On stormy, starless nights there were no drives, no beachcombing, only sleep-filled hours, the girls turning and turning, sliding in and out of each other’s dreams. Some nights they woke suddenly, knowing she was there, looming, terrifying, waving that ugly cane.
“There are things to tell.”
She would pull up a hand-carved teak chair, lean close and talk. The wonders of the world, the Pyramids, the Great Wall, the serpent called the Amazon. She talked past dawn, past noon, into another evening, drugging them with her legends, her travels, what she had seen. When they were young, they believed everything she told them, though they didn’t understand. When they were older, they learned everything she had said was true.
Jess woke with a start, voices of airline passengers assaulting her. She woke up different, several hours closer to the Pacific. And it seemed her metabolism changed, she could almost feel the pigment in her skin thicken, imagined her knuckles hardening like knobby bamboo, soles of her feet growing calluses. And the sea, the sea, quickening in her veins! A coral reef ticking, nerves jangly like tambourine-fins of wrestling oarfish, a whispering like planchette conversations of wise octopi. She closed her eyes, seeing prismatic colors on backs of leaping dolphin, and gold on gold—the sun on Polynesian surfers, bodies arched into calligraphy.
Three years, the longest she had ever stayed away. This homecoming doubly urgent, for Pono had summoned her, all of them, a desperate thing. She’s nearing eighty. Maybe she is dying. Something inside Jess buckled and troughed, she wanted to bark out loud. She had always been terrified of Pono, there were rank feelings, possibly hate, between them. Because of her, Jess’s mother had perished alone in a desert. Still, it was too soon for Pono to die. Too many questions unanswered, too many mysteries unsolved.
Jess thought of her cousins converging on the big house. Rachel and Ming flying over from Honolulu, where they had spent their lives, from which, except for the Big Island, they had never ventured. And Vanya, arriving from Australia, from a political caucus, she and Jess the movers, always running from Pono, trying to forget her, yet possessing a capacious need to remember. The woman was their genesis, their dark fairy tale, the unraveled narrative they needed to solve. She was the lamp always burning, signaling them to come burn their wings on her.
Ka Wahine Maka’u
* * *
Woman Afraid
IN DARWIN, ON AUSTRALIA’S NORTHERN TIP, in a slovenly imitation of signaling, a cabbie jammed his hand out the window, yelling profanities at pedestrians.
Vanya studied his crimson, pockmarked neck, thinking how utterly she hated these whites.
He eyed her in the rearview and grinned. She was dark, with a yellow cast that, in certain lights, turned golden. Big-breasted, flashing eyes, electric hair. Could be Maori, or Tongan, no, the legs too good. More likely, Tahitian.
He swerved, avoiding a lorry, and eyed the rearview again. “Where we headed, dearie?”
“The airport.” She spoke each word with precision so he‘d know she was educated. “And keep your eyes on the bloody road.” Two weeks here and she sounded like them. Bloody this, bloody that.
She dropped her head, studied a sheaf of papers, thinking of the man she had just left, eight days and nights of their bodies snapping together like furious animals. She had hated him on sight, had subscribed to his attraction only out of fatigue.
That’s how it begins, she thought, With malice.
Since her son’s death three years back, it had been nothing but mindless swerving and crashing against strangers, not looking back, not sweeping up. This one, though, this Simon Weir, kept pulling her back.
“You’ll come to trust me,” he said. “Because we bled each other first.”
She hated his presumption, his white Aussie voice, malign persistence of a nasal undertone. Yet she came back repeatedly.
Now she dragged luggage from the cab and boarded the flight to Honolulu, sick in body and soul. During the long droning hours, she flashed back on the last two weeks, a Pacific Women’s Peace Conference in Sydney, exploring the role of women’s political, economic, and social life in the major islands throughout the Pacific. Along with matters of land rights, alcoholism, street crime, the lack of women in government, delegates had voted on a consensus of resolutions demanding denuclearization of their islands: no more uranium mining, no more dumping of nuclear waste, no nuclear-powered ships in their waters.
The conference had lasted five days and she had been gone over two weeks. She saw herself on the dais the last day of the conference, as legal representative for Native Hawaiian Nationalist Women, urging militancy among all Pacific peoples, warning them they were being written out of history, that they would soon unexist. The greedy superpowers of the world would roll right over them. And all the while she lectured, she thought of Simon, of meeting him in Darwin, what they would do to each other.
The first time she saw him, a year earlier, she was in Darwin meeting with Gagadu Aborigine women campaigning against further uranium mining in their lands, chemicals of which were polluting their streams and rivers. One evening she had found herself staring at flying foxes hanging upside down from trees. Like me. Asleep in their own filth. Disgusted, she turned toward her hotel. She was entering; he was leaving—it should have stopped there. He followed her back into the lobby and watched her without watching her. Tall, muscular, wiry, reddish hair and mustache, a paramilitary air; he even wore his watch above his wristbone, military-fashion.
He approached cautiously, and Vanya stepped back, appraising. She knew the type, an outcast of sorts, all the women he wanted, most unsought. So he sought her out instead, drawn by her disinterest, a certain hauteur. For a while they seemed to circle, two wolves recognizing each other. When he finally introduced himself, his smile was quick, a reflection across a blade. In bed, he was cold, mechanical. Fondle. Penetrate. Ejaculate. Arrest. But in his sleep, he wept. She had never seen a white man weep. Now, away from him, all she could think of was Simon moving toward her, then in her, in a ruthless, sexual glide. Of all the men she had slept with, he was the source of her greatest shame. A race she loathed, distrusted, preached against. Yet, he was in her blood like a virus.
Mid-flight she stood in the rest room, splashing her face, avoiding the mirror. Then, she sat down, leaning her head against the sink, wishing she were dead. Her life was loveless, sonless, obscene. What is more obscene, more deviant from the moral progression, than a parent outliving its child?
Buckling back into her seat, she wrapped up in a blanket, imagining Jess winging her way from New York City, the two of them colliding midair. They had last seen each other three years earlier at Vanya’s son’s funeral. The pain was too sweeping, Pono’s rage at her grandson’s death, at Vanya for “neglecting him,” too devastating. Since then, Jess had stayed away.
Now they were being officially summoned, corraled into that dreadful big house, a place Vanya reconstructed so often in dreams she could no longer leave it behind. It inhabited her. Through the years it had become for her a House of Horrors, Pono mocking her, demeaning her, offering no comfort, no advice. Lost in her own dark epic, she was always sliding on long leather gloves, off on another mysterious journey, so that Vanya came to associate her grandmother’s departures with dead skins coming to life.
That creaking house, with its smells from another era. Curdled odor of rotting antimaccassars, nauseous sachets in warped drawers. In her mind, Vanya was already seeking out a room where she could hide, trying to get beyond the sound of Pono’s voice. Even when they were young, she had never treated Vanya as a child, had always addressed her differently, scolded her more harshly than the others, relying on the inherent toughness Pono was sure Vanya had inherited from her. She always loved me less. The least. Yet, at the end of those summers—shutters banging against days veering into September, the end of their stay, Jess flying back to the mainland—Vanya’s feet had always dragged, she became depressed, not knowing why.
It seemed her
whole life had been like that. She learned to hold her breath and wait, with foreboding certainty, for events to develop in her life in which love was withheld, or taken back from her. Her parents. Her husband. Then Ta‘a Utu from a rough tribe of Samoans in Honolulu. A man she had loved, lost, and found again, so he could ultimately desert her. And, then, Hernando, her son. Each loss a disfiguring, so that who she was was no longer a fixed text.
Ming will comfort me. She always does. Vanya pulled the blanket round her, thinking of her frail cousin, oldest of them all, the wisest. She and Rachel, that useless slave, stuck in Hawai‘i all their lives.
Images sifted down, Ming and Rachel appeasing, fluttering round their grandmother the way, in old Japanese prints, butterflies and peonies always escorted the lion. The way Pono bullied them, yet favored them, regarding Vanya and Jess as gypsies, addicted to lives of drift, one or both of them showing up randomly, like unexpected animal parts in one’s soup.
‘Ole
* * *
Nothingness
KORI-KORI, THE OLD GARDENER, STOOD in the driveway splashed with jacarandas. He hesitated, then continued raking the gravel. The lady of the house was never untheatrical, he had learned to look away. If she was hurt or dead, the cook would summon him.
Hearing the gunshot, the cook ran from the house, looked into the swimming pool, and covered her face. Rachel stared down at the shark floating belly-up in the crimson runoff of its dying. For years she had swum beside that thing in a daring and careful truce. It never bothered her, had hardly acknowledged her. She swore she could read its mind. She pumped another bullet into it, the shot resounding across the lawn, setting peacocks shrieking in the trees.
She stood up disgusted, having wanted the act to be the equivalent of a haiku, swift, simple, clean. But the first bullet had sent the thing thrashing out of the water, spraying blood over Tahitian gardenias, delicate spider lilies. She dropped the automatic in the grass and walked away, a woman stepping from a frame.
In the kitchen, she drank guava juice straight from the bottle like a derelict. “Ask Kori-Kori to clean the pool.” Then, she glided from room to room of her spacious house in Kahala, the Beverly Hills of Honolulu.
That morning Rachel had discovered two things, the message from her grandmother summoning her to the Big Island, and a snapshot from Macao. In the snapshot, her husband, Hiro, and a young prostitute were sitting together in a gambling casino. The girl was whispering in his ear, one hand under the table.
Maybe he is giving her money. Maybe she is touching him. For twenty-three years he had kept his world apart from her, kept her on her carousel of make-believe. Rachel had never wanted children, refusing to share Hiro’s affections. Now, almost forty, she found herself in a state of arrest, of female infantilism, a thing repugnant at her age. Yet their love was sharp as teeth. When Hiro was away from her, she knew he valued life a little less, so he took chances.
His business was the “water trade,” which encompassed it all—liquor, blackmail, prostitution, drugs—up and down the Asian coast from Malaysia to Hong Kong and Tokyo. Through the years he had set her up in the house in Kahala and she became something of a salonnière. Vanya and Ming would arrive to find artists and buffoons swaggering in her gardens on Sunday afternoons, orchids fluttering in their drinks, matching birds gyring overhead. Sometimes the carp in the pond surfaced, staring at the strangers, so that they seemed to be a thought in some very cold-blooded mind. There were even gangsters there on Sunday afternoons, people Rachel hated, but they were part of Hiro’s world, and so she competed with them in dangerous ways.
When he left, she lived like an acolyte waiting for his return. He would come home, stay a few weeks, and leave again. When he was with her too long, he said he felt like something swallowed by an animal drinking. Sometimes, seeing his gun strapped to his chest like a rodent, Rachel wondered if he wore it to protect himself from her. Maybe her love was so intense, his absence was how they kept from killing each other.
Full-blooded Japanese, Hiro was sixty now, a Yakuza, tattooed from his neck to his feet. As a boy he had been sent by his father from Honolulu to Japan to be educated. Instead, he became a gangster. At twenty-six he returned to Honolulu and, seeing the tattoos, his father disowned him. That same night, a young girl moved to him through moonlight, drawn by his blue skin. Hearing of their elopement, Pono had damned Rachel forever, forbidding her cousins to see her.
Months passed, and Pono received a letter. She sat motionless while Run Run read it aloud in Pidgin.
“Tūtū . . . Maybe you ha’ nevah loved,” Rachel wrote. “But when one loves a t’ing, infuses it wit’ love, a soul is born from darkness, from not’ingness. Widdout love, a light is missing from dat object. I miss my cousins so much I t’ink my heart is breaking, but I will even sacrifice dem foah my husband. I would die for him.” Run Run was silent afterward, her eyes floating off.
Her granddaughter’s words, rude and melancholy, struck a chord. Pono walked the beaches barking at the sea, cursing this bastard child who knew nothing of sacrifice, or love, a thing earned harshly year by year, decade by decade. Nonetheless, after two years, she relented, allowed Rachel to come home again. But she never allowed Hiro near the place, never laid eyes on him.
“And don’t be fooled,” she warned Rachel. “What you and this man share is he-dog she-dog heat. When your loins are dead, long hair growing from your chin, then maybe you begin to understand real love.”
By now, Rachel understood the word had many definitions. It could mean denial, deprivation. It could become bizarre, occult, a game where Hiro held all the stakes. Still he proteced her, kept a shield round her, was attendant to his lust for her. Just two years earlier, he had returned from Bangkok bringing her three rare pearls. Implanted in the foreskin of his penis, they had increased orgasmic sensation to the point where she lost consciousness. Now she looked down at the snapshot from Macao. When did the players change? When did allegiance slide, and love turn sloppy?
She picked up the message from Run Run, her grandmother summoning her, and with the message came a sense of fatigue. Around Pono, Rachel went without makeup, wore loose clothes like a woman in purdah. Sometimes she even wore cardigans, what she felt women wore when their sex life was over. She kowtowed, playing Pono’s game. At the price of submission, she was allowed to get close enough to study the old woman, try to glean the source of her brutal powers.
In turn, she let Pono study her, this bastard granddaughter who had succumbed to the operatic and perishable life of a geisha, of eternally pleasing one man. A life dedicated to the painting of delicate calligraphy, to learning the intricacies of the tea ceremony, a life spent playing the catgut shamizen and perfecting the art of origami, the wrapping artistically in precious papers, space, nothing at all. And the other, unspoken life dedicated to pleasure, delirium. Sometimes, seeing herself through Pono’s eyes, Rachel saw her slow evaporation. Life was growing old for her, Hiro traveled more and more. Her seductive arts, her rituals, her passion for him, had nowhere to go. Without him, she was pared down to ‘ole. Nothingness.
Like a zombie, she readied a room for Jess. A day and a night of shoring each other up before meeting the others and taking the thirty-minute flight to the Big Island. She thought with dread of seeing Vanya. They had never been close. Not that they were so opposite, but Vanya despised Rachel’s life, belittled her, used ambiguous figures of speech Rachel never quite caught on to. Lately, they had resorted to a dialect of the eye, criticizing, consuming each other, silently.
Ming will smooth things over. Pono’s favorite. Our little mediator.
From the window, she watched Kori-Kori wipe blood, one petal at a time, from Tahitian gardenias. Then he knelt at the pool with chopsticks, delicately plucking at floating viscera, like a man at a terrible meal.
Kānalua Buda
* * *
Buddha Doubt
MING SAT ALONE IN HER GARDEN of blue ginger, face so pale she seemed to fade into the whit
e of an aging afternoon. Beyond her high-hedged tiny yard, traffic honked in potholed streets of Kalihi, outside downtown Honolulu. She sighed, closed her eyes, the book she held sliding to the grass.
All day she had traveled, with K’ang-hsi, seventeenth-century emperor of China. She had ridden into battle with his mounted archers, capturing Taiwan, leveling the walls of Albazin, then suffering through the terrible eight-year San-Fan War. K’ang-hsi’s mounted archers were trained from infancy, never knowing fear. At age five, from galloping steeds, they slew geese in flight with bow and arrow. At eight, they slew leaping stags and learned formation riding. At twelve, they were fearless, hunting tiger and bear with only one arrow. As warriors, they were the emperor’s living shield.
In the sixtieth year of his reign, sitting in his golden room among his golden books and jade-and-ruby-handled writing quills, K’ang-hsi wrote in emperor’s vermilion, the red ink reserved only for him:
I am approaching seventy, the world is my possession. My sons, grandsons, great-grandsons number one hundred and fifty. My country is at peace. And yet. What of my loyal mounted archers, companions in my glorious victories? Gone, all gone. Trained for early death, what did they know of this life? A horse’s rhythms, penetration of an arrow, precision of a how. Yet, they are what my memory fastens on. Gallantry died with them.
Exhilarated, with the toe of a tiny slipper, a footbinder’s dream, Ming closed K’ang-hsi’s memoirs. Still lovely, but arthritic and bent with lupus, at forty-five she had long retired from teaching. Children grown, husband deep in orchid breeding, she had retreated into great books, great thought, Albinoni and Bach, a world that would not betray. Years of physical pain were reducing her to a life of the mind, which, increasingly, Ming felt was the only reality in this imagined world. She had begun to see that lupus—the cyclical fevers, chronic fatigue, crippling arthritic pain—was a kind of ally, exempting her from the slow drip of the quotidian, giving her time to consider art, God, humiliation.
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