To me, the Hawaiian archipelago is a string of wonderful pearls. Kauai and Maui and Hawaii itself, but the best of all is the island of Oahu, where sits the city of Honolulu above the Kaiwi Channel. It looked like a colored news-reel shot from where I stood on deck. I went below and awakened Mike Murder, my director and cameraman, and we came back, the morning gin-and-lime in our stomachs, and leaned on the rail enjoying the sights.
“Nothing like it,” said Mike.
“You're not a malibini?” I asked.
“Who you calling a greenhorn? I been here six times to make pictures. I can smell a luau cooking from here.”
The dock was a busy sight of people coming and people going and people just watching. And there, just watching, was a rather worn-looking woman whose best years, were very far behind her, and she smiled and said, “I'll be a cockeyed screen writer! Fellow members!”
“Carol!” I said. “Meet my director, Mike Murder.”
“Hello,” said Mike, “How's the island?”
“Filthy hot, filthy fun. Good to see old drinking friends.”
“How long,” I asked, “have you been here?”
“Just to avoid my fourth husband.” she said. “He's fifteen years younger than I am and he's suing me for alimony.”
“This called for a drink, and we went up to the hotel to have it. Carol Tinning (that isn't her name) is or was, I guess, one of the best writers of women's pictures and soap operas in the business. She wrote what she called hanky-wetters. epics about sad women and love and passion torn to tatters. Aging, wrinkling, smelling of the best brandy, she had been out of the picture for years; but it was good to see her, if only to see how time had marked her as well as the rest of us. Carol was a good soul, and she married young men to mother and feed them. She could outdrink any six drunkards and remain on her lean, bony legs. Her face was kind but not pretty, and Mike, full of lime-and-gin, said she could play the horse in bis next western, which wasn't kind even if true. (The horse has the best part in a western, anyway.)
There was a big luau back of the hotel that night, and Carol fell into the poi bowl. Poi is the fermented pink paste of the grated taro plant, but I never cared for it. It's eaten with a finger; one dips and sucks and makes faces. The best thing there was na papai boopibapiba, or stuffed crabs. The crabs arc steamed in boiling water for half an hour. The meat is picked out and sautéed with garlic, onions, tomatoes, and lime juice. Then it is packed back into the shells and cooked for about four minutes. The crabs are then dipped in beaten egg and cracker dust and fried in hot deep fat until brown. Lemon is added when they are ready to eat, and the crabs are served. with papaya juice. They're enough to. thank the good Lord for making creatures of the sea.
Carol Tinning came over to where we were sitting on the grass. “Isn't it wonderful? It's just like the old days at the beach. How I used to cook!”
“You were the worst cook in California,” I said. “I still get ill when I think of your fried eggplant.”
“Those electric ranges at the beach! Mexican was my best style.”
“Was it? A Spanish artist I know who ate at your place said he almost died from your food.”
“He must have been a modern painter,” said Carol, who knew nothing about art and enjoyed that,
A large native came over to us with a tray of desserts. Ka boobuibui o na lichee ante ka avocado— a salad that I knew only as the litchi and avocado. And maia me ka niu, bananas with coconut, which I am mad about. Carol was drinking the manako uaina, a native wine, and bragging about all the husbands she had had.
“Have you ever thought of getting married?” she asked Mike.
“Too many times.”
“I'm a lousy romantic,” Carol said. “I'm just romantic in every pore, that's my trouble. I like all men and I cry a lot about it later, but you can't keep a romantic old gal down. I'm only fortyfour.”
I knew she was lying by several years. but to me she is always the lady, and anyone you have been fond of in the past, you feel close to. So I took; her up to her hotel and got the clerk's wife to put her to bed. I was reading when Mike came in, sat down, and took off one shoe and looked at it.
“You know that old bag is right … it's a romantic place.”
“Carol is an old, dear friend of mine; she's no old bag.”
“Sorry, that middle-aged bag is right.
Maybe it's the moonlight, or the surf on the shore, or the way the roads wind up to the pineapples, but I feel like a young calf in a green field. Hell, there I go getting full of moonlight and roses. When do we get home?”
“As soon as we get some money wired us for the films we shipped. It costs money to live in all this moonlight.”
Mike decided to sleep on the idea of money, and I rolled over and woke up with the phone ringing in my ear.
“Hello, rise and shine. It's Carol, ”
“What time is it, dawn?”
“You didn't come here to sleep, did you? There's a party at a fruit farm a friend of mine runs. I'm bringing you.”
“Do I have to go? We're getting older, Carol; it isn't like the old days with you breaking every law known to man, beast, or traffic cop.”
“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?”
“As one of Carol's oldest friends, I can say we never look at her surface; under it all is a flabby and kind old heart.”
The little man groaned. “I'm ten years younger than she is.”
“Fifteen, I'm sure. Well, Carol loves to mother people. Happy marriage.”
“You ever been married to her?”
I held up my crossed fingers. “The evil eye doesn't take in my family. I don't know how I avoided it; just luck, I guess.”
The little man went off to see if everybody was trying the rum drinks. It had rained again, and the sky was crayon-blue, and the pink foothills under the purple mountain range were more beautiful than anything else I had ever seen. The native girls, an army of sensual service, were bringing in more food.
I latched onto a platter of pickled salmon called lomi lomi. To make it, the natives take a good-sized salmon and soak it in lemon juice for a day or two, wash it, skin it, bone it, and cut it into slices. They make a paste of shallots, tomatoes, sugar, and lemon juice. This they mix well and stuff into the slices of fish, which they cover and put in the icebox overnight. If you never ate raw pickled fish before, you will this appetizer.
It was followed by vegetable soup flavored with pineapple, kupa bala-ai me kabi meaai luananabelebele, if you must know, and baked lobsters, not just baked but roasted on hot stones buried underground.
I found Mike in a corner eating oyster fritters with two native girls. “Having fun?” he asked me.
One of the native girls giggled. “Mr. Wald is promising us jobs in his next picture.”
Mike grinned and swallowed an oyster. I looked at my wrist watch. “Look, Jerry.” I said to Mike. “Don't you think you better go back to worrying over your productions for next year?”
“Aw, we'll miss the la malao.”
One of the native girls nodded. “We promised Mr. Wald a special order of Bombay duck and dried salt fish.”
“He'd better come; duck never agrees with him.”
“Oh. this is hung in feathers for two years over the door.”
Mike had a sip of bala-ai wai and got up. “Maybe I better sec how Howard Hughes is doing while I'm gone.”
Outside, the host was watching some people getting into cars. He said to me. “You'll be staying and taking care of Miss Tinning?”
“We're leaving in a few days.”
“Too bad.” He suddenly brightened. “Carol said she'd go home if her friends wanted to see her again. Look, I'm not a rich man, I don't expect to make more than three hundred thousand dollars on the pineapples this year. But I'll set her up in a first-class stateroom if you boys will get her on that boat.”
Mike shook his head. “You don't know what you're asking.”
The little man said softly, “You ever see Carol in the sunlight? You ever eat any of her Mexican cooking?”
I said, “We can't do this to a good guy, Mike. We'll deliver the body to her old beach bums at Topango Beach. The nights will roar again, and pity the poor grunion-fishing.”
The little man smiled for the first time, and we shook hands on it. Mike was very still all the way back.
We didn't see Carol for two days. We got our money and space on the boat and as we hadn't heard from the little man. we went below. Our cabin looked like a war-hoarder's delight. Sides of ham, a whole suckling pig in aspic, a keg of island rum, and more fruit than the Lord could ever afford in Eden. And a note. It read:
“She's in Cabin B2. Good luck, and don't let her swim back. I'm marrying my native cook … Max.”
I didn't see Carol at dinner so I went below and found her cabin. I knocked and was told to come in. Carol was seated at a dressing table arranging a daring evening gown on what was left of her once famous figure.
“We'll have dinner in a moment.”
“Dinner is over, Carol.”
“Odd. I must have slept through it. Well, let's go up on deck and show the passengers a treat.”
We sat in deck chairs, and I waited for Carol to explode. But she only said. “Nothing like your own kind. Max was a nice little man, but I'm going to marry Mike. He's big and dumb; reminds me of my father. It's time I changed my type. Remember the old days, Stevie? We were younger then, maybe, and felt things … the beach at dusk and the lights going on in the cottages and (hose long drives in the hills. We had it then, didn't we? Talent and beauty and a hope for all the good things of life.”
“Care for a drink, Carol?”
“I'm not drunk. I'm just remembering what you once told me about Proust. ‘You haven't lived anything you can't remember.’”
She sat there, the darkness hiding the tearing and warping of time, the twilight at sea keeping the inner madness, the soft center of her half-gone mind, from spoiling the picture of her there. For a minute almost she was again beautiful and young, and all the mistakes of her life had never been made; she had not done the foolish and dreadful things; she was Carol Tinning as the town had known her years ago. The sea dipped and dimpled in the moonlight, and we moved— all the millions of pounds of steel and passengers, business and love. food and water, hope and despair— across the sea.
A steward passed, and Carol stopped him. “Will you ask Mr. Mike Murder to step up on deck? You'll find him in the bar most likely.”
The steward Shook his head. “Mr. Murder went buck with the pilot boat. He's taking :he next ship, he said.”
We sat a long time watching the smoke pour out of the funnel. Then Carol said softly, “I'm getting old; they're beginning to slip off the hook.”
The ship moved on. gulping into the night journey. I took her hand in mine and lied and said it was just like the good old days. …