Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [65]
“I didn’t think you did.”
“I want a drink,” she said. “I want to sit down.”
One of the hotels facing Mamala Bay had a patio restaurant with uncomfortable, wrought-iron chairs, the servers who patrolled it barely out of their teens. A Cruzan rum card on the table said MAI TAI! David’s beer came in a clear plastic cup—garbage, he thought, that would soon end up in the ocean. Small birds raided every crumb that fell to the floor and swarmed any of the plates the busboys were slow to clear. David counted an astonishing number of fat people.
“I’m starving,” Alice said, looking over the menu.
From here they had a clear view of Waikiki Beach, that famous strip of sand everyone’s seen somewhere, in movies or on television or postcards as ubiquitous as images of the Grand Canyon, so in person it seemed it fell far short of one’s expectations, seeming instead diminished and banal. There were surfers everywhere, boys and girls and old men and teens, both close in and out far, riding sets of waves so long they seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, the water clotted with swimmers and boogie-boarders navigating between catamarans and large pleasure craft that barreled toward shore at breakneck speed while small planes flew overheard, the sheer density of the crowds like some time warp back to Coney Island of the forties, the black-and-white photos of that beach showing it to be so choked with people there was no sand to see, no reason even to come except perhaps to hate the proximity of your fellow man; it would be like riding the rush-hour subway for fun, he thought, and for the lifeguards glassing these masses from their towers, a drowning among so many bobbing heads and arms and legs must be impossible to catch. From this vantage, Diamond Head seemed nearly overwhelmed by all these people and towers on the beach, by this disease of development, so this majestic sight now could be a sculpture symbolizing America’s ugliness and failure. Terrible, he thought.
“Terrible,” Alice said.
Couple telepathy, they called it. Not that her disapproval affected her appetite. She ordered a main-course chef’s salad with her bacon cheeseburger, a banana daiquiri, a slice of key lime pie. When the food was placed before her, she ate without pause and left nothing for the birds.
“This can’t be Hawaii,” she said finally.
“I know what you mean.”
“This can’t be all of it.”
“No.”
“We can’t have come here for this.” She began to cry.
“We didn’t,” he said. “I promise.”
“Then get us out of here,” she said.
When they got back to the hotel, she arranged for a cabana at the beach. He told her he wanted to rest in the room for a while and would meet her later.
The minute he was upstairs, he called Harold.
“We need to go somewhere else,” he told him. “Somewhere pure.”
They went to Kauai.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, this was exactly the place Alice needed, that she’d been searching for since the death of their child—though neither did she realize this until they arrived.
Only a half-hour flight from Honolulu, it’s the westernmost island of the chain, circular in shape, a mere ninety miles around, composed primarily of mountainous, undevelopable land. When checking in at the airport, David was given—thanks to Harold—a brochure thick with maps and so much geographical information that he could only skim it, along with the key to a condominium on the north coast.
Alice hadn’t been searching for beauty, though there was a superabundance here. Later, looking at the pictures from the trip, as he did quite often, David would reflect that Kauai’s beauty was something that photos didn’t really come close to capturing.
For instance, the sweeping view from their lanai, situated on a cliff hundreds of feet above the ocean. To the northeast was a lighthouse shaped like a baby’s bottle and from that distance no bigger than a fingernail. The pictures didn’t suggest the loneliness of the little red-and-white tower with its clamshell glass, which to David seemed like the perfect place to live out