From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [402]
The real dishes, the others, the old ones that smelled like feces until you had ignored your nose and gotten them into your mouth and then forever after never smelled that way again, and that were not on this menu, she did not miss because she did not know about them. And if the songs they played and danced here were mostly songs that the tourists would already know—Song of the Islands, Sweet Leilani, Lovely Hula Hands, Hilo March and Kalhala March, Hanakai Tomboy, and the War Chant—still, she did not know because she had never heard the old ones, the ancient ones, like we use to play at Tony Paea’s family luaus, old Tony, who ran a battery shop on Nuuana, and whose father Ioane Paea had once been sole owner and proprietor of the Island of Paea, before the missionaries. Old Tony was somewhere Stateside now.
She had really taken it all in, eaten it up. And by the time the roast whole hog and pipi orna roastbeef had been finished off everyone was drunk, even some of the tourists were drunk, and he had stripped off his gook shirt and kicked off his sandals and rolled his slacks up to his knees and jumped out into the firelight and danced Meliani Oe for them with a gardenia snatched from the hair of the youngest wahine stuck over his ear, and that had really gotten her. With the grinning dancers who could not keep from forgetting they were paid entertainers egging him on solo, the seated ones beating time on the ground with their hands, the standing ones stamping it with the feet.
It made quite a sensation. Not many white men could dance the hula at all, let alone dance it well. But he had learned well, what old Tony had taught him better. And he had the figure for it, if I do say so as shouldnt.
And then when he came back grinning and put the gardenia in her hair, just as a gesture, just to carry it on out. And the fat-faced tourists whispering to each other about the crazy haole wondering who he was must be from old Island family who appeared to be more savagely Hawaiian than the Kanaka natives. Natives, he grinned, who would go back tomorrow morning to their jobs as waitresses at Walgreen’s and mechanics in some auto paint-and-body shop on Nuuanu with very unnative haole hangovers and the tourists if they went into Walgreen’s for a coke or stopped to get their carburetor fixed would not even recognize them.
“You’re always full of surprises,” she had smiled. “You’re always coming up with something. You just love to shock people, dont you? Where on earth did you ever learn to dance like that?”
And when they got back to the hotel—inn, they called it—that night it was again like it had once used to be, hot biting wiggling sweating savage, her playing the White Goddess again and him the savage. Like he liked it. But like it had not been very often lately now for a long time, and like it was not to be again, after that one time, during the rest of the last two days.
“My savage,” she had whispered biting gently. “My primitive crazy savage.”
The next night, the last but one, he made the mistake of trying to get it back again. He called her His Chippy, My Chippy, as he had done before; but this time she not only pushed him off but flounced out of the bed crying and after a seeming endless period of name-calling in which the worries about the kid came out again (“What if he should get sick? How would I find out? Here, shacked up with another man in a hotel like a common whore? What if he died? Would you care? Yes, a lot you’d care!”) ended up by sleeping in the other bed. Just like bundling in the old days, he had thought wanting to beat his fist into the wall, bite blood from his knuckles with the frustration of being unable to say one word that did not sound guilty and apologetic, except that now instead of a board inbetween we have this rocklike silence.
It was during those last two days, whe