Sleeping Beauties (16 page)

“As Mabel would say, you mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that memory is fact.”

“You’re agreeing with Burta? You’re actually saying to me, Steamy, your brother, your
half
-brother, that you didn’t come crashing down out of the tree because you’d put a hundred mangoes in your pockets?” He was furious.

“Of course I fell out of the tree. And you saved me. You called the fire department.” She smiled at him, her mouth underwater.

“She never knew that it was me who called. So I can’t take too much credit for it.”

“Yes, you can.”

He reached for her braid. She moved away, but he caught her by the leg and pulled her to him, embracing her, his hands finding her in the cold water. He put his hands on her hips. Her skin looked very white in the water.

“Steamy!” she said, kicking him. She swam to the side and lifted herself onto a rock. She twisted her braid like a dishrag and water ran down her arms. The light was almost gone and the pond looked like a hole in the middle
of the forest. She climbed over the rocks, arms outstretched to balance herself.

It was not until she was in the grove of Norfolk pine that she felt crisp again, light in the cool air, not sad, not rushing. She liked the feel of chilled skin on bone. She shivered, and remembered that when they were children they had called a shiver a cheap thrill.

Behind her, she could hear Steamy kicking and splashing furiously in the cold pond that didn’t want him, that didn’t want any of them.

A
lthough Clio had been at Hale Moku for a month, she still had not seen her father. She’d called several times, and she had been relieved when he’d said that he was too busy preparing for the trial of the Kilohana brothers to take her to lunch. The Kilohanas had trespassed on government property, claiming the land was given to their grandfather in the Great Mahele, the nineteenth-century proclamation that granted homesteads to native Hawaiians. To Clio’s surprise, her father was prosecuting the Kilohana brothers, not defending them. Emma was not surprised, however. “Your father is the most practical man I’ve ever known. He always has been,” she said. “In some shrewd way, he’s figured out what will do him the most good. He’s always been at the front of the backlash.” She had laughed at her joke, but she was furious.

Clio finally made an appointment to see him at his office downtown. She was early, and the secretary told her that she would have to wait until Mr. Lynott was free. She was too restless to sit in one of the chairs in the big reception room. She stood at the window. She could just distinguish Wisteria House, nearly hidden by the buildings surrounding it. She thought of Lester, dead then, and the evening he had made her listen, over and over, first to Willie Smith, then to Wes Montgomery, so that she could tell them apart
in her sleep, and she wondered if it were true that traces of life disappear quickly. The house far below had not yet vanished, but she knew that it would not be long before it did, lost in its dusty, dry repose. She was startled when the secretary, a pretty blond girl, called her name. Mr. Lynott was able to see her. Clio realized that her father had not told the secretary that she was his daughter.

He looked up when Clio came into the room. They shook hands and then, conscious of their awkwardness, leaned stiffly over his big table to kiss on the cheek. He was not tall, but he was full-chested, like a mating bird. His gray hair had a natural disposition to curl and it stood out from the back of his head like a ruff. She looked at his beautiful English suit and smiled. She had never minded his smaller vanities, although she’d been embarrassed as a child whenever he wore his straw planter’s hat.

She sat on the stiff
koa
settee that her mother had left behind with her children and a few other burdensome things when she moved to Australia. The only thing that Clio remembered her mother taking—Clio had silently watched Kitty pack the whole fast week before she went away—was a silk negligé with her new initials embroidered on the bodice in tiny pearls that looked like grains of rice. Clio wondered what else Kitty must have liked enough to take with her, but she could never remember anything other than the pale green nightgown sewn with Biwa pearls.

“I thought you were in Morocco, Clio,” he said, looking down at a paper on the Philippine refectory table that he used as a desk.

She was uncomfortable on the horsehair sofa in the big glass room, Honolulu floating soundlessly all around them. The flat gray ocean reminded her of one of Steamy’s backdrops. When she did not answer, he reluctantly raised his head to look at her. She saw that his eyes were as gray as
the sea around them, and as unreflective, and she wondered if she were afraid of him, if he still had the means, and the will, to harm her.

“When do you go to trial?” she asked.

“Those Kilohana boys are making a lot of trouble for themselves. And for everyone else. Even if the land does turn out to belong to them. There’s a lot of this useless agitation in the air. This grass-roots shit. It’s got to be stopped before they all get big heads. Hawaiian rights! It’ll scare off the Japanese. You know, it’s one thing to go up against the Hawaiian Land Trust, but to take on the Feds, you have to be pretty stupid. Or full-blooded Hawaiian.” His laugh was like a short, sharp shout.

“It is one of the things I’ve always regretted not being,” Clio said.

“I would hardly regret not being stupid.”

She hesitated. “Yes. That’s it. I have really regretted not being stupid.”

He winked at her. “I’d hate to ask what else you regretted.”

Clio smiled in embarrassment, not for herself, but for him, and looked through the glass at Diamond Head, moving out to sea like a big brown ship. The ocean was still; it did not seem to move from so great a height. “There aren’t many things that I regret,” she said.

“I shouldn’t think so, married to a movie star.”

His gaze fell again to the papers on his desk. He forgot for a moment that she was sitting there, and when he looked up and saw her, he blinked. “Well,” he said, slapping the tops of his thighs. “What can I do you for? You know where to find me if you need me.”

She turned her gaze from the band of gray sea that seemed to encircle and confine them. “Why would I need you?”

“Don’t tell me you’re upset about this Kilohana business. Has Emma Fitzroy got you all riled up? Just think about
it a minute before you get on your high horse, Clio. These two local guys, one of them not even wearing a shirt or shoes, for Christ’s sake, hole themselves up in a deserted lighthouse. They don’t even use lighthouses anymore. Did you know that? It’s all computerized.” He stopped for a moment, distracted by Progress. “So there they are, two Hawaiian kids with a few fishing knives and some fermenting poi in a plastic bag, claiming that the lighthouse land is theirs. It was sad, Clio. If it weren’t so embarrassing for the Hawaiians, I’d be tempted to feel sorry for these boys.” He shook his head. “Maybe they thought they could light the lighthouse with luau torches.”

She wondered, as she had before, why the arguments of the ignorant had a greater clarity and seeming truth than the more complicated, more subtle, arguments of the wise. Her sense of powerlessness made it difficult to know what to say to him. She might as well try to explain, at last, how Dix had broken the Chinese lamp with his Frisbee.

“Perhaps,” she said, “the Kilohanas are aware of the hopelessness of their act. Perhaps they can no longer bear the difference between expectation and reality. Perhaps that is unbearable for them.”

“Oh, Clio,” he said, shaking his head. “You haven’t changed, all these years. I thought Hollywood would have made a difference. Thought you might have grown up. What was that again? The difference between ‘reality and unreality’?”

She realized that he was laughing at her, unaware of her curiosity, and the subdued interest she had always possessed, and the wish, still vivid after all, that he would love her and that she, more importantly, would love him. She had given him the means to patronize her. She was angry with herself.

“Come on, Clio, I thought you had the usual upper-class disdain for sentimentality.”

Her anger made her slow to understand his meaning. She suddenly felt her profound, abiding dislike of him. She saw in her quick way that she knew too much about him. She was so ashamed for him that she could not look at him. As she rose from the sofa, she understood for the first time why Kitty had not taken it with her, and she wondered idly if she and Dix had been as unaccommodating as the sofa.

“Sounds like you have that end-of-century thing, Clio. You know,
mal de siècle
or whatever it’s called. Pull yourself together, honey. Your grandmother probably collects the rent on that lighthouse. You’re a vested interest.”

She walked out of the room.

They lay on silk cushions in the library, their arms on ebony armrests. Tadashi opened the
shoji
door on her knees and slid a tray of tea across the mats to them. She, too, complied with Mabel’s wish to live, at least in one room, in another century, in another country. Clio sometimes thought that Tadashi didn’t know the difference. Mabel was mad, but Tadashi really didn’t know, or care, whether it was the Tokugawa shogunate or the Edo period.

There was a call for Clio, Tadashi said. She carefully emptied the
tansu
, piece by piece, until she found the telephone and brought it to Clio in two hands.

“Do you wish to speak in private?” Emma asked, and Clio shook her head, gesturing to her to stay.

“Hello?” Clio said.

“I’m not too happy about this,” he said. “I’ve been back in Malibu for two weeks and I’ve been looking for you. Your mom told me where you were. The two man-haters are together again at last, is what she said exactly. What the fuck does she mean?”

The simplicity of Burta’s suggestion that women who lived together without the company of men by nature hated men had a puerile logic that Burta must have known would appeal to Tommy.

“As usual, Burta has it wrong. There are not two man-haters here, there are four of us. Or is it man-eaters? I haven’t been so happy in a long time. Eating men, that is.”

That Mabel had endured a longing for a man who had been dead for thirty years, a longing that had eventually driven her crazy, was something Clio would never tell Tommy. She preferred that he believe Burta rather than know the truth. The truth would do him no good. He still would not understand.

“So. You coming home, babe?”

“Never.”

“Isn’t that the wrong tact?”

She considered for a moment whether to correct him.

“Everyone says you’ve flipped out. Even your cousin.”

“My cousin?”

“Here, she wants to say howdy.”

“Hi, Cliome,” said a woman’s voice. She spoke with a slight accent.

“Who is this?”

“I can’t believe you’re not here, Clio.”

“Is this Claire?” Despite herself, Clio began to smile.

“What are you doing? You’re supposed to be here! That’s why I stopped in Los Angeles. To see my cousin. Imagine how pissed I was to find you gone. Although Tommy has been unbelievably nice. Some Japanese went to buy the plantation and the right-of-way to the beach in the hope of building a hotel, turn the palm grove into a water park. I’m on my way home.”

There was not much cash, Clio knew, not much loose cash to fight off Japanese speculators. Mrs. Clarke had
recently, reluctantly entered negotiations with the Japanese. Clio was sure that Claire was on her way home to sell anything she could to the gentlemen from Osaka.

“When are you coming home?” Clio asked.

“More important, when are you?”

“That’s not home. And I’m not coming.”

“Don’t be stupid, Clio. Could be a
gigante
mistake.” Clio could tell from the way that Claire spoke that Tommy was in the room with her.

“Don’t think so.”

“He really misses you.” Claire laughed loudly and dropped the receiver. “He just made me a margarita,” she said when she came back on the line.

“Tommy made it?”

“Well, you know, that cute guy who cooks for him. I’m having such a great time, I’ve changed my ticket about eight thousand times. I left Nando at his horrible mother’s in Sintra and he’s furious because he thought I was going straight home to see Mamie and Mother, but being in Honolulu, not to mention Waimea, is not exactly my definition of fun, no? Is anyone there?”

“Where?” Clio was confused.

“In Honolulu, Clio,” Claire said with exaggerated patience. “Don’t be mean. Just ’cause you’re stuck there. Is Steamy there? I promised I’d pose for him. You know, like that naked Spanish queen on the soap.”

“May I speak to Tommy?”

“I wouldn’t stay away too long if I were you.”

“Hi, babe,” said Tommy. “She’s great. She wants to do something in films.”

“I’m not coming back, Tommy. I just wanted to tell you that. I don’t imagine that I’ll ever see you again. Even in the movies. Especially in the movies.”

He paused. “You’re not going to do something you’ll regret, are you? Or something I’ll regret.”

“If you ever,” Clio said, “try to speak to me again, I’ll file a complaint and you’ll go to jail.”

He laughed in relief. “A Moroccan jail? I don’t think so, babe. They totally love me there. Besides, you need proof. There’s no proof. I checked it out.”

She put down the phone. Her hands were shaking. She looked around, but she was alone in the library. She tried to put the telephone back into the
tansu
, but she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. Mabel would be agitated if she knew the telephone were sitting on a twelfth-century ink-stone box, but Clio could not help it. She took the receiver off the hook and covered it with one of her grandmother’s silk pillows.

Clio read the newspaper while she waited for Dix. He was late. She had looked around the club for him, but he was not on the volleyball court or in the water. The men in the bar played cards and watched a golf tournament on television. There were women with naked children on the little beach.

“Up to no good, I see,” Clio heard someone say, a man, on the other side of her newspaper.