Paradise Park

  “Yeah, right.” I laughed.

  “You don’t believe me? That’s what they told me,” she said.

  “Listen, I really appreciate all the trouble you went to, but …” “Rabbi Simkovich said you were the perfect candidate for the program,” she said.

  “Oy, oy, oy!” I threw up my hands. “I’m telling you. No can do.”

  “So it’s okay, it’s all right. Maybe they can hold your place,” Ruchel said. “So go when it’s more convenient.”

  “No, don’t ask them to hold my place,” I said. “I don’t want them to do that.”

  “It’s okay. Rabbi Simkovich would do that for you, because he thinks you are a perfect candidate.”

  “No, I don’t want him going to all that trouble,” I said.

  “It’s no trouble,” Ruchel insisted, and she shook up the last of the formula in the baby’s bottle. “So he’ll hold the place at least a little while. I’ll tell him he should just wait. It won’t be a problem. He is very impressed with your desire for learning. And also he’s my brother-in-law.”

  ON Memorial Day, Kathryn and Rich were having their traditional barbecue blowout. The tradition really belonged to our old co-op house, but like a lot of other things, including most of the pots and pans, Kathryn had taken the tradition with her. Still, she and Rich invited the former housemates and all their friends, which amounted to at least forty people. And since no one else ever took the initiative to have a Memorial Day party, everybody always came.

  Wayne and I drove out to the North Shore in his truck, and I was saying we didn’t have to stay long. Actually I had to twist his arm to come at all, since Wayne was still convinced all my academic friends looked down on him. But we drove out there, through silvery green cane fields, and we stopped and Wayne cut down a few stalks with his pocket knife, and we sucked them as we drove. And we got there to this expensive shack Rich and Kathryn had on the beach, and we hopped out and Wayne surprised himself. He actually had a great time, and nobody looked down on him once. Wayne was the star when we played volleyball on the sand. There was swimming, and coolers of cold beer, and Kathryn manning the grill serving up hamburgers and chicken breasts, and her great marinated vegetarian kabobs. Kathryn was a great cook, and an incredible hostess—I appreciated that now. I really had a lot of respect for Kathryn, now that I didn’t live with her. She had all this energy and these organizational skills. She was such a doer. Who else would think of stringing up little Christmas lights to the volleyball net when it got dark? Who else would clear out every stick of furniture in her living room to create a dance floor? She had a boom box, and music, which was tapes of everything from the Beatles to Talking Heads, and Tom was appointed DJ. Will, and Kathryn, and Rich, and Kathryn’s girlfriends from work, and Kathryn’s kid, and me and Wayne, we all began to dance. We danced until everybody was just about exhausted, except me. Wayne went out to get another beer. But Tom had just put on the soundtrack tape of Dirty Dancing. “Hey, Wayne,” I called. Terrible timing. “Ba-by, my sweet ba-by, my sweet ba-by, You’re the one….” Here they were finally playing all the really danceable songs! My fingers were snapping, my whole body was twirling. I looked out through the open doorway, and there I saw Brian smoking his pipe pensively.

  So naturally I danced right over to him, and I took his pipe.

  “Stop that! Sharon!”

  And I tapped it out.

  “Sharon. What are you doing? I’m not dancing.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I’m not going in there,” he said. But he was laughing. I had both his hands. Everybody was crowding around after us.

  I danced him inside where the music was pounding.

  “I don’t want to!” he said. “Will you shut up!”

  “All right, Sharon!” Will called out to me.

  “Go, Sharon!” yelled Kathryn.

  “Sharon, no.” He was like a drowning man.

  “Follow me!”

  And I put my hand on his shoulder, and I put his hand on my waist, and I led, and he followed, and by God, Brian was doing the box step. “Stop laughing, and stand up straight!” I ordered him. And I counted out the beats, and everybody circled us, and the music encompassed us. “Follow!” I said. “Follow me.”

  I can’t even tell you how everyone was cracking up to hear me ordering Brian around like that.

  But I didn’t notice, because by then a huge revelation had come over me, which was that Brian knew how to dance just fine, because he was leading, and all of a sudden he was improvising, and he was spinning me out.

  “Whoo, all right!” yelled Rich.

  People were clapping.

  “Liar!” I said. But Brian had never lied to me. It had been my mistake all along, assuming he was a klutzy naturalist, thinking it would be some kind of joke bringing him out onto the dance floor. I guess deep down I still thought real dancers looked like Gary. Brian was stocky, but he was light on his feet. And then I realized something. He hadn’t been dancing because Imo wasn’t there. It was loneliness, not two left feet. The house was throbbing with “I Had the Time of My Life.” Who would have thought? The guy could swing.

  He twirled me and I twirled him; he brought me in close and I followed. He curled me into him and he spun me out. Everyone was clapping. And we looked into each other’s eyes, and we forgot ourselves. We forgot about Wayne and Imo. We were buddies again. We moved together and all our differences just blew away.

  We danced out wilder and wilder, until this time I was nearly out of breath. I almost collapsed, but still I yelled to Brian, “Let’s do hips!” and he mirrored me and we wiggled our hips. And I beckoned to him and I leaned back and he leaned over me, and I would have fallen all the way over I was laughing so hard, except he caught me. And that was when the music ended and everyone burst out clapping. Brian and I were drenched with sweat, and we were going to stagger out for drinks except Wayne got to me first. I thought he was coming to bring me water, but he grabbed my hand and hustled me outside.

  “What?” I said. “Wayne!”

  “We’re going home,” he told me, and he led me to the truck.

  “Why?”

  He looked at me with such a hurt expression I almost forgot for a moment he was being a total jerk.

  Then I remembered. I said, “Wayne! What is your problem? You’re mad because I danced with someone else?”

  “Get in. We’re going home.”

  “It’s not even midnight!”

  “Get in.”

  “No!”

  Then he grabbed my arm.

  “Wayne! Don’t you think you’re being a tiny bit unreasonable?”

  He got in the truck, and he started the engine. He was waiting for me to climb in.

  “No! I’m not coming!”

  He slammed the door and drove off.

  “Geez,” I said. Actually I was pretty upset.

  I went back around to the yard and got a drink. Brian was standing out there cooling off. “Where’d you learn that?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “To dance.”

  “I had lessons,” he told me. “When I was a kid.”

  “You had lessons?”

  “Where’s Wayne?”

  “He went home.”

  “He was annoyed with you,” Brian said.

  “He has to get up early for work,” I said, which was true.

  “You’re a flirt,” Brian said.

  I guess I looked kind of aghast when he said that. It just really surprised me to be accused of that. I’d never thought of myself that way. “You know I’m not.”

  He snorted.

  “You looked so lonely without Imo,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Why’d you let her go to Auckland?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’d be pretty unreasonable to have her give up her job.”

  “There’s such a thing as being too reasonable,” I said.

  “Do you want a ride home?”

  “
Why?”

  “It’s late.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Well, if you want a ride, I’m going,” he said.

  So we said good-bye to Kathryn and Rich and the thinning hordes still dancing, and we hiked up the beach road to where Brian had parked his rusted-out Datsun. And we got there and we stood for a minute by the car and looked at the black waves and the black sky. “There aren’t as many stars as on Tonic,” I said.

  “Well, there are….”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said. “There’s just as many, only you can’t see them all here. You’re so predictable.” And I guess that was when I kissed him. I admit it, I kissed him on the lips.

  He stood there completely still. For about a minute neither of us could even move. Then he put his hands on my shoulders and he kissed me back. And my kiss had been fast and shy, but his was slow. I couldn’t even breathe for a second there. I was sure it was a dream, because I had dreamed it so many times. His hands spread over me; they stroked my hair all down my back. They were wide gentle hands; they hesitated at my waist. Don’t stop, I thought. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. He was too polite. He was too good. Any second he would pull away. But he didn’t stop. My shirt was old and loose, and I wasn’t wearing anything under it. Slowly his hands drifted up my bare back; his touch was so light and so warm I felt drowsy with him. A sleepy heat spread through me like the sunshine trapped in sand. He touched my breasts and I bent my head down. I couldn’t look at him, my heart was beating so hard.

  Yet we did get in the car, and I think we still intended to take me home to Aina Haina, but somehow the car didn’t go that way. We never said anything. It’s just that we ended up driving to Manoa. Windows open, nobody else out on the road. The car drifted on the freeway. In silvery phantom freeway light we drove to Brian’s place. We glided up to his apartment. We took no stairs or elevators; we had no keys that I remember. We just levitated through the door. We never turned on the lights, just floated into the bedroom. It was all dark and shadows, except the pale sheets tangled up on the bed. We might have been a pair of ghosts the way our clothes slipped off of us. My shirt and shorts—they’d grown and grown until they slipped off, too big for me. Brian took one step back. He took one breath. But that was all. We were transparent. I reached out to him; he stepped inside of me.

  • • •

  WHEN I opened my eyes it was morning, and the first thing I saw was Imo staring at me, her face framed in a photograph right by the bed. There she was, examining me with her dark eyes. So I turned the picture facedown. And I saw a stack of dog-eared page proofs from Atoll Research Bulletin and clean laundry piled in a plastic basket, and brown curtains pulled back, and, covering most of the wall behind the bed, a Rand McNally map of the Pacific Ocean. An enormous rectangle of sky-blue, flyspecked with islands. “Brian?” I called out. “I’m in here,” he said from the living room.

  So I padded out there where he was sitting with a mug of coffee. “Could you get dressed?” he snapped.

  “Why?” I said.

  He was all dressed and tense and sitting on the couch reading the newspaper, every single word.

  So I left him alone and took a shower and found my clothes and all, and I came out again brushing my hair.

  He didn’t look any happier. “Sharon …”

  “Do you have anything to eat here?” I asked.

  “Sharon!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice. “I’m hungry.”

  “Listen,” he started again.

  “I know,” I said.

  “This was a really big mistake.”

  “Well,” I said, cautiously, “it wasn’t a mistake at the time.”

  “Yes!” he said. “It was a mistake at the time!” And he rattled his paper, and he shook his head. He was horribly upset. “What were we thinking?”

  I came up to him, as near as I could, which was about three feet away. The distance between us was growing again, but I came up to the edge, and I said, “Brian, I know what I was thinking.”

  “What?”

  “Just that I wanted to be with you.”

  “And that was wrong,” he said. “Given the circumstances. Given each of us is committed to someone else.”

  “Well, I guess for a while we forgot. You know, people forget.”

  “Oh, Sharon,” he said. “God, what a mess.”

  And I saw what he meant. I could see the mess in front of me, or at least I was beginning to see. What had I done? What had I destroyed by spending the night with him? It was like sleeping with your own conscience. I was still so fuzzy from the night that Wayne barely even crossed my mind. “We won’t tell anyone,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Damn right,” he said, but more to himself than to me.

  “I’ll go,” I said, but I didn’t leave.

  He wouldn’t even look at me.

  “Brian,” I whispered.

  Finally he relented and got up and opened the door for me. “Sharon, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  He touched my face, but still he shook his head at me.

  I went home—where else would I go? I figured the less I thought about the whole thing the better. And I got there, and Wayne’s large glossy truck was still parked in front of our small scruffy house. I let myself in, and he was sitting on the couch. He looked terrible. He was still wearing his clothes from the night before. He hadn’t shaved. It looked like he hadn’t slept at all.

  So I figured I’d go into the kitchen and get myself some cereal. I really was hungry. I got a bowl and spoon and poured myself some Wheaties.

  “Where were you?” Wayne said. He was standing in the doorway. I poured the milk in. “At the party.”

  “All night?”

  “Look,” I said, “it took me a while to get home.”

  “A while? It’s eleven o’clock in the morning!”

  “You were the one who took the truck,” I said.

  “Where were you really?” he said.

  “At the party.”

  “You’re lying,” he said. “You were with Brian.”

  I decided to keep eating.

  “You were with him.”

  “I don’t think you really want to have this conversation right now,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, I do.”

  “Well, it’s not happening. I’m not talking now.”

  “Tell me the truth,” he said. And he grabbed my bowl and he hurled it to the floor, milk splattering, soggy bits of cereal flying. But the bowl didn’t break. I was staring at it, fixated by the bowl wobbling there on the white tiles. “Look at me.” He put his hands on my head, and he forced me to look him in the eye. He kept at it, asking and asking, “You were with him, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

  “Stop it!” I screamed.

  But he kept on saying, “Tell me the truth! Tell me the truth.”

  No. No, I thought. I won’t talk. I refuse to talk. “I’m not telling you anything until you calm down!” I finally said.

  He backed off of me. He went back in the living room and started walking around. When he came back he’d calmed way down. He said, “Sharon, I can’t have lies between us.”

  “I know.” All of a sudden I felt tearful. Suddenly I was starting to feel remorse.

  “I can’t live in a relationship without honesty.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “We can’t live that way.”

  “All I’m asking—what I need to know is—were you with him last night?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He hit me right there with the flat of his hand. I could taste the blood in my mouth. I could hear my ears ringing. He hit me again. My whole head was growing on my shoulders, my eyes were swimming, tiny particles were coming before my eyes. My whole mind was being shaken up, and I saw stars—the tiniest solar system with pea-size planets orbiting around. I saw a whole constellation of stars; they were leaping and jumping like a flea circus. The room was going dar
k, but this whole microcosmos was coming down in little flecks of light. And there I was, falling. I guess actually I was blacking out. I was falling into this minute universe; this small blackness that was inside my head. And Wayne’s voice was getting blurry, and blurrier. “But I loved you! I loved you!”

  I found myself some time later on the kitchen floor. There was one of our old termite-eaten cane chairs lying beside me, and there was blood, and there was milk, and the white cereal bowl still unbroken. The vinyl tiles were caked with dried-up cereal. I didn’t see the spoon. One of my eyes wasn’t opening, so my view was skewed. Gradually I lifted up my head, but the room was going around. I thought, Is this what it’s like to have a concussion? Then I remembered Wayne. I was afraid he was still in the house. I put my head down and listened. The house was very still. I listened harder. I could hear the mynah birds outside, and little white-eye birds—the ones who’d driven out the native Hawaiian honey-creepers—the white-eyes were in the bushes singing to each other. I heard no cars on the street, only far away a motorcycle, like the buzzing of a fly. Slowly I lifted up my head again. I sat up, but I couldn’t put any pressure on my wrist. I must have sprained it. I crept along the floor into the living room, all the way to the louver windows in front, where I had to stand to see out over the bushes that his truck was gone.

  Then I went to the bedroom and took my guitar. I stuffed a canvas beach bag with some clothes. There was a necklace Wayne had given me, and there were other pretty things, but I didn’t take them, just the extra clothes to wear, and my toothbrush, and my old book, my falling-apart Norton anthology—I thought of that.

  All that week and some of the next I stayed at Corinne’s house, and she and Rae doctored and nursed me and alternately begged and scolded me to go to the police and swear out a complaint against Wayne, but I wouldn’t do it. And they said they couldn’t believe me, and they told me I had to stop acting like I was at fault—they didn’t understand how I, the victim, could be blaming myself for what had happened. I kept telling them I felt so guilty, but they didn’t see why, since I never told them straight out I’d slept with Brian or anything.

  Corinne said to me that I was a battered woman, even though Wayne had never battered me before. She said I was in denial, but I owed certain things to myself like safety. She told me that above all I must stop blaming myself for what went wrong. She said that I must have a plan. I did have a plan, which was to go back to the way my life had been before, i.e., back to the co-op house, and to my friends, and to my job at Shirokiya, but Corinne and Rae were worried about my safety. They were convinced Wayne would come after me and kill me. They were talking me into going to a safe house for a while; going underground for shelter. And when we talked I tended to agree with them. Yet, when I was alone and thinking, when they were at work and I was home with the cat, Jane, I rebelled against the whole idea. Why should I hide? Why should I live under house arrest? Hiding was not in my personality, not at all. “Jane,” I said, “I’m not going to hide. I am not going down into some little hole.”