by Albert Wendt
‘Are you tired?’ Michelle asks Daniel after they are seated at the corner table in Sam Choy’s, her favourite restaurant, in Kapāhulu Street, at about 7 p.m. ‘You look tired; have you again been working too hard?’ He shakes his head and tries denying to himself, for the first time in their relationship, that he is irritated by her questions. He wonders why so many haole Americans insist on discussing every thing – and they mean every thing – even over dinner. ‘I know you: once you get into the zone in your writing you go on and on until you drop,’ she says. ‘How’s your novel coming along?’
He continues smiling, shrugs his shoulders and hopes she won’t insist, tonight, on filling all the silences with conversation. Why do they insist on doing that? Are they afraid of the menagerie of fears, secrets, aitū and so forth they believe lurk and crouch in those silences? ‘It’s going well,’ he replies, hoping that will divert her from the novel.
‘I bet you it isn’t going well,’ she says, brushing a long strand of her blonde hair away from her left eye. ‘I bet you, you tried and tried all the hot humid day to unravel, develop the difficult, complex, destructive relationship between Mark and Shirley …’ He now wishes he hadn’t told her the storyline.
‘I had to give it up in the early afternoon and go for a swim at Kaimana …’ That should discourage her.
‘You mean, you went without me, Daniel?’ Her eyes are round with mock surprise. ‘You didn’t do that, did ya? God, you Noo Zealanders treat yar wimmin roughly, neglect them, ignore them …’ He realises it was the first time in their relationship he’s been for a swim without her, and is glad about it.
‘What are you having tonight?’ he asks, handing her the menu.
She reaches across the table and holds his left hand. ‘I’ll have you, but I’ll order my usual seafood salad.’ She laughs, the soft white light of the restaurant snared in the sheen of her perfectly groomed hair and in the glint of her laughter. ‘What are you having?’
‘You. I hope, but later.’ He mimics her invitation but doesn’t really mean it. ‘Right now, I’ll have some stamina-inducing lobster!’ They laugh together, and she caresses his arm.
He’d first met her at the departmental function held to welcome him. He caught her distinctive scent of Aloha perfume before she came into his view. ‘Michelle Bramford, Professor Malaetau,’ she introduced herself. ‘I don’t teach here; I’m on the Board that finances the writers’ fellowships, and I wanted to be here tonight because I love your work. Simply love it.’
‘Thank you, thank you. And what do you do?’
‘I’m just a humble amateur artist,’ she said, and paused, looking up into his face. ‘I do watercolours and acrylics …’
‘Of what – what kind of art?’ He felt secure again, now she was embarrassed.
‘I suppose you can say, of seashores and the landscape, mainly.’ She looked down at the floor, hiding her discomfort. ‘I do the seashores and magnificent mountains of Hawai‘i.’ Paused again. ‘Is that a good enough description of what I do?’
‘I guess so,’ he replied.
Not long after that he used the excuse that he had to meet the other guests, and moved away politely. For the rest of the function, she was absent from his view.
‘Here’s my card, Professor Malaetau,’ she intruded again at the end of the function as he headed for the door and home. ‘If you ever need someone to show you round O‘ahu, please ring me.’ He was not surprised at her boldness – weren’t American women supposed to be like that? He accepted her card without looking at her, said thank you and walked out, relegating her into that zone of the people you meet once and see no need to meet again.
The next evening, a balmy Saturday, while he was suffering his usual weight training in front of the television and the world news, she rang. ‘This is Michelle. Am I interrupting anything important, Daniel?’ she asked, as if she’d known him for a long time.
‘No, I’m just lifting some weights,’ he heard myself replying. He realised he was automatically playing her game of familiarity, and enjoying it.
‘Do you lift very heavy weights?’
‘No – well, not too heavy.’ He was even showing off.
‘No wonder you look very fit!’ He could sense genuine admiration in her remark. ‘Me, I’m the most unfit woman you’ve ever met.’
‘You looked very fit to me the other night,’ he returned her compliment, recalling her physical appearance and liking what he had seen and was imagining ‘Really fit, Michelle.’ He caressed her image.
After that he quickly accepted her invitation to show him around some of the beaches of O‘ahu the next day.
That guided tour, on that brilliant Sunday, with her driving always in sight of the Ko‘olau into the cool trade winds and the lush mythology of Hawai‘i as Paradise, and then swimming in the healing waters of Waimānalo, extended the next day into dinner with her at her cosy and expensive home in Kāhala right on the water, and a few impatient days later erupted into an uninhibited exploration of her bed and a wild savouring of the compelling newness of their lust for each other and a discovering and triggering of their favourite points of sexual fantasy. ‘Jesus,’ she’d exclaimed, ‘Jesus, I love it, love it!’ He revelled in her frankness about and boundless, extravert enjoyment of sex, and she in his.
Over those first few weeks, he observed that Michelle was fastidious, neat, tidy, controlled in most things. The way she dressed, the way her house was organised and furnished was expensive, tasteful but never challenging; her politics, her tastes in food and her paintings showed she lived within set prescriptions that didn’t invite or attract controversy. She was safe within the expensive cocoon of the conventional tastes of the wealthy.
She divulged that she’d grown up in Los Angeles, in a wealthy home. Her father produced some of the biggest crime television series – she was too ashamed to name for him. When Michelle was born and her father started making lots of money, her mother stopped aspiring to be an actress and devoted her time to raising Michelle and money for the Cancer Society – her own mother had died of breast cancer, and her father of lymphatic cancer. When Michelle’s mother was tested and found to have the cancer gene that had killed her mother and many of her mother’s female relatives and ancestors, she didn’t hesitate from having both her breasts removed, as a precautionary measure. Soon after that Michelle’s father had left the family for the hugely-breasted young star of one of his series – his latest lover in a long series of them.
Michelle had been packed off to an exclusive girls’ boarding school, while her vengeful mother took her father to court where, on the basis of their prenuptial agreement, she was awarded half of his worth: enough for she and Michelle to live on in splendid comfort for the rest of their lives, and for her mother to start the series of disastrous marriages that were to be her life.
Feeling utterly forsaken by her parents – especially by her father, who she had been devoted to – and finding herself in a school (and later, a university) where most of the students behaved extravagantly beyond the conventional, Michelle had woven a protective skin of safety limits around herself: don’t do anything that attracts attention, including commendation. She had learned early that she had a large passion for art – particularly painting – but even that she curbed, by choosing to specialise in realistic watercolours.
A few years previously, Daniel had walked into one of his writing classes in Auckland and unexpectedly into the middle of a heated, hilarious discussion his students were having about sex. ‘It’s fucking spring and we’ll all randy, aren’t we?’ a gifted poet, who was studying to be a medical doctor, was saying. He’d not expected such frankness from her.
‘You speak for yourself,’ a young man said. ‘Spring’s got nothing to do with it. You’re just not getting enough of it.’ The others laughed.
‘Fuck you, dickhead!’ she countered. ‘Whoever’s fucking you n
eeds to have his head examined!’ When she saw Daniel, she collapsed into her seat, hugging her embarrassment.
‘Are you poetic enough, Professor, to believe that spring makes live creatures randy?’ someone else asked. They waited, and he had to make it good.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t comment on that, because Samoa, where my physical roots are, does not have spring. Only a wet and dry season!’ Some started laughing.
Pointing at her attacker, the poet said, ‘Yeah, and he’s in the dry season all the dry time!’
Daniel took the opportunity to explore their generation’s sexual mores and behaviour. ‘Is there such a creature called Love in your scheme of relationships?’ he asked. Maybe, they concurred, maybe when you needed to be with your partner for a long time. But most of it was lust – healthy, heart-thudding, overwhelming, inescapable lust that gave your genitals total control of your life, they claimed. Forever in a relationship? he tested them.
‘No; hell no,’ replied his romantic poet. ‘Six months if you’re lucky, then it cools quickly and you go searching for lust in new others.’
‘And gender doesn’t matter?’ he continued.
‘Depends on your preferences,’ she reasoned.
‘On the preferences of your lust!’ someone called.
After that wave of laughter, he asked, ‘If our society allowed us to be honest about our relationships – say, admit in a marriage that it was now all bloody boring and meaningless – would any of those last forever, like in the adverts for marriage and true love?’ After a bout of noisy debate, with his romantic poet trying to control it, they arrived at the consensus that no honest relationship lasted. ‘Not even for oldies like me who’ve lost the lust and are permanently limp and just want friendship and consolation until I die?’ he then asked.
‘What about Viagra? That cures your limpness and, in doing that, restores your lust!’ the thoughtful aspiring novelist, who usually occupied the seat at the back corner, spoke up for the first time. Again they were all focused on poor limp old him.
‘Thank you, for that wonderful advice, but as a poorly paid lecturer, I can’t afford the exorbitant price of that cure,’ he declared. They clapped. ‘So until I die, I will have to be content with friendship.’
In remembering that episode, he anticipated – but didn’t want to admit – that his lustful explorations with Michelle, like all his other previous ones, would flourish for maybe six months and then go the way of spring.
Four months later, Michelle is still at the centre of his view. Like all the other women who have shared his life at varying emotional depths of commitment and lengths of time, she initiated that entry, and he’s let her deepen her claim. This time, he was vulnerably inviting because he was alone and trying to adapt to Honolulu and a new job while still preoccupied, every day, with the effects of the break-up of his marriage, or so he keeps telling himself. ‘Again, you’re bloody lying to yourself,’ Aaron would have accused him. ‘You were starved for sex, that’s why.’ Well, that too. ‘And when everything, including the sex, gets boring, you don’t have the guts to end it, and the relationship just limps on until the poor neglected woman discovers you’re fucking another woman on the side, and ends it for you.’ Not true, was never true, he protests, as he watches Michelle pouring more French dressing on to her salad.
‘Your lobster looks scrumptious: as edible as you, darling,’ she says. He has always hated being fondled and claimed, by anyone, in public; hated showing affection for someone he loves publicly. He has tried to rid myself of that, blaming his parents for raising him that way, but, even now, watching and feeling and hearing Michelle displaying her genuine affection for him is turning his irritation into upsurging anger he has to swallow back as he digs his fork into the grilled tail of his lobster: Karruunnch!
Two months later, he realises spring with Michelle is over, as his students would say, and he is trying to escape his sorrow at losing Laura and his family by lusting mindlessly with Megan. Incapacitated by guilt for betraying Michelle, he is allowing his relationship with her to limp on, just as Aaron would have had it.
Once, just before Laura left for good, and she’d found out about his latest affair, at a party they were having at Keith’s house, she’d shouted, ‘Dan, you’re just a sleazy lying coward. You also lie convincingly to yourself, and I’m fed up with it. It’s never your fault. Women just come crawling to you!’
‘Yeah, Dan, why don’t you admit that you’re just addicted to fucking more than one woman at once, and love the guilt and sleaziness of it,’ Mere accused him.
‘Like your mother did!’ Laura turned the knife, and, as he scrambled to his drunken feet to get at her, Keith kneed him in the belly and he dropped to his knees, winded.
‘Why do ya keep going with other women, man? Ese lou lē alofa ia Laura ma lau fagau, Dan!’ Keith delivered the blow that made him stagger up and out of the house.
5
The pain under the bridge on the top right-hand side of his mouth worsens and lengthens in duration but he keeps postponing seeing a dentist. Then, when he’s having an ice-cold beer on Thursday afternoon, the pain jabs like a bolt of electricity up from the bridge into his gum and up through his cheekbone, and threatens to blow open his right eye, and he cries with the pain. He rings Michelle and she recommends her dentist, Dr Megan Shibata.
He rings Dr Shibata’s receptionist and pleads for an emergency appointment on Friday morning. He takes some strong painkillers and is able to sleep until dawn, when the pain re-grips the whole right-hand side of his face and refuses to let him sleep.
His appointment is for 9 a.m. but he is in the clinic by 8.30, gripping a small pack of ice to the swollen right-hand side of his unshaven, ashen face.
‘I’ll see if Dr Shibata is in now,’ the nurse whispers after she settles him in to the dental chair and stretches it back until he is lying, head slightly raised, gazing up into the cream-colored ceiling.
‘What is wrong, sir?’ The nurse’s face comes into view above him: two glistening brown eyes above a white mask.
‘Got this awful pain!’ he says, pressing his fingers into the side of his face. ‘Up here.’ He opens his mouth and jabs his forefinger into the bridge. ‘Under the bridge.’ Hurry, hurry, hurry! he pleads to himself.
‘Professor Malaetau? I’m Megan Shibata’ The very American accent enuciates his name carefully. Her full face is in view, no mask yet – but because of his preoccupation with the pain, he doesn’t take note of her features.
‘This pain is bloody awful.’ He shows her the location of the pain.
On with her mask, and she says, ‘Now, let’s have a look. Open.’ She examines the area quickly. ‘We’ll have to take some X-rays …’
‘Just give me a shot of that stuff you use to numb a bloody sore tooth!’ He pauses. ‘Please. Anything!’
Dr Shibata talks to the nurse; he doesn’t understand what she is saying. ‘Okay, Professor, just open your mouth.’
God, he welcomes the needle as it slides – a thin slit of pain – down into his gum under the bridge and then up. Within seconds, the saving numbness starts closing round and squeezing the larger pain out of existence. Thank you, thank you, he wants to say to Dr Shibata. A short while later, as he runs his tongue over the area, he feels nothing there; no feeling whatsoever. Imagine your whole physical being and body numbed out of existence, out of all feeling, but your consciousness still knowing you’re alive and contemplating your being numbed out of existence. Imagine!
It is only then that he starts to see Dr Shibata and what is happening around him: the nurse with the soft hands taking X-rays – six of them, he counts – rushing out of the room every time; Dr Shibata returning after that, and standing behind him and discussing his X-rays with the nurse. Before he can ask, she brings the X-rays round and, raising the chair so he is sitting up, shows him each one.
‘See, the
last tooth under the bridge has already had a root canal, so it can’t be that one. However, if you look at this one – the first tooth – see the roots? There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it though …’
‘So where’s the pain coming from?’
‘Probably the one with the roots still.’ She pauses. When he glances up at her, she is smiling. ‘I’m not much help, am I? Nerves have ways of sometimes sending us the wrong messages. But my guess is the tooth that still has roots.’
‘I thought this was all supposed to be scientific,’ he jokes.
‘Sometimes it’s all intuitive!’ she says. ‘You should know that. I mean you’re a professor of literature.We’ll take a few more X-rays of the suspect and see what he’s hiding.’