Sleeping Beauties (7 page)

“The Buddhist painter Jakuchu was famous for his love of chickens,” Mabel said, nodding. She sucked
ume
, sour pickled cherries, fishing them from a glass quart jar.

“Will you play ‘Net of the Moon’ with me?” she asked. The big jar wobbled precariously and Clio reached out to steady it, but Mabel deftly slapped away her hand.

The light of the moon was necessary in order to play the hand game correctly, but as Mabel could not see the moon, she could play whenever she pleased. It had confused Clio to play a game that required the light of the moon without any moon at all, but over time she had grown used to playing it, like so many things, Mabel’s way.

Mabel’s fingers were sticky with syrup. Clio held her hand to Mabel’s hand, and as they tried to trap the absent moon in the skein of their fingers, Clio thought that her grandmother had not outlived her memory, after all. She knew everything.

C
lio saw Tommy Haywood for the first time in 1983 at the volleyball court at the Outrigger Canoe Club in Waikiki. She was twenty-seven years old. It was late afternoon. She had left the museum where she worked as a historian in the Department of Oceanic Myths two hours early in order to watch her boyfriend, Puna Silva, win his match. Puna’s partner was Clio’s younger brother, Dixon. It was not altogether a true victory, taking the club title, as the day before Dix had been suspended from the club. He had not paid his bar bill in eight months, or rather, Emma had not paid it. She was no longer able to pay his bill at the Outrigger Club. No one, except Clio and Puna, knew that Dix was not eligible to compete. Among other things, Dix used to keep a shoe box full of souvenirs from the war in Viet Nam, photographs of female genitalia turned inside out and a sealed bag of ears he’d bought from a door-gunner who’d apologized that the best ears, the ears from the right side, had already been removed by the time he reached the bodies. So competing in a state championship when he was disqualified was not a particularly serious lapse for Dix. He made the winning spike, as Clio would expect of him.

Mr. Haywood was in town making a movie about Japanese gangsters, and although Clio recognized him, she
pretended not to know who he was. She was not trying to get his attention, although that is what she did. She sat on the damp sand in the shade, while Tommy Haywood and his bodyguard did stretching exercises. There was a pretty girl with Mr. Haywood. Clio recognized her. She was the daughter of the director of publicity at the Kahala Hilton. The girl rubbed oil on Haywood’s back, and Clio noticed that he had acne scars on his shoulders.

She was introduced to him on the Hau Terrace by Dix, who was buying drinks for everyone. The Chinese barman, Ching See, didn’t like that Dix was charging the drinks, and Clio would not have liked it any better had she known that Dix put the many, many drinks and orders of sashimi, and T-shirts from the Beach Shop that he gave to the girl with Tommy Haywood, on her account, but by the time Dix was signing the last of the chits, Clio had left the terrace to take a night swim with Puna and Tommy Haywood.

Two weeks later she married him. Tommy Haywood, not Puna.

The first night that Clio spent with him, he’d moved her aside with both hands and asked if she’d mind touching up his hair.

He had a cover interview with
Aloha
magazine in the morning. He usually had his hair color done in L.A., he explained, but he had prolonged his stay in Hawai‘i in order to be with her and he had missed his last hair appointment. Not that he regretted staying. He said that he’d never met anyone like Clio, and he meant it, but a few gray hairs were beginning to show around his ears. Clio cheerfully got out of bed to dye his hair with the bottle of L’Oréal Brasilia he’d asked the bell captain to send to the room. Clio knew the bellboy who brought the bottle of
hair color. He was in her hula class. His eyes opened wide when he recognized Tommy, and even wider when he saw Clio, but he pretended not to know her. “Hi, Galen,” she said before she’d realized how pleased he was by his own discretion. She regretted her haste in speaking to him. He blushed as he pulled the door closed behind him.

“I can date you by your bra,” Tommy said, looking away for a moment from the television when she walked across the room from the bathroom.

“You mean
for
my bra.” She looked down at her brassiere. She’d thought it quite glamorous when she ordered it from a lingerie catalogue.

“No,” he said. “
By
your bra. Older women wear bras that hook in back. I haven’t seen one in years.”

“An older woman?”

“Not you, babe. Not you.” He winked at her and turned his handsome head back to the television. “Relax. I like you. I even like your family.”

“My family?”

“I don’t know from families,” he said, patting his knee for her to come and sit. He was wearing the terry-cloth hotel robe and it fell open across his lap. “You’re related to everyone on the island.”

“Not really,” she said. “It only seems that way. It’s a form of snobbery.”

“Whatever. It’s cool. Power is cool.” He grinned with pleasure at his own wisdom.

The sound of the surf rose from the little beach far below. She could see the lights of Waikiki. The glare of the lights diluted the black of the sky, and made the stars disappear.

“You don’t talk much,” he said, watching her. “I like that.”

The telephone rang, but he did not answer it. When she turned to look at him, wondering if he wished her to
answer it, he said, “It’s that girl from the other night.”

“The one you were going out with?” she asked.

He laughed and she blushed in embarrassment. “I don’t date, babe,” he said.

She turned back to the night sky.

“It’s kind of a relief,” he said. “Takes the pressure off. You know, having to pick her up in a car or telephone a hundred fucking times before she’ll have dinner. You don’t seem to mind about that stuff. You don’t mind not going to restaurants.”

She smiled. “My grandmother thinks it’s common to eat in public.”

“Common?”

“She thinks that we are in the nineteenth century. I mean, she really thinks it.”

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

The telephone rang again and he picked it up in irritation. “I told you to clear the calls, hon,” he said to the operator. “No calls unannounced. No visitors. I’ve talked to security about this before.” He grunted and put down the receiver. “Come sit, babe.”

He looked down at his legs and patted his thighs. “You know, if my legs had been six inches longer, I’d have been famous six years sooner.”

“And if they’d been six inches shorter?”

“I’d still be parking cars.”

“And dating.”

She went to him, and he pulled back his robe and she sat on the thighs that had belatedly made him a star.

The day before they left Honolulu, Tommy Haywood bought Clio a Bentley sedan. She had never had her own car. For years she had been driven around Honolulu by
Lester, both their lives at stake because she was afraid to offend him by refusing to ride with him. Tommy had the beautiful car wrapped in flannel and shipped to California.

Tommy saw the car more as an investment than as a gift, and Clio realized this, but she was too proud, too inexperienced, and too far gone in the details at least, not in the passion, to change her mind because of a 1954 dark green Bentley. “I know that he is not in love with me,” she said to Emma, “and that is all right, but I refuse to be jealous of a car.” Clio knew that although Emma did not, could not, admire Tommy Haywood, she would never speak against him.

“Sensible of you,” Emma said. “About the car, I mean.”

“It wasn’t until I read
The Sun Also Rises
a second time that I finally understood the meaning of the word ‘impotent.’ I’d thought it meant ineffectual; a man who had trouble getting taxis or the attention of a waiter. These lapses had seemed perfectly good reasons for a woman’s discontent.”

“One has suffered for less.”

“I suppose it is an unfashionable idea, but I’ve always liked the way that men are different from women. I am not aroused by sameness, but by the very way that a man is different from me. That is what interests me. The hair on his arms. The thickness and the smell of him. I like that penis.”

“You are more old-fashioned than I even imagined.”

“And you?”

“Oh. Me. I don’t remember what I like. Yes, I liked the maleness, too. I did.” She sounded sad.

“I used to feel guilty for liking it so much.”

“I think,” Emma said slowly, “that the great thing is the discovery, hardest for a woman, of the chasm between expectation and reality—the profound want of means—
oh, I don’t mean penises and I certainly don’t mean money and privilege, but the want of ramification. One is thrown into the ocean almost at birth and a girl is deceived into thinking that because she can hold her head above water, she will stay afloat.”

“Oh, we are a different thing altogether. We have been
trying
to swim out of the current. Although you and Grandmother never seem to tire, it has been a difficult thing for me—to stay out of the current. I long to be in the current and it frightens me because you have taught me to want to stay out of it. You’ve taught me that to be in the current is to drown. Lester tried to get me into the current, with his music.”

“And did he succeed?”

“Perhaps Tommy will pull me into the current,” Clio said quietly. “He doesn’t have to love me. He just has to know how to swim.”

Clio had convinced herself that if she could leave the islands, if only for a little while, perhaps she’d be able to figure out just what she was meant to do with all of the secrets, all of the chants and songs and legends that so filled her head that she could no longer distinguish what was real from what was myth. She could no longer separate what had happened a hundred years earlier from what she had dreamed in the night. She used to say laughingly that she knew the ritual ceremony for wrapping the bones of a chief, but she could not divide fractions. She could steer an outrigger canoe through rough seas, but she had never learned to iron. Emma had kept her busy all those years, and Clio had been a good student. She had worked hard, and she was tired.

Emma, who was always so sensitive to Clio, misjudged her meaning. She thought that Clio was simply overwrought, preparing for her departure and her new life, and she did not pay too much attention to Clio’s warning.
“You’re too good in the water to ever drown,” she said.

But Clio knew better.

Tommy Haywood lived in Malibu, California, above the Pacific Coast Highway in a steel-beam and redwood house that looked like a big land crab. Its rusted metal legs extended stiffly in the scrub as if it had been dropped there to guard the dry fields and to keep the dirt and rock from spilling into the narrow canyon below. There was a swimming pool, and a chain link fence at the bottom of the steep terraced yard in case someone tripped on the ice plant and slid down the rocky slope to the highway. There was an electric gate and television monitors so that overeager fans would not be sitting in the kitchen when Tommy came down to breakfast each morning.

Tall stands of pine surrounded the house, hiding it from the road. There was a smell of mesquite and dust. Brush fires ignited spontaneously in the brush and Clio worried that they would be trapped in the house and burned to death. She asked if they could replace the louvers with screens or casements, but Tommy wouldn’t hear of it. The opaque glass louvers kept people from seeing inside the house. The week before they returned from Honolulu, two teenage girls with binoculars had been found in an eucalyptus tree.

Emma had told Clio, years earlier, that she’d known everything she’d ever need to know about Clio’s stepmother once she’d seen Burta’s favorite painting, a view of Mount Fuji done in crushed coral and seashells. Clio had laughed and said, “If she were only just that bad.” So although Clio understood aesthetic snobbery and she could see the fairness in the remark that her husband’s house looked like a Mexican flying saucer on stilts, she did not laugh. After all, now it was her house, too.

Tommy had a cook named Bobby whom he had met at a health food store in West Hollywood. Bobby had advised Tommy on colonics and herbal cleansers and Tommy had asked him to work for him. Bobby did not sleep at the house. Tommy did not like his crew, as he called them, to be in the house at night. There was a young secretary, Judy, who came each morning. There was a gardener and a pool man and a security guard who sat at the gate. The pool man also sold drugs. There was an exercise trainer and a business manager, a press secretary, a lawyer, and an agent. It was difficult for Tommy to get around town without being recognized. His business was done at home.

Tommy was the sort of man who, before he became famous, bought postage stamps from a machine at the drug store, one packet at a time, as he needed them. If he had a headache, he asked if anyone had an aspirin. It is unlikely that he’d ever owned a pair of scissors or a pencil sharpener before Judy, his secretary, came to work for him. Judy tirelessly interviewed and hired the stream of Mexican maids who flowed serenely through the house. Tommy was convinced that the women, who did not speak English, would sell information about him to the newspapers, and the women were seldom allowed to stay for more than a few weeks. Judy bought bed sheets, magazines, after-shave lotion, hanging plants, compact discs, light bulbs, razor blades, athletic socks, and the occasional present that Tommy needed to give—in other words, everything. She was never upset by Tommy’s demands, even his more eccentric ones. He insisted that she leave a new box of Tucks sanitary wipes on the back of the toilet each morning. Clio discovered a cabinet full of unopened green Tucks boxes.

Devi, the girl who gave Tommy a massage twice a week, told Clio that she often did girls up at the house after she did Tommy. She also did extras. She asked Clio if she
would like a massage. Clio said that perhaps they could do it another time, when it was not so hot, and she went to ask Judy what Devi had meant by extras.

“Oh, you know,” Judy said, making a pitcher of margaritas. “Stuff to relax you. Depending, of course, on whether you’re a gal or a guy. Extras.” She turned on the bar blender.