Luigi the Wharf Rat's was not actually on the beach but on the bank of
a body of water called the Ala Wai Canal. Across the water were the
snowtopped hills. A maitre-de escorted Chandler personally to a table
on a balcony, and there he waited. Rosalie's "half-hour" was nearly
two; but then he heard her calling him from across the room, in the
voice which had reached a thousand second balconies, and he rose as she
came near.
She said lightly, "Sorry. You ought to be flattered, though. It's a
twenty-minute drive--and an hour and a half to put on my face, so you
won't be ashamed to be seen with me. Well, it's good to be out in my
own skin for a change. Let's eat!"
The talk with Hsi had left a mark on Chandler that not even this girl's
pretty face could obscure. It was a pretty face, though, and she was
obviously exerting herself to make him enjoy himself. He could not help
responding to her mood.
She talked of her life on the stage, the excitement of a performance,
the entertainers she had known. Her conversation was one long
name-drop, but it was not pretense: the world of the famous was the
world she had lived in. It was not a world that Chandler had ever
visited, but he recognized the names. Rosie had been married once to
an English actor whose movies Chandler had made a point of watching on
television. It was interesting, in a way, to know that the man snored
and lived principally on vitamin pills. But it was a view of the man
that Chandler had not sought.
The restaurant drew its clientele mostly from the execs, young ones or
young-acting ones, like the girl. The coronets were all over. There had
been a sign on the door:
KAPU, WALIHINI!
to mark it off limits to anyone not an exec or a collaborator. Still,
Chandler thought, who on the island was not a collaborator? The only
effective resistance a man could make would be to kill everyone
within reach and then himself, thus depriving them of slaves--and
that was, after all, only what the execs themselves had done in other
places often enough. It would inconvenience them only slightly. The
next few planeloads or shiploads of possessed warm bodies from the
mainland would be permitted to live, instead of being required to dash
themselves to destruction, like the crew of the airplane that had
carried Chandler. Thus the domestic stocks would be replenished.
An annoying feature of dining with Rosalie in the flesh, Chandler
found, was that half a dozen times while they were talking he found
himself taken, speaking words to Rosie that were not his own, usually
in a language he did not understand. She took it as a matter of
course. It was merely a friend, across the room or across the island,
using Chandler as the casual convenience of a telephone. "Sorry," she
apologized blithely after it happened for the third time, and then
stopped. "You don't like that, love, do you?"
"Can you blame me?" He stopped himself from saying more; he was
astonished even so at his tone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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