We sat at the dining room table under the glow of the chandelier. Our dining room was the most un-Hawaiian room in the house, lifted almost intact from a home decorating magazine of twenty years ago. The elegant crystal chandelier had been shipped in from San Francisco, as had the formal mahogany table and chairs. “I don’t need a babysitter,” I said. “I can stay by myself. I can even go home.”
Behind us was a tall mahogany cabinet filled with Chinoiserie and other knickknacks. Across from us the living room was dark. “Your Uncle Chin called today,” my father said. “We had a long talk, and I recognized something. Chin had two sons, and he has lost them both. I don’t want to lose any of mine. You are who you are, even if I don’t like it. You’re still my son and I’ll try to accept you.”
I didn’t know what to say. My father continued, “Uncle Chin would like to see you. I said we would have lunch with him tomorrow.”
“Where? I don’t want to go anywhere people will recognize me.”
My father laid his fork down next to his plate, and then used the napkin from his lap to dab at his mouth. “Places Uncle Chin goes are very discreet,” he said. “Why don’t you come to the office with me in the morning, and we’ll go together to lunch.”
“I don’t know.”
He leaned forward toward me, and the warm light from the chandelier glinted off his glasses. “I’m preparing a bid on a big job,” he said. “You could help me. It gets harder for me to read the tiny details on the plans.”
“All right.” I looked down at my plate.
A little later, from a phone upstairs, I finally reached Tim. “Hi, it’s Kimo. I haven’t talked to you for a couple of days.”
“It’s been really busy.” He hesitated. “I saw a piece on the news about you. How have you been holding up?”
“It’s been hard,” I said, and my voice broke. “I just want to be with somebody who accepts me totally, you know? I want to forget about all this for a while.”
“I wish I could be there for you. Things are crazy at my office right now. We’re in the middle of discovery for this big case, and there are piles of documents to read. I brought home two full briefcases tonight.”
“You have to eat. Maybe we can get together. It doesn’t have to be for long.”
“Kimo.” Then there was silence. I was afraid the connection had been broken, and then he said, “My private life is my business, and I don’t want to see it spill out into the headlines. I just need to back away from you for a while. It’s not that I don’t like you-I do. I think you’re handsome and kind and interesting and I enjoy being with you. But you’re public property right now, and I can’t be part of that.”
“I understand.” I wanted to argue with him, to say we could make it work. He could stay in the shadows and I’d carry the weight of the spotlight on me. But I’d already seen what that spotlight had done to my brothers and my parents and I couldn’t blame Tim for wanting to avoid it. After all, he’d run all the way from Boston to Honolulu to keep people from knowing he was gay. It wasn’t up to me to drag him out.
“You are very nice,” he said. “I hope you come through this all right.”
“I hope so too.” I paused. “Well, I’d better let you get back to work.”
“I guess so,” he said.
After I hung up the phone, I flopped back on my bed, surrounded by all those artifacts of my teen years, and felt just as confused and lonely and bad as I had back then, before I could really put a name on my problems. What a long journey I had taken from those high school posters and old books, to wind up at the same place. Well, not necessarily the same, but a place so close to where I had been that it felt no different.
I turned the light off and lay on my bed in my clothes, staring out the window at the crescent moon rising over the Ko‘olau Mountains, trying not to think of the brief time I had spent with Tim, trying not to worry if I would ever meet anyone else who could make me feel the same way.
I didn’t have much success.
SHOPPING CENTER DETAILS
The next morning my father and I stopped on the way to his office and got coffee and malasadas from a van in a shopping center parking lot. We sipped and ate in silence, and I wondered if this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
There were worse things. My father’s business was winding down, but perhaps Haoa and I could revitalize it. With his advice, we could be as successful as he had been, maybe even more. My notoriety might even help. Long lost classmates would remember who I was from having seen me on the evening news. We could even develop a subspecialty among Honolulu’s gay population. Build houses with extra-large closets and dressing areas for the fashion plates, and big, comfortable kitchens for the aspiring caterers. Forget about kids’ rooms and play areas. I knew a contractor in California who specialized in kitchens for Orthodox Jews, with extra storage space for their second set of dishes, and separate dishwashers, even separate refrigerators, for keeping milk and meat apart. There had to be a similar sub-specialty for the gay population.
We pulled up at my father’s office, on the second floor of a strip center he’d built near Salt Lake Park. The ground floor was filled with your usual variety of tenants: dry cleaner, deli, karate donjon, beeper store, and mattress warehouse. But unlike the Kahala Mall, this center somehow seemed uniquely Hawaiian. The truth came in the details.
My father was big on details. All the storefronts were set back behind a colonnade that provided shade from the hot tropical sun. He’d had a template of a palm tree made, and pressed it into the front of each of the supporting columns, so the implication was that the roof was supported by a row of palms, like the caryatids in Greek architecture.
When I was a kid, he’d had fancier offices, always moving around from project to project. When he was building homes, it was important that the style of his office match the kind of construction he was doing, and as he built more expensive and lavish homes, the style of his office improved. Now that he was building malasada stands and small warehouses, he had three simple rooms. His office, a reception area, and a conference room where he could lay plans out on a big table.
In each room there were framed photos, artists’ renderings and architects’ elevations of homes, offices, stores and shopping centers he had built. As I walked from room to room I marveled at the range of things he’d built, what he’d done to keep us all in food and clothes and pay our school tuition, take my mother on vacations and buy antique furniture for her in San Francisco and ship it to Hawai‘i. Over his desk there was a photo of a small bungalow I didn’t recognize.
“What’s this?”
“The first house I ever built,” he said. “Before Uncle Chin’s, even. I built it nights and weekends while I was still working for Amfac. I found it two years ago and took the picture. Nice, eh?”
The house was nice, but the photo was even nicer. Richly saturated colors, strong contrasts between light and shadow. It looked as professional as any of the promotional shots on the walls. “You took this?”
“I have grandchildren,” he said shyly. “You take a lot of pictures. You learn a few tricks.”
“More than a few,” I said.
It was interesting, getting to know my father again. He set me up in the conference room with a set of electrical plans and a list of items, from light fixtures to dimmer switches to outlet face plates. I had to count each one and then multiply by unit costs. “This is the worst part of the job for me,” he said. “These details are so tiny, but if you miss a couple of expensive light fixtures, there goes your profit.”
I worked diligently all morning, surprised that I could concentrate. It was like going surfing with Harry, getting something into my brain that pushed everything else aside. In the other room, I could hear him on the phone, schmoozing with potential customers, calling suppliers, checking schedules. I wondered if I could do that.