Paul Christian had spoken often that year of his “position.”
Surely Inez had heard her father speak of his position.
He conceived his position as “down,” or “on the bottom,” the passive victim of fortune’s turn and his family’s self-absorption (“Dwight’s on top now, he can’t appreciate my position,” he said to a number of people, including Dick Ziegler), and, some months before, he had obtained the use of a house so situated—within sight both of Janet and Dick’s house on Kahala Avenue and of the golf course on which Dwight Christian played every morning at dawn—as to exactly satisfy this conception.
“The irony is that I can watch Dwight teeing off while I’m making my instant coffee,” he would sometimes say.
“The irony is that I can see Janet giving orders to her gardeners while I’m eating my little lunch of canned tuna,” he would say at other times.
It was a location that ideally suited the prolonged mood of self-reflection in which Paul Christian arrived back from Tunis, and, during January and February, he had seemed to find less and less reason to leave the borrowed house. He had told several people that he was writing his autobiography. He had told others that he was gathering together certain papers that would constitute an indictment of the family’s history in the islands, what he called “the goods on the Christians, let the chips fall where they may.” He had declined invitations from those very hostesses (widows, divorcees, women from San Francisco who leased houses on Diamond Head and sat out behind them in white gauze caftans) at whose tables he was considered a vital ornament.
“I’m in no position to reciprocate,” he would say if pressed, and at least one woman to whom he said this had told Ruthie Christian that Paul had made her feel ashamed, as if her very invitation had been presumptuous, an attempt to exploit the glamour of an impoverished noble. He had declined the dinner dance that Dwight and Ruthie Christian gave every February on the eve of the Hawaiian Open. He had declined at least two invitations that came complete with plane tickets (the first to a houseparty in Pebble Beach during the Crosby Pro-Am, the second to a masked ball at a new resort south of Acapulco), explaining that his sense of propriety would not allow him to accept first-class plane tickets when his position was such that he was reduced to eating canned tuna.
“Frankly, Daddy, everybody’s a little puzzled by this ‘canned tuna’ business,” Janet had apparently said one day in February.
“I’m sure I don’t know why. Since ‘everybody’ isn’t reduced to eating it.”
“But I mean neither are you. Dwight says—”
“I’m sure it must be embarrassing for Dwight.”
Janet had tried another approach.
“Daddy, maybe it’s the ‘canned’ part. I mean what other kind of tuna is there?”
“Fresh. As you know. But that’s not the point, is it.”
“What is the point?”
“I’d rather you and Dwight didn’t discuss my affairs, frankly. I’m surprised.”
Tears of frustration would spring to Janet’s eyes during these exchanges. “Canned tuna,” she had said finally, “isn’t even cheap.”
“Maybe you could suggest something cheaper,” Paul Christian had said. “For your father.”
That was when Paul Christian had stopped speaking to Janet.
“Send him a whole tuna,” Dwight Christian had advised when Janet reported this development. “Have it delivered. Packed in ice. Half a ton of bluefin. Goddamn, I’ll do it myself.”
Paul Christian had stopped speaking to Dwight a month before, after stopping by his office to say that the annual dinner dance on the eve of the Hawaiian Open seemed, from his point of view, a vulgar extravagance.
“ ‘Vulgar,’ ” Dwight Christian had repeated.
“Vulgar, yes. From my point of view.”
“Why don’t you say from the point of view of a Cambodian orphan?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I could see the point of view of a Cambodian orphan. I could appreciate this orphan’s position on dinner dances in Honolulu. I might not agree wholeheartedly but I could respect it, I could—”
“You could what?”
As Dwight Christian explained it to Inez he had realized in that instant that this particular encounter was no-win. This particular encounter had been no-win from the time Paul Christian hit on the strategy of coming not to the house but to the office. He had come unannounced, in the middle of the day, and had been cooling his heels in the reception room like some kind of drill-bit salesman when Dwight Christian came back from lunch.
“Your brother’s been waiting almost an hour,” the receptionist had said, and Dwight had read reproach in her voice.
As tactics went this one had been minor but effective, a step up from turning down invitations on the ground that they could not be reciprocated, and its impact on Dwight Christian had been hard to articulate. Dwight Christian did not believe that he had mentioned it even to Ruthie. In fact he had pushed it from his mind. It had seemed absurd. In that instant in the office Dwight Christian had realized that Paul Christian was no longer presenting himself as the casual victim of his family’s self-absorption. He was now presenting himself as the deliberate victim of his family’s malice.
“I could buy the orphan’s point of view,” Dwight Christian had said finally. “I can’t buy yours.”
“Revealing choice of words.”
Dwight Christian said nothing.
“Always trying to ‘buy,’ aren’t you, Dwight?”
Dwight Christian squared the papers on his desk before he spoke. “Ruthie will miss you,” he said then.
“I’m sure you can get one of your Oriental friends to fill out the table,” Paul Christian said.
Later that day the receptionist had mentioned to the most senior of Dwight Christian’s secretaries, who in due course mentioned it to him, that she found it “a little sad” that Mr. Christian’s brother had to live at the YMCA.
That was January.
At first Dwight Christian said February but Ruthie corrected him: it would have been January because the invitations to the dance had just gone out.
The dance itself was February.
The Open was February.
In February there had been the dance and the Open and the falling-out with Janet over the canned tuna. In February there had also been the Chriscorp annual meeting, at which Paul Christian had embarrassed everyone, most especially (according to Ruthie) himself, by introducing a resolution that called for the company to “explain itself.” Of course the newspapers had got hold of it. “Unspecified allegations flowed from one dissident family member but the votes were overwhelmingly with management at Chriscorp’s annual meeting yesterday,” the Honolulu
Advertiser
had read. “
DISGRUNTLED CHRISTIAN SEEKS DISCLOSURE
,” was the headline in the
Star-Bulletin
.
The Chriscorp meeting was the fifteenth of February.
On the first of March Paul Christian had surfaced a second time in the
Advertiser
, with a letter to the editor demanding the “retraction” of a photograph showing Janet presenting an Outdoor Circle Environmental Protection Award for Special Effort in Blocking Development to Rep. Wendell Omura (D-Hawaii). Paul Christian’s objection to the photograph did not appear to be based on the fact that the development Wendell Omura was then blocking was Dick Ziegler’s. His complaint was more general, and ended with the phrase “lest we forget.”
“I’m not sure they could actually ‘retract’ a photograph, Paul,” Ruthie Christian had said when he called, at an hour when he knew Dwight to be on the golf course, to ask if she had seen the letter.
“I just want Janet to know,” Paul Christian had said, “that in my eyes she’s hit bottom.”
He had said the same thing to Dick Ziegler. “An insult to you,” he had added on that call. “How dare she.”
“I respect your point,” Dick Ziegler had said carefully, “but I wonder if the
Advertiser
was the appropriate place to make it.”
“They’ve gone too far, Dickie.”
After the letter to the
Advertiser
Paul Christian had begun calling Dick Ziegler several times a day with one or another cryptic assurance. “Our day’s coming,” he would say, or “tough times, Dickie, hang in there.” Since it had been for Dick Ziegler a year of certain difficulties, certain reverses, certain differences with Dwight Christian (Dwight Christian’s refusal to break ground for the mall that was to have been the linch-pin of the windward development was just one example) and certain strains with Janet (Janet’s way of lining up with Dwight on the postponement of the windward mall had not helped matters), he could see in a general way that these calls from his father-in-law were intended as expressions of support.
Still, Dick Ziegler said to Inez, the calls troubled him.
He had found them in some way excessive.
He had found them peculiar.
“I may not be the most insightful guy in the world when it comes to human psychology,” Dick Ziegler said, “but I think your dad went off the deep end.”
“Fruit salad,” Dwight Christian said.
“That’s hindsight,” Ruthie Christian said.
“What the hell does that mean?” Dwight Christian had stopped drinking martinis and lapsed into a profound irritability. “Of course it’s hindsight. Jesus Christ. ‘Hindsight.’ ”
“Janet loves you, Inez,” Dick Ziegler said. “Don’t ever forget that. Janet loves you.”
8
D
URING
the time I spent talking to Inez Victor in Kuala Lumpur she returned again and again to that first day in Honolulu. This account was not sequential. For example she told me initially, perhaps because I had told her what Billy Dillon said about the crackers, about talking to Dwight and Ruthie Christian and to Dick Ziegler, but it had been late in the day when she talked to Dwight and Ruthie Christian and to Dick Ziegler.
First there had been the hospital.
She and Billy Dillon had gone directly from the airport to the hospital but Janet was being prepared for an emergency procedure to drain fluid from her brain and Inez had been able to see her only through the glass window of the intensive care unit.
They had gone then to the jail.
“I suppose Dwight’ll be breaking out the champagne tonight,” Paul Christian had said in the lawyers’ room at the jail.
Inez had looked at Billy Dillon. “Why,” she said finally.
“You know.” Paul Christian smiled. He seemed relaxed, even buoyant, tilting back his wooden chair and propping his bare heels on the Formica table in the lawyers’ room. His pants were rolled above his tanned ankles. His blue prison shirt was knotted jauntily at the waist. “You’ll be there. I’m here. You can celebrate. Why not.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Actually I’m glad you’re here.” Paul Christian was still smiling. “I’ve been wondering what happened to Leilani Thayer’s koa settee.”
Inez considered this. “I have it in Amagansett,” she said finally. “About Janet—”
“Strange, I didn’t notice it when I visited you.”
“You visited me in New York. The settee is in Amagansett. Daddy—”
“Not that I saw much of your apartment. The way I was rushed off to that so-called party.”
Inez closed her eyes. Paul Christian had stopped in New York without notice in 1972, on his way back to Honolulu with someone he had met on Sardinia, an actor who introduced himself only as “Mark.”
I can
’
t fathom what you were thinking
, Paul Christian had written later to Inez,
when I brought a good friend to visit you and instead of welcoming the opportunity to know him better you dragged me off
(
altogether ignoring Mark’s offer to do a paella, by the way, which believe me did not go unremarked upon
)
to what was undoubtedly the worst party I’ve ever been to where nobody made the slightest effort to communicate whatsoever …
“Actually that wasn’t a party,” Inez heard herself saying.
“Inez,” Billy Dillon said. “Wrong train.”
“Not by any standard of mine,” Paul Christian said. “No. It was certainly not a party.”
“It wasn’t meant to be. It was a fundraiser. You remember, Harry spoke.”
“I do remember. I listened. Mr.—is it Diller? Dillman?”
“Dillon,” Billy Dillon said. “On Track Two.”
“Mr. Dillman here will testify to the fact that I listened. When your husband spoke. I also remember that not a soul I spoke to had any opinion whatsoever about what your husband said.”
“You were talking to the Secret Service.”
“Whoever. They all wore brown shoes. I’m surprised you have Leilani’s settee. Since you never really knew her.”
Billy Dillon looked at Inez. “Pass.”
“Everyone called her ‘Kanaka’ when we were at Cal,” Paul Christian said. “Kanaka Thayer.”
Inez said nothing.
“She was a Pi Phi.”
Inez said nothing.
“Leilani and I were like brother and sister. Parties night and day. Leilani singing scat. I was meant to marry her. Not your mother.” He hummed a few bars of “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” then broke off. “I was considered something of a catch, believe it or not. Ironic, isn’t it?”
Inez unfastened her watch and examined the face.
“My life might have been very different. If I’d married Leilani Thayer.”
Inez corrected her watch from New York to Honolulu time.
“That settee always reminded me.”
“I want you to have it,” Inez said carefully.
“That’s very generous of you, but no. No, thank you.”
“I could have it shipped down.”
“Of course you ‘could.’ I know you ‘could.’ That’s hardly the point, you ‘could,’ is it?”
Inez waited.
“I’m through with all that,” Paul Christian said.
Billy Dillon opened his briefcase. “You mean because you’re here.”
“That whole life,” Paul Christian said. “The mission fucking children and their pathetic little sticks of bad furniture. Those mean little screens they squabble over. That precious settee you’re so proud of. That’s all bullshit, really. Third-rate. Pathetic. If you want to know the truth.”
Billy Dillon took a legal pad from his briefcase. “I wonder if we could run through a few specifics here. Just a few details that might help establish—”