Paradise Park

by Allegra Goodman

  HERE’S what I took to Hawaii: my guitar, and my backpack with my name on it in black laundry marker. In the backpack: six panties, and a bra. Five T-shirts of different colors, a pair of shorts (I wore my jeans), two Indian gauze skirts wadded up in little balls, and a macramé bikini. A notebook and a ballpoint pen to write down my feelings. My wallet, my hairbrush, and toothbrush, and, from the free clinic, a good supply of the pill. I had a watch, a big silver man’s watch that had been my grandfather’s. Grandpa Irving’s watch had a creamy face and bold black roman numerals. The crystal was scratched, and when you opened up the watch-case there were pawn marks inside, stamped in the silver. The watch was battered up, but lucky. Grandpa had kept it during the flu epidemic of 1918, when he holed up in his room for two weeks with a bottle of wicked germ-killing brandy, and he’d carried it through all his union organizing. It was his talisman—at least that’s how it was told to me. He even brought it down to Mexico, when he’d tried to organize the tobacco workers in Yucatán. So of things of value I had that watch and my guitar.

  It was raining when we got to Oahu. Everything was gray and white and windy, like an old movie as we came down closer and closer, and out the airplane window I could see these little palm trees waving around hysterically by the tarmac. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. My face was just pressed against that cold airplane glass. In the airport there was slack key guitar music and such a strong sweet scent of flowers I thought at first that everyone was smoking weed. There were servicemen, and tourists and honeymooners, who you could tell right away because they were all dressed up, everything about them new. And then there were scraggly folk like us, some with hiking gear. We all got free paper cups of pineapple juice.

  The two of us piled into a station wagon taxi—which wasn’t really necessary, considering how little luggage we had, but we laid our backpacks and my guitar in the back and we got in. All the car’s windows were open in the rain, and I couldn’t believe it, the air was so warm and soft and damp. We drove on the shortest freeway I’d ever seen. It was like it was foreshortened, and there was Honolulu coming up so fast, just a few tall white buildings, a little clump right in front of Diamond Head. We’d got a two-week deal in Waikiki. Our hotel was not on the beach; it did not have views, its rooms were not equipped with many towels, but it was cheap. We figured it would be our launching pad.

  The rain cleared up by the next morning, and we hopped a city bus, which was painted turquoise and had turquoise seats too. The windows were half open, and outside the colors were spectacular. I couldn’t get over it. The greens were so green, the blue sky so blue. The leaves, the clouds, even the mock orange bushes. It was like everything on that island had just come out of the wash; it was like the trees were hanging out to dry. I just wanted to ride around all day. I just wanted to go out to a park bench with my guitar and write a song. But Gary had a look of disgust on his face. He hadn’t come to ride buses and feel like he was still in the United States. He never said anything to me unless it was some kind of critical comment about tourist traps and raped ecosystems and the scummy bars in Waikiki.

  We got off at the university, which was full of trees. There were trees that launched these seeds just like brown golf balls, dimples and all. And there were trees with big saggy phallic seed pods hanging down, just obscene looking. The buildings were all a mishmash, lots of dirty cement and glass. There was a tubular sculpture, bright orange, house high, with enameled pieces of metal bent into cones and big pointy curves. The top looked like lipstick scaled for a giantess. I loved all this. I was gawking at everything, but Gary just strode over to the zoology department. He was focused on digging up that ornithologist, the hero he had come all this way to meet and work with and learn from and basically get involved with his cause. There was real drama about it, the way Gary walked into Spaulding Hall. It was like it was going to be: Dr. Williamson, I presume? And Gary would be Stanley.

  Well, as it turned out, Brian was a very down to earth feet-on-the-desk type guy. He was about Gary’s age, mid-thirties, but shorter than Gary, and stockier. He had a lot of sandy blond hair and a beard, and basically looked like a mountain man. His eyes were dark and steady, his nose was peeling. His arms were thick and freckled, and his shoulders broad, as opposed to Gary, who was so tall and sinewy and fleeting. At the time I just thought Brian looked bluff and bland, and not as sharp as Gary. I thought Brian didn’t have a lot of rhythm to him. Still, when it came to birds, he seemed to know his stuff. He thought it was cool Gary had read his articles. He said why don’t we all have lunch. So we went to a lunch wagon on the street and bought big white dumplings with pork called manapua, and meat sticks, and that sweet cold inari sushi in a brown sugary-vinegary cone.

  We sat out on the grass and Brian talked about his new project that he’d just got funded. It was a study of red-footed boobies, which were a very gentle lovely bird that traveled all through the Hawaiian Islands to breed, even to certain tiny islands way northwest. They were one of those species that were indigenous to Hawaii and they weren’t used to having any predators. They had no idea how to protect themselves against goats or pigs or mongooses. On Tern Island and various atolls they were being slaughtered by the jeeps and machinery the military was bringing in. They were flying into guy wires, and being sucked up the intakes of jet engines, which tended to crash the Air Force’s precious fighter-bombers. Naturally, grunts had no sensitivity to this rare bird. In fact they liked driving around mowing boobies down when they stood in the middle of the road. Brian had been ridiculed by the Coast Guard when he’d gone out to defend the birds on island bases and installations. The government’s official position was that the birds were dumb for getting in their way, while in fact it was the boobies’ innocence and trust that was getting them killed. But now the Coast Guard was pulling back from a lot of places in the northwest, so Brian had a grant to sail out there and take a census of the boobies and other seabirds that were nesting happily on the islands the military had left. In particular, he was making plans to go out for three months to observe a bunch of red-footed boobies that he’d banded on Kauai when they were just chicks.

  Gary listened closely all during lunch, but he didn’t say much. I think maybe the Berkeleyites had made Brian out a little larger than life. Gary was becoming a little bit downcast.

  After lunch when Brian went back to his office, Gary and I walked through campus.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. “Isn’t the bus the other way?”

  Gary kept his eyes on the ground. He just kept walking. I looked over at him. He was making me nervous. What should I say to him? That I was having a great time? That those meat sticks and pork dumplings had made my day? It had been months since I’d had meat, and I wasn’t exactly a vegetarian, even though in Berkeley I’d been living in a vegetarian co-op house. I just walked and walked along. It was hard to keep up, Gary’s legs were so long, and he was so deep in thought. Finally I said, “Gary, could you just stop for a minute?”

  He stopped.

  “Don’t you want to work on Brian’s project?”

  Gary looked at me like he’d never seen me before. I guess I should have realized the very suggestion was an insult. He’d come to Hawaii planning to work in the jungle looking for those endangered honey-creepers being driven out. He wasn’t here to sit and watch a thriving seabird colony!

  “How come you don’t like it here?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  All of a sudden I lost it. “Well, what the hell do you like? What do you want? We’ve been traveling together all this time and nothing is good enough for you. Nothing is clean enough or wild enough; nobody is radical enough. Just what exactly are you looking for?”

  He set his mouth, and still he didn’t answer.

  “You are the most selfish person I’ve ever known!” I raged. “I’ve come all this way with you and you are never never satisfied. I’m not going to take it anymore. I’m not going anywhere else with you. I’m not walking w
ith you; I’m not dancing with you, I’m not following you from—”

  Then Gary floored me. He said, “Fine.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I should have known. But it just hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been too young and green to understand that Gary’s goal in life wasn’t just being with me! It hadn’t occurred to me that we were different that way. I still had in my head some idea of symmetry, that since I loved him, he loved me the same way. And since I was all wrapped up in him, he was also all wrapped up in me. And that was the way it should be. I’d probably written too many songs.

  He left me there right on campus with those ridiculous golf-ball trees, and I walked around and around, and my face twisted up like crumpled paper as I walked.

  Finally, I went back to the hotel room and gathered everything that belonged to Gary. There were some papers, and his good hiking boots, and some extra clothes. He had his backpack with him, but I took everything he’d left in the room out onto the balcony. And if we’d had a room looking out on the ocean I’d have flung it all into the sea. As it was, we were on the tenth floor overlooking the street, and not far from an open-air shopping bazaar called the International Marketplace. I didn’t want to kill anyone with the boots, so I left them on the balcony. Then I hurled Gary’s shirts with all my might, so that they fell all the way down ten stories to the ground and flopped all over the sidewalk and draped on bushes far below. I wadded Gary’s papers individually into little balls, and I tossed them too. All those balls of letters and notebook doodlings blew back against the building, and so did his socks, so they probably landed on the balconies below me, but Gary’s jeans went straight down over the side, flapping in the breeze. And his underpants had a good wind behind them. Some hit the street, and some landed on the sidewalk, where the tourist couples in their matching aloha wear looked up to see what was going on.

  But even after I did all that, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t see how Gary would want to shake me off—I who not only had loved him, but who had been such a good sport.

  I started looking for him. For days I looked. I called Professor Williamson and I searched all through the university, and went back to the lunch wagon on the street. I walked through Waikiki and peeked in the lobbies of the hotels, the pink Royal Hawaiian, and the Halekulani, which had this whole library in the lobby of old novels and mysteries, and the Moana, which was a rickety old white-frame colonialist building from the twenties with a banyan tree in its courtyard. I searched the Pacific Reef Hotel. I stood like a zombie in front of their oceanarium—a humongous fish tank where they used to send a girl down in a bikini and scuba gear to feed all the bug-eyed fish with pieces of lettuce. I looked in the restaurants and the bars, like the Tahitian Lanai with its paintings on black velvet of Polynesian maidens and topless hula dancers. I didn’t realize at the time that those paintings were world famous, being artworks by the master velvet painter, Leeteg. I just figured they were pornography.

  I walked to Ala Moana Shopping Center and spent hours looking for Gary in the shops there. I wandered by the marina where the sailboats bumped against the dock. After five days my anger had almost all turned into sadness, and my energy was gone. Poor me, with my long hair and my callused feet. I was actually getting frightened because I didn’t know anyone, and I only had a few traveler’s checks. Then Gary showed up again. He walked into our hotel room in the evening like he’d never been away. I almost jumped off the bed where I was sitting with my guitar. I almost felt more relief than actual despair.

  “Hi,” he said.

  I put down the guitar.

  “I came to get my stuff.” He started opening up the rattan dresser drawers.

  I said, “Your stuff isn’t here anymore.”

  “None of it?”

  Then I remembered his boots. I got up and opened the sliding door onto the balcony. The boots were sitting there all covered with pigeon poop. They were all mottled with little black-and-white turds and runny green.

  But Gary picked them up and took them inside and began cleaning them off in the bathroom with my one hotel towel. “I’ve met up with a group going to Fiji,” he said.

  So I looked at him and I was going to shriek: You selfish clichéd opportunist pig! You shallow self-serving piece of scum! Yet I was still gasping for air. I took the boots and I dumped them in the bathtub and turned on the shower till they were soaked. I wanted to kill Gary’s stuff for good—although I should have known you can’t destroy good hiking boots—meanwhile I was shouting, “Who’s in this group, Gary? Some girl who wants to see the world?” And I screamed all kinds of other stuff at him, and I tried to hit him, and I think I did scratch him a fair amount. I screamed, “Don’t lie to me, asshole!”

  “I’m not lying,” he said. But when I let go of him and we went back into the bedroom and talked a little but not a lot more calmly, it turned out the group of three he was taking off to Fiji with did include a girl named Katrina. He’d managed to hook up with this German chick who was an anthropology student with a huge fellowship to write her diss on quilt making in the Pacific Islands and she was traveling all through the South Pacific photographing quilts and taking oral histories. But the main thing I gathered was she had all this money. So she must have been enjoying herself, having a great time partying along the way.

  I was numb by then. My face was all dried out from crying. Gary didn’t once say he was sorry. What could he say? He was sorry he was tired of me? He was sorry our relationship wore thin as time wore on? I guess there was no good way to put it. I told him to get the fuck out, which was pretty much what he was waiting for. He turned tail and closed the hotel room door. And he didn’t forget his sopping boots, which he carried by the laces.

  After he left, I lay on top of the bed and I thought and thought how just two years before in Boston this same guy was practically begging me to sleep with him. How he’d picked me out from all the dancers as his partner to teach with. How we’d walked out after dancing in short sleeves in the winter, and all down the street we didn’t even notice the slush and the cold.

  2

  I Shall Go A-Wanderin’

  THERE are all different famous kinds of sleep. The sleep of the just, and the sleep of the good—but there’s nothing like the sleep of the totally devastated. Nothing so sound. Nothing so deep. You hit the pillow and your eyes shut, and your whole body sighs with relief. You don’t want to wake up, ever.

  The night Gary left I slept that way. I slept and slept far into the morning, and that was when I had that vision about light, and space, and God, but, as I said, the whole thing dissolved as soon as I woke up all the way. I just couldn’t make myself sleep any more. Then I sat on the edge of my bed and tried to figure out what I was going to do.

  The hotel bill was half paid, because Gary had paid half in advance. But the other half I was going to have to come up with, and that was about all I had in traveler’s checks. I tallied up the bill, and I counted my money a few times. Every time, I saw that the hotel would just about clean me out. I guess I cried a little bit more. I saw myself in the mirror crying, and then I felt strange doing it, but I couldn’t help it. I watched myself crying. I began to feel like I was watching some girl in my situation. And that feeling was the worst of all—that I was hanging around watching myself. That was the feeling of being alone.

  I got up and started washing my face, but the towel was filthy lying there on the bathroom floor. Who knew when housekeeping would come with another one? Probably never. Especially not for me, who they wanted to check out already—settle my bill and split. I went and dried my face on the top sheet of the bed.

  Then I did something odd. I made the bed and smoothed out the bedspread on top until it was perfectly flat, hideous bird-of-paradise design and all. I took my guitar and my backpack and all my things, even my toothbrush, and I laid them out on the bed around me very carefully one by one. And I got on the bed and sat cross-legged with my back to the mirror and looked at my stuff. I sat there on that gr
een bedspread like I was a castaway doing an inventory of the things left from my wreck, spreading them out to dry on my little bed-size island. There were my T-shirts. There was the wad of string that was my macramé bikini. I looked at everything I’d packed to see the world. I picked up Grandpa Irving’s old silver watch and I held it in my palm and rubbed it with my fingers like a worry bead. I looked at the little dime-store notebook I’d bought back on Shattuck Avenue. There wasn’t a single word written in it. I turned over Grandpa Irving’s watch in my hands, and I looked at the pawn marks like tattoos inside the cover of its case. I wished that some of the luck in that watch would rub off on me, or maybe that some genie or ghost of my grandfather would pop out from the winding stem to grant my wishes—except what would those wishes be? I was almost too demoralized to come up with anything besides Gary’s plane crashing in the ocean on the way to Fiji, and a tiger shark coming in to eat Gary limb by limb, leaving a long trail of blood in the water. For myself I guess I could only wish I had money for the hotel and also some breakfast, which I really needed, since I was so hungry. Beyond that I didn’t even know what I’d wish for, because the last five days had pretty much destroyed any confidence I had.

  But there was one little voice inside of me that kept speaking to me. I wish I could say it was the voice of reason, but to tell the truth, at that stage of my life reason didn’t speak to me very often. I really wish I could say I heard a still, small voice. I love when there’s a still, small voice! But nope. My voice inside of me was more of what I would describe as enraged and terrified yet squeaky, but it kept on talking till I couldn’t help listening, and it kept saying—It’s not fair. It’s not fair! That was the one thing I kept telling myself. Because, why did Gary get to go off to Fiji while I had to stay here? How come he got to pursue his causes while all I got to pursue was him? Why was that?—apart from the fact that I’d been in love with him? Why were all his harebrained schemes so important? I mean, what about my journey, and my odyssey? Where were my poems that were supposed to be written down there in my notebook? Where were those songs from my life experiences that I was going to write? Of course nobody had forced me to become the long-suffering girlfriend of this jerk—but I wasn’t thinking about that—I was thinking how it was just so unfair. Angry and sulky and with a wounded pride, I sat on that bed and looked at my little array of clothes laid out there. I looked at my guitar, and my scrunched-up gauze skirts, wrinkly as tissue paper. And then my eye fell on my return ticket to California.