by Paul Theroux
He would not have come to Hawaii at all except that Lionberg had come. Lionberg’s suicide had nothing to do with living in Hawaii—it was the failed love affair. He had been a friend to Wevill. Wevill felt the loss.
Now and then, Wevill saw a tidy old man in new sandals, carrying his lunch in a bag to the beach, and the man sat on the sand at the center of his own neatness—the beach towel, sunblock, water bottle, the newspaper folded into quarters to show the day’s crossword. The man pretended to be busy, pretended not to notice the loose breasts of girls in bathing suits, the way they pinched and snapped their bikini bottoms—pretended to be content while he was dying of loneliness. At the beach, not swimming. Wevill feared being that man.
Such a man was killing himself with his routines. Having come to Hawaii to live, to escape a routine, he suffered an even more punishing routine and felt his age more sharply. He had no pleasures—he was just conspicuously growing old, a dying man among the living. It alarmed him to think that he would do anything to make things different.
The mother and daughter, Rita and Nina, murmured and giggled together like sisters, usually about gambling or psychics or both, while Wevill watched with the complacent horror of a man surrendering to being sucked into a vacuum. He could not be still, he felt like a stranger in his own house, he dropped things, and defying the logic of the house owner at home, he bumped against his own furniture. The two women seemed more at home to him than he was. That also fueled his ardor. They did not talk to him, though now and then they had a laugh with Ramon, the gardener.
Wevill lusted for them both, he did not differentiate, they were so similar, Rita and her fine flesh, Nina and her slender solemnity. Both were divorced, Nina had a small child—Rita a grandmother!—they worked hard, they were strong. Their strength was part of their beauty, their alluring untidiness. They had no idea how lovely they looked or how Wevill desired them, which made it possible for him merely to gape at them while they unselfconsciously cleaned his house.
He had made his life by resisting fantasy, yet, captivated by the women, he found himself one day on the verge of making a wild suggestion to them: paying them to work naked. Knowing the penalty, he was able to resist. He was well versed in sexual harassment settlements, the vindictive juries, the severe punishments, the awarding of costs; he knew how much he would claim were he their lawyer and this fantasist employer their stalker. The knowledge made him circumspect, almost passive. The women were so innocent of his desire he went on watching them mop and dust, the multimillionaire in his fabulous house reduced to an unsatisfied voyeur.
Life had once been so simple. Long ago, a touch told him a woman was willing, a smile said the answer was yes. “We could share a taxi,” he might say to a woman he had just met. The merest hug in the back seat, his hand on her leg, or hers on his. At her house, if she said, “Want to come in?” it meant yes to everything.
Rita and Nina sometimes looked so at home there he pictured himself approaching them and delivering lines he had carefully rehearsed. The lines were ambiguous enough to dissolve in any possible lawsuit.
“I've been studying massage with a practitioner,” he imagined himself saying. He would discuss the details of his progress, stressing the health benefits. And then, casually: “Want one?”
You did not mention sex. A massage was a respectable medical procedure, but of course a woman willing to be massaged—to be touched—was open to other suggestions. But you could say, “Don’t worry—strictly an R-rated massage,” to emphasize the point that there were other kinds. Hyperbole helped. Such a proposition was impossible without innuendo.
Wevill said nothing. He was judicious, but his caution was not all that restrained him. “Seduction” was the inaccurate word for what he planned, “invitation” was better, but whatever it was called he could not initiate it in his own house. He told himself that it was not really his fear of a lawsuit, or even snobbery on his part, but just bad timing—a sunny morning in his huge house on the North Shore was wrong for what he had in mind. He could imagine meeting either of them after dark in a bar or one of the cheaper tourist hotels in Waikiki and taking her upstairs. But something told him that it was wrong in his house, while they were cleaning, making the beds, dusting the sofas. He could not imagine them sleeping on those beds or sitting on those sofas. It seemed a kind of defilement.
He stared at them like a big hungry boy looking at hunks of homemade cake, his fingers damp, and he talked to them, stupid questions about the weather, or holidays, or their jobs in town, how they worked in Housekeeping in one of the hotels in the Ohana chain. He was only making plausible noises to detain them, so that he could rest his eyes on their bodies as they worked.
A woman in repose did not interest him. He loved to see women being active, engaged in something strenuous, stretching, bending, carrying heavy loads, dealing with an impediment—anything that made their bodies contort with effort and their hair shake loose. Tight tensed knees, clenched buttock muscles, elbows working, the neck stiffened with concentration, the tongue clamped between the teeth—he watched with his own tongue clamped that way.
Rita was the pretty witch, Nina the skinny ballerina, and Wevill imagined that he had his pick.
His neat, dusted house irritated him, for it represented a job done, no reason for these women to deal with it. He preferred a room that needed attention. He had been a very messy husband with a pretty housekeeper and an impatient wife. “Someone to pick up after you!” his second wife had scolded. Yes, that was just it. He had slyly watched the exertions of the young dark woman. When his first wife had been alive, her sitting had bored him; her perfect hair and her way of picking at lint had killed his desire.
Nina the ballerina cleaned his car, she got dirtier as the car got cleaner, got sweatier and wetter with suds on her bare toes as she squeegeed the windows and dried the door handles, got damper and duller as the car got shiny and dry; and finally she was dirty and the car was clean, and he desired her that way and hated the car for being done.
Ramon came every two weeks—weed-whacking, mowing, watering the potted trees. The simple fellow easily talked to the women, usually in pidgin. That made Wevill bolder.
He was trying to talk with Nina one day, not hold a conversation, just mouthing meaningless pleasantries to attract her attention.
“Great weather.”
“Ya.”
“All that rain yesterday.”
“Ya.”
Getting nowhere, he said, “Maybe you could do the rugs next month.”
Anticipating it gave him a foretaste of pleasure, mother and daughter swinging the old beaters like wire tennis rackets, their clothes flying as they spanked dust from the rug.
“Sorry,” Nina said. “Next month we going to Vegas, Rita and me.”
He was thrown. He said, “You were there just recently.”
“Five months ago, ya,” Nina said with a precision that startled him, for he expected her not to know, at any rate not to remember.
He was at first deeply disappointed, feeling abandoned, and he imagined she was gloating—enjoying turning him down. But that was irrational. Then he grew curious. Where exactly? How long for? What to do?
Nina reminded him of their routine, that they went twice a year on a gambling tour—two weeks in Las Vegas.
In his sixty-one years Wevill had never been to Nevada, and when this young woman answered his questions with a casual unintentional rebuff, he was impressed and humbled.
“Leave the kid with Auntie, stay at the California, play the slots, come back broke. The Vegas package.”
This lovely young woman talking such nonsense appalled him, and he was sad for her, almost sorrowful for her loving this ignorant pleasure, grieving for her wasted beauty. Her mother was no better.
“And party a little.” The older woman laughed.
“Vegas,” he said, and wondered if any of this information would kill his desire.
On one of his working weeks, Ramon didn�
�t show up. Rita said he was sick with a backache, that he had seen a doctor and was taking medicine. The next week Rita said she had seen Ramon's sister at Foodland; Ramon was dead, the muscle relaxer he had been prescribed had shut down his liver.
At the end of a twisting road in the middle of the island Wevill found the chapel and Ramon’s grieving relatives. A clergyman read from the Bible, delivered a homily, quoted Kahlil Gibran. Wevill sat at the back, a stranger, wondering if Ramon’s family had a lawyer for this personal-injury suit, and where were Rita and Nina? They must have gone to Las Vegas. When the time came for Wevill to pay his respects, he stood before the closed casket and a color photograph of Ramon in an aloha shirt, smiling broadly, youthful, the picture of health, confident and vital.
2
The moment Wevill arrived in Las Vegas and tasted bitterness in the hot dust of the air, he felt he was in a corrupted desert city built on sand, one he imagined he might find described in the Bible, the damned rejoicing, worshiping a gilded animal while a godly prophet lamented somewhere on the perimeter. Wevill was out of his depth—humbled was no exaggeration. Since he had never been to Las Vegas, he could not think of it familiarly as “Vegas.” It bewildered him as much as any Third World capital. He was dismayed to be among people who were delighted to be there, so many of them from Hawaii. He learned late what everyone already knew: because Hawaii was heavily taxed, and gambling illegal, tax-free Nevada was full of people from the islands, many settled there, many visiting, he recognized the faces. Two he looked for but did not see.
He did not mind feeling helpless. It was a more accurate reflection of his condition, the big brooding man enthroned in his mansion, for he was now lost in his house.
To understand the women’s lives better, he had asked for the one-week package that included the airfare, the room, and coupons. But: “Been sold out for months!” Was the clerk rubbing it in? The first-class ticket he bought was absurdly more expensive than the package, but at least he had his anonymity. He had no plan other than to be away from his house and near these women, to be here, in this place. But the place was more bizarre than the bizarrest pictures of it.
In his desperation he realized that he seemed more like a stalker than a mere admirer. He excused his obsession by reminding himself that he was helpless, he had time and money, he could have anything he wanted. Where were they?
I just want to look at Las Vegas, he told himself, have a drink, see what all the fuss is about. A place I have never visited. It was a plus that he happened to be near Rita and Nina. What next he did not know. Being close to them would clear his mind and make him happier. But he knew he was kidding himself.
As a lawyer he was able to hold two different, opposite ideas in his head at the same time, the prosecution’s argument and the defense. Happiness was his defense, but he was well aware that he was driven by physical desire, a sort of hunger he had known very few times in his life, most of them as a boy, for he was captive to the feeling and unsatisfied, and what in his life had he craved that he had not enjoyed? He always knew the answers to the questions he asked.
He felt the insecurity and frustration of his early youth, for he had no idea what would happen next. His needing to be near them, not thinking of them as his cleaning women, yearning to satisfy himself, made his mouth dry. The desert heat of this big blighted place didn’t help. In Las Vegas, where money was everything, he could have anything he wanted, because he had money. But his first day showed him the falseness of that proposition, for he was still alone.
He chose not to stay at the California Hotel, because they were there and he had no clear plan. His only pleasure in his room at the MGM Grand lay in his remembering how he had desired the two women in Hawaii—washing his car, mopping the floor, disheveled nymphs. Las Vegas itself he found appalling for its lights and its carnival atmosphere, the mindlessness of its advertised pleasures. The frenzy, built on sand.
With a stranger in the elevator, tapping the poster for the casino, he found himself saying that it was silly to think that anyone actually believed you could get rich by gambling.
“Then what are you doing here?” the stranger said.
The stranger, a white-haired blotchy-faced man, was wearing a cheap shirt and sneakers, but Wevill found it an intimidating question, for his coming here to see the women was a greater gamble than throwing down money.
Still, that first day he located the California Hotel and Casino, where they were both staying. He watched it from across the street but went no closer. He longed to see the mother and daughter, but just to gape, for he was not yet prepared to confront them. His sneaking satisfied him, gave him a way to pass the time—stalker time.
The frenzy evident everywhere in the city was something he could not share. His mood was opposite—the only watchful, cautious person in Las Vegas. He was passionate but he was particular, and there was only one way out. Apart from buying tasteless meals—there were no other kinds for him here—he hardly spent money. Steeling himself, he went into the California’s casino and scanned the faces and saw islanders pushing money into slot machines, others plopping chips onto numbers on the roulette felt, turning over cards at the blackjack tables, always losing. It was a place for children, big old idiot children, a terrible place, and he began to feel the rage of the prophet at his first Las Vegas sighting.
He knew that he was in this defiled and pagan desert just as obsessively, but that his desire was pure.
Bumping into the women would be best—just let it happen. But his wandering in the casino turned to methodical pursuit as he stalked the rows of gaming tables and banks of slot machines, like an anxious father looking for his missing children.
They were nowhere in that crowd, or any crowd he searched on his second day of being in Las Vegas. He was embarrassed to seem so serious and sad as he walked among the shouting, laughing people on the sidewalks and in hotel lobbies. He looked everywhere, the hunt made him sadder. His only satisfaction was that he saw no one who even remotely resembled them in the whole riotous city. The trouble was, by lingering as he did, and looking uncertain, he was pestered by hookers, who seemed to understand that here was a lonely man with a hole in his life.
Am in town for some meetings—just thought I’d stop by, he practiced to himself, trying to strike the most casual tone in the note he eventually wrote and left at the front desk of the California Hotel. Then he went and hid in his room.
Rita called that night.
In the lobby of the California he was approached by a dark woman in a green dress. Her tight pulled-back hair gave her foreign face a gleaming largeness and a fierce beetling confidence. She said, “How’s it?” and he stepped back. Even after he sized her up he did not recognize her. Then another, smaller woman appeared, with the same hair, the same peering face, and tapped the first one on the shoulder. Now both women were smiling, so Wevill smiled uncertainly back at them—he did not have a clue—and his anxious suspicion was that they were both hookers, not soliciting sex but working a scam whereby one bimbo would hold his attention while the other picked his pocket.
“So how long you been here?”
The first woman was still smiling in the familiar way of a con artist.
“He don’t get it,” the other said.
And he almost objected—Excuse me, I’m here to meet some people—when he realized it was them.
They were much taller in their stiletto heels, and they were darker but in the same towering and stylish way—almost as tall as him. Their new dresses gave them bosoms and cleavage. Their legs were long and in flesh-toned tights seemed bare. He had never seen their legs, for they had always worn sweatpants and slippers. No baggy clothes here, not disheveled at all. Their hair was perfect, they wore makeup, mascara, red lips, nail polish. He was still stepping backward when he saw who they were.
“Sorry!”
He was dreadfully embarrassed and off balance, with an odd toppling sense of being in the wrong.
The Hawaiian
housecleaners looked poised and prosperous in the lobby of their Las Vegas hotel. They looked prettier and better dressed than the other women there, more self-possessed.
“For a minute there, I didn’t...”
Didn’t know what to say, for though he now knew they were Rita and Nina, now that the two women were the same height, he was not sure which was which.
He was still backing up, gabbling, trying to cover his embarrassment. He said, “I made a dinner reservation at my hotel.”
“You’re staying which place?”
“MGM Grand. It's very nice. Excellent kitchen.”
One of the women laughed and the other said, “She wants ribs.”
He was lost again. Hadn’t she heard “I made a dinner reservation”? It was the height of bad manners, he was thinking, and then realized how glad he was to see them. But he was thrown by the awkwardness of the meeting, and put off by the way they were dressed—intimidated as much by their stylishness as their sense of being so at home here.
“There’s this place—Tony Roma’s. Famous for ribs.”
He had no idea; but this woman’s voice was Rita’s. He glanced at the other woman and recognized Nina by her eyes and her smile.
“Three for dinner,” Rita was saying into her cell phone. “Ten, fifteen minutes. Under ‘Nelson.’”
This Filipino-Chinese haole’s name was Nelson?
The restaurant was a block away. Wevill felt small and conspicuous as they walked, some passersby staring at them, seeing the gray-haired man with the two young dressed-up women. But in the restaurant he felt like King Farouk—other diners glanced as they made their way among the tables, following the waiter.
