The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (40 page)

“How old are ya, kid?” the recruiting sergeant asked me, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Eighteen, sir,” I replied confidently, just the way Gus had told me to.

“You’ve got the right sentiments, son,” he said kindly, “but you need a few more years’ growing before you can stand up for your country.”

I was bitterly disappointed. In the back of my mind had been the hope that I might be sent to Europe. Gus was luckier. Somehow his streetwise confidence got him through, and he walked from that storefront recruiting office a full-fledged member of the U.S. Navy.

Gus wasn’t the only one to leave the hotel. Men were drafted and sent immediately for training, and with help at the hotel in short supply, I suddenly was transferred and promoted to waiter. I was observant, I learned quickly, watching the others to see how
they behaved, but underneath I still did not know the rules of life. I was still the wild boy from the islands.

Two years passed. San Francisco bristled with Navy personnel; they occupied all the hotels, and their girlfriends and wives flocked into the city to be near them. I was seventeen. One more year, I told myself; then I could legitimately enlist in the Navy. I followed the war news, still with the vague hope that I would be sent to the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, I got myself a new job.

The St. Francis was a grand hotel with a smart clientele: The men were officers; the women classy, chic, rich. One of them whom I served regularly kept a suite there on a permanent basis. She said her husband, an officer, was “down in the sticks” at Camp Pendleton, the Marine base near San Diego, and she refused to go anywhere near it.

“It’s the back of beyond,” I overheard her complain to her friends as they drank their usual six o’clock cocktails and assessed the evening’s amusements.

She was fortyish, attractive and flirtatious, with blue eyes and a pale, almost translucent skin. Her hair was a natural silvery blond worn in a fashionable pageboy, and her wide, predatory mouth was the color of the cardinal that used to sit on the lanai rail on Kalani in the evenings.

I noticed her because she was pretty and always gay, always laughing and joking with her friends and the officers they went out with. But there was a restless quality about her. I noticed her eyes searching the room all the while she was talking, and I wondered what she was looking for. Sometimes I would feel her eyes rest speculatively on me.

I blushed as I felt her look me up and down from across the room. I was young and innocent; I had hardly even spoken to a girl. I was tall now, and wiry
and muscular, and I thought she was mocking the way I looked in my tight black pants and short red brass-buttoned jacket.

She watched my face as I put the martini carefully on the table in front of her, and I turned away from her smiling gaze because I knew I was not exactly handsome. My face was too thin, my features were too strong, and thanks to Jack, a scar ran in a deep groove from beneath my left eye almost to my chin. But Mrs. DeSoto seemed to find me interesting.

“I can see you are a good waiter, Johnny,” she said. “I shall have to make sure I get you when I call room service. They are always so slow, and then there’s always a mistake, somebody always forgets something.” She sighed. “It’s bad enough there’s a war going on without the room service waiters making our lives hell.”

She smiled at me again, her cardinal red lips stretching over her beautiful even white teeth.
Like pearls
, I thought, dazzled.

“Thank you, Johnny,” she said, giving me a generous tip along with an intimate glance that made me blush again.

After that I often served her in the bar, and she always tipped me well, always gave me that smile, and let her hand touch mine as she slipped a dollar into my palm, making me feel hot and uncomfortable.

A few weeks later I was on room service duty. It was after midnight. No one liked the graveyard shift because you got all the drunks, but somehow as the youngest I always ended up with it. Mrs. DeSoto called down: She wanted a bottle of gin, a bottle of vermouth, and ice sent up right away.

“I’m glad it’s you, Johnny,” she said, flinging open the door and smiling at me.

I walked past her into the room and placed the tray on the side table. I looked at her. She was wearing a long, slinky red evening dress, gathered at the
hip, and a diamond and ruby pendant nestled in the low V neckline, just above the white curve of her breasts.

“Open the bottles for me, Johnny, would you?” she said, sinking onto the sofa. “And then pour me a drink. Wait, I’d better show you exactly how I like it.” She glanced up at me through her lashes and gave me that smile again. “So you’ll know for next time.”

The room was lamplit and smelled of her perfume, rich and musky. I handed her the drink with a trembling hand, and she leaned toward me and put the glass to my lips. “Taste it, Johnny,” she murmured. “Then you’ll know
exactly
how I like it.”

I took a discreet swallow, and the alcohol caught at the back of my throat. I began to cough, and she stood with her hands on her hips, laughing at me. “I bet you’ve never even taken a drink before,” she said. She sat on the sofa again and patted the cushion next to her. “Come sit here beside me, Johnny, and tell me what else you have never done before. So I know what else to teach you.”

I sat next to her, hypnotized by her knowing blue eyes and her sexy red mouth. “Look at you,” she said, running a finger down the length of the scar on my face, “You’re like a young buck, on the way to becoming a stag.” She gave me that special smile again, and I wanted to grab hold of her, to kiss her. “Such an attractive young innocent,” she said thoughtfully, holding the drink to my lips again.

She stood up and put a dance record on the Victrola. It was Glenn Miller playing “Moonlight Serenade.” I gulped down the martini, watching as she drifted around the room in time with the music.

“It’s my favorite,” she said as it finished. She shook her hair free from the net snood she was wearing and stretched her arms luxuriously above her
head. “Don’t you like it, Johnny?” she asked, fixing two more martinis.

“Sure,” I mumbled, watching her swaying hips as she glided across the floor and put the record on again. She turned and looked at me. Then she drank the martini down and tossed the glass into the fireplace. And she began to dance again. Only this time she also began unbuttoning her dress, swaying closer until she stood before me. And then she let it slide to the floor.

She was a blond vision in a red satin slip and high heels, and I was lost. She sat next to me and began slowly to remove my clothes, everything except my tie. “Now what shall we do with this? I wonder,” she asked, playfully pulling me toward her. She smelled of rich perfume and gin and her own flesh, and I was drowning in the scent of her, the softness of her, the sheer lavish femaleness of her. I couldn’t wait.

The first time I was too quick, but then she taught me control, how to make love to a woman. “You’re a good learner, Johnny,” she told me. “I shall remember you. Except I still don’t know your name.”

And my senses blurred with alcohol and perfume and sex, I blurted out my real name. “Johnny Leconte.”

She stared wide-eyed at me for a long moment. Then she threw back her head and laughed, her long white throat rippling. I looked at her, puzzled.

“Isn’t that amusing!” she gasped at last. “It’s just too good to be mere coincidence. I mean, how often do you hear the name Leconte? I knew Archer Kane had changed his name when he married the Frenchwoman and that he had a son. It is you, isn’t it? Johnny Leconte?”

My heart sank as I stared at her, still not comprehending. “Of course,” she exclaimed, still laughing, “you don’t know who I am. Why, my dear young
buck, I am Chantal O’Higgins. I was Archer’s second wife. The mother of his goddamn son Jack.”

I threw on my clothes as fast as I could and ran for the door, not daring to look at her. She was still laughing as though it were the best joke in the world.

I left the hotel that same night, and the next morning I faked my age and successfully enlisted in the Navy. But somehow I knew that one day that fateful encounter with Chantal O’Higgins DeSoto would come back to haunt me.

30

I
learned
a lot in the U.S. Navy, but my education was more about men and war, and life and death, than book learning. I did two and a half years’ service on a destroyer, mostly in the South Pacific. Regretfully I had to let go of my dream of ending up in the Mediterranean.

It wasn’t difficult for me to adjust to war conditions. After all, I had spent most of my life in a state of siege. I already had that extra sixth sense that warned of danger, and my formative years in Hawaii had also made a sailor out of me. I was used to the ocean and its ways.

That does not mean I was never afraid. I would have been a fool not to be. Whenever I manned my turret gun and faced the enemy across a few hundred yards of gray water, that old metallic taste of fear was in my mouth. War was a bitter and thankless business, but as recompense I had the camaraderie of my fellow sailors, my colleagues in arms. I learned at last how to live with my fellowmen, how to accept friendship and offer it in return. I finally became civilized, if not quite a man of the world. I doubted
that I would ever become that. The psychologists say that one’s personality is formed in the years before puberty, and mine was battle-scarred.

Still, despite living on the knife-edge of war, dodging torpedoes and suicidal aircraft on bombing raids, I was almost happy. At last there was the right number of miles between me and the Kanes. My eighteenth birthday had come and gone, and I knew, had I still been on Kalani, I would have already suffered the planned “fatal accident.” Death in the service of my country was preferable; at least that would be honorable.

I was tempted to stay on and pursue a naval career when the war ended in 1945, but I lacked the education to become an officer, and my prospects were limited. Besides, I had the old urge to paint again. I had taken to sketching the sailors, playing cards in their undershirts and steel helmets, or sprawling in exhaustion on their bunks after a long night on watch, or reading mail from home, and I captured the longing expression in their eyes as they thought of their wives and children. From memory I sketched battle scenes of warships blasting the hell out of each other, of fire and mayhem and bloody, broken bodies. And of convoys slipping silently across the horizon while we, the vigilantes of the South Pacific, kept watch.

The captain saw my sketches. He praised them and hung them in the wardroom. When the long war finally ended, he submitted some to the chief of naval operations. A few were framed and displayed in lofty corridors in Washington.

I felt sad the day I became a free man for the second time in my life. The U.S. Navy had taken me in as a rough boy and molded me into a man. I also missed the camaraderie and the discipline. I would have to think for myself again now.

I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to paint. I
had the bit of money I had managed to save, plus the financial sweetener we got to ease us back into civilian life, but I knew it would not last long, and I also knew I could not go back to the West Coast or to Hawaii.

My life became a series of odd jobs. I worked the summer season as a waiter in mountain resorts in the East to make enough money so I could spend the winters painting. I had no idea if my art was “good.” It was just something I felt compelled to do, the single driving force in my life.

There were girlfriends in those days, sweet young things, mostly models who fell for the romantic young artist in his icy “garret”—actually a loft over a hardware store in a little seaside town in Maine. I fell in and out of love along with the seasons, but my only true loves were the sea and my art.

The years drifted past slowly as they do when one is young. Occasionally I sold a painting, but it was always a terrible wrench when I had to let it go. I wanted to keep them all because they were my memories of the people I met and the places I had been and the girls I had loved. I was, as usual, painting my life. But I never painted Kalani or anything to do with my childhood. They lurked in the back of my mind, like an unexploded torpedo.