Paradise News

by David Lodge

  Drove to St Joseph’s in the afternoon to visit Daddy. When I got to his room he was in the act of receiving Communion from a hospital chaplain. An awkward moment. I hovered at the doorway, wondering if I could retreat without being observed, but Daddy noticed me and said something to the priest, who smiled and beckoned me to approach. He was a youngish, plumpish man, with a short haircut, wearing the stole over a grey clerical shirt and black trousers. A bored-looking teenager in jeans and running shoes was in attendance as acolyte. It was strange to watch them going through the familiar motions, like watching a previous incarnation of myself (why do I so often have the feeling of being a ghost these days?). Daddy closed his eyes and extended his tongue to receive the host in the traditional manner. He never had any time for the post-Vatican II practice of receiving it in the hand – a disrespectful Protestant dodge, he used to say of it scornfully.

  When he had closed the lid of the ciborium, the priest put his hand on Daddy’s head and began to pray aloud for his recovery. I recognized the trademark of the charismatic. Daddy, taken by surprise, shook his head like a startled horse, but the chaplain pressed his scalp firmly down into the pillow and continued with his prayer. I suppressed a temptation to smile at Daddy’s discomfiture. When the priest had finished, he turned to me and asked me if I would like to pray. I shook my head. Then it was Daddy’s turn to give a faint, sardonic smile.

  The priest introduced himself to me as Father Luke McPhee. He said he was deputizing for one of the regular chaplains who was in California attending a course, and that it was a great privilege because the sick seemed to appreciate the Eucharist so much more than parishioners at an ordinary Sunday mass. I mumbled some appropriate reply, but perhaps I looked unconvinced, or unconvincing, for he looked at me keenly, like a uniformed officer who suspects a deserter in disguise.

  Drove on to the Geyser to visit Ursula. I didn’t go into detail about the nursing homes – just said they weren’t suitable, and that I was looking at another two tomorrow. She asked anxiously about Daddy. Apparently she’d tried to speak to him by phone earlier, and someone at St Joseph’s had told her he wasn’t available. She had left a message, but he hadn’t called back. I said that he didn’t have a bedside telephone and she said that they would bring one to him if he asked. She fretted at being just a few miles away from her brother – “so near and yet so far – it would be something if we could just talk.” I said that Daddy had never been a great one for chatting on the telephone, which is true enough, perhaps because he spent almost his entire working life with telephone bells shrilling in his ears. But he had said nothing to me about getting a message from Ursula.

  She was envious when I told her about his receiving communion. She said the Catholic chaplain came round the Geyser once in a blue moon. She would like to be in a Catholic hospital, but her health plan is tied to the Geyser. I said I was sure that Father Luke would visit her, but she would have to put up with being prayed over. She said she didn’t go much for that kind of stuff, it was what she called Billy Graham religion. “But it seems to be creeping into the Catholic Church. When I started going to mass again, a few years ago, I hardly recognized the service. It seemed more like a concert party to me. There was a bunch of kids up at the altar, with tambourines and guitars, and they were singing jolly camp-fire type songs, not the good old hymns I remember, ‘Soul of My Saviour’ and ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine’. And the mass was in English, not Latin, and there was a woman on the altar reading the epistle, and the priest said the mass facing the people – I was quite embarrassed watching him chewing the host. When I was a girl, at the convent, we were told never to touch the host with your teeth. You had to sort of fold it over with your tongue and swallow it.”

  An old superstition, I assured her, that had been dropped from First Communion preparation years ago. I gave her a brief rundown on modern eucharistic theology: the importance of the shared meal in Jewish culture, the place of the agape or love-feast in the lives of the early Christians, the misguided scholastic effort to provide an Aristotelian rationale for the eucharist, leading to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the superstitious reification of the consecrated host. I could hear myself sounding more and more like a St John’s College lecturer, and see Ursula getting more and more restive, but somehow couldn’t shift into a more appropriate register. When I had finished, she said, “What’ve the Jews got to do with it?” I said that Jesus was a Jew. She said, “I suppose he was, but somehow I never thought of him as Jewish. He doesn’t look Jewish on the shroud of Turin.” I said the shroud of Turin had recently been exposed as a medieval forgery. She was silent for a moment, then she said, “Is that Sophie Knoepflmacher still poking her nose into my affairs?”

  There are times when it is quite hard to love ignorant, prejudiced old people, even if they are sick and helpless.

  Drove back to the apartment to get ready for my visit to the Millers. By 5.15 I was ready: showered, beard trimmed, shirt changed. I wondered whether I should wear a tie, but decided against it: too hot. To kill time, I wrote up this journal for today. It is now 6.15. I feel strangely nervous, excited, expectant. Why? Perhaps because I haven’t told anyone about the invitation – not Daddy, not Ursula, not even Mrs Knoepflmacher, who knocked on my door just now with some tuna-fish salad, which I received with thanks and put in the fridge. I feel a little bit as if I am truanting, or fraternizing with the enemy. That must be it.

  10.00 p.m.

  Just returned from dinner with Yolande Miller. An interesting evening, and mostly enjoyable, though it ended rather abruptly and unsatisfactorily. My fault entirely. I feel restless and dissatisfied; also curiously wide-awake – an effect of jet-lag, no doubt. I know that if I go to bed, I won’t sleep, so I might as well write down my impressions of the occasion while they are still fresh.

  The Millers’ house is one of many small, square, one-storey wooden structures stuck into the flanks of a damp, narrow cleft at the end of a valley in the hills above the University, which is itself above Waikiki. The road climbed steadily, and towards the end became so steep and twisty that I wondered more than once whether my ageing Honda was going to make it round the next bend. It’s a different climate from Waikiki up there, wetter and more humid. The vegetation is dense and lush. “Welcome to the rainforest!” Yolande called out from the porch as I climbed the stepped path from the road, slippery with trodden leaves and hibiscus petals. She says it rains almost every day, though seldom for long. The clouds graze the tops of the hills and every now and then they let fall a gentle precipitation. “Out of habit,” she said, “like a dog peeing against a post.” Appliances rust, books become mildewed, wine turns sour. “I loathe it,” she said, “but I’m stuck here.”

  It wasn’t raining this evening, however, and from the verandah (or lanai, as Yolande called it, with a certain droll emphasis, as if to disown by self-parody any ethnic affectation) there was a stunning view of the sun setting behind Waikiki, tinting the clustered tower blocks pink and mauve. From up there, you can see just how compact and improbable Waikiki is. It looks like a mini-Manhattan, clean and pristine as an architect’s model, magically sprouted from a tropical beach. Yolande pointed out to me the line of the Ala Wai canal which contains it on the inland side. “They built the canal to drain the marshes – that was what made Waikiki habitable. Before that it was infested with mosquitoes. But it was a stroke of planning genius, because as well as attracting the tourists it keeps them corralled in one place, so they have to spend all their money in the Waikiki hotels and the Waikiki shops, and don’t interfere too much with the rest of us. My husband explained that to me. He’s a geographer.”

  I soon ascertained that she is separated from her husband, and that the “we” of the invitation referred to her sixteen-year-old daughter, Roxy, to whom I was introduced as “Mr Walsh, whose father had the accident.” Roxy looked at me curiously and inquired politely about Daddy’s state of health. Her own father, it seems, left Yolande a year ago for a younger wo
man, an instructor in his Department at the University. Divorce proceedings have been delayed by disputes about the financial settlement, disputes that Yolande admits to prolonging.

  “He would like me to move away, out of his life, to give him his divorce as quickly as possible, take my share of the value of the house and move back to the mainland. But I’m not going to give him an easy out. Why should I? I want to embarrass him. I want to shame him. I want to hurt him. I want him to know that he can’t go to the supermarket or the drugstore or to a faculty party without the risk of running into me. I have a special baleful stare I keep ready for him – or her. I practise in front of the bathroom mirror. Not very mature behaviour, you may think, especially for a therapist, and you’d be right. But I was hurt. I felt betrayed. I knew the girl, you see. She was one of Lewis’s graduate students. She used to come to the house. I thought of her as a sort of friend.”

  I should say that she had put away a fair amount of drink by the time she reached this degree of candour. A stiff gin and tonic before dinner (if the one she mixed for me was anything to go by) and more than half the bottle of Beaujolais I had brought with me. We were sitting over cheese and fruit. The rise-and-fall lamp-shade, pulled down low over the dining-table, cast a circle of bright light on the yellow puddle of melting Camembert, but left her face in shadow. We were alone. Roxy had gobbled down her salad and lemon chicken casserole and departed with some friends to a drive-in movie. (“Don’t be late,” Yolande said to her, as a car horn cleared its throat in the road below the house, and Roxy leaped to her feet. “How late is late?” “Ten o’clock.” “Eleven.” “Ten thirty.” “Ten forty-five,” Roxy yelled from the porch, as the screen door slammed behind her. Yolande sighed and grimaced. “It’s called family negotiation,” she said.)

  Roxy (short for Roxanne), a pretty girl with her mother’s dark colouring and glossy black hair, is another factor in the marital deadlock. Although, according to Yolande, she disapproves of her father’s behaviour, she sees him regularly and does not want to lose touch with him. There is another child, an older boy called Gene, who is at college in California, and at present doing a vacation job in a State park, but Roxy is the focus of Yolande’s concern. “I’m afraid if I take her away from Hawaii, she’ll resent it. I think she secretly hopes Lewis and I will get together again one day.”

  “Is that likely?” I was bold enough to ask.

  “No,” she said, pouring the last of the Beaujolais into her glass. “I don’t think so. What about you, Bernard, are you married?”

  I shook my head.

  “Divorced? Widower?”

  “No, just a bachelor.” Something, I don’t know what – I suppose that I too had imbibed more alcohol than I am used to – prompted me to add: “I’m not gay, either.”

  She laughed and said, “I didn’t think you were. Otherwise I wouldn’t have invited you up here to work my feminine wiles on you.”

  “What wiles are those?” I said hoarsely. My larynx had contracted in panic. Please don’t let her throw herself at me, I prayed inwardly – (to whom?) – please not that. I was enjoying the evening, the excellent food, the wine, her company, the sense of being on holiday from the responsibilities of Ursula and Daddy. Now I feared she was going to spoil it all by making some sexual overture that I would not be able to respond to, and she would be hurt, and I would have to leave, and we would never see each other again. I wanted to see her again. I feel she could be a friend, and I ache for a friend.

  “Oh, the food, the table linen, the soft lights … You don’t know how lucky you are to get a genuine French Camembert in Honolulu. And to tell you the truth, I thought I looked pretty good in this dress. Roxy said it was a knockout.”

  “It’s a very nice dress,” I said lamely, not looking at it. I had a vague impression that it was predominantly dark red, and silky.

  She laughed again. “OK. Let’s come to the main business of the evening. Are you or are you not going to sue?”

  It took me a second or two to catch her meaning. Then I laughed, with relief. “Of course not. It was our fault. We were crossing the road in the wrong place.”

  “Well, I know. But the cops tested my brakes after you left in the ambulance, and they didn’t seem too impressed. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but it wouldn’t have made any difference to the accident, trust me. Your father walked into my fender before I had time to hit the brakes.”

  “I know,” I said, remembering the sequence of events, the sickening thud and the squeal of tyres.

  “But it’s the sort of thing lawyers exploit. I haven’t had the car serviced in quite a while. Things have been difficult, with Lewis dragging his feet over maintenance and so on, and I just haven’t gotten round to it. The last thing I want is to get involved in more litigation. I can’t afford it. Haven’t people been telling you you should sue?”

  I admitted that they had, but repeated that I had no intention of doing so.

  “Thanks,” she said, with a smile. “Somehow I could tell you were an honest man. There aren’t so many left.”

  Her face is transformed by a smile. In repose the deep upper lip gives her a somewhat truculent, almost sullen expression, but when she smiles the whole face lights up with the curl of her full mouth over the crescent of white teeth, and her dark brown eyes seem to sparkle.

  Over coffee she told me her life-story, in brief. She was born and brought up in an affluent outer suburb of New York, daughter of a lawyer who commuted daily to Manhattan. “And is called Argument, believe it or not. That was my maiden name, Yolande Argument. Lewis used to say it was all too appropriate. It’s some kind of Huguenot name, originally.” She went to college in Boston in the mid-60s, was very radical in the approved style of the day, majored in psychology, went on to do postgraduate work and met Lewis Miller, another graduate student, doing a PhD in Geography. They lived together and, when Yolande became accidentally pregnant, married. In the early years of the marriage Yolande worked in an office to support Lewis, and consequently never completed her own PhD. “You’d think the son-of-a-bitch would be grateful, wouldn’t you? The hell he is.” One of the points of legal dispute between them at present is that Yolande is claiming financial compensation for the non-completion of her PhD, and consequent loss of professional earnings, as part of the divorce settlement. “My attorney – she’s a woman – is all fired up about it.”

  In the 1970s Yolande was swept up in the Women’s Liberation Movement. “I was ripe and ready for it. But instead of applying its lessons and going back to school, I threw all my energy into the movement itself – meetings, demos, workshops. For a time I thought I was going to be a feminist artist. I made collages out of diapers and tampons and pantyhose and pages torn out of women’s magazines. Jesus, the time I wasted! Lewis was cunning. While I let off steam with the sisters, he put his head down and got on with his career. As soon as he finished his PhD, he was appointed assistant professor in his Department. He didn’t have any problem with women’s lib. The other women in my group used to envy me, he seemed so housetrained. He would always do his share of the cooking and the shopping. Well, he liked cooking, he liked shopping.”

  One day Lewis came back from a big convention in Philadelphia and said he had been offered a good job, associate professor with tenure, at the University of Hawaii. “He was desperate to take it. It was a promotion, and the place suited his research interests – he’s a climatologist. To me the idea of moving to Hawaii seemed bizarre – I mean, it didn’t sound like a serious place, where anyone would do serious work. It was somewhere you went for vacations, or your honeymoon, if you were kind of corny and had the money and didn’t mind long airplane trips. It was a resort. The last resort. It is, you know. This is where America ends, where the West ends. If you keep going past Hawaii, you wind up in the East, in Japan, Hong Kong. We’re out on the rim of Western civilization here, hanging on by our fingertips … But I could tell Lewis was desperate to accept the offer, and would hold it a
gainst me for ever afterwards if I refused to go. And it was the middle of a New England winter, and I had a cold, and the kids had colds, and Hawaii didn’t seem such a bad idea for a few years – Lewis promised he would stay for five at the most. So I agreed.

  “As soon as we got here, I knew it was a mistake – for me, anyway. Lewis loved it. He liked the climate, he liked the Department – the faculty were much less competitive than back East, and the students were in awe of him. Our kids loved it – swimming and surfing and picnicking all year round. But I was never happy here. Why? Basically because it’s boring. Yeah, that’s the bad news. Paradise is boring, but you’re not allowed to say so.”

  I asked her why. She said: why is it boring, or why are you not allowed to say so? I said, both.

  “One reason it’s boring is that it has no real cultural identity. The original Polynesian culture has been more or less wiped out, because it was oral. The Hawaiians didn’t have an alphabet until the missionaries invented one for them, and it was applied to translating the Bible, not to recording pagan myths. There are no buildings older than the nineteenth century, and not many of them. All there is to show for a thousand years of Hawaiian history before Captain Cook are a few fishhooks and axe heads and pieces of tapa cloth in the Bishop Museum. I exaggerate, but not much. There’s a lot of geography here, wonderful volcanoes, waterfalls, rainforests – that’s why Lewis loves it – but not much history, history in the sense of continuity. What you’ve got is a lot of disparate elements who came here at different times for different reasons – haole, Chinese, Japanese, Polynesian, Melanesian, Micronesian – all bobbing up and down like flotsam in a lukewarm sea of American consumer culture. Life here is incredibly bland. Nothing important has happened in Hawaii since Pearl Harbor. The sixties passed almost unnoticed. News from the rest of the world takes so long to get here that by the time it arrives it isn’t news anymore. While we’re reading Monday’s newspaper, they’re already printing Tuesday’s headlines in London. Everything seems to be happening so far away that it’s hard to feel involved. If World War Three broke out, you’d probably find it on an inside page of the Honolulu Advertiser, and the lead story would be about a hike in local taxes. It makes you feel out of time, somehow, as if you’ve fallen asleep and woken up in a kind of dreamy lotus land, where every day is the same as the one before. Perhaps that’s why so many people retire to Hawaii. It gives them the illusion that they won’t die, because they’re kind of dead already, just by being here. It’s the same with the absence of seasons. We have a lot of weather, a lot of climate, but no seasons, not so you’d notice. Seasons remind you that time is passing. I can’t tell you how much I miss the New England fall. The maple leaves turning red, yellow, brown, dropping off the trees till the branches are black and bare. Then the first frost. Snow. Skating out of doors. Then the spring, shoots appearing, buds, blossom … here it’s blossom all fucking year. Excuse me,” she said, perhaps seeing me blink at the expletive. “It’s my rock fever speaking. That’s what they call it, rock fever, the panic at being stranded here, two and a half thousand miles from the nearest landmass, the desperate longing to escape. It’s like a social disease among the senior faculty here, people avoid you if you’ve got it, because implicitly it’s a judgment on them, for settling here. Or perhaps they think it’s catching. Or perhaps they’ve already got it, but are hiding their symptoms. Officially we’re all supposed to be terribly lucky to be here, in this wonderful climate, but sometimes you can catch people off their guard, and there’s a kind of glum, faraway look in their eyes. Rock fever.