“Pick you up in half an hour.”
Carol Tinning in full sunlight took courage to look at. Her mouse-brown hair was dyed some orange color, her claws ended in silver nail polish, and her poor battered face (a nice enough face on a Palomino) was wrinkling and crackling under the pancake makeup. She wore the tormented hair long, over a brow like a soup bowl, and had earrings that appeared to make her round shouldered. …
“How do I look?” she said, spinning around what had once been the best hips at Warner Brothers.
“Greatest show on earth,” I said, “But why silver nail polish?”
“My fortuneteller said it would bring luck.”
“You still go to soothsayers, Carol?”
“They control my life. I used to be unhappy when I thought for myself. Now they just tell me what to do. Don't I look happy?”
“Gibberingly,” I said, and we all piled in with the other guests into small cars driven by wild men in beach shirts.
Oahu, like all the islands of the archi pelago, is beautiful. The sun shines, the mountains are black against the skies, little clouds puff along like wool brushings. Then suddenly it rains. A green downpour, a great wetting of earth and leaf. And as suddenly it is over, and the rainbows cross your path, and the drip-drip is everyplace. Then the sun again, lime-white and powerful, the shadows blue and delicate violet, and the green fields and the plants growing. On the mountains, the mist lingers for a few minutes; then it. too, is gone, and the dark teeth of mountain spines are up there again. Everything grows here and grows with lush ease. We passed guavas, custard apples, pomegranates, mangoes, the aromatic carambola, oranges, lemons, limes, dark, surly avocados, the cigar-shaped tamarind, and all the pineapples in the world.
Carol's friend was a little man with a pot belly and a long cigar and a lot of servants all over the place, and before we knew it, the party had started. People came and they went, and the host served everybody and smiled.
He was a nice little man and he gave me a cigar and got me into a corner.
“I wish this party would end. It's been going on for five days.”
“Oh, I thought it just started.”
“No, Carol started it, but I can't stop it.”
I grinned, “Great girl, Carol.”
The little man looked at me. “Man to man, mister, I'm in trouble. She wants to marry me.”
“She always does.”
“She's planning to go ahead with this.”
“That's bad.”
“Fifteen years ago I saw one of the pictures she wrote. When she came out here. I looked her up; but right now I doubi if I could ever like the picture. Gaudy old gypsy, isn't she?”
Pinterest
