“No, I’m still at Auckland,” Imo said.
“We gave up waiting till we lived in the same place,” Imo explained.
“Congrats!” I burst out, which sounded so phony. Congrats? When in my life had I ever used that word?
“See,” Wayne was telling me. He put his hand on my bare thigh. “Everybody’s doing it.”
Brian looked at Wayne’s hand on my leg.
“Well, give me seven years.” I jumped to my feet. “I’m going to say hi to Geoffrey and Julie.” I practically ran off to find the guests of honor. I had to get away somewhere—just to take in the fact that Brian and Imo were now permanent. I just had to get used to the idea. So I left Wayne there with Brian and Imo, and he tried to make small talk with them, and there they were humoring him, being polite, only he didn’t realize it. They were observing him, but he didn’t get that. He actually knew a ton about animals, but it was all in the area of raising, breeding, and hunting. He didn’t understand about making observations.
That’s what I thought. Actually, as it turned out, he observed just fine.
“Why did you do that to me?” Wayne asked me that night in my room.
“I didn’t do anything to you,” I said.
“You pushed me away in front of all your friends.”
“I just wanted a chance to talk to them,” I said, “without you breathing down my neck. That’s all.”
“If you’re embarrassed of me, then why did you bring me?” Wayne said.
“I’m not—why would I be embarrassed of you? I just wanted for one second to see them without you touching me all the time. It just bothers me, that’s all.”
“Why shouldn’t I touch you?” Wayne said. “Is it because I’m not some professor? Is it because I’m not some scientist?” And he put his hands on my shoulders and shook me. There I was in his grip, and I couldn’t pull loose. He was way too strong.
“Stop it!” I screamed. My teeth were rattling. “Wayne, what is your problem?”
He stopped. He was in tears. He yelled, “My problem is that I love you, and you don’t love me back.”
7
The Whale
NOW I seemed to be, in the classical sense of the term, in something of a rut, since here I was on an island in a dead-end job, and in the middle of this tempestuous relationship with the wrong guy. Maybe if I’d been smarter or stronger I would have seen how to get out—of the rut, the island, the job, the relationship, what have you—but probably then I wouldn’t have gotten in there in the first place. Somebody else with just a modicum of sense would have up and quit a job selling miniature surfboard key chains. Somebody else would have looked at Wayne and said, You’re big, needy, and overbearing, and I love someone else. We’re through. Yet I was not somebody else; I was myself. That was the whole problem.
I mean, here I was, twenty-six already, and what had I done? I’d already been in Hawaii five years. I’d never intended to stay that long; I’d intended to keep traveling through the entire Pacific. I’d intended to circumnavigate the globe by this time, yet I never had. That was the terrible thing I was discovering about myself. Gary got to be Ulysses and what did I do? Hunker down like Penelope. To put it another way—in gender-neutral terms—maybe some people think they’re buffalo, but when it comes down to it, they don’t actually roam. When it comes down to it, some people are really more like cats, who like to curl up—who actually seek out the smallest spaces. Yet even in the smallest place I peeked out, trying to find, or at least know, something bigger. Even with my flat little cat eyes I was always looking. I was always on the lookout for a better spot. Maybe I didn’t see my way out of my problems, but I was always ready for a solution to come along. That’s huge: readiness. As Hamlet once said, it’s “all.” You have to be open to ideas. You have to be ready—you have to be on your toes—then, boom! Your whole life might be transformed. All of a sudden you’re looking at a whole different picture. To me it happened on a whale watch.
It was the first time I’d ever been. Wayne and I sailed out from Waikiki on the whale-watching boat, and it was a gorgeous Sunday with puffy clouds, and we’d had a few beers, and we were good—we were having a ball. He had this camera with a timer on it and we were running all over town setting up the camera and then racing in front of it and photographing ourselves. So we got onto this whale-watching boat that was about to leave—a dilapidated boat stuffed with tourists, and with some nautical tour guide at the helm who carried on about how there were ample snacks in the galley and rest rooms for our convenience. Wayne and I were cracking up. He was saying, “Ample snacks, ma’am?”
Then when we finally sailed out to where the whales were supposed to be, it seemed like they’d heard us coming. The tour guide kept announcing things like “At two o’clock you can just see …”
Thumpity, thumpity, thumpity, all the passengers ran to two o’clock. The boat tilted down from the weight of everyone running and pushing and shoving to one side. Then, “Well, it looks like she’s gone down for a dive. We’ll wait and see where she comes up. Oh, there’s her friend there—nine o’clock….”
Thumpity, thumpity, thumpity, everybody was running back the other way. The boat was starting to tilt in the other direction, and everyone was fighting for the railing. But now it looked like the whales had gone down again.
Wayne and I were already in a rambunctious mood. There we were in the thick of it, running around, making more commotion, laughing our heads off.
“It looks like a case of stage fright today,” said our announcer. He was starting to sound somewhat resigned. Everyone on board was getting impatient—like, we’ve sailed forty-five minutes out here already—where the hell are the whales? And some people said how could we be so unlucky? It was only something like one trip in a hundred that there weren’t any sightings. And other people said clearly the whales were out here but they didn’t want to show themselves. And then one big guy with an aloha shirt that was too small for him, and the buttons were straining against his belly—he said the whale-watching cruises were guaranteed, and we’d all get our money back if we didn’t actually see any whales.
But this other guy said, “You don’t get your money back. You just get tickets for another cruise. And if you read the fine print,” this guy said—and he opened up his brochure—“dolphins count as a whale sighting.”
“No way!” I said, pretending to be scandalized.
“Yup,” he said. And he said it so smugly—like, I have looked into the heart of this scam.
There we all were, maybe fifty people on this little boat idling in the ocean—and somewhere in the distance, or deep down where we couldn’t see, those whales were hiding. Everyone was milling around, and people were starting to get grumpy. We were starting to sound mutinous. And I was standing near the bow of the boat with Wayne, and I was staring at the water, and I got kind of quiet. I looked down at the green sea, wistfully, as in, Just my luck. As in, A watched ocean doesn’t boil. I stared and stared. “I can see how you wouldn’t want to reveal yourself.”
“What?” said Wayne behind me.
“I was just mumbling,” I told him. I leaned over the side of the boat. I sent my thoughts down into the water: “I can see how you wouldn’t want to come up with all these people around. Why should you? It’s crass. It’s worse than that. It’s the descendants here of the folks who killed your ancestors. What a sick little world.” But I was also thinking, Please, please come. I was thinking, Whale, please show your face here, because we need you. We do. I was thinking, Please, whale, come out, because there are some people here who miss your presence. There are people out here on this boat who can’t even imagine staying under water for twenty minutes at a stretch. There are people here who can barely hold their breaths at all, and, honestly we are surface dwellers. We like our dolphins in tanks, and our birds in aviaries. We’re very trivial. Yet we have so much respect for you when it occurs to us. Whale, I kept thinking, please come.
Then I saw them.
Two clouds coming up from underneath the sea, and they were two whales, big ones, and they came up like these black clouds from underneath, enormous but swift, from right under the boat. And suddenly everyone was on top of me and Wayne; they were pushing and squishing us against the railing, and there were cameras and the announcer was talking, but I didn’t even notice. I was just about flattened there against the rail and Wayne was somewhere, but I’d forgotten about him. The shadows were melting back under the water.
Then one whale came back. The whale’s flukes began to lift. Our boat was still. The whole vessel was frail next to her. She was massive as a building, and almost close enough to touch. In a rush her flukes came up. Our boat rocked backward. It was as if the whole ocean slid back for an instant, the surface of the water sliding off and opening as that tail reached and tipped itself. It was as if the whole ocean was sliding open. And I saw something there. The world was big, not little. The place was deep. The sky swung back in liquid gold, the air mixed with the water. I saw something. It was a whale, but not just the whale. It was a vision. It was a vision of God.
I was shivering, just in pure terror; just in shock—because all of a sudden I’d seen it—all the power under the world, all this presence and wisdom that wasn’t human.
“Sharon!” Wayne was calling to me. “Sharon, are you okay, hon?”
I was just looking and looking at the green ocean. The whale was gone.
“Get off of her. Get off!” Wayne was yelling. He was shoving people back away from me—just peeling people off me and the railing. And I remember feeling grateful to him for doing that. I remember it occurring to me briefly that it was very sweet of him—but I was already in a completely different place.
AT first Wayne thought this vision was just a passing thing with me—a bad reaction to the crowds and the choppy water. Just a serious case of seasickness on the boat. But days and weeks went by—and I was still dazed. I wouldn’t go out anymore. No dinners, no movies, no more Kailua Drive-in. No more bar-hopping in Waikiki. I wouldn’t even sleep with Wayne anymore.
Wayne tried to be patient with me, but I was not back to my old self. I was just not the same. Two months later we went for a walk on the beach. It was a moonlit night and we walked along, and I tried to explain it to him. I pointed out to sea, all the way out to the horizon, where the ocean slipped over the edge of the world. I pointed to that place and said, “Wayne, I saw a vision of God there.”
“What do you mean, a vision of God? What does that mean?” he kept asking.
“I can’t explain it,” I said. “I saw Him.”
“How long is this going on for?” he asked me.
And that made me mad. “What do you mean, going on for?” I said. “What? Do you think I’m coming off a bad trip or something? You think I have a cold?”
Wayne yelled back at me, “What’s your point?”
“I don’t know! Stop bothering me so I can find out!” I stomped off.
He ran right after me. Sand sprayed up against our legs. He grabbed me and he wouldn’t let me go, which ordinarily would have frightened me, but I looked into his face and I had no fear at all. A jealous boyfriend was all I saw. A guy I’d been with at one time. That was it.
“I saw God, and I’m going to find Him,” I said. “I’m going to search and search until I find Him again. I’m going to look everywhere. Every single place there is.”
He started shaking me. “Snap out of it! Snap out of it! Who do you think you are, Joan of fricking Arc?”
And I started laughing at him. I couldn’t help it. He was so helpless there with me, like a kid with a broken toy, shaking me, trying to make me work again.
He pushed me as hard as he could. The sand burned as I fell. My hair fell all around my face and I just lay there in a heap. “Don’t ever laugh at me.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Wayne, I’m so sorry.”
He came over to me. He helped me up, and I put my arms around his neck. “Wayne,” I told him. “It’s not personal. It’s nothing about you. You were great—don’t get me wrong—and I’m sorry all of a sudden … it’s just that—it’s like all of a sudden I’m not available anymore—not through my own choice. It’s not that at all. It’s just all of a sudden I see—I know….”
“You’re breaking up with me,” he said. His voice was sullen and at the same time desolate.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to,” I told him.
“Sharon. You’re making me crazy! You can’t tell me this stuff. It doesn’t make sense. You’re breaking up with me, but you don’t want to? Then who’s making you? What’re you, listening to voices in your head? Hearing God talking to you? The whale is telling you what to do? What?”
“All I know is I saw Him. I know He’s out there, and I’ve got to find Him.” I kept saying that, over and over.
“Why?” Wayne asked. “Why?”
“It’s just—when you see Him, even for one second—you have to get back to Him again.”
I didn’t just break up with Wayne, I changed everything else in my life as well. New house. New job. The works. My new place was a room in a house with a couple of guys, Baron and Thad—who everyone called T-Bone. I’d met them at some zoology parties years before. They were not zoologists, but they were partiers, that’s for sure. They were two extremely big, basically decent yet rowdy local guys. Baron was a former football player—he’d been kicked off the university team, the Rainbow Warriors. He was heavy now—out of shape and depressed about it. He was trying to get into music and his dream was to start a band, except he wasn’t very musical. T-Bone, however, was a comer. He lifted weights, and was a player in the bodybuilding scene. He had a girlfriend named Christina, who was lifting too. The two of them, when they were together, they bounced when they walked.
Baron and T-Bone were a little wild at times, but also generous and open-minded. When I said I was on a quest for God, they said okay. When I wanted to adopt a cat, they told me no problem. So I brought home a kitten an Ecuadorian grad student named Miguel had found at the university. Just a little black fluff ball with white feet, and he was so soft and sweet. But after a few months he grew into a black slinky outdoor teenage cat, and he went out at night and fought all the neighbor cats, and it turned out he wasn’t cuddly at all, yet he was my new companion. I named him Marlon, after Brando. All the neighbors hated him. You could hear him screaming at night.
Our neighborhood had bungalow homes with teensy tufty mondo grass lawns in front and borders of hedges manicured every day by these older Japanese couples, mostly second generation off the sugar plantations. However, our place was not exactly manicured. It had once been used for cockfighting and then boarded up by the cops, and then converted into a rental. The bugs were plentiful, but, given my experiences, to me it was no big deal. The house swayed a little in the breeze, since it was mostly termite eaten. Baron and T-Bone went to school some days and sold restricted substances on others. Yet when I moved in with them I barely ever took a hit. There I was, searching for God, and caring for Marlon, and it wasn’t as if I had a lot of time for smoking dope.
I got my new job through Geoffrey Wong’s fiancée, Julie Liu, whose aunt and uncle owned Paradise Jeweler in Ala Moana Shopping Center. And one of the main reasons I took the job was that Mr. and Mrs. Liu were very religious! They were, in fact, evangelical. At the store the Lius would stop everything they were doing just to talk to me about the Lord. They were always open to discussion. They got me my own copy of the New Standard Annotated Bible to study and mark up, and they invited me to pray with them whenever I wanted to, and also to go to their church. Telling it now, it sounds a little bit wrong, like mixing church and state—me praying with my new employers. Yet at the time I couldn’t get over it. Just when I was looking for divinity, this highly spiritual couple was looking for a salesperson! It was like all along they’d been waiting for me.
I had been to church a couple of times before with Kekui, but t
he Lius had a different house of worship. They went to a place in Manoa called the Greater Love Salvation Church, which was a Pentecostal millenarian revivalist congregation. The gist of the church was there was no greater love for mankind than that of Jesus our savior, and he chose to die for us in order to save us. But since there was still sin in the world he was coming back. He could be coming any day, so we had to get ready, because when he arrived there would be an Armageddon and a rapture, and those who were saved would rise up on eagle’s wings, and those who were not would go straight down the chute to hell. I admitted up front I was skeptical about these concepts of the faith, but the Lius were fine with that. The idea was that someday I’d get so bowled over, I’d get the big picture all at once. It would be like a circuit of the philosophy of Jesus and my vision of God. The two would click, and zap. I’d get the charge, and then, like one of those gilded roaches, there would be no looking back.
The Lius’ Pastor McClaren loved to preach and read from his scripture that he’d selected for the day and extemporize and tell anecdotes about what he’d seen and heard during the week. He had a big cross, maybe five feet high, hanging up above him, and a smaller one on his lectern, and a cross on his robe, and he had about two hundred people filling the pews of the funny old cement-block building. Little kids passed around polished monkeypod wood bowls to take collection, and Mr. and Mrs. Liu used to sit with me and look up front with their gentle faces, and Geoffrey and Julie used to sit together holding hands. As for me, I sat on the edge of my pew. I was on tenterhooks. I was just trying so hard—not so much to understand, but to believe. I was very ignorant, so a lot of times I didn’t get down beneath the beauty and the poetry of what the pastor said. I only perceived the surface, and the shape of the words, rather than all the connotations he was assuming everyone knew. The rapture, for example, didn’t have a lot of technical meaning for me, but just sounded very sexy. Sort of like Christ and the Church finally getting back together after they’d been apart so long. I was reading in my annotated Bible the Lius had given me, and I’d found this Song of Solomon, which the annotations said was all about Christ and His Church being lovers. And the Church was this beautiful virginal girl who had taken up with all these men who weren’t good for her, but just the same, she ran everywhere searching for Christ who had been her first love, and better for her than anyone she’d been with since. And that really touched me, having this whole ballad with these two beings, the Church and Christ, who longed for each other constantly and searched for each other, and just so wanted that rapture of being together again. “Oh that I could kiss your lips; your lips are sweeter than wine” or “Oh that his left hand were under my head, and his right hand embracing me!”
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