one ever wanted you. At least she had money.”

Clio, who had turned to look once more at the forest, turned back, and calmly put her hands around Burta’s neck.

Lynott came onto the lanai, a martini in his hand. “Burta, your show is on television! Sweetheart?” He waved hello to Clio, then pointed to the face of his watch.

Burta hesitated. She looked back and forth between Clio and Lynott. Clio smiled and let her go. Burta wiped the corners of her lips, her mouth held wide so as not to smear her dark red lipstick. Her hands were shaking. “Don’t you ever come here again. Don’t dare come here!” She strode unsteadily toward the lanai.

“Your show’s just starting!” Lynott called. “You’re just in time.” He paused. “You look funny, sweetheart. Are you all right?”

“I want to go with you this time,” Steamy said to Clio. “Don’t leave me here again.”

“You’ll be fine, Steamy. You were always fine.”

“There’s my contact!” he said in surprise, bending down to pluck it from the grass. There was a dark circle where the dew had soaked through the seat of his trousers. He held the lens proudly between his fingers. “You know what I was thinking just then? It reminded me of the time I
cut my head. You bandaged it with stuff from the forest. Do you remember?”

“I remember. You were fine. Then and now.”

“You’re not disappointed?”

“Disappointed?”

“In me. In all of us.”

Clio turned to nod goodbye to the ancestor figures on the lanai. She knew that she would not see them again. She looked at the silver
kukui
trees on the hill. The sound of the stream was lighter than usual. It was going to rain. I did not run into the forest, she thought.

“No, I’m not disappointed,” she said and kissed him goodbye.

“There is someone here,” Tadashi said as Clio came in the kitchen door. “On the lanai.”

A man?”

Tadashi nodded and pointed to the garden. Clio had hoped to rest before seeing Tommy. She wiped her face and hands with a towel and went out the kitchen door.

Sitting on the lanai with Emma and Mabel was a man, as Tadashi had said. They were listening to
Lucia di Lammermoor
, Mabel’s favorite opera. The man lifted his dark head when he saw Clio, and rose to greet her.

“We’ve been waiting for you. You’re here at last,” Emma said.

Clio stared at Henry. He smiled at her, amused by her surprise.

“He hasn’t much interest in the past!” Mabel shouted. “Isn’t it grand?”

They laughed. “We have been talking about Moloka‘i,” Emma said. “Henry says that it has changed very little. I never much liked Moloka‘i. Did I ever tell you that, Clio?
Oh, I saw its beauty, but it was too Hawaiian for me. Tell me,” Emma asked Henry, “is the General Hospital still there? My father gave that to Moloka‘i.”

“Everything is the same, although Moloka‘i Ranch is now owned by people from New Zealand. The men are angry because they brought in ranch hands from Mexico.”

“I remember your mother,” Emma said. “She was good on a horse.”

“My father said she was the best he ever saw,” Henry said.

Emma looked at Clio. “I used to hope that Clio would write down the story of these islands. Our story, and your story, Henry. But now it seems so foolhardy an idea that I wonder how I could ever have imagined such a thing. I am going to change. I am going to do it differently. How could I have spent my life this way? And to enlist Clio in behalf of the past! Write it down for whom?”

“For me,” Clio said quickly. “That was our understanding, Aunt Emma. You allowed me to live at Wisteria House, and in exchange, I learned what you had to teach me. I was happy to learn it.” Something in Emma’s voice made Clio feel alarmed.

“Letters, songs, name-chants. Lists of extinct birds! What does it all signify? You two should sign up to go to the moon.”

“Well, Paris, maybe,” Clio said. “Paris would be nice.”

“Does he play ‘Net of the Moon’?” Mabel asked, taking Clio’s hand.

“You know, Clio,” Emma said before Clio could answer, “that committee to protest the Navy’s missile testing on Kaho‘olawe has been in touch with me. They’ve asked if I’ll accompany them. They need support. As someone interested in saving ancient sites, they thought I might be of
assistance.” She paused. “This would be about the future. For a change.”

Clio looked at her in surprise. “A protest will make no difference to the government, Emma. They’ve been using Kaho‘olawe as a bomb site for years. Kaho‘olawe itself has been abandoned for a century. It is hardly hallowed land.”

“Will you answer me, Clio?” Mabel asked querulously. “Does he play ‘Net of the Moon’ or do I have to wait for Kageshiro to come?”

“The channel is very rough this time of year. There are sudden storms. It’s a meaningless demonstration. There are better things for you to do than circle Kaho‘olawe in a bad sea for hours,” Clio said.

Emma looked at her. “I’ve spent years doing just the sort of other things you mean. So have you. Raising money and spending money and recording oral histories and restoring buildings, and that, as you know, has made very little difference.”

“It has mattered to us,” Clio said.

“I don’t think the boy has eaten,” Mabel said loudly.

Clio looked at Henry. She was suddenly weary. She wanted to be alone with him. She could think of nothing but putting her hand on his skin, her mouth on his skin. She dared not stare at him too long, lest Emma see her desire. Emma would not disapprove, she knew, but Clio was protective of her passion. It was one of the first things she’d ever thought of as her own, and she meant to keep it her own for as long as she could.

“Are you hungry, young man?” Mabel shouted over the opera. “Kageshiro is late.”

“Will you stay here with us?” Clio asked him. “I live in the cottage in the garden.”

He nodded. She could feel that he, too, was full of desire.

They rose together.

“I believe that I knew your father,” Emma said quickly, gazing up at him. “He taught me to lasso.” She smiled. “It sounds funny now, but he did.”

“I always wanted him to teach me,” Henry said, “but he never had time.”

“There you are,” Emma said.

“Perhaps you could teach him,” Clio said to Emma.

“Perhaps I could.”

“I am very hungry,” Mabel said. “Will you bring him to us as soon as he is ready?”

“It sounds as if you’re going to eat me,” he said.

“We have returned to the ways of our ancestors after all,” Emma said, laughing.

She lay on the bed and watched him take off his shirt. He looked out of place amidst the rich bed hangings. His presence made the room seem too feminine.

He looked at the sorcery sculpture that Emma had given to Clio the summer she left her job in the camera store. Bits of dried flesh and the blood of human sacrifice were still lodged in the god’s saw-toothed helmet, and Clio was surprised to see him touch it so easily. He noticed her expression. “It’s not voodoo, Clio,” he said with a smile.

“So I’m discovering.”

He went into the sitting room.

“It is so unlike Emma to join a demonstration,” she said. She could not see him from the bed. “She won’t even lend her name to a committee. This is very odd of her. It’s all because of your father.”

“I’ll go with her,” he said from the other room. “My father?”

“I’ll go, too,” she said.

“No,” he said, coming into the room. “It’s a small boat.”

He stood at the side of the bed. His bare arms and chest
were dark against the bed. His hair rested heavily on the back of his neck. The wind had risen, and she could hear the jasmine vines brush against the screen.

He bent over the bed and lifted her hips. He pulled down her skirt and underpants, and took off her shirt. He lay her arms on the pillows above her head. He parted her legs.

He looked at her as if he were looking at a woman for the first time. Perhaps he was. She closed her eyes, barely able to lie still beneath his scrutiny, unable to watch him while he looked at her. He began to speak to her, telling her what he saw. Clio had learned to wait to discover what it was that he thought, what it was that he wanted. It sometimes seemed to her that they made love in order to talk.

The jasmine moved back and forth across the screen. She could hear the birds settling in their nests. There was the shuffle of an animal looking for some small live thing to eat, a mongoose perhaps, on his evening round. It trotted up and down the path outside the window. She wondered if she would ever be able to stop listening.

He held her open with his fingers. She flushed with shame and desire.

“I could have guessed it,” a voice said. “Actually, I knew all along.”

Henry slowly turned his head. He had never seen him before. He gazed impassively at him, waiting patiently as if it were Tommy who needed to explain himself.

He took his hand from her vagina. He gave her her shirt and watched as she put it on. It was inside out and it bunched under her arms. He pulled it over her bare lap, covering her.

“What do you want?” she asked. She had meant to speak with force, but she could only whisper. “Why are you here?”

“I came to get you.” His eyes flickered for a moment to the sorcery idol. “What the fuck do you think?” He rested his hand on the base of the sculpture.

Henry rose, his pants unbuttoned at the waist. “There’s nothing for you here,” he said, standing at the foot of the bed.

Tommy turned as if he had just realized that there was another man in the room. He lifted the sorcery god from its pedestal and held it loosely in one hand. A scrap of ancient
kapa
cloth, dry and brittle, fell to the floor. “Want to bet?”

Clio slid off the bed. The T-shirt reached only to her waist, but she seemed not to know it.

“Is this all about Morocco?” he suddenly yelled. “Is that it? Man, I told you: I believe in adult education. It was just that once. Did it ever happen before? No. And it won’t happen again. Women do things just as bad to men. Sometimes worse things. It fucking evens out.”

She wondered what it was that women did to men that was worse than beating them. Perhaps he means murder, she thought. It was a curious scorecard that he was keeping. “If I beat you up and leave you bleeding in the Sunrise Suite at the Kahala Hilton, we’ll be even? We could stay together?”

“Even?” He laughed. “I didn’t say that. I don’t think it works quite that way. Sorry.” He passed the idol from hand to hand, and she realized that he was nervous, and that his nervousness made him dangerous. I wouldn’t be able to beat him senseless, she thought. I am not strong enough. That is why it doesn’t work that way. It never has, and it never will.

“Put your clothes on,” he said in disgust. He picked up her skirt from the floor and threw it in her face.

Henry stepped toward him and Tommy took the god in two hands and struck him in the head.

There was blood on Henry’s face, dark against his skin, and Tommy looked startled. Henry gazed at him with interest. Then he grabbed him tightly around the chest. Tommy dropped the sorcery god with the force of his embrace. There was a smell of sweat and expensive tanning oil. Tommy’s silk shirt was dark with perspiration. There was blood on Henry’s chest, and on his arms.

As she bent to pick up the sculpture, to safeguard it, Tommy kicked out at her in fury. She looked up in surprise and she saw that Henry was no longer interested in making it easy for him. He was no longer curious, no longer amused that Tommy would be so reckless as to try to fight him. Clio saw that he was angry. He meant to hurt him.

He shoved him out the open door onto the porch. Tommy fell to his knees and Henry bent low and picked him up with one hand and hit him across the face.

Tommy put his hand to his face. He was bleeding, and he stared at the blood in amazement. “He cut my face!” he said, shocked. “He cut my face!” He looked up at Clio, as if for help, wiping the blood and mucous from his face with his sleeve. “I knew it! I knew you were fucking someone. I knew it all the time. You deserve each other. Fucking island.” He spit blood.

“You knew nothing,” she said.

“Cunt.”

Clio whispered, “Take him away from here. Take him away!”

Tommy tried to stand, but he could not get to his feet. Henry lifted him and pushed him ahead of him, and Tommy fell onto the grass.

She closed the door and turned off the lights, afraid of being seen, not by Emma, not even by Tommy, but by someone, some stranger, who meant her harm. She ran from room to room, into the kitchen, into the bathroom,
full of fear and elation. There was a quarter moon, like a clean fingernail, low in the sky, but she did not see it.

Henry let himself in quietly. “I thought you were gone,” he said as she darted to him through the darkness. “The lights were out.”

“Gone?” she whispered in astonishment.

He held her to his bare chest and she kissed his eyes and his hands. There was blood on his hands. He was breathing heavily.

She held herself apart from him, to see him.

In the pavilion, Mabel had started
Lucia
again, playing it very loud.

She leaned into his chest. “Forgive me,” she said. “No more Love Contests.”

The boat was very small, as he had said. The life preservers were stuffed beneath the console. There was a radio so that Henry could talk to the other boats. His cousin Leroy was on a blue sampan. One of the fishing boats had been chartered by the Human Reactor, who had come from Hiroshima after all.

The Coast Guard had dispatched a cutter and it was so close that Clio could see the faces of the young sailors as they watched idly from the sides. They looked sunburned, and a little bored.

The island of Kaho‘olawe, bare of vegetation, disappeared with each new sweep of water, and Clio, like the sailors, wondered why they were there.

Emma stood at the wheel with Henry. “All cultures end eventually, Henry,” she shouted, turning to smile at Clio.

Henry, intent on keeping the small boat steady, did not answer. Emma turned again to Clio and beckoned to her with a gesture that seemed to take in the sky and bleak
Kaho‘olawe, and even the pink-faced, sullen boys on the cutter.