“Happy 1972, Mala,” Jeannie said. “Lots of luck.”
I nodded, clinked her goblet, and continued on to the upstairs bathroom.
Sitting on the toilet, I began to feel dizzy. When I stood at the sink and poured the rest of my champagne down the drain, I didn’t have to glance into the mirror to see that I looked as bad as I felt. It had been seventeen months since I had arrived on the island of Kauai and it wasn’t long before I discovered I was no longer immune to the effects of alcohol and drugs. Not only was it impossible for me to imbibe freely anymore, but I was more susceptible to getting very high very fast than I had ever been before the spider bit me. But that didn’t stop me from drinking or smoking ganja. My hope of continuing the clean and stripped-down lifestyle I’d enjoyed on Rarotonga had fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately, I was not even deterred by the fact that, of all the places I had ever been, Kauai was by far the most intensely beautiful. The fact is, being around people again turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined.
I first heard of Kauai, one of the eight major Hawaiian islands, during the week I spent in Honolulu after leaving the Cook Islands. A woman I met at breakfast in my hotel had just spent a year on Kauai. She was selling her house north of Honolulu before leaving Hawaii for good. “It’s time,” she said. “I’ve been here since 1944. Maybe I’ll end up in Australia, maybe in South America, but I’ll never go back to the mainland.” She was a striking woman, a tall blonde about fifty years old, who said she was the widow of a wealthy hotelier, and added acerbically, “He helped to build up Waikiki as you see it—a crime for which he ought never to be forgiven. At any rate, he was my first—and last—husband.” Then she started talking rapturously of Kauai, describing its rain forests, and the inherent healing powers of its climate, and the mystical properties visitors since the ancient Polynesians attributed to its natural features. (Later I would hear of the devotees of a certain yogi who believed the core of the island to be an enormous quartz crystal.) This woman—her name was Stella—whom I never saw again, had gone to Kauai after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. Within six months of bathing daily in the sea and subsisting on a diet of taro and fresh fruit, her cancer had gone into remission. If the island worked miracles for cancers of the vital organs, I told myself, think how it might heal parts of the innermost self equally damaged.
With these expectations, I once again rented a bungalow a short walk from the ocean, in Haena on the northern tip of the island. The bungalow was at one end of the single main road that ran along the periphery of three-quarters of the island, a horseshoe that began at the green volcanic peaks of Na Pali coast and ended in desert terrain. Driving the length of this road was like traveling from the Philippines to New Mexico in just ninety minutes, passing through dairy country, sugarcane fields, and even a miniature version of the Grand Canyon, in Waimea. About ten miles apart on the island were the desert-like village of Mana, where the annual rainfall was eleven inches, and Mount Waialeale, which a rusted sign proclaimed to be the wettest spot on earth with 462 inches per year.
To reach my house, you drove through the Hanalei Valley, a quilt-work of taro fields, and then over a dozen one-way wooden bridges that forded the many streams and lagoons carrying that tremendous rainfall into the sea. There were three bungalows widely spaced on my crooked dirt lane, one belonging to an old fisherman named Lon and the other to a widow on Maui who came for two months every year. I was hemmed in by the sea in front and a lush valley in the rear that ran to the foot of the jagged green mountains. My bungalow, painted pale green, had four rooms and a shaded lanai. There was also a small shed where the original owner, a potter, had set up his wheel and which I eventually used as a developing room when I began taking undersea photographs. But that was much later.
From the lanai I saw nothing but open sea. Or as my neighbor Lon put it, in his singsong fashion, “If you was to continue north by northwest, the next piece of land you hits is Japan.” Yes, I thought, and if you go due west, the next piece of land is Vietnam. Hanoi, in fact, lies on the same latitude as Kauai. Except for February, March, and April, the trade winds never stopped blowing; having crossed the entire Pacific Ocean from Alaska, they cooled my house on the hottest days, ruffling the palm trees that circled my tiny lawn. There was bougainvillea, like a blanket of fire, up one wall of the bungalow, lush ferns along the north side, and a pair of papaya trees beside the shed that produced fruit with sweet, delicate flesh. Flanking the front door in wide, deep beds there were plants with white flowers that bloomed constantly. I had never smelled flowers more fragrant. Year-round they filled the bungalow with their perfume. After a few weeks, when I asked Lon about it, he told me the plant was called a spider plant.
But idyllic and solitary as this place was, I could not long have tried to replicate my life on Rarotonga, for the simple reason that what money remained after my year of island-hopping had been exhausted—even sooner than I’d anticipated—by my move to Hawaii. I needed to get a job, pronto. Not a waitressing job that would keep me scraping along in a furnished room, but something that would provide a steady paycheck to support my bungalow and the secondhand VW on which I had put a down payment. At first I thought of applying to teach Latin and Greek at the high school in Hanalei, despite being a few credits short of my B.A. But the secretary there informed me that they didn’t have classes in those languages. Probably a good thing, since on second thought I doubted I was prepared to enter a classroom and work with kids sixteen years old—Loren’s age, if indeed there still was a Loren drawing breath somewhere. Since there probably wasn’t much call on the island for an arachnologist’s assistant, that left the only profession in which I truly had formal training: X-ray technician.
The notion of spending half my waking hours in a hospital was not very appealing to me. But x-raying people on Kauai, I told myself, would be something altogether different than it had been aboard the Repose. No matter how sick they were, or how terrible the injury they might suffer, it was doubtful they would have stepped on a land mine or been strafed with shrapnel. In fact, I was informed there hadn’t been a homicide on the island in ten years.
“And that,” said Dr. Samuel Prion, the elderly radiologist whom I saw in my second interview at Wilcox Memorial Hospital in Lihue, “was a hunting accident.”
“I didn’t know there was any hunting on the island,” I said.
He was a slightly stooped, soft-spoken man with sharp blue eyes and white hair ringing his bald head. “Aside from pheasants,” he replied, “the only game are the wild goats. Once a year it’s legal for them to be hunted in Waimea Canyon. They’re the descendants of a few domestic goats, brought here by Captain Cook, that ran off into the mountains.”
“Captain Cook?”
“The first European to discover Kauai, in 1778. Came just that once and left the goats, among other things.”
No wonder I had felt so at home there from the first. “I should have known,” I said, and at the end of the interview Dr. Prion hired me, subject to the approval of his oversight board.
I was nervous when I came before the board at Wilcox Memorial the following week. I had had my hair cut and set at a beauty parlor in Lihue—there were none in my part of the island—got a manicure and pedicure, and had my legs waxed. I bought an overpriced white linen dress and even pricier Italian sandals. I wore my pendant, of course, and for good luck Cassiel’s bracelet and the jade earrings he had given me. And I put on makeup for the first time since being discharged from the Navy. Peering into the rearview mirror as I sped down the coast road, I hardly recognized myself. I look like Luna, I thought, who always wore makeup and kept her hair carefully coiffed, even when she was broke. And I had done my makeup very much like hers—mascara just so, a narrow cloud of blue shadow on my eyelids, and lipstick a soft rose—which was not that strange seeing as it was Luna who had taught me how to do my face one long-ago summer day in our house in Brooklyn.
But none of this, or the little I was c
alled on to say, seemed to matter one way or the other to the tribunal of three doctors, two administrators, and the head nurse whom I faced for the next twenty minutes in a conference room. The Vietnam War was still peaking, and whatever their political views (they never did ask what I thought about the war), the fact I was a medical corps veteran, one of the nurses who had volunteered to be in a combat zone—and the first to be sighted on Kauai, apparently—went a long way toward assuring me the job. I was actually well qualified, but through all the frantic running around over the previous days, that fact hadn’t really registered on me. I had been alone so long that I hadn’t realized how much my self-esteem had fallen.
As for the war, I seemed to think about it incessantly now. Part of this was due to the fact that I was back on American soil, seeing newspapers and hearing radios and televisions regularly for the first time in over two years (though I had only a radio in my own house). I also had daily conversations with people, many of whom were angry and anxious about the war, which at that time was spreading deep into Cambodia.
Many mornings I walked down to the green sea and thought of the B-52s three thousand miles across those same waters streaking inland after their overnight flights from Guam, veering up the Ho Chi Minh Trail to carpet-bomb Hanoi or to soar over the Northern Highlands into Cambodia to drop their massive payloads into the jungle. I didn’t know where Cassiel was at that time, in early 1971, but if he was alive, I couldn’t imagine him participating in either of those missions. In Manila, he had requested a transfer and then disappeared. Now more than ever I asked myself how those two things could possibly be unrelated. I was resigned to the fact I would never find the answer and would never see him again, but I didn’t know how or why I should stop loving him, a man I had only known for three weeks, a period of time that now seemed like the compressed vital center within the broader, gloomier expanse of my life.
If that advisory board at Wilcox Memorial had asked me what I thought about the war, what would I have replied? Maybe that I never regretted serving as a nurse and helping the men I had encountered in that capacity. Whether those men were oppressors or victims or both was a question I had put aside when I arrived in Vietnam. I had wanted to be a nurse, and to me that meant I wasn’t going to be a judge. Certainly after leaving the service I had no desire to judge those men. But for their superiors, the politicians and military brass who began and mismanaged that war, manipulating its effects for their own ends, I had only contempt. Whatever repulsion I had felt for the war as a student had been intensified a thousand times by the suffering I had witnessed as a nurse. I too realized that the deeper I tucked away my love for Cassiel, trying to keep it whole against the erosion of time, the more my loathing for the war grew.
Meanwhile, I started working for Dr. Prion in the small but up-to-date radiology department on the second floor of the hospital: two X-ray rooms, a developing room, and his office. The patients were what I had expected: standard preoperative types, fractures and cancers, and a surprising number of children who swallowed all sorts of objects like marbles or tacks. But no keys. Once again I experienced the simultaneous detachment and intimacy of taking and reading an X ray, the wave of cool solitariness that washed over me when I was gazing into a person’s inner workings. Once again hearts, lungs, kidneys, spleens were like familiar islands in a dark vaporous sea, places in which I could discern any irregularities and intrusions. Once again I became acquainted with the geography and physics of the bones, the names of all 206 of which I had now memorized.
Yet the daily reality of a hospital was quite different from that of a hospital ship. I had never held a straight job of this sort before. A ship was hermetic; soldiers were the patients, and sailors, doctors, and nurses were the crew, everyone governed by strict military codes, even, especially, in the chaos of combat. What occurred outside the codes—dope-smoking, casual sex—was seldom a surprise and was always overwhelmed by the inexorable universe of the war. In that universe, Cassiel and I had been the exception, not the rule. In the hospital, I suddenly found myself in a microcosm of a society that as a whole still felt alien to me. Working solo—odd hours, odd tasks—for Zaren Eboli or toiling with moth-eaten books in the morgue of an obscure branch of the New Orleans library had been more my speed. It was no accident that in college my refuge had been the ancient world, which I studied in classes of ten students or less.
All of which is to say that, despite my wartime experiences and unusual travels, I was still on unsure footing when it came to dealing with other people. Maybe it was those very things that had left me ill-prepared for the emotional transactions others found much simpler. I was not comfortable with large populations; on the Repose, it had been easy to carve out a niche as a loner. In one way or another, even the most gregarious of my shipmates—like Sharline—became loners. In Wilcox Memorial, being a loner only drew more attention to me, and increased my allure for those who already found me atttractive, mysterious, and even exotic on account of my history.
I couldn’t keep the men at the hospital away from me. I knew I was pretty, and I knew that on an island, especially one of moderate size, the men were on the lookout for new pretty women. Maybe a part of me was flattered and didn’t mind it so much. There was one man, especially, who had his eye on me from day one. He was privy to more of my history than other people at the hospital because he had sat on that advisory board which approved my hiring. But he bided his time while I routinely turned down requests for dates from other doctors. Comparing them to Cassiel, as I did every time, I found—predictably—that none of them measured up. After a couple of months, completely alone, I thought I couldn’t keep it up much longer. I felt the need for private companionship as well as solitary privacy, and most of all I needed to have sex. But I decided not to look for it at the hospital.
On Rarotonga I had learned to handle a sea kayak. During those first months on Kauai, I often rented a kayak in Hanalei on a Sunday morning. I slid down the river into the bay and then up the coast to Ke’e Beach, passing my own beach on the way, where two beach dogs who had taken to sleeping on my porch followed me along the shore barking. So when I received my paycheck the first day of my third month at my job, I decided to blow it all on my own kayak.
It was a real beauty, all Plexiglas, purple with an orange cockpit and storage holds fore and aft for food and supplies. It was built not just for hugging the coast but crossing the open sea. If you had the stamina, and the stomach for the waves, it could carry you the ninety miles to Oahu, and beyond. I bought it at the place where I had been renting, from the manager, Val, a tall, towheaded young water-skier and rower with a terrific build who had given me the eye, but in a nicer way than any doctor I’d yet encountered. He offered to deliver the kayak personally in his pickup, following me in my VW to Haena.
Afterward I made sandwiches and we drank beer on the beach. Val was wearing his typical business attire: a red swimsuit and a T-shirt. It was late afternoon, but he was in no rush to get back to town. Business was slow, he said. So we drank more beer and went for a swim. Val had grown up on the island and he swam effortlessly, powerfully, like a dolphin. I brought a portable radio down from the house. The dogs, whom I had named Castor and Pollux, fell asleep on either side of the new kayak. The sun set. We took another swim and this time he glided up and rose before me silently, through the clear, shallow water. He put his arms around me and kissed me. He unsnapped my top. And I shuddered as he kissed me again, running his hands over my breasts, cupping them, and then peeling off my bathing suit and running his hand between my legs. No one had touched me there since Cassiel, but I didn’t hold back from him. After he slipped out of his own suit, we lay on a blanket on the sand. He spread my legs and was very gentle, first with his tongue, and then pushing into me. I came almost at once, and tightening my embrace, waited for him to follow.
Afterward, I rested my head on his chest and for the first time noticed a small tattoo on his left shoulder, a pair of crossed swords over a numera
l 7. I had seen it many times on members of the 7th Air Cavalry in Vietnam. So he was a vet. But I said nothing about this, or the fact I had been in the war.
Val came out to see me a few more times, but we both knew it wasn’t going to turn into anything serious. He had told me that first time together that he had a girlfriend, and after I found out who she was—a young redhead who worked at the bakery whom I liked very much—we agreed to stop. But we stayed friends, too, and later, after I’d surprised him with the fact I had been a Navy nurse, we would talk about the war, but not too much. Mostly we went kayaking along Na Pali coast, alone or with other friends of his, and he taught me everything I knew about the North Shore’s peculiar currents and reefs. One day, after I had built up my stamina, he took me on my most ambitious excursion, to the island of Niihau, seventeen miles across the Kaulakahi Channel from Kauai.
Niihau was known as the “Forbidden Island.” It was privately owned by a single family who bought it in the nineteenth century from a Hawaiian monarch in need of funds. No visitors were allowed. Its population was under three hundred, all pure-blooded Hawaiians who raised cattle and sold rare shells gathered on its beaches. It had been known as the Forbidden Island long before it became private property. The ancient Hawaiians had shunned it as a haven of ghosts and demons, elusive lizard-men reputed to be capable of sucking the blood from a man in less than minute. On nights when the west wind blew, it sometimes carried the howls of the demons—and the moans of their victims. It was said that on such nights, if you were trying to escape the currents around the Forbidden Island, the harder you rowed the more you were drawn back to shore, and certain death. After Val and I had paddled most of the way across the channel, we turned around, the wind whipping up whitecaps, and rowed back to Kauai without meeting any resistance. But that was because we had not actually reached Niihau, Val told me, where the demons could pick up our scent. That would have been a different story.
A Trip to the Stars Page 27
