House of Many Gods (5 page)

M
AX FOUND HER A SECRETARIAL JOB AT A COMMUNITY COLLEGE
where eventually she would complete her degree. At first he puzzled her, a man who dressed impeccably as if to compensate for something lost in his expression, something sad, used-up. He asked few questions. He did not seem to ask much of life either.

But as weeks passed, they began to talk in such a natural way the hours seemed calibrated into periods of stillness and motion, coolness and warmth, a flawless, almost timeless ease. Yet Ana was careful, leaving blanks rather than lie so that she would not have to cover her tracks, lie to protect earlier lies. Rather, she told him half-truths.

She had dropped out of university. She had left home because her family stifled her. With seeming modest dignity, she spoke of her Hawaiian father, a well-known lawyer. And her uncle, a celebrated trumpeter who had played for heads of state in Europe. Testing Max’s credulity, she began to see how near truths and half-truths could ease her way into the world.

And so she told of her great-grandfather who had owned a phaeton and matching steeds with which he had raced through the cobblestone streets of Honolulu to play checkers with the queen. And as she continued, Ana saw how in telling her tales, she assumed a kind of power over Max, how in linking sequences of made-up events she captured and held his attention, making him her accomplice.

She told of a thieving ancestor who had stolen all the land from her father’s side of the family.

“We never speak of him in public. Hawaiians believe the tongue is the steering paddle of the mouth. Better to hold the paddle still than speak offending thoughts.”

She told of farmers of the valleys whose torches zigzagged through the nights, folks so poor they still went forth to borrow fire.

“Some nights our fire god
Lono-makua
, sends them fire from the hearts of bursting rocks, which we call
pōhaku
. With these, folks light their torches, until each rock says it has had enough.”

Max had leaned forward smiling, only half believing her tales. But by patiently listening, he saw how very slowly, like an image in a developing tray, her truer self began to emerge. And later, recalling the stories she had told, Ana realized that some of them were true.

She remembered Nanakuli nights rippling with running flames as folks without electricity ran through the fields with borrowed fire. There
was
an uncle famous for his trumpet-playing, though he had never played for heads of state. And in fact, her father
was
a well-known lawyer, though he had started out a beachboy. What she did not tell was that for the first sixteen years of her life, she did not know he was her father. And the woman she believed was her older sister turned out to be her mother.

… She birthed me in a tub, in wartime during blackout. My mother, Malia. Stifling her screams by biting down hard on a bar of soap. Then wiping her birth blood on her mother’s thighs, and calling me that woman’s child. In that way, I was born to lying. I was born a lie
 …

When they had finally confronted her—telling her who she was, and who they were—she understood there was such a thing as truth with taste, and truth without taste. She had been unplanned, a mistake. And even after they told her, her parents virtually ignored her, so impassioned they looked right through her trying to get at each other. And so she had made her own mistake, and finally got their attention.

All in all, she had not entirely lied to Max. Her background, if not happy, was interesting. She was interesting. Only, she never told him of the child. Perhaps when the girl was older, perhaps when they were in touch again. She fell asleep thinking of the metaphysical quality of the word
perhaps
.

I
N TIME SHE AND
M
AX HAD BECOME LOVERS, NOT BECAUSE SHE
loved him but she felt he had earned her, more than earned her. And because she was weary of being alone, weary of self-loving, and self-loathing. She wanted someone to do it for her. They lived in his house in Pacific Heights, a rather formal house—all was foreground and exact. But one room held only a grand piano and a terrace overlooking a garden
of blooming orange trees. Ana thought she could live in that one room. She could grow old and die there watching the gardener rake the gravel driveway slowly and thoughtfully, like a croupier.

A stately Siamese prowled the house and some nights it padded across her stomach. Something breathed softly in her face. Paws like little clutching hands. She dreamed of old midwives, their voices shouting “
Pahū. Ho‘opūhūhū
!” Push. Push hard. She remembered how in those moments she wanted to reach up and strike them. Let them lie down and push. She thought how her mother must have pushed, wanting her out, unborn.

And some nights she dreamed of the father of her child, handsome, reckless, eyes of shave-ice green. Handcuffs jangling at his hips. Then she and his child had been banished to a dehydrated coast.
Four years I tried. A bastard raising her little bastard
. In the end she had loved the child. She had thought of marrying the father. But then a gunshot, a sound so innocent. Like someone opening a flip-top can. And there was nothing but to run, find a better life. Men did it all the time.

As she and Max grew closer she began to perceive how the act of conversation was a gift, how that exchange between two humans made one feel less alone, feel just a bit more capable of bearing things. And so she came to love the give-and-take, the miracle of cells jostling and combining, the slow adagio of minds proceeding in the same direction.

When he saw how bright she was, how hungry for knowledge, he sent her back to college to finish her degree. Then he steered her to certain medical texts which introduced the interlocking brilliance of the human immune system, the difference between T-cells, antibodies, and antigens. The makeup of phagocytes and lymphocytes. The genius of the thymus, a tiny gland that produced tens of millions of killer-vigilantes of the human immune system—lymphocytes or T-cells—and then proceeded to kill off those cells, keeping only the most “intelligent,” with the sharpest powers of recognition.

As her fascination with Max’s work grew, Anahola earned an advanced degree in biochemistry, became his lab intern, and eventually his assistant. It was extremely solitary work, perfect for a woman who had always proceeded at a tangent from the crowd. There was something urgent about sitting poised on a stool over a microscope, completely focused and alert; she lost all sense of artifice and vanity. The world outside melted away. Time itself seemed to dissolve, as a second world—the truer, minute world—made itself known to her.

Such moments gave Ana a deep sense of fulfillment, as if she had finally
found the answers to life, its riddles. When, in the future, she occasionally grew bored, suspecting she had not sufficiently challenged life, had not tested the limits of her daring and her drive, she would remember that first grueling year in Chinatown.

 … I
T HAS BEEN FOUR YEARS SINCE
A
NAHOLA LEFT THE ISLANDS
and one day Max asks her to accompany him to a conference on immunology. It will be held on the outer island of Kaua‘i, a forty-minute flight from Honolulu. At first she is terrified, fearing the island will take her hostage again. But he is a kind man, and has asked for very little. Her company would give him pleasure
.

When they arrive, she is extremely uncomfortable at the Coco Palms Hotel, hating the nightly blowing of the conch shell, the theatrical torch-lighting ceremony on the lagoon, entertainment geared for tourists. As she enters the dining room, men lift their heads like game dogs tracking spoor. Pale-shouldered women stare with anthropological interest. She sees herself through their eyes: rich, honey-colored skin, full lips, a languid sultry body. Except for the waiters, she is the only nonwhite in the room. She pulls herself in, her movements exaggeratedly chaste, and makes her way to the table
.

In one glance the staff of the hotel recognizes her as local, and that she is this older man’s kept woman. As Max becomes engaged in seminars, she is left more and more alone. Painfully self-conscious, she wears suits and high heels even to breakfast. She ignores the maids. But after a few days she begins to lose her bearings. The perfumed island air becomes a drug, making her eyelids heavy. Flowers drop in her lap, big and pale like the ears of priests waiting to hear her confession
.

An old bronzed man with aged-dove hair sits mending a fishing net, “talking story” like tūtū men from her childhood. She hears the blending of Pidgin and Hawaiian Mother Tongue that in the mouths of soft-voiced elders becomes intrinsically poetic. One night, hearing the wounded music of the sea, she runs barefoot to the beach and dives into moon-shot waves. She feels the harmony of things, the bliss of letting go. She thinks of the child and her ‘ohana
.

The next day she takes a forty-minute flight to Honolulu, then a cab out to the west coast. She stares at the stark Wai‘anae Mountains, at cattle thirsty for so-plenty rain. Alongside the highway are trash bags spilling chicken heads, used-up cans of Roach Motel. Skinny poi dogs run in packs. Kids in an abandoned truck seem to be sniffing glue rags
.

At a traffic light, a woman pulls up beside them in a car that looks welded
together from many cars. Her face is bruised, one eye shut. She sees the cabbie staring and leans out of the window
.

“Ey! Wha’ choo looking at, manong?” Then she floors the gas and takes off
.

The Filipino driver glances at his passenger in the rearview, a pretty woman in a suit. “Rough neighborhood out here. Sure you know where you going?”

Anahola smiles at him. “This town holds all of my mistakes.”

They turn up Keola Road and drive past a pond where piggeries discharge their waste, past an old school bus oxidized to rust, then small neat houses with pretty yards full of flapping laundry. They turn into the potholed driveway of the house
.

In high heels and a pongee suit, she stands in the living room amongst them, self-consciously handing out cartons of cigarettes and See’s Candy from San Francisco. She has forgotten to take her shoes off at the door; the family stares as her heels sink into termite-ridden floorboards. She totters slightly, stylish, well cared for, out of place
.

Yet here she is to show that she has not forgotten them. She sits and drinks a beer that someone offers, and dips her hand into a bag of soggy, boiled peanuts. Food seems to float across the room, great bowls cupped in big, dark hands. Laulau dripping good, good grease. Poi, and lomi salmon. Steaming mounds of rice and fish
.

While she eats, she glances round the room. Same old rusty flit gun on the windowsill. In the kitchen, same Bull Durham bag wrapped round the faucet for the drip. She shifts her weight, looking farther into the kitchen and sees the kerosene string still tied round each leg of the Frigidaire to ward off ants. Food relaxes her elders and makes them somewhat confident. They ask about California, the weather, about jobs. Do folks eat poi there? And kimchee? They do not ask who she is living with. She will tell them that in time. Or not
.

“How is Uncle Noah?” she asks
.

They laugh, pointing to his room, where he sits at his window, a sentry at his post. Later, she knocks and steps into his room. “Noah. Pehea oe?” How are you
.

He turns from the window, her father’s younger brother who saw too much combat in Korea
.

She moves forward and holds him. “Don’t hate me. I had to go. I had to.”

What she wants is for him to say that it’s all right. That life will be right. Instead, he pulls her to the window and they gaze out for a while. His hands are broad like her father’s had been and now he takes one of her hands in his, following her lifeline with his finger. He turns it over, smoothing her knuckles,
then balls her hand into a fist and squeezes it over and over, as if to say, Be strong. Be strong
.

For a while she sits in the bedroom with little Ana, surrounded by rickety bamboo furniture, and old flower leis gathering bugs and mildew on the walls. She smokes a cigarette, watching the child dig under the sheets, hiding from her, too frightened to talk to her. Each time she reaches out her hand, the girl scuttles deeper and deeper away from her, so that only her feet show, sienna-tinted from red dirt
.

“Who can blame you?” she whispers
.

Wanting to give her privacy, folks had moved out to the lānai. Now she stands in the living room alone, and in the silence hears the drip. drip. of stewed guava sieving through a cheesecloth. She knows it will drip all night for ‘ono guava jelly. She writes a check and leaves it discreetly under the sugar bowl. Finally, she steps outside and hugs each one good-bye, then slides into the cab, still smelling stewed guava, and the iron-rich soil of Nanakuli
.