Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  When I got back to my parents’ house Harry was in their living room, chatting. “Hey, brah, how’d you get here?” I asked. “I didn’t see your car.”

  “It’s at my folks’ house. I came through the woods. We can go out the same way and head up the coast for some surfing. Those news hounds outside will never know.”

  More than ever before, I was noticing the acts of kindness people do every day. I guess when you stop expecting them, each one comes as a small gift. “He brought his boards with him,” my father said to Harry. To me he said, “Go on. Everything will still be here when you get back.”

  I took my long board and Harry my short one, and we went out the back door, sneaking across the yard to the steep wooded slope. No one saw us go, though I did look back for a minute and see my mother framed in the patio doorway. We climbed a narrow, winding trail that led to a higher street, coming out a few doors down from Harry’s house. When I was a teenager we used this path almost daily, and I was surprised at how familiar it remained, twisting past a banyan with hanging tendrils, discovering an orchid flourishing under the shelter of a kiawe tree. It was a road back into the past for me, back to a time when all I worried about was the condition of wind and surf.

  At the edge of the street we peered out and saw no one. Harry’s BMW was parked at the curb, and we bagged my boards and tied them down to the roof rack along with his, and then took off for the North Shore.

  It wasn’t the best time to go north; the winter provided really prime surfing conditions up there. But it was a place we could go to get away from the press, where no one would recognize me, and if they did, it would only be as a fellow surfer, not a media target. We put the windows down under a clear blue sky and cruised north, up into the hills, past Schofield Barracks, descending again past fields of pineapple with the glorious blue sea ahead of us.

  We snagged an oceanfront parking space just beyond Haleiwa, stripped down to our suits, and dragged our boards toward the ocean. From then on, all I concentrated on was surfing. I emptied my mind of murders, police, sex and family troubles, and felt wonderfully free as a result. The waves weren’t killer, but then I was accustomed to surfing Waikīkī so it didn’t really matter. I practiced my turns for a while, and then just surfed for fun, catching the waves I liked and running them as long as I could hold on.

  Harry had packed a picnic lunch, and after a couple of hours of surfing we collapsed on the beach and ate, then dozed for a bit and then surfed some more, until the sun was beginning to sink over the hillsides. “This was great,” I said, as we carried our boards back up the beach to the roadside. “Mahalo.”

  “I had a good time too,” Harry said. “I’ve been wanting to get up here again ever since I got back from Massachusetts, but you’ve been so busy.”

  “I’m gonna have a lot of time on my hands now.”

  On the ride back to the city, I tried to hold on to the good feelings. I turned the radio up and when I couldn’t find a good station put in a tape of the Makaha Sons, luxuriating in the rhythms of the slack key guitar, the ipu gourds and the pahu hula drum. We stopped on the way back at a roadside diner we’d loved as teens and reminisced about high school.

  “So you were always keeping this secret,” Harry said after the waitress had taken our orders. “All through Punahou, and years after.”

  “I didn’t really understand it for a long time. I mean, I didn’t have any role models, and I didn’t have anybody I could ask questions of. So it was kind of a gradual thing, an awareness that kept growing.”

  “Does it color your memories, when you look back, you think, oh, if I’d only known, I would have reacted differently?”

  I shook my head. “You can’t go back and change things. You learn at a certain pace, and what you know to that point colors what you do.” I thought about Haoa. I had to give him a chance to learn, to assimilate what he knew about me in the past with the me I was today.

  We slid easily into further reminiscences, and then eventually we were home. He dropped me off at my parents’ house, and mercifully, all the reporters and vans had disappeared, off to exploit someone else’s misery. I spent an hour or so watching TV with my parents in the living room before I went up to bed.

  Sunday morning I woke late and had a bowl of cereal while I read the newspaper. There was no mention of either me or Haoa, a good sign. Funeral services had been set for Evan Gonsalves, at the Kawaiahao Church downtown, across from Honolulu Hale. The Clarks were descended from early missionaries to the islands, and had ancestors buried in the graveyard behind the church. Even though they had sold Clark’s to a Canadian with a chain of stores across the States, Terri’s family was still very prominent in Honolulu. Because of Evan’s connection to them, the funeral would be big and well-publicized, and I knew it wouldn’t be possible for me to sneak in the back unseen.

  I wanted to go, but I didn’t know how Terri felt about my part in his death and I was sure that there would be reporters at the funeral who might come after me. I didn’t want to add my troubles to her grief.

  I didn’t feel like doing anything much so I sat in front of the TV, watching cable reruns of talk shows, hoping the misery of others would make me feel better about my own.

  By lunchtime my mother was fed up. “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll go somewhere for lunch, and then you can come along while I go shopping. I need a present for Ashley’s birthday and a pair of blue shoes with a low heel.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “You’re coming.” When her mind was made up, my mother did not tolerate argument. It was the same thing when I resisted going to Punahou because my brothers went there. It was simply not a matter open to discussion.

  “All right,” I said. “But no place close to home. I don’t want to see anyone you know, or anyone I know, all right?”

  “You’re going to have to face people eventually.”

  “Eventually is fine. Just not today.”

  I made her drive all the way to the Kāhala Mall instead of going down to Ala Moana. There was a Clark’s there, along with a Liberty House and a bunch of standard mall shops, the same kind you find in every shopping center in every corner of the United States. Foot Locker, Banana Republic, The Limited, and all their ilk: the chain shoe stores and chain bookstores and chain record stores. Without the occasional crack seed stand or tourist knickknack shop selling plastic leis and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, you could think you were in Florida or California. If you stayed indoors where it was climate-controlled, you could imagine you were anywhere from Oklahoma to Oregon or Maine to Maryland.

  I’d brought a book with me, a Florida thriller by James W. Hall, and I tried to sit and read while my mother tried on shoes or picked through dozens of junior dresses. But I couldn’t concentrate, and yet I didn’t want to make eye contact with any other shoppers. Instead I roamed the aisles restlessly, looking at the merchandise but not really seeing it. Finally my mother said, “All right, I can’t take any more of this. We can go home.”

  That night at dinner she complained to my father about me. “He needs something to do. Why don’t you take him to work with you tomorrow.”

  We sat at the dining room table under the glow of the chandelier. Our dining room was the most un-Hawaiian room in the house, lifted almost intact from a home decorating magazine of twenty years ago. The elegant crystal chandelier had been shipped in from San Francisco, as had the formal mahogany table and chairs. “I don’t need a babysitter,” I said. “I can stay by myself. I can even go home.”

  Behind us was a tall mahogany cabinet filled with Chinoiserie and other knickknacks. Across from us the living room was dark. “Your Uncle Chin called today,” my father said. “We had a long talk, and I recognized something. Chin had two sons, and he has lost them both. I don’t want to lose any of mine. You are who you are, even if I don’t like it. You’re still my son and I’ll try to accept you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My father continued, “Uncle Chi
n would like to see you. I said we would have lunch with him tomorrow.”

  “Where? I don’t want to go anywhere people will recognize me.”

  My father laid his fork down next to his plate, and then used the napkin from his lap to dab at his mouth. “Places Uncle Chin goes are very discreet,” he said. “Why don’t you come to the office with me in the morning, and we’ll go together to lunch.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He leaned forward toward me, and the warm light from the chandelier glinted off his glasses. “I’m preparing a bid on a big job,” he said. “You could help me. It gets harder for me to read the tiny details on the plans.”

  “All right.” I looked down at my plate.

  A little later, from a phone upstairs, I finally reached Tim. “Hi, it’s Kimo. I haven’t talked to you for a couple of days.”

  “It’s been really busy.” He hesitated. “I saw a piece on the news about you. How have you been holding up?”

  “It’s been hard,” I said, and my voice broke. “I just want to be with somebody who accepts me totally, you know? I want to forget about all this for a while.”

  “I wish I could be there for you. Things are crazy at my office right now. We’re in the middle of discovery for this big case, and there are piles of documents to read. I brought home two full briefcases tonight.”

  “You have to eat. Maybe we can get together. It doesn’t have to be for long.”

  “Kimo.” Then there was silence. I was afraid the connection had been broken, and then he said, “My private life is my business, and I don’t want to see it spill out into the headlines. I just need to back away from you for a while. It’s not that I don’t like you—I do. I think you’re handsome and kind and interesting and I enjoy being with you. But you’re public property right now, and I can’t be part of that.”

  “I understand.” I wanted to argue with him, to say we could make it work. He could stay in the shadows and I’d carry the weight of the spotlight on me. But I’d already seen what that spotlight had done to my brothers and my parents and I couldn’t blame Tim for wanting to avoid it. After all, he’d run all the way from Boston to Honolulu to keep people from knowing he was gay. It wasn’t up to me to drag him out.

  “You are very nice,” he said. “I hope you come through this all right.”

  “I hope so too.” I paused. “Well, I’d better let you get back to work.”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  After I hung up the phone, I flopped back on my bed, surrounded by all those artifacts of my teen years, and felt just as confused and lonely and bad as I had back then, before I could really put a name on my problems. What a long journey I had taken from those high school posters and old books, to wind up at the same place. Well, not necessarily the same, but a place so close to where I had been that it felt no different.

  I turned the light off and lay on my bed in my clothes, staring out the window at the crescent moon rising over the Ko‘olau Mountains, trying not to think of the brief time I had spent with Tim, trying not to worry if I would ever meet anyone else who could make me feel the same way.

  I didn’t have much success.

  SHOPPING CENTER DETAILS

  The next morning my father and I stopped on the way to his office and got coffee and malasadas from a van in a shopping center parking lot. We sipped and ate in silence, and I wondered if this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

  There were worse things. My father’s business was winding down, but perhaps Haoa and I could revitalize it. With his advice, we could be as successful as he had been, maybe even more. My notoriety might even help. Long lost classmates would remember who I was from having seen me on the evening news. We could even develop a subspecialty among Honolulu’s gay population. Build houses with extra-large closets and dressing areas for the fashion plates, and big, comfortable kitchens for the aspiring caterers. Forget about kids’ rooms and play areas. I knew a contractor in California who specialized in kitchens for Orthodox Jews, with extra storage space for their second set of dishes, and separate dishwashers, even separate refrigerators, for keeping milk and meat apart. There had to be a similar sub-specialty for the gay population.

  We pulled up at my father’s office, on the second floor of a strip center he’d built near Salt Lake Park. The ground floor was filled with your usual variety of tenants: dry cleaner, deli, karate donjon, beeper store, and mattress warehouse. But unlike the Kahala Mall, this center somehow seemed uniquely Hawaiian. The truth came in the details.

  My father was big on details. All the storefronts were set back behind a colonnade that provided shade from the hot tropical sun. He’d had a template of a palm tree made, and pressed it into the front of each of the supporting columns, so the implication was that the roof was supported by a row of palms, like the caryatids in Greek architecture.

  When I was a kid, he’d had fancier offices, always moving around from project to project. When he was building homes, it was important that the style of his office match the kind of construction he was doing, and as he built more expensive and lavish homes, the style of his office improved. Now that he was building malasada stands and small warehouses, he had three simple rooms. His office, a reception area, and a conference room where he could lay plans out on a big table.

  In each room there were framed photos, artists’ renderings and architects’ elevations of homes, offices, stores and shopping centers he had built. As I walked from room to room I marveled at the range of things he’d built, what he’d done to keep us all in food and clothes and pay our school tuition, take my mother on vacations and buy antique furniture for her in San Francisco and ship it to Hawai‘i. Over his desk there was a photo of a small bungalow I didn’t recognize.

  “What’s this?”

  “The first house I ever built,” he said. “Before Uncle Chin’s, even. I built it nights and weekends while I was still working for Amfac. I found it two years ago and took the picture. Nice, eh?”

  The house was nice, but the photo was even nicer. Richly saturated colors, strong contrasts between light and shadow. It looked as professional as any of the promotional shots on the walls. “You took this?”

  “I have grandchildren,” he said shyly. “You take a lot of pictures. You learn a few tricks.”

  “More than a few,” I said.

  It was interesting, getting to know my father again. He set me up in the conference room with a set of electrical plans and a list of items, from light fixtures to dimmer switches to outlet face plates. I had to count each one and then multiply by unit costs. “This is the worst part of the job for me,” he said. “These details are so tiny, but if you miss a couple of expensive light fixtures, there goes your profit.”

  I worked diligently all morning, surprised that I could concentrate. It was like going surfing with Harry, getting something into my brain that pushed everything else aside. In the other room, I could hear him on the phone, schmoozing with potential customers, calling suppliers, checking schedules. I wondered if I could do that.

  As a police officer and then a detective, I always had a sense that my work mattered. I was protecting the people of Honolulu, the office workers, hotel maids, and visiting tourists from bad elements of the population. Then as a detective, I was righting wrongs, bringing society back into balance. I supposed that building houses mattered too, though I wasn’t sure about strip malls and malasada shops. Then again, maybe part of my problem was looking for meaning in everything. Maybe all that really mattered was supporting your family, living a good life, having a little fun on Saturday nights, and not treating your fellow man in a way you wouldn’t want to be treated.

  So I thought and counted switch plate covers, and around noon my father got me and we drove into Chinatown to meet Uncle Chin for lunch. We ate in a luncheonette with dingy windows and a long row of booths with peeling vinyl. The food was only mediocre, but they knew Uncle Chin there and we were served without even ordering, steaming pla
tters of chicken and shrimp and sticky white rice in chipped porcelain bowls.

  Uncle Chin poured us tea and said, “You know my grandson, yes?”

  I nodded. “Tell me what he like.”

  I didn’t know what to say at first. Did I say he was learning the family business? That I wasn’t sure what role he had played in his father’s death? Finally I said, “You read about me in the newspaper?”

  Uncle Chin nodded. “Derek is like me. He lives in an apartment downtown with a guy he went to Yale with. Derek and his friend will probably take over the Rod and Reel Club.”

  Uncle Chin cupped his hands around his teacup, and I noticed how old and frail they seemed. He looked down at the table and spoke softly. “Tommy not tell me much about Derek. I knew something between them but I don’t know what.”

  “Derek loved his father, I can tell you that,” I said. “Even though I don’t think his father ever accepted him.” I paused to scoop up some sticky rice with my chopsticks. “I can’t tell you much more about Derek, because I didn’t talk to him much. I know he’s intelligent and well-educated. He likes art. He wants to open an art gallery, and his apartment is filled with paintings.”

  “I want know him,” Uncle Chin said. “To become man, boy needs much guidance. Took so long know his father, give him what I could. Maybe I start earlier with Derek.”

  “I know he met you once. He mentioned you by name. I don’t think he knows you’re his grandfather.”

  He nodded. “Sometimes easier learn such information from third party. Easier for me, sure. You make arrangements?”

  I wasn’t supposed to be involved in Tommy’s death anymore. But did that prohibition reach to contact with his son on a family matter? My father and Uncle Chin were both looking at me, and to deny this request would disappoint them both. I decided I had disappointed my father enough. I said, “I will. I’ll call him.”