The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (33 page)

“I want numbers from psychics. Like, if they can see the future, why aren't they rich?”

“Maybe they can only see the past, but what's so great about that?”

“I'd like to go to Vegas with a psychic. Just to see.”

“Or one of those cruises where you just play slots and eat.”

They often mentioned gambling, which seemed odd to Wevill, because they were two of the unlikeliest gamblers—just pretty island women, all smiles, easygoing, in old clothes, with none of the obsessive behavior and tasteless outfits he associated with gamblers, no superstitious rituals, no strange jackets.

They threw him, everything about them foxed him.

Most people walk a certain way in their own house, with a confident nakedness—efficient, unselfconscious, with an economy of gesture, not noticing anything, fixed on the one thing they happen to be doing, undistractible. 'I'm in here,' while stretching out a hand in the darkness to flick a switch, taking the shortest route among the sharp corners of furniture without looking, all the flourishes of ownership. Wevill was like that six days a week.

On Saturdays you would not have believed Wevill to be in his own home, this shrine to his life and taste, his enlarged being, for his distraction and his impatience were obvious. That was the day the cleaning women were at work in his rooms, and in his head Wevill was bereft, he never felt weaker or more superfluous.

Wevill, who told me “I bite people on the neck for a living,” watched helplessly as the cleaners possessed the house, possessed him, the pretty witch, the skinny ballerina, mother and daughter.

The day the cleaning women came was usually the day you went out or made yourself scarce—“The check is on the kitchen counter”—but that was the one day Wevill made a point of staying home, looking like a brain-sick potentate, big and ineffectual, bumping into his own chairs, too numb with desire to do anything but gape at their ungainly grace.

The women cleaned as though mimicking dancers, the same approximations of bending and stretching, sometimes on tiptoe, reaching straight-armed, darting forward and back, bowing to the lowest shelves, often kneeling, crouched like spaniels, showing Wevill their dusty footpads and their pretty buttocks. They wore no makeup, their hair was loose, they favored baggy sweatsuits. They might have just crept from bed, that was their look as they worked, disheveled nymphs.

Wevill—pretending to be busy, shifting vases, squaring-up papers—watched them, the twenty-year-old, her mother not yet forty; young, husbandless, no partners—he had obliquely asked, they had answered directly. “Let's say you had a boyfriend.” “No thanks!” Knowing he could have been father to one and grandfather to the other, he desired both of them.

Mopping, scrubbing on all fours, lying on their backs to beat a feather duster at cobwebs under the sofa, straining on tiptoe to brush at geckos, they hiked up their shirts and showed smooth honey-colored down on their lower backs. All the demanding postures of housework, which represented the most passionate postures of lovemaking. And still they talked.

“Dwarfs marry each other sometimes, but sometimes they get normal big-sized kids and sometimes they get more dwarfs.”

“Britney and Christina used to be Mouseketeers, and so did Justin. That's why Britney and Justin are dating.”

“What makes a guy lolo is living with his mother.”

This is just a miscellaneous anecdote in the life of Leland Wevill, someone universally acknowledged to be a powerful man—who died a few years ago and has been written about endlessly for his contributions to charities, his shrewd investments, his vast holdings, his career as a lawyer, his role on the boards of several large corporations, his successful innovations, his superb art collection. In almost everything he did he acted from a position of strength—bought weak companies and built them up and sold them, found an inexpensive but ingenious product and represented it for a share of the proceeds, acquired paintings and sculptures years before the artists' reputations grew and the prices shot up. Even in the case of the Watteau he had been bottom-feeding.

Everything he accomplished was a species of transformation. Even himself, his own life. He was born into an ordinary family in Massachusetts, the city of Cambridge, the unfashionable side. But he was bright. He got into Harvard as a townie, lived at home to save money, earned a scholarship to Harvard Law School and afterward seemed like someone special: Bostonian, Harvard graduate, with a distinguished-sounding name—“Leland” was his own idea, he hated being Fred Junior. In the active part of his life he made a fortune, the sort of lawyer who owns a portion of every case he represents, not taking risks but studying the client's odds, and winning big when he won. He had moved to Hawaii in his fifties, on the suggestion of Royce Lionberg. He was sixty-one now, just under six feet, a healthy man, and until answering the ad in the
Star-Bulletin
for the two cleaners, he had believed he was very happy.

Apart from Lionberg—the former personal-injury lawyer who had fallen in love with a woman of twenty-three, was rebuffed, fell into a depression, and died by hanging himself from the door handle of his Lexus with his Hermes tie—Leland Wevill was the most powerful man I knew.

He was a highly intelligent man, which made it all the more interesting to me that he had the capacity to behave foolishly.

Ever since coming to Hawaii, Wevill had been keenly aware of his aging body—he was a big soft man with white hairless legs and a potbelly. He didn't mind being conspicuous, he hated being a fool. He didn't swim much, he didn't play golf at all. A good golf swing would have won him playmates in Hawaii. He did not understand the social scene at all. Now and then when he went to a strip club he was horrified to recognize that many of the other patrons were men who looked exactly like him—bored, sixtyish, desperate, no friends, just rattling around, more lonely than horny.

He would not have come to Hawaii at all except that Lionberg had come. Lionberg's suicide had nothing to do with living in Hawaii—it was the failed love affair. He had been a friend to Wevill. Wevill felt the loss.

Now and then, Wevill saw a tidy old man in new sandals, carrying his lunch in a bag to the beach, and the man sat on the sand at the center of his own neatness—the beach towel, sunblock, water bottle, the newspaper folded into quarters to show the day's crossword. The man pretended to be busy, pretended not to notice the loose breasts of girls in bathing suits, the way they pinched and snapped their bikini bottoms—pretended to be content while he was dying of loneliness. At the beach, not swimming. Wevill feared being that man.

Such a man was killing himself with his routines. Having come to Hawaii to live, to escape a routine, he suffered an even more punishing routine and felt his age more sharply. He had no pleasures—he was just conspicuously growing old, a dying man among the living. It alarmed him to think that he would do anything to make things different.

The mother and daughter, Rita and Nina, murmured and giggled together like sisters, usually about gambling or psychics or both, while Wevill watched with the complacent horror of a man surrendering to being sucked into a vacuum. He could not be still, he felt like a stranger in his own house, he dropped things, and defying the logic of the house owner at home, he bumped against his own furniture. The two women seemed more at home to him than he was. That also fueled his ardor. They did not talk to him, though now and then they had a laugh with Ramon, the gardener.

Wevill lusted for them both, he did not differentiate, they were so similar, Rita and her fine flesh, Nina and her slender solemnity. Both were divorced, Nina had a small child—Rita a grandmother!—they worked hard, they were strong. Their strength was part of their beauty, their alluring untidiness. They had no idea how lovely they looked or how Wevill desired them, which made it possible for him merely to gape at them while they unselfconsciously cleaned his house.

He had made his life by resisting fantasy, yet, captivated by the women, he found himself one day on the verge of making a wild suggestion to them: paying them to work naked. Knowing the penalty, he was able to resist. He was well versed in sexual harassment settlements, the vindictive juries, the severe punishments, the awarding of costs; he knew how much he would claim were he their lawyer and this fantasist employer their stalker. The knowledge made him circumspect, almost passive. The women were so innocent of his desire he went on watching them mop and dust, the multimillionaire in his fabulous house reduced to an unsatisfied voyeur.

Life had once been so simple. Long ago, a touch told him a woman was willing, a smile said the answer was yes. “We could share a taxi,” he might say to a woman he had just met. The merest hug in the back seat, his hand on her leg, or hers on his. At her house, if she said, “Want to come in?” it meant yes to everything.

Rita and Nina sometimes looked so at home there he pictured himself approaching them and delivering lines he had carefully rehearsed. The lines were ambiguous enough to dissolve in any possible lawsuit.

“I've been studying massage with a practitioner,” he imagined himself saying. He would discuss the details of his progress, stressing the health benefits. And then, casually: “Want one?”

You did not mention sex. A massage was a respectable medical procedure, but of course a woman willing to be massaged—to be touched—was open to other suggestions. But you could say, “Don't worry—strictly an R-rated massage,” to emphasize the point that there were other kinds. Hyperbole helped. Such a proposition was impossible without innuendo.

Wevill said nothing. He was judicious, but his caution was not all that restrained him. “Seduction” was the inaccurate word for what he planned, “invitation” was better, but whatever it was called he could not initiate it in his own house. He told himself that it was not really his fear of a lawsuit, or even snobbery on his part, but just bad timing—a sunny morning in his huge house on the North Shore was wrong for what he had in mind. He could imagine meeting either of them after dark in a bar or one of the cheaper tourist hotels in Waikiki and taking her upstairs. But something told him that it was wrong in his house, while they were cleaning, making the beds, dusting the sofas. He could not imagine them sleeping on those beds or sitting on those sofas. It seemed a kind of defilement.

He stared at them like a big hungry boy looking at hunks of homemade cake, his fingers damp, and he talked to them, stupid questions about the weather, or holidays, or their jobs in town, how they worked in Housekeeping in one of the hotels in the Ohana chain. He was only making plausible noises to detain them, so that he could rest his eyes on their bodies as they worked.

A woman in repose did not interest him. He loved to see women being active, engaged in something strenuous, stretching, bending, carrying heavy loads, dealing with an impediment—anything that made their bodies contort with effort and their hair shake loose. Tight tensed knees, clenched buttock muscles, elbows working, the neck stiffened with concentration, the tongue clamped between the teeth—he watched with his own tongue clamped that way.

Rita was the pretty witch, Nina the skinny ballerina, and Wevill imagined that he had his pick.

His neat, dusted house irritated him, for it represented a job done, no reason for these women to deal with it. He preferred a room that needed attention. He had been a very messy husband with a pretty housekeeper and an impatient wife. “Someone to pick up after you!” his second wife had scolded. Yes, that was just it. He had slyly watched the exertions of the young dark woman. When his first wife had been alive, her sitting had bored him; her perfect hair and her way of picking at lint had killed his desire.

Nina the ballerina cleaned his car, she got dirtier as the car got cleaner, got sweatier and wetter with suds on her bare toes as she squeegeed the windows and dried the door handles, got damper and duller as the car got shiny and dry; and finally she was dirty and the car was clean, and he desired her that way and hated the car for being done.

Ramon came every two weeks—weed-whacking, mowing, watering the potted trees. The simple fellow easily talked to the women, usually in pidgin. That made Wevill bolder.

He was trying to talk with Nina one day, not hold a conversation, just mouthing meaningless pleasantries to attract her attention.

“Great weather.”

“Ya.”

“All that rain yesterday.”

“Ya.”

Getting nowhere, he said, “Maybe you could do the rugs next month.”

Anticipating it gave him a foretaste of pleasure, mother and daughter swinging the old beaters like wire tennis rackets, their clothes flying as they spanked dust from the rug.

“Sorry,” Nina said. “Next month we going to Vegas, Rita and me.”

He was thrown. He said, “You were there just recently.”

“Five months ago, ya,” Nina said with a precision that startled him, for he expected her not to know, at any rate not to remember.

He was at first deeply disappointed, feeling abandoned, and he imagined she was gloating—enjoying turning him down. But that was irrational. Then he grew curious. Where exactly? How long for? What to do?

Nina reminded him of their routine, that they went twice a year on a gambling tour—two weeks in Las Vegas.

In his sixty-one years Wevill had never been to Nevada, and when this young woman answered his questions with a casual unintentional rebuff, he was impressed and humbled.

“Leave the kid with Auntie, stay at the California, play the slots, come back broke. The Vegas package.”

This lovely young woman talking such nonsense appalled him, and he was sad for her, almost sorrowful for her loving this ignorant pleasure, grieving for her wasted beauty. Her mother was no better.

“And party a little.” The older woman laughed.

“Vegas,” he said, and wondered if any of this information would kill his desire.