This Is Paradise (18 page)

“You’ve got a steady hand,” Pili called from the doorway. Albert smiled and motioned for Pili to join them.

“No distract ’im,” Harrison said to Pili. “He get one razor at my neck. I no can escape.”

“If you like talk when I shave you, you no more have no lips.”

“Auwē! Look, son, he like t’reaten me. I glad you hea fo’ see dis.” Both Albert and Harrison laughed. After a moment Pili joined in, but he had the feeling this was a practiced joke between them and he merely an accidental audience.

Albert touched Harrison’s face firmly, lifting the skin at his jaw to get a good, clean shave on the neck, and then, when the shaving was finished, wiping down Harrison’s face with a cool cloth and patting his skin with Old Spice. Pili was jealous. He wanted his father to laugh with him as he did with Albert. He wanted Albert to touch him as Albert touched Harrison. Pili wanted to be either of them, or both.

“After this shave, you like go holoholo?” Albert teased.

“I’ll go get your good boots,” Pili added. “Make sure they’re shined.”

“Like find me some good-lookin’ woman fo’ dance,” Harrison said. He lifted his arms and held them curved around the air in front of him, like he was holding a woman around the waist. “Hell, like find one māhū if he haf da kine legs and know how fo’ two-step.” He laughed hard at that, and Albert with him, but this time Pili remained silent.

The subject of māhūs always left Pili reeling. Sometimes he felt his father was purposefully aiming jokes at him, and other times he believed Harrison was just a product of his generation and place. The debate over his father’s intentions had plagued Pili since he was twelve and had accompanied his father to Oʻahu. Pili had, until that trip, assumed his father knew everything about him, and that between them no secrets existed.

They had flown to Oʻahu so Harrison could finalize the arrangements for the sale of two ponies to a polo player on North Shore. Pili went along to witness the inspection of the horses, the negotiations, and the gentlemanly airs of the polo men. Selling to them was different than selling to a fellow paniolo.

After the papers were signed, Harrison drove to his sister’s place in Kailua, and in the evening the three of
them—Harrison, Pili, and Pili’s aunt Inez—visited Waikīkī. They strolled along Kalākaua Avenue to take advantage of the view of the beach. The waves were small, hardly the kind of thundering mountains Pili had seen on North Shore that morning, but he barely noticed. The few times they had come to Oʻahu, they had never visited Waikīkī. Now Pili was there, with his father and aunt, having been chosen over his sister, and he felt very grown up and important. He would have liked if his mother had been along too, but she had stayed behind to continue training the two-year-olds and a pair of five-year-old stallions she had taken on from another ranch. Later, when Pili reflected back on this trip, he would realize it had occurred just a couple months before his mother’s accident.

In Waikīkī, at the International Marketplace, Pili perused the vendors’ stalls, studying the coconut purses and overpriced shell combs lining the tables. He stepped into the T-shirt shops to feel the air-conditioning chill the sweat on his face and arms, and he stared through the windows of the bathing suit stores with their bikinis and pareos in bright flower patterns. Outside the Moana Surfrider, Pili paused to watch the bellhops as they jumped to open car doors and load luggage on carts made from gleaming brass. The young men were dressed smartly in white coats with matching white gloves to keep the brass from being smudged. They moved with grace, their bodies bending and twisting to lift Samsonite suitcases and to open doors and to prance with their carts into the hotel.
Pili watched them as he might a parade of young fillies, captivated by their energy and beauty.

Harrison led them past the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center, which was poorly lit and dank and curved in endless hallways. Inez asked to look at more stores, but Harrison laughed at her for acting like a tourist and they went instead to walk around the grounds of the Royal Hawaiian. The hotel was the pink of a wilted lokelani flower. Pili stared at its high walls and felt that the small, square windows were fifty pairs of eyes returning his gaze.

The bellhops at the Royal Hawaiian were dressed just as well as those at the Moana, but their movements were heavier, less lithe, stiffer. They, too, wore crisp jackets, but in black rather than white, and this, combined with their movements, made them seem older. They were not as smooth-cheeked either. In fact, one bellhop even had the fuzz of a young mustache. Pili watched him the most closely. He was probably in his early twenties, with full lips, brown hair bleached to red from the sun, and fine lines at the outer corners of his eyes. He had a weathered look about him, like a sailor, and Pili wondered if the man’s skin would feel rough or smooth to the touch.

Harrison and Inez walked with their heads bent together, his arm tucked around her waist. Harrison was describing Mahea’s latest feat, breaking one of the five-year-old stallions. The horses had belonged to another rancher, and only Mahea would take them on. They weren’t worth any of the other paniolos’ time. But Mahea
loved working with horses like these, taming and calming them, creating a bond where none had existed before. Harrison’s descriptions focused on Mahea’s more daring tactics—Pili knew his father loved impressing other women with stories of Mahea—and when Inez gasped in both fear and admiration, Harrison smiled broadly.

However, Pili didn’t love these stories. They left him dry-mouthed and jumpy. He tried to ignore his father, turning to look again at the rough-cheeked bellhop, and this time the young man noticed and smiled. Pili felt his throat close. All he could think to do was run, but when he caught up to his father and aunt, he immediately wished he hadn’t fled.

They returned along Kūhiō Avenue, which was grittier and dirtier than Kalākaua, with more bars and men in military costume. Pili paused to stare at the front window of a bar, its glass shattered in a cobweb pattern, its fragmented pieces held together with black duct tape, and when he looked back toward the street, he saw his father and aunt had again walked ahead of him. They stopped when the light turned red at Lewers, and Pili dodged two Japanese women with shopping bags in order to catch up. At the corner, he found himself pressed into the crowd, standing beside a tall woman in a black evening gown. Her legs were long and shapely, covered in mesh stockings that drew attention to a deep slit in the dress revealing her left thigh. She had black hair, as black as her dress, hair that was dyed over and over until it was stiff and dry. Her
lips were plush, like the lips of the bellhop Pili had admired, and her eyelashes were thickly layered. Pili stared at her without meaning to.

She smiled. “Good evening, sir.” Her voice was like cigarette smoke curling in the evening air.

“Good evening, Auntie,” Pili answered, smiling back at her.

She laughed, clearly delighted, but where Pili had expected the high, floating laugh of his mother, this woman’s laughter dropped low and hovered.

Harrison noticed Pili then. Immediately he tensed, and Pili could tell something had upset him. Harrison nodded politely at the woman and took Pili’s hand, though Pili was far too old to hold hands. When the light turned, Harrison marched them across the street.

Inez had to run to catch up. “Oh, Harrison,” she said, laughing, and rested her hand on his arm. “So country, you.” But Harrison was not laughing, and Pili wondered what had made him so serious.

“Boy, you see anyting diff’rent ’bout dat woman? Da one you call Auntie?” Harrison demanded when they reached the other street corner.

Pili shook his head.

“Nutting?” Inez asked more gently, a smile prying at her lips.

“She wen dye ’er hair?”

Inez laughed. “Yeah, she wen dye ’er hair. Dat not da only ting she wen do.”

“Dat one māhū, son,” Harrison said finally. “A man like tink he one woman.”

Pili knew what a māhū was, though he had never seen one in person, only on television or in movies. But there was a boy in school—Jesse—who everyone said was māhū. In grade school he used to chase Pili and his friends around the playground, chase them like the girls did, and sometimes he’d catch them and pin them to the ground, sitting on them so his stuff was almost touching theirs. He moved like a girl, he dressed like a girl wearing pants. He even had the skin of a girl, clear and smooth. Pili had little interest in Jesse other than to copy his math homework, but he made fun of him anyway along with the other boys.

Inez led them back to the parking lot where they had left the car. “Funny, yeah, Dad,” Pili said, as Harrison fit the key into its lock. “Māhūs, dey try so hard fo’ look good, but dey neva beautiful like da real ting.”

Pili watched his father’s shoulders relax. Harrison smiled. “Dat, Son, is da trut’. Nutting beautiful like one real woman.”

In bed that night Pili thought of the bellhop, the one at the Royal Hawaiian. I am not māhū, he said to himself. He did not want to play as if he were a girl, nor dress like a woman, nor powder his face as his aunt did. But he did think about touching a man in the way his friends spoke of touching a woman. He wanted to feel the soft hairs on another man’s arm, and press his hand against the smooth landscape of another man’s chest. He wanted to stand so
close to a man, he could breathe him in, and instead of a girl’s passionfruit chapstick or coconut lotion, he would smell musk and heat and that peculiar sour of dried sweat.

I am not māhū, Pili repeated to himself. Yet, when he had told Harrison nothing was as beautiful as the real thing, he had not meant women but men.

Albert refused to join Maile and Pili for dinner in the evening. Maile often asked him to, but he always declined, and eventually she would relent and promise to set aside a plate of food for whenever he got hungry. Pili never caught Albert eating—Pili never saw him do anything except care for or talk to Harrison—but each morning the food had disappeared, and the plate was washed and dried and back in the cupboard.

While Pili and Maile ate, Albert sat beside Harrison, the bedside lamp casting a yellow circle around the two of them. They spoke off and on. Harrison liked when Albert read aloud from
West Hawaiʻi Today
or a breeding bull catalog or, more rarely, the Hawaiian prayer book that had belonged to Mahea. Eventually Harrison drifted off. Sometimes he slept through half the night, but usually he was wracked by violent coughing fits that were calmed only when Albert administered codeine or, increasingly, morphine.

Pili spied on Albert and his father. He wasn’t proud of this, but he did it anyway. In the evening, on his way to
the bathroom, to his bedroom, to select a book from the shelf in the hall, he’d glance into the study to see what they were doing or saying or even how Albert’s body was positioned in relation to Harrison’s. Again, in the early morning, when Pili awoke to conference with his assistant in San Francisco, he’d peek in on Harrison and Albert, and they’d still be together, side by side, just as Pili had left them the night before. Once Pili even glimpsed Albert leaning over Harrison’s body and dabbing gently at his temples where a layer of perspiration shone. Pili wondered what made Albert care for Harrison like that. What made him so selfless? And how could he be so comfortable with Harrison? At night, in bed, Pili wondered if his father favored Albert, or even Maile, over Pili. Did he crave their care more than the paltry conversation Pili offered? Was Pili perhaps even a joke among them—they who knew each other’s habits so well?

One night, plagued by these doubts and unable to sleep, Pili made his way to the kitchen. As he passed his father’s study, he peeked beneath the door, but no light seeped from the room and he wondered if, during the long hours of the night, Albert read by flashlight or slept in the chair beside Harrison’s bed or merely sat in the dark with his own thoughts and Harrison’s haggard breath to keep him company. In the kitchen, Pili didn’t bother to turn on the lights. He poured himself a glass of water and walked to the window where just a few days before Maile had pressed her hand to the pane. The land appeared black
and thick as a wool rug, and the sky was dotted with tiny pinpricks of stars. He felt impossibly small.

“It’s dark in here,” a voice said. Pili turned to see Albert leaning against the kitchen door frame, one hand wrapped around the wood and the other resting on his thigh. “Do you always stand around in the dark?”

“I can see the stars better with the lights off.”

“In that case, I’ll let my eyes adjust.” Albert found his dinner plate and heated it in the microwave. He sat at the table and motioned for Pili to do the same. The room was warm still from the sun beating into it all day, and along the bottom edge of the window frame condensation had gathered in large, drooping pearls. Pili wanted to dip his finger into those droplets and see if he could taste the night air.

“How you holding up?” Albert asked. He had rice in his mouth, and the smell of beef stew was strong.

“Fine, I guess.” Pili shrugged.

“You getting along okay during the day?”

“Sure. My sister runs a one-woman show, and my father and I are merely the audience. A very well-fed audience.”

“I’ll tell you a secret.” Albert leaned toward Pili. “I’ve gained six pounds in the two months I’ve worked here!” He took another bite of stew and chewed it sideways, like a cow, his jaw working in a left to right motion. “But I can’t complain. I’ve never had a placement where I was fed like this. Your sister knows how to take care of a man. I
just wish she would relax a little. I would give up the dinners to see her chill out.”

“I’ve been trying to get her to relax since we were kids.”

Albert laughed as if Pili were making a joke.

“I’d like to help her during the day,” Pili said, “but I don’t know what to do and she won’t show me. I end up just sitting and talking with Dad most of the time.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“But she’s doing all the work. I feel like a schlump.”

“Don’t. It’s her choice. I think it’s great you sit and talk with your dad.” Pili watched as a carrot bounced from one side of Albert’s tongue to the other. “I’ll tell you something: I was seventeen when my grandmother died. I was her hānai son. She had raised me since I was four, made me her own, but she was old when I came along, you know? I cared for her at the end. It’s what made me become a nurse. But being her caretaker was a full-time job, and I don’t mean time. I mean, when I became her caretaker, I ceased to be her grandson. I had to know every part of her body. I had to see her in ways a child should never see a parent. And I didn’t mind. I loved her too much to mind. But for her? How humiliating. For her grandson to stare on her naked body, to wipe her mouth and her ʻōkole, to tend to bedsores and see and touch every part of her skin. To empty her catheter and clean her feeding tube and wash out her mouth at night with a washcloth because her face had shrunk and her dentures no longer fit her
mouth and a toothbrush was too rough on her gums.” He stood and made his way to the sink. “You don’t want to be a nurse to your father, and you don’t have to be. I wish your sister would realize that, too.”