A Trip to the Stars (34 page)

I was dancing with a man named Philippe and he had just put his hand on my breast. We were on the terrace of a long white house jammed with revellers on New Year’s Eve. It was a hot, humid night. Down a flight of smooth wooden steps bordered with sea grapes the Pacific breakers rolled in high under a new moon. Flickering blue lights were strung through the arbor, dense with the flowering branches of hau trees, that overhung the terrace. A pair of toucans were perched on a rod overhead. Out in the garden the flames of tall torches leapt in the wind. The music on the stereo, “Crossroads” by Cream, was deafening. And though the song was fast, we were dancing slowly cheek to cheek. I had met Philippe less than five minutes before when he passed me a joint laced with THC.

I took his hand from my breast and placed it on my hip as we danced around knots of people sitting cross-legged on the tile floor smoking hash from hookahs and sipping champagne from goblets. Each hookah held a different colored liqueur—crème de menthe, cognac, grappa, Pernod—that bubbled softly whenever someone inhaled and sent ghostly curls of smoke swirling up toward the mouthpiece. Some guests were decked out in their best tropical finery—silk shirts and pantaloons, Nehru jackets, batik dresses—while others wore bathing suits and tank tops. A darkly tanned man with hair halfway down his back and a long beard, naked but for a net loincloth, had just come up to the terrace dripping from the sea and assumed the lotus position on a prayer mat below an enormous Japanese fan. The fan depicted two storks mating in a rainstorm. Hanging from his neck on a gold chain was a medallion of a lion’s face with a sun for one eye and a moon for
the other. He dipped his finger into a goblet and coated his lips with wine. Then he introduced himself to all of us as Olan and announced that he had just hiked and swum up the coast to Kilauea from Anahola. To do so, I calculated, he would have had to set out late that afternoon, which I doubted was the case. Not least of all because that stretch of sea was particularly rough, with fierce riptides.

Olan raised his right arm and untaped a waterproof packet from his armpit. “Five hundred milligrams of pure mescaline,” he said in a high clear voice, smiling and brandishing the packet, “no speed, no impurities, spiritually sound.”

Philippe immediately made me a little bow and joined Olan on the floor, indicating that I ought to follow.

I declined and drifted into the house, crazy with the shadows cast by Chinese lanterns, where someone handed me a goblet, kissed the back of my neck, and disappeared into the darkness. I drank deeply and wiped the champagne bubbles from my lips. My eyes were burning and my mouth was dry. Both downstairs bathrooms were occupied, so I picked my way around people sprawled on the stairway in order to use the one upstairs. A small Christmas wreath blinking with stars was hung on the banister. I was halfway up the stairs when all the lights came up below, the music stopped suddenly, and a woman’s voice from the throng in the living room began counting down from ten.

“… 7, 6, 5, 4,” she cried, “3, 2, 1—Happy New Year!”

Cries of Happy New Year resounded inside and outside the house. A couple rose from the steps before me, kissed each other, and then kissed me simultaneously, one on each cheek. Like me, and a lot of other people at the party—including my lover at that time, a hematologist who was somewhere in the living room with his wife, and the host, an orthopedic surgeon whose wife had just done the countdown—this couple also worked at the hospital in Lihue. She was a physical therapist named Jeannie and he was the cafeteria manager. Like my old friend in the Navy, Sharline, Jeannie seemed to have a different boyfriend every month. “Do you ever dream of Jeannie?” was her favorite come-on line. I’d had a few boyfriends myself in the last year and a half, but I let them provide the come-on lines. My own come-on after a while was nonverbal, and obvious: I was wide open, for companionship, a good time, sex. I had had enormous gaps in me waiting to be filled ever since I arrived on the island. Those near the
surface were evident even to a man with the weakest antennae; the deeper ones, I thought, could never be filled, and so were off-limits to everyone until I felt otherwise. In short, I was available for anything but love, and instinctively gravitated to men who didn’t have it to give.

“Happy 1972, Mala,” Jeannie said. “Lots of luck.”

I nodded, clinked her goblet, and continued on to the upstairs bathroom.

Sitting on the toilet, I began to feel dizzy. When I stood at the sink and poured the rest of my champagne down the drain, I didn’t have to glance into the mirror to see that I looked as bad as I felt. It had been seventeen months since I had arrived on the island of Kauai and it wasn’t long before I discovered I was no longer immune to the effects of alcohol and drugs. Not only was it impossible for me to imbibe freely anymore, but I was more susceptible to getting very high very fast than I had ever been before the spider bit me. But that didn’t stop me from drinking or smoking ganja. My hope of continuing the clean and stripped-down lifestyle I’d enjoyed on Rarotonga had fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately, I was not even deterred by the fact that, of all the places I had ever been, Kauai was by far the most intensely beautiful. The fact is, being around people again turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined.

I first heard of Kauai, one of the eight major Hawaiian islands, during the week I spent in Honolulu after leaving the Cook Islands. A woman I met at breakfast in my hotel had just spent a year on Kauai. She was selling her house north of Honolulu before leaving Hawaii for good. “It’s time,” she said. “I’ve been here since 1944. Maybe I’ll end up in Australia, maybe in South America, but I’ll never go back to the mainland.” She was a striking woman, a tall blonde about fifty years old, who said she was the widow of a wealthy hotelier, and added acerbically, “He helped to build up Waikiki as you see it—a crime for which he ought never to be forgiven. At any rate, he was my first—and last—husband.” Then she started talking rapturously of Kauai, describing its rain forests, and the inherent healing powers of its climate, and the mystical properties visitors since the ancient Polynesians attributed to its natural features. (Later I would hear of the devotees of a certain yogi who believed the core of the island to be an enormous quartz crystal.) This woman—her name was Stella—whom I never saw again, had gone to Kauai after being diagnosed with
terminal liver cancer. Within six months of bathing daily in the sea and subsisting on a diet of taro and fresh fruit, her cancer had gone into remission. If the island worked miracles for cancers of the vital organs, I told myself, think how it might heal parts of the innermost self equally damaged.

With these expectations, I once again rented a bungalow a short walk from the ocean, in Haena on the northern tip of the island. The bungalow was at one end of the single main road that ran along the periphery of three-quarters of the island, a horseshoe that began at the green volcanic peaks of Na Pali coast and ended in desert terrain. Driving the length of this road was like traveling from the Philippines to New Mexico in just ninety minutes, passing through dairy country, sugarcane fields, and even a miniature version of the Grand Canyon, in Waimea. About ten miles apart on the island were the desert-like village of Mana, where the annual rainfall was eleven inches, and Mount Waialeale, which a rusted sign proclaimed to be the wettest spot on earth with 462 inches per year.

To reach my house, you drove through the Hanalei Valley, a quilt-work of taro fields, and then over a dozen one-way wooden bridges that forded the many streams and lagoons carrying that tremendous rainfall into the sea. There were three bungalows widely spaced on my crooked dirt lane, one belonging to an old fisherman named Lon and the other to a widow on Maui who came for two months every year. I was hemmed in by the sea in front and a lush valley in the rear that ran to the foot of the jagged green mountains. My bungalow, painted pale green, had four rooms and a shaded lanai. There was also a small shed where the original owner, a potter, had set up his wheel and which I eventually used as a developing room when I began taking undersea photographs. But that was much later.

From the lanai I saw nothing but open sea. Or as my neighbor Lon put it, in his singsong fashion, “If you was to continue north by northwest, the next piece of land you hits is
Ja
pan.” Yes, I thought, and if you go due west, the next piece of land is Vietnam. Hanoi, in fact, lies on the same latitude as Kauai. Except for February, March, and April, the trade winds never stopped blowing; having crossed the entire Pacific Ocean from Alaska, they cooled my house on the hottest days, ruffling the palm trees that circled my tiny lawn. There was bougainvillea, like a blanket of fire, up one wall of the bungalow, lush
ferns along the north side, and a pair of papaya trees beside the shed that produced fruit with sweet, delicate flesh. Flanking the front door in wide, deep beds there were plants with white flowers that bloomed constantly. I had never smelled flowers more fragrant. Year-round they filled the bungalow with their perfume. After a few weeks, when I asked Lon about it, he told me the plant was called a spider plant.

But idyllic and solitary as this place was, I could not long have tried to replicate my life on Rarotonga, for the simple reason that what money remained after my year of island-hopping had been exhausted—even sooner than I’d anticipated—by my move to Hawaii. I needed to get a job, pronto. Not a waitressing job that would keep me scraping along in a furnished room, but something that would provide a steady paycheck to support my bungalow and the secondhand VW on which I had put a down payment. At first I thought of applying to teach Latin and Greek at the high school in Hanalei, despite being a few credits short of my B.A. But the secretary there informed me that they didn’t have classes in those languages. Probably a good thing, since on second thought I doubted I was prepared to enter a classroom and work with kids sixteen years old—Loren’s age, if indeed there still was a Loren drawing breath somewhere. Since there probably wasn’t much call on the island for an arachnologist’s assistant, that left the only profession in which I truly had formal training: X-ray technician.

The notion of spending half my waking hours in a hospital was not very appealing to me. But x-raying people on Kauai, I told myself, would be something altogether different than it had been aboard the
Repose
. No matter how sick they were, or how terrible the injury they might suffer, it was doubtful they would have stepped on a land mine or been strafed with shrapnel. In fact, I was informed there hadn’t been a homicide on the island in ten years.

“And that,” said Dr. Samuel Prion, the elderly radiologist whom I saw in my second interview at Wilcox Memorial Hospital in Lihue, “was a hunting accident.”

“I didn’t know there was any hunting on the island,” I said.

He was a slightly stooped, soft-spoken man with sharp blue eyes and white hair ringing his bald head. “Aside from pheasants,” he replied, “the only game are the wild goats. Once a year it’s legal for them to be hunted in Waimea Canyon. They’re the descendants of a
few domestic goats, brought here by Captain Cook, that ran off into the mountains.”

“Captain Cook?”

“The first European to discover Kauai, in 1778. Came just that once and left the goats, among other things.”

No wonder I had felt so at home there from the first. “I should have known,” I said, and at the end of the interview Dr. Prion hired me, subject to the approval of his oversight board.

I was nervous when I came before the board at Wilcox Memorial the following week. I had had my hair cut and set at a beauty parlor in Lihue—there were none in my part of the island—got a manicure and pedicure, and had my legs waxed. I bought an overpriced white linen dress and even pricier Italian sandals. I wore my pendant, of course, and for good luck Cassiel’s bracelet and the jade earrings he had given me. And I put on makeup for the first time since being discharged from the Navy. Peering into the rearview mirror as I sped down the coast road, I hardly recognized myself. I look like Luna, I thought, who always wore makeup and kept her hair carefully coiffed, even when she was broke. And I had done my makeup very much like hers—mascara just so, a narrow cloud of blue shadow on my eyelids, and lipstick a soft rose—which was not that strange seeing as it was Luna who had taught me how to do my face one long-ago summer day in our house in Brooklyn.

But none of this, or the little I was called on to say, seemed to matter one way or the other to the tribunal of three doctors, two administrators, and the head nurse whom I faced for the next twenty minutes in a conference room. The Vietnam War was still peaking, and whatever their political views (they never did ask what I thought about the war), the fact I was a medical corps veteran, one of the nurses who had volunteered to be in a combat zone—and the first to be sighted on Kauai, apparently—went a long way toward assuring me the job. I was actually well qualified, but through all the frantic running around over the previous days, that fact hadn’t really registered on me. I had been alone so long that I hadn’t realized how much my self-esteem had fallen.

As for the war, I seemed to think about it incessantly now. Part of this was due to the fact that I was back on American soil, seeing newspapers and hearing radios and televisions regularly for the first time
in over two years (though I had only a radio in my own house). I also had daily conversations with people, many of whom were angry and anxious about the war, which at that time was spreading deep into Cambodia.

Many mornings I walked down to the green sea and thought of the B-52s three thousand miles across those same waters streaking inland after their overnight flights from Guam, veering up the Ho Chi Minh Trail to carpet-bomb Hanoi or to soar over the Northern Highlands into Cambodia to drop their massive payloads into the jungle. I didn’t know where Cassiel was at that time, in early 1971, but if he was alive, I couldn’t imagine him participating in either of those missions. In Manila, he had requested a transfer and then disappeared. Now more than ever I asked myself how those two things could possibly be unrelated. I was resigned to the fact I would never find the answer and would never see him again, but I didn’t know how or why I should stop loving him, a man I had only known for three weeks, a period of time that now seemed like the compressed vital center within the broader, gloomier expanse of my life.